FENOMÉN KNIHA 2010
PHENOMENON: THE BOOK 2010

A Book as a Phenomenon of Bringing a Message

Jiří Havlíček

Book culture – from clay tablets of Mesopotamia, Egyptian papyri, illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages up to printed folios and artists’ books of the twentieth century – is an essential part of our civilization.

Modern times have brought electronic and multimedia books online focusing on visual informative elements on various data sources. However, that is only an extension – diversification of the original purpose and meaning of a book: to preserve and spread information beyond time and space.

While the interpretation of visual arts continues to narrow down, the book phenomenon remains a constant challenge to creating aesthetic objects whose purpose of bringing a message – information in today’s terminology – seems to have a secondary meaning. The aesthetic value of a book lies in its individual and often non-utilitarian interpretation. The degree of originality and authenticity and also the continuation of the historical tradition of fiction carry most value.

In addition, books strengthen communication not only in the aesthetic but especially in the social sense, the intersubjectivity of the anthropological philosophical type. It documents the level and development of our culture. Without the beneficial impact of physical books we gradually lose active contact with the socially structured reality. We are left in the desert of the internet surrounded by many electronic toys for children, teenagers and adults, fascinated and manipulated by electronic illusions playing never-ending hide and seek.

The contemporary construct of visual culture in various media – photography, film, television and video, computer and internet, digitalized transfer of visual information – also brings dangerous limitations and simplifications by gradually losing higher verbal culture and communication.

It is not easy to construct live spoken speech as a meaningful discourse. It is articulation of the human spirit and soul. The art of coherently giving life of spoken words to manuscripts and books through text, which outlast our ephemeral individual lives, is the privilege of humanity and hope for a second life in the sense of Platonic philosophy.

Physical books are therefore a creation of new living forms of seemingly extrahuman existence because many private as well as public libraries are shells which hold human spiritual heritage and the eternal message for the contemporaries and descendants. A well-built and maintained library is a superorganism, not in the biological but social sense. It is not only a databank or database focused on the accumulation of information but also an extension of universal memory and a substantial aesthetic subject. Only uneducated barbarians stuck in their animal state destroy and burn books, which they don’t understand, and ruin and cause the deterioration of libraries by their lack of care...

An adequate symbolic code guarantees the effectiveness of the transfer of information between partners in communication. An interpretation of coded messages in developed culture and civilization is rather a skill of one’s intelligence and intellect than badly controlled emotional changes. However, pure and non-interpreted visual information have a greater effect on human emotions and can be one-sidedly and freely manipulated through visual symbolic clues. There is a great danger where a one-sided depiction outbalances in a mental area. A flurry of rapidly changing images literally disrupts the integrity of a psyche and agitates this mental state by profound subliminal perceptions. If this is done by means of mass media massages, the impact becomes irreversible. The whole population gives in and nobody stays aware of what has happened. Everyone is transformed under the magic spell of syncretic media patterns…

The sun of civilization and culture has gone down; not in the sense of the Weber “disenchantment of the world” but the actual opposite – the media curse of reality into conveyed patterns.

Rapidly changing images break the borderline between subliminal perception, reaching the range of animal reflexes and distant interpreting intellect.

We may still recall the purpose of books; at least those which did not contain banal stories and did not parrot familiar paradigms of science, art and religion; especially bending our numb thinking towards convenient and false simplicity. The creative approach of artists who create physical books as tangible artefacts, made of traditional and non-traditional materials, becomes therefore a lasting contribution.

Book objects often connect images and words into simple clear forms for one cannot exist without the other. It is only us who are fooled by the cognitive nature of thinking. It juxtaposes ideas into opposing reflections in order not to go astray in the endless library labyrinth, described in works of Borghes and Eco.

The art of an artist book as a physical book object is a magical techné recovering a repressed and forgotten ability to evoke aesthetic information value as a way of bringing a message of a creative individual act. In addition, the aesthetic and conceptual approach to the book phenomenon initiates the author’s freedom towards understanding an artifact as an object. Its form – in typical text features and books – were inspired very distantly after Duchamp’s “suitcases” and surrealistic books-objects.

A particular experimental timelessness takes us back to the threshold that we overstepped by creating spoken and written language at the beginning of civilization and culture. If we were to forget this art and craft in the chaos of virtuality, the so-called age of electronic media, we would risk the loss of human identity.