Art and Books, a summary.

Art and Books certainly has been a learning curb. Some of the topics I had touched on before in history of art, but here we looked at books in an entirely different way, answering questions that could without a doubt sent you around the bend if you let them. The question of what art is can't be answered by any one person. Everyone has varying opinions because we all see things in different ways. Many people don't regard abstract as art, after all their ' four year old could do the same,' but look in their houses and find work by the same four year old attached to the fridge, ' he painted that in art,' what is the difference?

I found it difficult to describe exactly what artist books are because of the conflicting opinions on the genre. A painting in a gallery is regarded as art, without doubt the artist who signed it painted the image, but who stretched the canvas? With an Artist's book the framework is usually the cover, to be an artist book this would have to be designed and constructed by the artist or in mutual collaboration, what if the canvas was bought over the counter? Maybe I'm splitting hairs but it seems that there is much more criteria involved for a book artist to have his/her work accepted as art, where as with better known art forms it is just accepted. Australian Artist, Patricia Piccinini designs and draws all her work with great detail while the construction of her sculptures is entirely left to the fibreglass and resin artists. I question the originality of the work as being hers.

The question of what a book is opened a can of worms on the forum, like art, books are personal and there will always be great varying of opinions. My answer to the question hasn't changed since my rethink a couple of weeks into the term; in fact it has been re enforced with topic 6, the digital book. We unconsciously divide books two ways, the physical and the emotional. We see the physical book as more important than the emotional feelings we get from reading it. Basically it doesn't matter what the book looks like it won't make any difference to the information or story within, but the physical feel, weight and smell of books is important to us so we feel we need that in a book. The biggest concern that computer eBooks might take over from books as we know them is in that physical sense, computers are impersonal, unemotional, sterile, cold and ugly.

Children's Illustrated books were my favourite topic, I learned a lot about the relationship between illustrations and text and how they relate to a child's understanding of books. Old illustrated books fascinate me and I still prefer the detailed work of Harry Clark, Willy Pogany, Harry Rountree and Mabel Lucie Attwell to the more modern books like Where the Wild Things Are, Mister Men and Spot the dog books. There are some great modern children's illustrators but they don't seem to have the same subtlety in their work, maybe it is the modern printing process. Children's books have changed a great deal since the early 20^th century, today even the cheapest books are in colour; during the depression and war years board books and annuals were popular, they were made from the cheapest materials and taken from other books or in the case of annuals, a combination of stories and comics from weekly or periodical issues. I don't like to think of children's literature becoming only available as eBooks, or children losing the ability to read or write anything other than text speak, god forbid...

The topic on the printed book was the least inspiring to me and that shows in my learning journal. The evolution of the printed book from manuscripts is interesting, particularly when so much about book layout is similar today. The early printed books were expensive and only the wealthy could have owned them, but they remained and printed books now, more than 500 years later are much the same. The scary thing is that computers are expensive too but they are not going to go away either, maybe the Sven Birkerts of this world are right, several hundred years from now students could be discussing the printed book in the same way we do the manuscript book.

I think the best part about this subject is the freedom we had to express our creativity through our assessments. I didn't do anything as creative as I would have liked, particularly for the Learning Journal, but the advantage of the blog is there is always room to expand or change it. In saying that if I had to do this subject again I would use some of the great ideas I have discovered through artist's book research and the book interludes to create my own journal. It's a shame distance student don't get to see the creativity of each other's work, perhaps if we photographed our work and with rationales, put them together on a blog or just a pdf, it would be a good idea, even for future students to see.