Bookish

A book may hold portraits of an artist’s work, and a book in its simplest form is the artwork of any given author, but the material of a book may also be used to create new art that expresses diverse ideas and is open for interpretation. The Glucksman Gallery on campus celebrates this with a display entitled, “Bookish: When Books Become Art,” and as I listened to the curator explain the different pieces, a completely new world unfolded before me. I was able to justify my innate attraction to books and open my mind to a more creative way of examining them. I was able to sit on a bench for a short period of time and reflect on what I saw. This is what came out:

Something completely unique. Brilliant actually, and quite able to help me justify my love for books. What do they stand for? How do they survive? An old man films his thick country boots kicking a book full of outdated political ideas across the square and the pages flutter about the sidewalk. The binding cannot keep the pages together; what is he saying about the stronghold of this theory? A curious artist plucks love notes and illegible post-it’s from the pages of borrowed material. Tags from brand new shirts, receipts, and ticket stubs litter the library, but are hidden within the two covers of so many books. Sit down in your area library and flip through the pages, see what sort of archeological discoveries are dug up. What can one book carry to the next reader? A book is a vessel of knowledge and ideas. It carries germs and footnotes, garbage and timeless treasures. It is a symbol—colorful artwork, and a bird fluttering over any certain landscape. The book is a constant that is always changing—dirty laundry and a list of quotations. It is a canvas meant to make a beautiful backdrop or stamp a lasting image behind one’s eyelids. Books are a common display so often overlooked by the everyday admirer. Any given one can show an artists work, but why do they insist on producing in a page-to-page format?
A book may also manifest into a piece of art by itself, making all sorts of statements about humanity and materialism. They can build walls and stop floods, even create a compass for which one can use to discover the world. The young red book is quite able to socialize with the old wrinkled one she is positioned so pleasantly against on your bookshelf. In fact all the books chat among themselves and with the model airplane on display. Lines of importance and famous quotations are collaged together and seem quite ridiculous without the encompassing context. Pages of encyclopedias are transposed on top of one another and what we see is merely a smudge—a blur of information that must be separate, yet bound in order to make any sense at all. Never in my life did I see a display so focused on the ironies of books and the thoughts that created them. I feel my passion is more rounded after seeing this display, and I understand why I think books are so beautiful now.