Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Twentieth-century artists and writers used the book format to present text and image in creative dialogues in livres d’artiste. The genre defies neat definition but words and images manifest aesthetic materiality and verbal-visual information for viewer/reader interpretation. The “art books” negotiated with artists and writers by publishers are printed as “art” publications. The artist’s book acquired significance in the late 20th century when it diverged from the livre d’artiste. Originated by visual artists and conceived as sculptural forms with text and images, artists’ books were usually created as unique artefacts or handprinted in limited editions. This illustrated paper explores handmade, handprinted artists’ books and analyses the synergies between a book form and meanings inherent in image-text relationships. I discuss artists’ books published by The Caversham Press in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa to reveal the versatility of the sculptural book form as purveyor of story-telling in South Africa’s complex, multi-ethnic apartheid society. Selecting Exile (2001), an artist’s book by novelist-artist Ingrid Winterbach for detailed analysis, I argue that the visual, tactile form of this book develops a postmodern narrative. Winterbach consults South African history to empower Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman (1789-1815), a Khoisan woman who was taken to Europe to be exhibited as an exotic African curiosity, to tell her story. The accordion paper pull-out and bound pages of Exile enable different interactive sequences and palimpsests of printed pages, handwritten script and drawings to be handled, seen and read as composite ‘imagetext’ objects (T.J.W. Mitchell’s term), and image-texts with variable relationships.