'Book as Art': Read Closely

Wandering through "The Book as Art: Twenty Years of Artists' Books From the National Museum of Women in the Arts," I was reminded of the traditional Rosh Hashanah greeting "May you be inscribed in the book of life for another good year."

The traditional Jewish New Year's wish seems apt, and not just because the show is a celebration of the museum's 20th anniversary, coming up next year. There's just something about books -- artists' books in particular, but all books really -- that lends them to being taken as metaphors for life. "The word made flesh." That sort of thing. In their not infrequent evocation of scrapbooks, diaries, photo albums, newspapers and maps, artists' books possess a quality of something used as a repository of memories, a documentary record of who we are and where we have been. I am also reminded of another saying, this one from "Forrest Gump":

"Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get."

That particular line came to mind while looking at two works in the show, Julie Chen's "Bon Bon Mots" and Peregrine Honig's "Ovubet (26 Girls With Sweet Centers)," both of which play with the visual iconography of a candy box as a stand-in for, as Chen writes in the show's accompanying catalogue, the "sadness and sweetness" of the human condition.

The exhibition, organized by the museum's curator of book arts, Krystyna Wasserman, is divided into several thematic groupings: "Storytellers," "Food and the Body," "Autobiographers," "Dreamers and Magicians," "Historians," "Mothers, Daughters and Wives," "Inspired by the Muses," "Nature" and "Travelers." Yet the theme of autobiography (or, at the very least, biography) pervades the work as a persistent subtext, even when not explicitly placed in that category. Childhood, puberty, sexual awakening, romantic yearnings, marriage, motherhood -- these themes crop up again and again, along with allusions to illness (breast cancer, for instance, in the case of Laura Davidson and Susan King), the Holocaust (Tatana Kellner) or the death of a loved one (Elisabetta Gut).

The cumulative effect is one of the artists' books and its component pages -- or other, less traditional parts, such as the empty tea bags of Allison Cooke Brown's "Teatimes" -- as forming a kind of crazy quilt composed of life's ups and downs, a "patchwork narrative of events," as Chen's "True to Life" puts it. Sometimes those events are personal; sometimes they are historical. They can be imagined or real. As with Vera Khlebnikova's "Russian Portrait" (a box containing the faces of characters from Russian literature that have been sliced in such a way that they can be mixed and matched), many of the works in "Book as Art" feel like stitched-together bits and pieces that together embody -- or sometimes merely hint at -- a whole person.

That notion resurfaces in "Raptured Browsers: Books as Visual Language," a three-artist show at Silver Spring's Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in which Clifton Meador's "Alabama Agricultural Agent Railroad Passes" forms a kind of pictorial record, of effigy, if you will, of the artist's grandfather, by reproducing a series of railroad passes used by him from 1929 to 1930. "When I make a book, I try as hard as I can to make something real," writes Meador, who notes that he is drawn to how "history is embodied in material culture."

It's not immediately apparent -- the show is far more conceptual than "Book as Art" -- but Meador's fellow "Browsers" artists are all plowing that same field. Specifically, one in which the book (or, more loosely interpreted, the word itself) is a physical manifestation of something less concrete.

Pattie Belle Hastings's work, for example, records, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, the impact of such domestic detritus as dryer lint and hair from My Little Pony toys on something the artist calls "gender performance." In the show's video installation, and in a series of deadpan "laboratory manuals," a white-coated scientist investigates the artist's "relationship to machine technologies." Alluding to her own home life as a kind of "domestic laboratory," Hastings makes books and performance art that document the minutiae of motherhood and housekeeping.

Ward Tietz's work is less book art than concrete poetry, composed of -- in some cases, quite literally -- concrete sculptures in the shape of words. Along with photographic documentation of earlier installations, his contribution to "Browsers" consists of a few word-based objects. A case in point is the artist's "SAVE monkey," in which the three-dimensional letters of the word "monkey," hanging precariously from one end of a ladder, are counterbalanced by the letters of the word "save" at the far end. The article "a" forms the ladder's fulcrum.

Tietz isn't interested in visual puns though. Save a monkey? What does that even mean? His work is more dadaist than, say, that of cartoonist Saul Steinberg, who also played with the idea of words as objects, rather than as symbols. He does fit in with Hastings and Meador though, in the sense that he's interested in the idea of the written word as not just a vessel, but as a kind of content itself.

THE BOOK AS ART: TWENTY YEARS OF ARTISTS' BOOKS FROM THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS Through Feb. 4 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW (Metro: Metro Center). 202-783-5000. http://www.nmwa.org. Open Monday-Saturday 10 to 5; Sundays noon to 5. $8; students and seniors $6; members and visitors 18 and younger free; free admission the first Sunday of the month.

RAPTURED BROWSERS: BOOKS AS VISUAL LANGUAGE Through Nov. 30 at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 8230 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring (Metro: Silver Spring). 301-608-9101. http://www.pyramidatlanticartcenter.org. Open Monday-Friday 9 to 5. Free.