bookwork

source: jacket2

Icelandic artist Ragnhildur Jóhanns’ work exists in the liminal space between book and art, between reading and looking, but perhaps, most significantly, because much of her work is so tactile, between looking and touching.

But doesn’t the experience of reading books always involve touching? We touch with our eyes. We look with our fingers. Books are also anthologies of touch. Their bindings, pages, paper, print. Holding a book. Turning its pages. We feel the paper – its texture and thickness. As my niece once exclaimed, “Wow! Its pages are paper thin.”

When we engage with written language, we feel each curve or angle of letter. Some books are the size of a sparrow, some are eagle-sized. In Jóhanns’ work, we examine text, reading the words, but also looking at them and not searching for each individual meaning or the relationships between them necessarily, but as a collection of words. A collection of tones and modalities of language.

The little strips of paper drawing the voices out of the book—the crowd of words speaking. And like listening to a crowd—are they saying ‘watermelon, watermelon’ or reciting their own Ur Sonatas—we listen to the overall profile rather than the individual words. We don’t listen to each cicada, but rather the swarm.

Meaning is ambient. Perhaps reading is ambient, also. We often read without really noticing. Words surround us, like leaves surround squirrels as they go about their daily leaps. (I think of a conversation I had with derek beaulieu about his notion of ‘ambient poetics,’ though I’m not sure if this is what he means.)

Jóhanns’ bookworks often feature little strips of paper sprouting from the book, the words, like plants growing through cracks in the sidewalk, escaping, seeking the outside. Instead of “Copy/pasting” the digital representation of the words, the actual physical contents of the book were moved. We feel the tactility of the book. Its objectness.

What is the sum of a book, what is its content? Its paper, its lines, its words on paper and lines? Our usual notion of a book is that it is one imaginary long paper segmented then bundled into the separate sheets of the codex.

In Jóhanns’ work, the words on distant pages can speak to each other across pages like residents in an apartment building on their balconies looking up, looking down, passing grammar between them.

Jean Cocteau says, “The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order. And what if that ‘out of order’ masterpiece were itself out of order? And what about the dictionary or the book considered as a form in itself, as a ‘masterpiece’ of its own? What happens if you take apart the book itself? When we read a book, we read so much beyond the words. So much beyond the grammar that the author presents.
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source: 3ammagazine

I am an artist, educated as an visual artist and I make art, it just so happens that my art is poetic and occupied with poetry. My poems are generally the byproduct of my art work and I thoroughly enjoy allowing flow between work – that the sculpture can be a poem, that, in turn, can be subject to performance, to sound, photographs, books. It’s because I’m an artist that I need to approach poetry in this way. I’m not even sure I could sit down and write a poem on paper, it would not give me the same pleasure as transfering works of poetry. I like considering the question of what is poetry? What can it be? Is a poem just text on paper or text as a visual form. Is a poem only what can be placed in a book of poetry, in print? To me these are interesting questions that I like to work with. In the process of creating, the performance is the very last thing I think about. I start with only the material work, and if I am working on a specific art project that can then be converted into the poem, the performance will follow. If I manage to create works that I can call a poem I am happy to publish the poems, anywhere and anytime, if I am asked to perform the poem I’ll start wondering how I will do so. I must admit that I decide how the performance will be shortly before I do it. Usually I have, however, a few ideas in the days before about the possiblilities I might want to perform for that specific work. Visual poetry has endless possibilities. How does one perform a visual poem? There is no one right way of doing so, all readings are correct and because the works are open to interpretation it´s so good to give yourself the freedom to read visual work in a new and exciting way. The performance of the poem is very influenced by my art education, I like performance and use it as a art form in and of itself, so when it comes to poetry, I think of it in a artistically performative way – how is the visual part of the performance generated by what is behind the physicality of the poem.

I wrote poetry as a teenager but I never took them seriously and never made any serious attempt to write further. I kept making notes, I wrote down some words from time to time through my teens but stopped even that as I grew older. However, when I started focusing on my art education, I carried with me (and still do) a sketchbook, wrote in that as much as I drew and pasted. I wrote often lyrical lines that I didn’t look at as poems. For me, this was more of a conversation with myself, writing down phrases and Text in dialogue with the self, that´s how I develop concepts. In my studies at the Icelandic Art Academy professors and other teachers noticed my way of working with words and often pointed out artists who use text in their work. I was advised to take a look at concrete poetry. I did feel a connection to the works of artists who use text as art and it made me more aware of the importance of the written word in my work. For a long time, however, it was hard for me to make the image and text work together until one day I decided to just focus entirely on the text and and feel free to be poetic. I made artist books that contained a poems, poems that I created from an online forum. I hand-printed the book with intaglio printing and bound the fifty copies together myself. I looked at it as an artist book rather than a collection of poetry. Shortly after that I started using the book as an object and to transform it into poetic works, poetic sculptures, as I choose to call them. Since I am an artist first and foremost, I approach poetry in a different way I guess. I am a very visual person and I like to work with my hands. I can not sit in front of computer screen and write poetry because I do not get the same connection to the computer screen as I do when working with what I have in my hands and with what can be transformed, taken out of context, put in a new context or be seen and experienced in some new and exciting way.
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source: 3ammagazine

Ragnhildur Jóhanns was born in Reykjavík, Iceland in 1977. She studied visual arts there and has exhibited and performed extensively in both Iceland and abroad. She will be appearing at the forthcoming Maintenant Icelandic & British poetry night at the Rich Mix Centre (November 27th), where she will be collaborating with Iain Sinclair (full details to follow shortly).