Infuriatingly Incomplete
Richard Kostelanetz
Having produced book art, along with more conventional volumes, since the late 60s, I eagerly opened Betty Bright’s handsomely produced No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980. I was wishing that it would be definitive, only to discover that it was not.
The publisher acknowledged my essays on the subject. I was, therefore, surprised that none of the book art books I produced before 1980 were. Not my first collection of visual poetry, Visible Language (1970), not Come Here (1974) in which very few words are visually enhanced sequentially into an erotic narrative, not my ladder books Modulations and Extrapolate (both 1975). Omitted also was my binding of two complimentary books back to back, Short Fictions/I Articulations (1974), The End Appendix / The End Essentials (1979) and not One Night Stood (1977), which publishes the same text in two radically different formats.
Neither were Inexistences and Tabula (1978), which have blank pages behind their opening frame, not my loose-leaf books Obliterate (1974), And So Forth (1979), not the stack of large cards I titled Rain Rains Rain (1976), not the three books composed entirely of numerals nor the Assemblings that I co-produced annually during the 70s. Nothing, nada, zilch! How infuriated I become, justifiably, as I describe all these titles.
Then I discovered that the major book art books of other authors were similarly slighted: Marshall McLuhan, whose classic Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations (1967) and The Medium Is the Message (1967) are not even mentioned, and Dick Higgins, whose great Foew&ombwhnw (1969) is not mentioned either.
Claes Oldenberg’s superlative Store Days (1967), Emmett Williams’ Sweethearts (1967), Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots, which arrived periodically in the mail before appearing in 1999 as a spine-bound book, Lucas Samaras’s Album (1971), John Cage’s Notations (1969) and Alan Kaprow’s Assemblage Environments Happenings (1965), likewise are not acknowledged. Even though Bright mentioned all these authors her book and thus she was aware of them, as was I, who emerges from the rubble of this book amidst the best company.
Given the omissions noted so far, it is scarcely surprising that other major North American book artists not mentioned at all. Such as Jesse Reichek, Alain Arias-Misson, Paul Zelevansky, J. Marks, Duane Michals, Don Celender, Bern Porter, Wally Depew, Merce Cunningham-Frances Starr, Michael Kasper, R. Murray Schafer, Lou Harrison, Fred Truck and Warren Lehrer, even though all of them produced admirable book art between 1960 and 1980. In addition, Celender taught for many years near Minneapolis, where Bright’s wrote the book.
Indeed, I have mentioned works by these artists and authors in books and essays published over the past three-plus decades, some of which are to be reprinted in my forthcoming book art, anthologies and alternative publishing. Need I note that nearly all of these masters also escaped the "scholarship" of Joanna Drucker in her The Century of Artists’ Books (1997), as I noted in a review at the time, making me wonder whether I’ll need to mention them yet again and again.
The problems mentioned above reflect in part a title that promises "book art," rather than brief appreciations of book-like works by well-known visual artists. I take this to be Bright’s real subject, perhaps because her text began as a doctoral thesis in art history. Also missing is a bio note for Ms. Bright whose cutesy name might be pseudonym. Although this book aspires to be definitive, the index is infuriatingly incomplete, which accounts for why may I acknowledge in advance, some of my claims about purported omissions might be wrong.
