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Jul. 4th, 2008 10:03 amSo, Brisbane. I've been trying on corsets in a rockabilly hair salon. Am fairly sure this is unique to brisbane.
Serena and I went to the Queensland State Library to see the Freestyle Books exhibit. Artist's books, which is to say, books as (twentieth century) art rather than books as containers of information. Most of it was very cool: I really liked the book with pages made of recycled towels, painted with a fantasy story. Also neat were some of the ones where the art was obscuring the text; one had nails driven in to each letter, the nails colourcoded to the letter they destroyed. And the tower of babel, which is on the advertising for the exhibition, is a scroll: on one side, various buildings around the world, and on the other, the story of the tower of babel over and over printed in various languages so as to make it incomprenhisble.
Still, I think of a book as something to be flicked through, something that has, well, a story that continues from page to page. And when the books are objects inside glass cases, that can't be done. Some of them had been scanned and were projected onto the walls, so that you could at least see each page, even if it was at a predetermined speed. And, of course, the items were all catalogued according to book standards, so that the little white cards showed the title, author and edition, but not what it was made of. To some extent the exhibition suffers from being in a library and not a museum.
But I want to take up bookbinding now...
Serena and I went to the Queensland State Library to see the Freestyle Books exhibit. Artist's books, which is to say, books as (twentieth century) art rather than books as containers of information. Most of it was very cool: I really liked the book with pages made of recycled towels, painted with a fantasy story. Also neat were some of the ones where the art was obscuring the text; one had nails driven in to each letter, the nails colourcoded to the letter they destroyed. And the tower of babel, which is on the advertising for the exhibition, is a scroll: on one side, various buildings around the world, and on the other, the story of the tower of babel over and over printed in various languages so as to make it incomprenhisble.
Still, I think of a book as something to be flicked through, something that has, well, a story that continues from page to page. And when the books are objects inside glass cases, that can't be done. Some of them had been scanned and were projected onto the walls, so that you could at least see each page, even if it was at a predetermined speed. And, of course, the items were all catalogued according to book standards, so that the little white cards showed the title, author and edition, but not what it was made of. To some extent the exhibition suffers from being in a library and not a museum.
But I want to take up bookbinding now...
