(From the article that appears in the Ithaca Times) Ithaca resident and Cornell professor Buzz Spector is a very busy fellow. Recently, Spector met with me in the Hirshland Gallery, a narrow space deep in the bowels of Cornell’s Kroch Library, which holds rare books and manuscript collections. The Hirshland Gallery is currently home to Spector’s latest piece, “The Big Red C,” a construction that is part of his larger project, “The Humanities Book Art Project.“
“The Big Red C” is a large architectural construction made entirely out of books written by Cornellians (staff, student, faculty, alums), resembling a circular room and shaped like the letter C. Books of varying shapes and sizes are stacked in sturdy columns, and many titles and their authors are immediately recognizable. The majority of the books are from local libraries, but over 40 volumes come from Spector’s personal bookshelves.
As I was waiting for Spector, I observed a steady stream of people admiring his craftsmanship. One middle-aged woman peered closely at a book cover before picking up the volume to flip through the first few pages; a few moments later, two teenage girls raced around the gallery with glee. One girl nonchalantly picked up the book and started reading it in the gallery. When Spector arrived, she set the book back into place somewhat reluctantly.
This is not unusual. Spector’s sculptures provoke such reactions in observers. Spector has been a pioneer of what he calls the “book arts.” Building meticulous parabolic curves comprising only books, Spector plays with the idea of authorship, the written word, and the “ivory tower” of learning.
The books themselves are loaded with meaning, and Spector’s constructions examine both their literal and conceptual domains. The materials themselves are sensuous, tactile and most importantly, familiar to viewers. Those not versed in conceptual art may find Spector’s constructions comforting anyway. The books evoke nostalgia and familiarity, and Spector allows people to relieve the urge to touch the books.
Since Spector’s arrival in Ithaca in 2001, he has been slowly transforming the connective tissue both within Cornell University as well as between the Ithaca community and the Cornell Art department. Perhaps fostered by his love of critical theory and the humanities (Spector has been called a “theoretician’s artist”), Spector embraces a method of critical discourse that emphasizes an expansive, intellectually engaged conversation with art in order to create a rich environment for conversing about disciplines across their boundaries.
Spector is a visual artist, but he has a very special relationship with the humanities, especially literature. He is quick to clarify that these two fields are not mutually exclusive, as his primary concern is how artists encounter language. Conceptual art has a long history of being concerned with the way language enters the viewer’s understanding of visual art and made things, and Spector plays with this notion.
Spector’s contribution to the realm of the “book arts” goes back nearly 30 years, when he would spend months in his own loft rearranging used books to form paintings, concrete poetry and maps. What was interesting, Spector found, was that the books did not become neutral units, and that his constructions were not simply minimalist structure. The books did not stop being books, and Spector immediately recognized the endless conceptual possibilities.
Spector and I sat down at a room adjacent to the Hirshland Gallery. The room was outfitted with three of his characteristically oversized Polaroid photographs of previous book pieces. Presented here are excerpts from our conversation, in which Spector talks about the future of the Book Arts, his own relationship to Ithaca, and his love of literature.
Popcorn Youth: How did you end up in Ithaca?
Buzz Spector: I had been teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It’s a good school, and not too far from Chicago, so I had access to that art center. But I also had a pretty active exhibiting career in New York City, so part of coming to Cornell was putting myself in a position to spend more time in the city. But the other part of coming to Cornell, was Cornell!
I had been on campus previously as a visiting lecturer, and when I got back to Champaign, I told my wife that if a good job opened up here, we were going to apply for it. And the job that opened was as department chair.
Popcorn Youth: Is it ever a challenge to balance your obligations to the University with your personal artistic career?
Buzz Spector: Oh, it’s ongoing. Absolutely. The idea wasn’t to be a Chair for the rest of my academic life. I’ve had to set aside a lot of professional opportunities in order to do this job properly, but that’s okay. It’s a long life, and I’m healthy. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: In the art world, what reputation does Cornell have as a fine arts department?
Buzz Spector: Well, when I got here, I don’t think we had much of a reputation. There had been some really great artists who had graduated from Cornell in recent years, but many of them were from other programs.
Gordon Matta-Clark was an architecture student, as was Richard Artschwager. And then there is the notorious case of Susan Rothenburg, a distinguished painter who was kicked out of the department because of her “lack” of talent. Eventually, she was rescued from exile by someone in the painting program. The sculptors couldn’t see that she was a good artist, but the painters could. And the painters won. (Laughs)
I feel that one of the tasks that I faced when I came here was to raise the profile of the department. And that was something that I have thrown myself into with a great deal energy. What is great about this department is the enormous amount of talent and energy and intelligence, all at once on campus. In every other art school at I’ve taught at, and that includes a couple of other schools that, at the time of my tenure, were ranked as number one — the School of the Art Institute at Chicago and later the Art Center College of Design — I never felt that I worked with so many talented and concerned and dedicated students as I work with here. This is the best mix.
Popcorn Youth: Would you say there is a lot of interaction between the Cornell art department and the Ithaca community?
Buzz Spector: I wish there were more. Really, we’re better at it than most places I’ve been connected to, but I still think we should be more active in the community as a group than we are.
Popcorn Youth: So what about you as an individual?
Buzz Spector: I believe in it really strongly. You should be exhibiting where you live. I show in many far-flung places that my friends and neighbors aren’t going to be able to get to, and that was part of the reason for joining the State of the Art Gallery. I did leave State of the Art, but I haven’t given up on showing locally.
A project like this is an opportunity for people to come on the campus and to see what I do. I’ve curated a show at the Tompkins County Public Library that got a fair amount of folks and my next thought about this is to do something with the book sale, and that’s twice a year. I’d like to make something at the book sale, let people touch the books.
Popcorn Youth: Would you encourage people to touch the books in a construction such as this one?
Buzz Spector: Oh, I don’t have to — the books encourage them. Every time, every single time, I’ve made one of these structures in a public venue, a museum, gallery, it doesn’t matter — people will touch it … People would come in and see this 36 foot long parabolic curve, this articulated structure that I spent so much time building, and then they notice that a book that they hadn’t read was sitting on top, so they’d just reach up, take it off, sit on the edge of the plinth, as if, just for one moment, the fact of the museum had disappeared.
Popcorn Youth: Perhaps because books are so familiar, approachable, comforting.
Buzz Spector: Totally. Absolutely. Our relationship to books is utterly democratic. One reason that little kids hate going to art museums is that you can’t touch! And that’s part of how we learn. And that’s why we have books.
Popcorn Youth: Your identity as both a visual artist and as a book lover seem inextricable.
Buzz Spector: Right. So the two have never been quite as oppositional as the mythology of modern art would have you believe. I grant that I spend more time writing and reading maybe than an average artist, but I don’t think it’s that much more.
Popcorn Youth: With this series, it seems like there’s a great deal of architectural and mathematical thought that goes into each construction. It’s not haphazard in the least.
Buzz Spector: Yes. Absolutely.
Popcorn Youth: Can you explain the event on April 20 that is in conjunction with this exhibit?
Buzz Spector: It’s a talk about book collecting. But it is performative in the sense that rather than just being me giving a talk about that subject, I’m going to read Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same title. So it’s a public reading of Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library.” I’ll engage in a series of public conversations about reading experiences with whoever wants to sit in the plush chair opposite mine, in front of a specially designed coffee table that holds the books so that they can be read from a distance. So it’s a performance because there are props and a recitation. Other than that, I’ll be “me.”
Popcorn Youth: You are a visual artist, but you seem to have a very special relationship with the humanities and with literature.
Buzz Spector: Well, not all visual art involves object making. A lot of performance art is already connected dialectically to theater, and therefore to textuality. All of conceptual art is concerned to the way language enters into our understanding of visual art and made things. So it’s never been quite as oppositional as the mythology of modern art would have you believe. I grant that I spend more time writing and reading maybe than an average artist, but I don’t think that much more.
Popcorn Youth: You have been working with text and its potential in the art world for quite a long time.
Buzz Spector: Thirty years, really.
Popcorn Youth: Could you tell me how your approach to this concept has changed over the years? What the environment like for this type of art was when you first started out?
Buzz Spector: When I first started out, I was very interested in the relationship between concrete poetry — or “visual poetry,” as it was practiced in the 60s — and conceptual art. I thought that it really seemed to be rather arbitrary that you would distinguish a concrete poem by Ian Hamilton Finley from a text based work by Lawrence Weiner, to use two artist examples.
And my feeling about Finley ended up being confirmed by a shift in the nature of his public in the 60s. Finley was making poetry that was chiseled into rocks or carved into tree trunks or embossed into steel or etched into glass, and they were seen as poems. But ten years later, they were seen as a form of language art. He shifted in the regard of his public from being an admired member in a circle of experimental poets to being an internationally known artist and frankly, with a much larger public.
Popcorn Youth: When did you found the art journal “White Walls”?
Buzz Spector: The magazine I started with my friends Reagan and Roberta Upshaw is called “White Walls,” a journal of art and language, and it’s still being published in Chicago. We focused at first on the intersection of interests in artists and writers. Later, we focused on writing by artists because we were getting hundreds and hundreds of unsolicited poems. And really we were trying to find writing that originated in a studio practice, rather than just lots of poems about the joys of being a sculptor or a painter.
I was in grad school when we started it, about 1977. Actually, my friends were also grad students as well, and we didn’t think we’d get any interesting artists to contribute to a grad student magazine, so we paid to have really nice letterhead printed. We introduced ourselves as an artist starting a new venue at the University of Chicago, and we left the status part out of it. We did get a few really interesting artists to contribute, and we used the money we were supposed to be paying our tuition with to pay the printers bill!
So we had this nice little magazine in a first edition, and then we could send that out to other artists and say, “This is what we’ve done, these are the artists that we’ve covered.” By the time we graduated, we had published three issues of the magazine, and gotten in a hell of a lot of trouble with the bursar and the housing office. (Laughs) But all was forgiven and I ended up getting a job at the university press, and that meant that I could print the magazine for the employees discount! (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: And it’s still being published today?
Buzz Spector: Yes it is, although it’s been transmogrified by this point. It’s a much larger operation, and they publish artist’s books, too.
Popcorn Youth: In your own work, do you incorporate texts in other languages?
Buzz Spector: On occasion. I mean, it’s true that my French is terrible, but I write it very well. (Laughs) And given all the work that we’re doing in China, I think I’m going to start using the Chinese language.
Popcorn Youth: What work in China?
Buzz Spector: We’re setting up a study center with Xinghua University in Beijing. It’s a critical center for theory and the visual arts in the art department. We applied for Lehman funding to cover the expenses, but I’ve already been over twice in the last six months, and we’re moving this project pretty far along.
Popcorn Youth: Will the center be open to undergraduate students?
Buzz Spector: Not at first, but eventually, yes. It’s still a totalitarian system for all of the good public relations you see about it, and we’re going to spend three years exchanging scholars in residence and seeing what the more controversial aspects of our critical method end up causing over there.
Popcorn Youth: Critical and theoretical in a general sense or department practices?
Buzz Spector: Both, really.
Popcorn Youth: What is the situation of critical theory in Beijing?
Buzz Spector: There’s not a lot of it. There’s a lot of really interesting independent curators with interest in ideas about art practice, but most of them aren’t connected to universities. And what I see over and over again in the university system is a type of academic practice that is extremely ideologically narrow.
Even at Xinghua when I was touring the campus, it was pointed out to me that there were two curricula that paralleled each other: one was the “traditional” and one was the “contemporary.” Well, what you think that means is what I thought it meant. I thought traditional meant studying basketry, scroll painting, calligraphy, cultural heritage practices. That’s not what they meant by that. They meant a form of socialist realism that was codified under Mao. They meant a repertoire of set subjects including depictions of the chairman, and believe me, that’s where all of the money is, that’s where all of the public art commissions are.
And by contemporary, they mean everything else! So there’s no possibility for a coherent discourse even though lots of students have really good ideas. But where do they get these ideas? Well, they get them from western art magazines, or they get them from going online, at least to the degree that search engines aren’t blocked or censored. So there are all of these ideas, but there isn’t a conversation about them.
Popcorn Youth: And you’re hoping to facilitate that conversation?
Buzz Spector: Yes. And so is Xinghua. I have to say, one of the things we’re expected to do there is to ruffle the feathers of certain elements of the faculty. And we can do that because we’re the outsiders — our privilege to speak is a function of the alienation of our status. But you know, we deal with questions of agency, instrumentality and colonialism here, too. But there is a much more central place to pursue these same questions. I’m really excited about it.
Popcorn Youth: Shanghai-born artist Wenda Gu showed here at the Johnson Museum very recently. What are your thoughts on his practice?
Buzz Spector: I’m extremely interested in the ways that artists embody language. Think of the how we might conduct this conversation using only such English that existed in 1601. There would be long lapses of silence, because the structure of the language wouldn’t permit certain zones of discourse even to be introduced.
We couldn’t even have these thoughts — and pardon the Lichtensteinian riff here — but we wouldn’t even have these thoughts without the language capable of activating them. And I’m interested in this. One property of artwork that is not shared with language, is that materiality as such is capable of provoking reverie, the conversation of phenomenon into language which doesn’t originate in language.
Popcorn Youth: What is the content and authorship of the books that you have included in this piece?
Buzz Spector: Every single book is issued from someone currently at Cornell. Let me correct that. There are a few books loaned by Cornellians in Ithaca, but who are teaching at Ithaca College. It’s all local people. You have to be student, faculty, or staff at Cornell. That was the original invitation. But when we started getting word to Ithacans not currently at Cornell but who had gone to school here, I didn’t see any reason not to include them in the project.
I got a lot of criticism from the New York venue, people who said, “Why didn’t you ask us? Why couldn’t it be for alums? Why didn’t you just use any book ever written at Cornell?” Well, the answer to that is, how many books is that? A quarter of a million, maybe? There isn’t a room on campus large enough to hold any kind of structure of all the books ever written by Cornellians! (Laughs) Not to mention the problem of load bearing capability.
Popcorn Youth: Could you explain the concept of why you chose this particular subject matter? That is, what would you say to someone who simply thought this was a project that is good publicity for Cornell, even Cornell propaganda?
Buzz Spector: That’s very transparently what it was about. This is about university relations. The idea came to me during the humanities roundtable of a year and a half ago, when the provost convened a discussion of all of the people to discuss the arts and humanities on campus, almost two years ago. This was a big event, proposing the question, do the humanities have to be useful?
Popcorn Youth: So you put out a call for submissions.
Buzz Spector: Yes! That’s what we did. When it started out, I had an image in my head, “Colleague A: 3 books. Colleague B: 27 books. Colleague C: 9 books.” And I’m thinking, given that I’m already photographing piles of books, I’m thinking that would be a pretty good pile — just taking all these books by these people and putting them in some sort of arrangement and photographing them.
Popcorn Youth: It’s almost like a historical document of who was at Cornell and in Ithaca this year.
Buzz Spector: Absolutely. And see, it’s just a little thing but it has a certain affect. If you walk around the outside, it’s an edifice. All of the books are stacked, but you can’t see the spines, you just see stacks of paper and they are beautiful and dynamic and architectural — but they’re not informative. But then you go into it and you can read all of the titles. It might not be as coherent of a structure because all of the words get in the way, because now you’re reading. But universities aren’t coherent on the inside are they? They are a cacophony of ideas coming at you from every source. But dialectical connections are established in all sorts of ways.
Popcorn Youth: So it was a conscious decision to have the spines facing inward?
Buzz Spector: Absolutely.
Popcorn Youth: And you could have faced them the other way if you wanted to?
Buzz Spector: Right. Well, it would have been safer to interleave them, alter them. But then it would have been about sculpture, and I wanted it to be an institution. I wanted it to become transmogrified. It starts out as a thing you regard, but it ends up being a zone of reflection.
Popcorn Youth: What are some observations you’ve made about the process of writing, the book as an object, and so forth?
Buzz Spector: Well, no one is an author in the course of making a book. Then, you are a writer. You don’t become an author until your imprimatur is on the publication. It’s a bureaucratic role. You’re a spokesperson for your own practice as an author.
It’s the same way artists give campus visits — they’re not artists at the time, they’re something like an “artiste,” an ambassador for work that only has meaning elsewhere. So I’m looking at all these photographs on dust jackets, and realizing that most people who write books haven’t spent much time figuring out what to do with their bodies when having their picture taken. And people who photograph authors want to suggest what to have them to, by interjecting posing suggestion of one kind or another. Well, they’re aren’t many posing suggestions, there are really just a couple dozen and after that, it might as well be a family snapshot right. (Poses jokingly with hand against head) I had 2,000 author photographs to look at once, so I had a lot of people doing that, of both sexes, of many ages. And this is another one. (Poses with both hands clasped under chin)
You’d be amazed at how many people do this (looks pensively; points at his brain). Or pencil chewing — there’s a lot of pencil chewing. Bad oral habits. But more than anything else, there are people holding books. And rarely it looks like they were holding the book for more than a minute before the picture was being taken. (Laughs) Mostly, it’s being held gingerly like a hot pizza. And then there’s this one pose that only male writers of adventure books who wear eyeglasses assume. And that is, lean back in your chair, take your eyeglasses off your head, and put them in your lap. And if it happened just once, you wouldn’t even have noticed it. But by the time you have six photographs of six different men doing it, you understand the relationship between pen and penis. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: Do you still collect so many books?
Buzz Spector: Oh, I still collect them, but very self-consciously. At this point I have several thousands of books — and more to come.
Popcorn Youth: Do you ever work with more disposal kinds of print material such as newspapers, magazines, journals, or periodicals?
Buzz Spector: No, but there are other artists out there who do. David Mack works with magazine press overruns because he can get them by the hundreds of thousands. He has magazine installations [made] of a quarter of a million [magazines].
Popcorn Youth: So this is a kind of discipline that you’ve seen a lot lately?
Buzz Spector: It’s a milieu. There are a lot of variations. There’s a Brazilian female artist who built a Parthenon of about 40,000 books. But the structural discretion of the piece is a function of a metal armature, so there’s actually a metal structure that supports the books, and I’m not so interested in that. She can make a larger structure [than I can] by doing that, but I really feel that one of the things that I’m presenting when doing these pieces, is the books as a library, not books in a dialectic relationship with a metal frame.
There’s never any interior structure, there’s never any support other than gravity and weight, and the care and placement. But the great thing about working on this project, is that it’s relatively small in terms of the number of books, but they’re all really interesting books. Usually, even always, I’ll say, in my past constructions, I worked with whatever discarded books were available. It’s not hard to get discarded books. Public library systems are constantly de-accessing books from their libraries. Not because there is lack of interest, it’s actually the opposite. A popular book is physically worn out by the actions of many successive readers and it’s annoying to read a book where it’s slipping out of the covers, so they just replace them constantly. And those are the books that I use for my projects. When I did my Art Institute project, there were two weeks’ worth of discards. And that was all the time I needed to get the 2,200 books I used in that piece.
Popcorn Youth: Do you find that Ithaca is an avid book reading community?
Buzz Spector: This is a terrific place to live if you like reading. It’s even better if you like talking about what you read. (Laughs) How many book clubs are there in this town? Hundreds. Every conceivable niche. That’s one of the things I’m going to have fun with on the April 21st event. I’ll be the instigator for god knows how many reading circles. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: What do you typically do when school is not in session? Work on your own projects?
Buzz Spector: I put a lot of time in the studio, because I just don’t have it during the year. And when I’m done being chair, I think I’ll even have more time during the year to work on this stuff. But it’s hard now. I curated a show of artists who were influenced by the works of Jorge Luis Borges, and it opens at the museum at the University of Iowa next Friday. Iowa has some Borges papers, so they’re inaugurating their Borges center with an international conference on the man and his writing. They contacted me out of the blue to ask if I would curate a show of artists’ books about this because a former student of mine is on their faculty, and she remembered that I once made a construction using a title from Borges, The Tower of Babel. And I’ve had to work on that show between 11 at night and 3 in the morning, so I think I’m going to like it but I don’t know for sure. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: How frequently do you travel to NYC?
Buzz Spector: At least twice a month.
Popcorn Youth: And you even taught a Cornell winter session class there in January.
Buzz Spector: Oh yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time in the city this year. One week, I was there for the class. It was a team-teaching for the class, otherwise I would have had to spend three weeks there. I was there yesterday that was just to run some polaroids in to be framed. But I love it.
Popcorn Youth: Would say that there is a lot of interaction between the New York art world and Cornell art communities?
Buzz Spector: Oh yes, absolutely. That’s been a good thing. Many of my colleagues go there. We also go to Toronto and Philly.
Popcorn Youth: Ithaca seems like a good and convenient location in that way.
Buzz Spector: Right. A day’s drive can bring you to many major art centers in two countries.
Popcorn Youth: Tell me more about your work with large-scale polaroids.
Buzz Spector: The camera is really that big. There’s only about 15 of them in existence, maybe even less. They don’t sell the cameras and you can’t buy them. You can only lease them from Polaroid. Originally, they were developed for use of the Vatican. They wanted a large, faithful, absolutely clear image of each square foot of “The Last Judgment.”
And they felt that the non-neg internal dye diffusion technique of Polaroid would give them the most faithful representation, even of the most minuscule of details of the surface. And Polaroid developed this camera to document Michaelangelo. The entire wall and the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling were photographed, so that the twenty-year restoration project would have a master image with which to work. That turned out so well, that as that project was taking place they started inviting photographers to use the camera. Marie Cosindas might be the first artist to make her reputation using the large Polaroid format as her basis. But a number of artists of widely different aesthetic temperaments started to use it, too. Bill Wegman on the one hand, even Ansel Adams took Polaroids.
Popcorn Youth: There are really only 15 cameras in existence?
Buzz Spector: I think so. It’s certainly not more than that. If there are more than that, than I have erred on the larger side. There’s two in NYC at the Polaroid studio, there’s one at the Polaroid headquarters, there’s on in the hands of a private photographer, Elsa Dorfman. She asked if she could use one, and after they gave her the camera they realized they can’t do that anymore, so she might be on the only private artist with one. There’s one in Prague, one in Tokyo, one in Paris.
Every time you see a Polaroid photo made with one of these cameras, it was someone who rented it for the day or the week. Bill Wegman photographs his dogs on the same camera. I’ve known Wegman for a while, so I will often time my visits for the same day that he is there because then we get to hang out, shoot the breeze, I like his dogs. (Laughs) His dogs are incredibly cool.
One day, I was at Polaroid and Bill was shooting a commission, someone with enough money to have Bill photograph him with his dogs. But his dogs are poodles, big standard poodles, and they were … unclear on the concept. (Laughs) They kept falling off the modeling stand, and barking and sniffing each others assholes and peeing on the floor and yipping. I’m sitting there, watching this circus and watching Wegman — who’s ordinarily a pretty even-tempered guy — getting redder and redder, and I noticed that the dogs are sitting on the sofa and they’re also watching. And I swear to god, they’re watching with these identical expressions of complete disdain and I could just hear their little thought bubbles — “Amateurs!” (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: Are there any topics that you would like to address? Any questions that nobody asks you, that you’ve been dying to be asked?
Buzz Spector: There are some questions I get asked too much, and I am grateful that you did not ask them. Often when I get asked questions about my work, especially dealing with my own library, I get asked, “And have you read all of your books?” I think that is an inherently hostile question because you know that you have not read all of the books that you own. And so the question is, why, then, do you own them? And the answer is, that is your vote on behalf of a future. That is the ultimate optimism about collecting books — is that you will get around to them!
Popcorn Youth: I have a friend who is a poet. He says that you should have a percentage of your library that you haven’t read, because that’s part of having a library!
Buzz Spector: Totally. He’s totally right. It is about appetite.
Popcorn Youth: Yes. It is about what you will come to, what you will discover, what you will take steps to allow that to happen.
Buzz Spector: Oh god, yes. My boys are 17 and 13, and I’m watching them go through the same process that my daughter did when she was living at home. That is, of gradually realizing that all of those books downstairs aren’t furniture and they are something else. They are pulling things off the shelves and taking them upstairs to their rooms. and it’s really interesting to see what they read. There are some books with some pretty anatomically specific descriptions of sexual activity, but that’s not what they’re going for, except inadvertently. They’re really going for the ideas. That’s one of those tear-bringing things about having a library.
Popcorn Youth: You described your practice as a “milieu.” How else would you describe it, specifically?
Buzz Spector: Generally, the book arts. There isn’t a proper term for it, because the reasons for entering into that zone of activity are so diverse. I’ve just joined the Cornell Book Arts Club, and there are several people from the community in it, and we’re interesting in making books as a starting point. The fact that I know how to sew signatures or attach a binding strikes me as sort of incidental to what I actually do with them, but still, there’s plenty of room to talk about what properties a book brings to the experience of viewing art as distinct from the experience of reading a text. So that’s one orientation. And then people who build structures out of books are another orientation, and then people who design experimental publications for the page are a third orientation, and it just goes on and on and on. And it should.
Popcorn Youth: Having done this for 30 years, and recognizing that the book is a very old and venerable object, what has been the effect of other spaces of visual art, such as digital, virtual, internet?
Buzz Spector: Well that’s the big question, isn’t it.
Popcorn Youth: I could imagine it being a very productive pressure or force, one that adds additional questions or phenomenon.
Buzz Spector: Yes, I was asked to speak on this subject at a symposium organized by the Getty in 1992 on the future of the book. And I think that was really prescient, really early on, in the recognition that digital technologies were going to have an impact. I remember one of the hypertext speakers spoke of a future in which we were not going to need to print any more books. And that struck me as sort of inane remark that only a really bright person could come up with. (Laughs)
I think key to the experience of reading is its physical nature. It doesn’t matter what subject you’re reading about, you’re still holding the book in your hands — and that behavior isn’t a novelty. A book is usually one of the first things offered to any child in a reading cultural context.
Popcorn Youth: And I think that the book’s very tactile quality is also what causes people to touch your works.
Buzz Spector: Totally. And furthermore, I say that every artist in a reading culture learns what images mean from book images. That’s where you first see them. Babies don’t learn from paintings on the walls, but from images in books. Most children are exposed to images on the pages of their books, and that experience introduces you to many other things besides that.
One of the first times you might find yourself in an adult embrace, it is because you are balancing on a lap, facing the same way as a parent or a sibling or your caregiver, and you face this little paginated theater. For very small children, exactly what prevents images from leaping off the page? When you read “Where the Wild Things Are,” what keeps the monsters from devouring you? I’m sorry, but there’s not a reality principle that’s so firmly grounded in small children that the eternal inertia of a print image is a fact. It’s not yet a fact!
And so one of the things at the hands of the parents is that they’re holding the page with the power to make it go away. But you’re balanced against that shoulder or that arm or that breast in that lap, as if you are growing out of the body reading to you. This is such a common experience, so total, it happens to everybody, so we don’t think about it — we don’t even begin the process of interpreting it. I would say that you learn first of all that the world is full of things and images of things. And the image of a thing and that there is a language to name things are of the same order of magnitude. And that’s what’s operating at the inception of reading.
And the second thing is, you introduce the future to small readers. First this happens, then that happens. There is a narrative given a body, and time explained through these little parcels of information.
And last and certainly not least, you learn of the existence of love. Every time you are at the breast, it’s loving, but it’s also sustenance and nourishment. And some mode of signification for the desire of others comes from how you are pointed to the world by the means of condensing it.
(Hirshland Gallery photos by Amelia Burns. To see more, visit our Flickr page.)