ON ARTISTS’S BOOKS, PIERRE LECUIRE AND BERN PORTER

by Dilara Koz

PROLOGUE

Artists’ Books

Books of artists, books made by artists. Which is what and what is which? To work on this research I met Jo Maddocks at the Weston Library’s special collections. Amongst many other duties, her job includes cataloguing recently acquired artists' books, which means she must describe them for SOLO, the search-engine of the Bodleian libraries. How does one begin to categorise or describe these artefacts that were developed to break boundaries, cross borders, and challenge one’s understanding of what book or art or art-book is.

Personally I have been interested in this particular genre of books since the last two or three years, upon discovering them in the gallery-bookstore Yvon Lambert in Paris. Since then, I visited many artist book fairs, met publishers, went to launch events, even made three of my own books and began to sell them— but, it simply had not occurred to me to research their origin and history. I guess one could say I had fallen in love and since love is blind it didn’t matter what the origin of this genre-bending, versatile, do-it-yourself book-form was.

CHAPTER ONE

A brief history of artists’ books

I was aware of zine culture, the quick-print, home-made publications often photocopied into market-free circulation. Zines had emerged in the 1920’s New York as a group of Black creatives in Harlem started a literary magazine to express themselves free of censorship and white legislation. Zines quickly became the literature of the underground scenes, subcultures and minorities. But, admittedly, it took me by complete surprise when I googled artists’ books and in a click the Wikipedia page revealed that the first artists' book was made by… William Blake between the late 18th and early 19th century.

Blake wanted to use text and visuals together and had to develop a new printing technique to accommodate this at-the-time-revolutionary desire. He was motivated to bring together illustration and text in the same bookform, having total control, detached from commercial publishers and printers.

The next time artists’s books appeared in the timeline of Western Europe seems to be in the 1890’s Paris, for the very opposite intention of marketing art in high-end commerce, initiated by an art dealer called Ambroise Vollard. These books also included original prints and illustrated classic texts, bound and made into book-form by intimate craft techniques. However these books were much more exclusive, thus much less accessible.

Experiments in book-form became popular amongst the Russian Avant-Garde artists, the Italian futurists, the Dadaists in Zurich, followed by Bauhaus in Germany, making its way to the artists’s book as we know it in America and France in the context of the swinging, counter-culture, post-war, hippy sixties.

Of course, the aforementioned artistic movements were paralleled by the development of photography and the increasing availability of cameras that made everyone in the public into a photographer, thus artist, thus artist book-maker by the making of their scrapbooks and photograph albums. To conclude the brief history of artists' books, it is very, very difficult to delineate what is and what is not an artists’ book because its essence negates a definition.

CHAPTER TWO

La Femme Est by Pierre Lecuire (1922-2013)

A poet asking of language more than language

I chose Lecuire’s book from a list of artists’ books at the Weston Library’s special collection. It stood out to me because it was the only French one and I had already spent about six months of my higher education researching the complex and revolutionary poem Un Coup de Des by also-French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. It had absolutely transformed the way I see language and poetry, so I was drawn to explore further horizons of French poésie.

At the very begining of my research I found that Lecuire had published around forty works, he was auctioned at Christie’s and his litographs were on Centre Pompidou’s website, but there was next-to-no information about him, his life, or even his works. Peculiar, I thought. Some further digging revealed to me that there has been an exhibition on his works at the Maison française d’Oxford in 1977 curated by Henry Bouillier.

I called the Maison Française and asked them if they might have any archive material on the exhibition dating back forty-five years. It sounded unlikely, the lady across the phone was very kind but she had no idea who I was talking about. In the next hour I received a call back, I was invited to the library and was greeted by Janet, the librarian. Like Jo, she was also cataloguing recently acquired books.

On her desk was a small colourful book sent to the library over lockdown, alongside a hand-written letter. This was the book of the 1977 exhibition on Pierre Lecuire’s books, waiting to be catalogued. What a coincidence! Janet took me around the bookshelves and showed me a generously sized, framed sheet of paper covered in rather small letterpress tex. A brief glance over the text revealed that it was a print from La Femme Est, signed and dedicated to the library by Lecuire himself at the time of his exhibition in Oxford.

Henri Bouillier, literary critic for Nouvelle Revue Française, had organised the 1977 exhibition and was the director of Maison Française at the time. The preface of the exhibition book by Bouillier was an homage to Oxford, an unparalleled temple of knowledge and learning. He described the libraries as full of treasures, manuscripts and calligraphies that preserve great thoughts and creations. In his essay titled Pierre Lecuire or the Poem in Majesty Bouillier spoke of Lecuire’s works as transcending categories and customs, thus remaining in the shadows despite their relevance to our age — or rather his age of 1988. For Bouillier, it was a necessity to introduce the works of Lecuire to to this enriching environment.

The introduction by Bouillier in the exhibition book described that Lecuire who was a born a poet was introduced to the world of the artist through a Russian-French artist called Nicolas De Staël. Lecuire saw beauty in De Staël’s paintings, misery in his starving family and a genius, to be found and recognised. This led him to publish his first book in 1954 titled Voir Nicolas de Staël (Fig 2.2) — “a collection of prose pieces written as much to celebrate the painter as to express a part of the young writer’s inner world” (as described by Bouillier.)

After arriving to Paris in 1943, de Staël became friends with Russian André Lanskoy in 1946. Both were born in Russia and both had ended up painting and living in Paris. Unfortunately De Staël committed suicide in 1955 at the young age of 41. Attracted to the similar style of the two painters, Lecuire continued to work with Lanskoy, leading to the cover of the 1977 exhibition book (Fig 2.4.)

The centrepiece of the exhibition was Lecuire’s monumental poem La Femme Est, contained within a box 65 cm long and 48 cm wide. It consists of looseleaf pages that are folded in half and slotted in one anohter to form a book. The first sheet introduces the piece itself and the next addresses the reader. Following the pages of the poem, there is a single sheet with the entire text of the poem. This is the same poster as the one in the library of Maison Française d’Oxford.

Lecuire’s writing for the exhibition introduces Ezra Pound’s typologies of poetry: Musicality of line, Play of images and the Movement of ideas. For Lecuire, there is a fourth, unaddressed but important category: panpoeia — a poetic continent, complete poetry, the unity of the book as a volume, the coming together of content and object. For Lecuire, the book is a “fusion of dissimilar delights, [taking] on the appearance, music, colour, phases and hospitable traits of a coherent albeit magical, primitive and ancient logic. Everything merges into a configuration and all configuration becomes indivisible.”1

The book itself is a typographic experiment, a book for the object’s sake, for the value of its own bringing-into-existence. Produced as a mere edition of fifty five copies, it is a monumental arrangement of aesthetic choices, in harmony with the poetics of text.

CHAPTER THREE

Found Poems by Bern porter (1972)

Fast forward five years to 1972, in New York city, the second home of the sixties artists' book movement. We are looking at the American artist, writer, publisher, performer and physicist Bern Porter’s work Found Poems.

There was an exhibition of Porter’s books in 2010 in the library of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the most important institutions in the discourse of contemporary art. The exhibition was organized by the senior library assistant, Rachael Morrison. Similar to Bouillier’s affection for Lecuire, Morrison had an appreciation for Porter’s work that she rightfully felt was under-recognised. What follows is the biographical introduction text of the exhibition because it does a much better job of justly summarising the incredible life of Porter in a paragraph than I ever could:

“Bern Porter (1911–2004) worked on the development of the cathode-ray tube (for television), the atomic bomb (with the Manhattan Project), and NASA’s Saturn Five Rocket. When the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, in 1945, Porter walked away from his position with the Manhattan Project and, disappointed with his work as a physicist, turned his attention to artistic pursuits. In the aftermath of World War II, a flood of visual information spread across the United States. Advertisements in newspapers and magazines and on billboards and television promised an easier and happier life through the purchasing of products.For his collages, which he dubbed “Founds,” Porter gathered the waste of this new culture—advertisements, junk mail, instruction booklets, scientific documents, and other material—and turned it into art. In addition to his books of Founds, Porter authored treatises on the unification of science and art (what he called “Sciart”) and books of experimental poetry.”

The introduction to Porter’s book Found Poems, was written by Dick Higgins. Born in Cambridge in 1938, Higgins studied in many different institutions in the US from Yale to New School, where he was a part of John Cage’s monumental music composition course in 1958. Upon joining the Fluxus festival in Wiesbaden in 1962, Higgins became one of the founding members of the movement. This led him to found Something Else Press in 1964, the first American publishing house dedicated exclusively to artists’s books, publishing many books of Porter.

The following text was published by Dick Higgins himself in the February of 1966 as part of the first issue of The Something Else Newsletter:

“Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media. This is no accident. The concept of the separation between media arose in the renaissance. The idea that a painting is made of paint on canvas or that a sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social thought- categorising and dividing society into nobility with its various subdivisions, untitled gentry, artisans, serfs and landless workers— which we call the feudal conception of the Great Chain of Being. This essentially mechanistic approach continued to be relevant throughout the first two industrial revolutions, just concluded, and into the present era of automation, which constitutes, in fact, a third industrial revolution.”

Similiar to Lecuire, Higgins and Porter were versatile in their work and approach to forms of art, seeking the union of many ideas and disciplines through the making of artists' books. They completely made sense as a pair.

EPILOGUE

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that I have not actually discussed much of La Femme Est, the poem, but rather La Femme Est the book and object. Whilst the time restraints were a part of this decision, as it is presented as a typographic piece, I wanted to keep it as such in your minds.

La Femme Est and Found Poems share many qualities. Their non-verbal being is one that stands forward. There is a precision in both that structures the book and that elevates it into becoming a work of art. Simultaneously, there is a playfulness and poesie that dissolves meaning into a different form of understanding, challenging the ideas of what a book is, what it means and what purpose it can serve.

It is particularly strange and remarkable to find these books in the collection of Weston library, alongside something equally complex but much more verbal such as original manuscripts of Wittgenstein’s letters on Logic.

Higgins compared the work of Porter to that of John Cage. Having been taught by him first hand, this would be a carefully considered remark of an artist who closely understood both figures. He thought they had a mutually objective, structural curiosity that is a product of their time that simultaneously transcends the time in which they lived. This comparison could be extended to Lecuire too, both the artists’ work, despite the difference in aesthetics as well as cultural context, begin to question what a poem is as well as what constitutes language. Porter seeking poetry in the language of visuals, whilst Lecuire maintains the presence of language but strips it of meaning, revealing an object-like quality to its being and beauty.

1. “The Book and its Poem/the Poem and its Book” (1976) by Pierre Lecuire, published as a part of the exhibition text in 1977. Translated from the French by Astrid Ivask.

Dilara Koz is an MFA student at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. She is interested in space, time, truth, communication, translation, images, memory, phenomenology, and the ontology of being. She has previously studied at the Architectural Association and The Barttlet School of Architecture, University College London. Three of her own artists’ books can be found in the Weston Library’s special collections from February 2023 onwards. Website: www.dikoz.online / Instagram: @di.koz