Artist: Bevil Staley
Year: 2011
Country: Australia
Publisher: Self published

Wandering through the Salt Water Murris’ Art Gallery at Dunwich on Stradbroke Island, I noticed a book in a display stand. It seemed unusual to see an artists book in an Aboriginal art gallery. While Bevil Staley may not be of Aboriginal background, the artist has undertaken diverse projects, exchanges and residencies in Aboriginal communities and with senior Aboriginal artists. While artists books by Aboriginal artists seem rare – the only ones that come to mind are works by Archie Moore and Judy Watson – many Aboriginal artists produce online works and text based works, offering critiques of ‘the book’ and ‘the word’ as symbols of domination (by religion, education, law and knowledge), overwriting difference and race.

This book is case bound. Measuring 21.5cm x 15.5cm, the bright yellow colour of the hardcover book was embossed with the title in black text A Banknote Invasion (A brief history of land ownership in Australia). This copy is 13th in an edition of 200, signed by the artist. It is a political act to appropriate ‘the book’ to reinscribe the history of this country; the book is a form and a symbol. Each page of the book featured a reproduction of an Australian banknote accompanied by a text about the history of Australia’s invasion by the British.

As I flipped through it, a man in the gallery, whose name I neglected to ask for, was telling me about the artist who created the artwork reproduced on the one dollar note. As the man speaks, I realise there are multiple stories unfolding here – that of the colonisation of this country as well as the dismal record of appropriation (although, clearly, both are linked). He mentioned that the artist, the late David Malangi, who created the work was not paid royalties for the use of the bark painting. The image was reproduced without the artist’s knowledge and the matters of copyright and royalities were not considered as the artwork, which depicted a traditional rite, was in the possession of a museum. It was an exchange between bureaucrats and professionals. Once the real circumstances of the artwork’s use were more broadly known, the artist was offered and accepted tokenistic compensation of $1000, a fishing kit and a silver medallion.

The overarching story, however, is that of invasion told through captions which accompany a banknote reproduced on each page. Following references to the royal instructions to Cook and the eventual landing in Australia, the caption on a page featuring a one dollar note, showing the late Malangi’s appropriated artwork, reads “This looks like an empty place”. The next page shows the contemporary polymer ten dollar note, issued to commemorate the 200th anniversary of European settlement. It features a portrait of a ceremonially painted young Aboriginal man. In the background is a Morning Star Pole, other Aboriginal artworks commissioned by the Reserve Bank and a dreamtime figure. The capition on this page reads “Hey! What’s an empty place?”. And so, as money circulates and changes hands, the story unfolds with references to the occupation of this land, the incursion by settlers and pastoral industry, the frontier wars, and, eventually, the high court decision about native title, ending with the young man on the ten dollar note and the caption “What now?”. That is a question for everyone to consider, as ‘the intervention’ continues its assault on the rights of Aboriginal people and remains focused on income quarantining for individuals and families.

In Aboriginal history, there’s a history of money and exploited labour – slave labour, withheld wages, underpayment, welfare dependency, poverty and now enforced income quarantining. Then, there’s another book that looms large here – the book of accounts, the ledger or the balance sheet. Someone has been fiddling the books, and the accounts now conceal a vicious truth about debts accrued – who owes what to whom. There is an ongoing issue of ‘carpetbagging’ in the Aboriginal art trade, with exploitation and copyright breaches of Aboriginal artists. Some galleries, like the Salt Water Murris Art Gallery, are operated by the artists and for the artists. Until the 1970s, Aboriginal wages were held in ‘security’ and the wages were stolen by corrupt officials and employers. It has been difficult for Aboriginal people to access records and there is ongoing reluctance to pay the monies withheld. Government response to Aboriginal challenges and claims has been slow and disappointing. Ultimately, Staley’s clever and humourous appropriation of money, word and book opens into the very serious, very real and very violent stories of theft from Aboriginal people, stories that persist into the present as deprivation and exclusion. While that last question is possibly too open ended and unanswerable, there is obviously unfinished business and a debt to pay. What now? Restitution.

Artist: Unknown
Year: Unknown
Country: Italy
Publisher: Commerically produced book attached to key ring

This little postcard booklet was bought a few years ago on Ebay. It reveals another aspect of my book collecting that I don’t much think about or actively pursue – Italian postcard books. I have about a half dozen such postcard books, or similar travel mementos such as two collections of slides from the 1960s. I can’t even remember how this treasure emerged from the great ocean of Ebay. It just appeared while I was browsing and searching. The seller had also listed a miniature vintage camera: images of an Italian city, probably Rome, were visible when looking through the viewfinder. Given a strange attraction to miniatures, I immediately bid for both objects, missing out on the camera but winning this beauty for the princely sum of $9.

The brass book which features 10 images of Rome is attached to a key ring with other brass fittings and a leather strap. The postcards are presented in landscape format, folding out as a concertina. The images have a hand coloured aesthetic which gives them a nostalgic and distant quality. Italy is my parents’ country of origin and these artefacts address a sensation, best described as ‘longing’, I feel when I encounter them. I am searching and exploring them from a position of detachment and displacement, as if I can see something of myself in them. The book measures 3cm x 2.5cm including the hinge. The cover image, set under plastic, features an image of St Peter’s Basilica and is headed ROMA.

The contrast is enjoyable as the monuments of Rome’s past are reproduced at a scale no larger than a thumbprint. Miniatures often convey a false sense of frailty. This object is quite sturdy with its metal frame and clasp and leather strap. Such materials give it appearance of quality, a souvenir to be treasured. However, as the concertina images, printed on light card, fold out from its protective casing, there is a fleeting fear that it might tear if handled carelessly or roughly. The pages must fold out and reveal themselves. The tiny images somehow, just barely, legible.

Artist: Linda Carroli
Year: Paper version in 2005, electronic version 2011
Country: Australia
Publisher: Self published book, downloadable from Scribd at http://www.scribd.com/doc/46198460/DIY-Origami-Book

An ordinary thing, not art. I’ve always loved origami. There’s something gently meditative about working with and folding paper, especially some of the Japanese papers with their repeating patterns and motifs, to reveal the magic of small gestures. I also take pleasure working with my hands, holding things and touching them. Perhaps that’s one of the many things we take from books – an unspoken connection between touching and learning, holding and reading. More importantly, I worked on this book during a period of disquieting quietude in my life – prolonged physical, emotional and material distress. It was akin to exile or redundancy, perhaps self-imposed, drifting on rising tide of scalding sadness. The book, as one of many projects during that time, required stillness. I recall a lecture by theorist, Mary Zournazi, in which she said that her book Hope: New Philosophies for Change arose out of her own hopeless circumstances. Her confession resonated, just as her appeal to hope did.

The original of this book was made for my great nephew a few years ago. Each page is a collaged tableau in which an origami animal dwells. I kept scanned copies of the collaged pages and recreated it for the daughter of former colleagues. Late last year at a seminar, they told me that their daughter still plays with the book and is fascinated with origami. While I thought the book to be too fragile for a child, it seems that such fragility can elicit a response of carefulness in hands willing to learn from the things they hold. While the work itself is not deeply meaningful or artful, it is conjured from deft gestures and presented as a gift for children only new in this world.

Artist: Michelle Vandermeer
Year: Undated, since 2005
Country: Australia
Publisher: Self published zine, See http://shelbyville.typepad.com

I have been tidying up my bookshelves lately, only to find more ephemera and publications  for documenting on CataBlogue, unearthing this as my tidying drifted from shelves to the piles of papers on my desk. These piles – let’s say compendia – of papers accumulate in trays as ‘things to read’, ‘things to file’, ‘things to attend to’ or ‘things that have nowhere else to be’. Accumulating in this manner is, apparently, a breach of the rules of personal efficiency – never handle any piece of paper more than once. I identified immediately with the artist’s reference to her own “personal collection of ephemera and arty crap”.

Earlier this year, this book was purchased for $5 from (m)art, a contemporary craft and design store established by Artisan, at South Bank. The book is also on sale online in several craft and design stores, like Etsy and Madeit. When I bought this book, I considered it as an artist’s book and discovered that the artist describes it as a zine. This raised some curious questions about the definition of such publications, a question I have little interest in exploring at this point, but one that I should put my mind to. I have, incidentally, sat in far too many symposia, seminars and forums where conversations turn to how to define this or that, only for dynamic conversations to grind to a defeated halt. Definitions provide a sense of certainty for some and for others they are simply a constraint. This has certainly been the case with artists’ books. Even so, it is of passing and notable interest that the artist of this piece has nominated it as a ‘zine’. The cataloguer or collector, as classifier, may need to consider whether zines are a class of artists’ books. The taxonomies and semantics of such things are rarely clearly cut. As I handle this unassuming publication again, checking against website entries (such as the entry in Zinewiki), I experience some satisfaction that such a small and modest production has posed this challenge to all encompassing classification systems.

Measuring 10.5cm x 10cm, Mini Majellen: Found Things is a concertina book copied on brown paper and bound with two loops cut from a plastic binding comb. It was created within strict parameters:

1. Black-only print, able to be photocopied
2. Printed on a single A3 sheet, cut and concertina-folded into a small 12-page book
3. Created purely from found things.

These ‘found things’ include familiar items like advertisements, tickets, greeting cards, stickers and other ephemera. A sticker of Tom (the cat from Tom and Jerry) graces the book’s cover. The tip of Tom’s tail is a little crinkled, slightly raised from the paper where the stickiness has failed, and the hapless creature looks like it is falling, having missed its mark yet again. There is a mystery here though. I do not know what the title Majellen refers to other than an earlier and much larger work of that title. At first, with its allusions to exploration and discovery, I wondered if it was a reference (spelling aside) to the Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, whose travels and name reterritorialised much of the world. There is the possibility that ‘Found Things’ is not just a name or a description but also an instruction to find things including an adventurous spirit. This, then, may mean the book is a kind of map that guides its reader into unfolding and unwritten terrains.

Scavenged items are assembled and manipulated with texts that suggest activities that break with routine: ‘taste the ocean’ and ‘wait’ are two that I found particularly appealing as someone who rarely gets to the beach yet loves the salty spray of the sea and whose impatience can be overwhelming. These playful arrangements entreat us to explore and experience more of our lives and our environment. They evoke those moments when we say to ourselves or our companions, “I haven’t done this for years …” There’s usually a sigh in there somewhere, possibly a tiny tide of tears or stretch of smile when a memory surfaces. As gentle reminders of the pleasures that await us in the everyday, there’s a touch of sadness in the realisation that we actually need to be reminded.

Artist: Nick Ashby
Year: 1995 or 1996
Country: Australia
Publisher: Self published artist book

These two small books were also hidden in the hat box for safe keeping. Nick Ashby was artist in residence at Metro Arts, where I worked as the Director of Visual Arts for a couple of years. He gave me the books in 1995 or 1996. Bound by staples and tape, these small black and white photocopied books seem to reference Robert Jacks. The title of the work is, itself, an instruction.

Open for Instructions is a compilation of 12 opening instructions sourced from packaging. The artist’s name is stamped on the back and editioned with the number 38. The book measures 9.5cm x 5cm.

Distressed is a series of small dramatic texts, seemingly appropriated from psychic columns in magazines with the first entry reading “can you give me some information about direction in my life?” Each entry entreats a response, seeking ways out of loneliness and unhappiness, seeking paths to some more rewarding existence, seeking answers from some wise stranger. The artist’s name is stamped on the back and editioned with the number 23. The book measures 10cm x 5cm.

Nick also produced a series of paintings reproducing the texts from newspaper personal columns with a stencil. I have one of these in my workspace; it reads “I just want you to know that I love you with all my heart I know that things will never be the same but I will never give up”.

The works which excavate those emotive pleas are poignant, yet depersonalised. There’s a quiet desperation in these texts, partly because we know them to be somehow real, somehow taken out of the lives of vulnerable people who are struggling with their loss and their sorrow.

Artist: Luke Roberts
Year: 1993
Country: Australia
Publisher: The Pope Alice Corporation

In an old hat box stowed away for safe keeping, I rediscovered several small artworks including this work by Her Divine Holiness Pope Alice (artist Luke Roberts). I don’t know the whole story of this work but I do recall it emerged at a time when AIDS awareness needed creativity rather than scare tactics – the copyright date printed on the inside of the envelop is 1993 – and this work entreats us to live and live well. A small printed cardboard envelop folds out into the shape of a coffin, sprouting wings. The work was produced with the assistance of the Queensland AIDS Council, AIDS Council of NSW and the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations

The front of the envelop carries the slogan, ‘Pope Alice loves you to life!’. The envelop contains three items – a $10,000 Hell Bank Note, a white cardboard disk (reminiscent of a host in the Catholic communion) with the words ‘EAT ME’ embossed on it, and a condom in foil packaging. The expiry date on the condom packaging is 1995. When folded, the envelop measures 10 cm x 6.5 cm. This work is signed and editioned with the number 171294 stamped inside.

The interior of the envelop features text under the heading, MYSTORY: EMISSION TO PLANET EARTH. Pope Alice landed on this planet after falling through a black hole. The site of her landing was Uluru, close to Alice Springs, which continues to bear her name. Close friend of Nefertiti, Pope Alice has been sighted variously throughout time.

Artist: Nick Cave
Year: 2007
Country: Australia
Publisher: Victorian Arts Centre

Nick Cave: The Exhibition was presented at Queensland Performing Arts Centre Museum in 2009. I almost missed it, repeatedly missing the closing time due to one mishap or another. I wanted to see this show because, even in his absence, Cave has such a presence in Australian culture. Others are better at the hyperbole which inscribes this man, his music and his words. Yet, even though I understand those texts which lavish praise on him, I also faintly recall a stinging interview by Antonella Gambotto through which her command of the acrid shines more than Cave’s demeanour. Nick Cave: Stories is the book that accompanies the exhibition and like the exhibition it is celebratory and revelatory.

At the time I saw the exhibition I couldn’t afford to buy the book. However, recently John and I visited Canberra and discovered it while browsing the bookshop in the National Library. And so, it came into my possession. Part catalogue, part biography and part scrapbook, with a few commissioned stories, the book probably doesn’t present as an artist book. I want to say ‘strictly speaking’ but artists books are a particularly unruly and lawless practice. The book includes extracts from Cave’s diaries and notebooks, and reproductions of memorabilia and lists. These items appeared in the exhibition too, now retained as Nick Cave Collection in the Arts Centre of Melbourne, providing insights into the creative processes and peccadilloes of an artist still writing his own script.

Books are such modest containers for secrets, surprises and dreams. As I walked the exhibition, I was enthralled by its profligate qualities. Yet, both as reproduction and in actuality, the books also provide a rare kind of pleasure that reveal what seems like a longing for, an imposition of, order. Lists, numbers and record keeping are indeed beguiling and intriguing. There’s both a repetitive strain and an inflection of difference in these narratives. Interesting things happen to personal affects as they transition from the private collection to the public catalogue – from the intimate to the infinite. I was browsing Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists for insight about this proclivity. Eco seems to spend much time considering the excess of lists, their profusion, their infinity. This reminds me of the art critic, Rosalind Krauss’ exposition of the grid, which while also being capacious, reproducable and extendable ad nauseum can also serve to order, confine and control.

As I slip into the mode of a critic, Cave seems to reveal himself through this assemblage as an inveterate collector, list maker, note taker and diary keeper. These are hallmarks of a true fetishist.  In turn, I find in that some affirmation of my own compulsions.

Artist: Tom Phillips
Year: 1997 (Second Revised Edition), fp 1980
Country: London
Publisher: Thames and Hudson

John recently walked into my study, interrupting as he does, to ask about the whereabouts of A Humument by Tom Phillips – he was chatting with someone on facebook about it and needed it then and there. It’s a book we both enjoy, repeatedly reaching for it and delving into it, just to know it again. The book has a welcoming size, measuring 12.5cm wide and 17.5cm high. At about 375 pages long (3cm), it has a chunky feel and I love to hold it, open it. My eyes dance with the excavated texts that float across fields of brilliant colour and pattern. Every page is a revelation with its paths of texts that play with the poetry of reading, the reading of poetry. A couple of days later John posted the link to A Humument’s official website to facebook.

I bought this commercially produced facsimile of this work a few years ago, found by chance in a remainder store buried in the lower level of an inner city arcade. As I cruised through the shop, its odd proportion caught my eye before I did a surprised double take. I was not aware that a facsimile had been produced, nor that such an intriguing work could be almost concealed among rows of cheap paperbacks. As I paid for it, the shop assistant commented that she wondered if anyone would buy that book. “It’s interesting though,” she affirmed.

This is one of my favourite bookworks, along with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and The Book of Kells, with subtle poetries found between the lines of someone else’s prose. These are works that make me wonder at this thing called ‘book’. A Humument is a ‘treated Victorian novel’, meticulously altered or, ‘cut up’ as he asserts, by Phillips. Using a copy of the 1892 novel The Human Document by WH Mallock, Phillips commenced his alterations in 1966. Every page is changed with shreds of text threaded to tell an alternative story. Beneath each of those elaborate works, the original words still linger. It provokes a doubling of longing – I want to know what that original story says – but not if it means peeling away the layers so carefully applied to conceal it, that reinterpret the book as material, as object and as text.

Artist: Paul Fletcher
Year: Undated, estimated mid 1980s
Country: Australia
Publisher: Uneditioned artist book

In 1986, while working at 4ZZZ, I’d managed to scrape together enough money for a train fare and spending to visit a friend in Melbourne. My best friend at the time also lent me some money – such surprising generosity. So I hopped on the train with the intention of spending a week or so catching up with a friend who I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. I stayed in the spare room of her starkly furnished terrace in Fitzroy, where she lived with her boyfriend, the one she’d left her much older lover to be with.

If I recall correctly, it was cold and I loved the way the frosty air bit into my cheeks. While there, I fossicked in second hand shops, book stores, markets and galleries, taking the tram into the city and then exploring surrounding inner suburbs with their tightly knitted rows of terrace houses, laced with laneways. It was here that I began to appreciate the pleasures of walking through cities and unravelling their webs, there were pleasures to be found in disorientation and the possibility of getting lost.

I returned to Brisbane with treasures packed carefully into my bag including this printed artist book, titled Another Human Another Monster, by Paul Fletcher. I also bought several limited edition screenprints and postcards by the same artist from a small gallery specialising in multiples and prints. While I don’t remember the price, these works wouldn’t have been expensive given my financial circumstances at the time. A brightly screenprinted concertina book folds out from the pale green cardboard sleeve. The comic like story tells of a visiting alien – a monster – who is assailed by humans at every turn until rescued by other aliens.

Out of curiosity, I recently googled ‘Paul Fletcher’ and found an artist with a background in printmaking, now working as a media artist, in Victoria. In a brief email exchange, he confirmed that he produced this work many years ago. As a graphic narrative, Another Human Another Monster looks like a precursor to Fletcher’s more recent explorations of animation and abstraction.

Artist: Jihad Muhammad John Armstrong
Year: 1982
Country: Australia
Publisher: One-off, artist book

This book was produced by my partner, JM John Armstrong, in 1982. It was uncovered while we were cleaning out John’s old studio/storage space. He was ready to just throw it into a box for endless storage, or more likely, just throw it away. Rather than let this happen, I approached Helen Cole at the State Library to ask if she was interested in it for the James Hardie Collection given John’s achievements as a conceptual and installation artist and visual arts academic. His work is included in the collections of several major institutions. Due to the manner of its storage, the book had become warped, but was generally in good condition.

John is an inveterate traveller and this work was produced after an extended period abroad, where he cycled through parts of Europe. While living in France, near the site of these menhirs, he carried out a pseudo-scientific study of them, using the measuring and recording conventions of archaeological practices. Between 14 and 19 February 1980 the large stones (menhirs) were closely studied and photographed, with measurements of cut string taken and included in the work. The book was not assembled until 1982, when John was working at the art school at the University of Tasmania and had access to the studios there. The use of plastic sleeves within a ring binder emphasizes the documentary nature of the work as the record of field work. The agency of the artist is evident through the photocopies of his hand in different gloves: the artist as archivist, cyclist and traveller in a cold land.

This book is no longer in our possession as we sold it to the State Library for the collection and the full book, which was included in Freestyle Books curated by Helen Cole, is available online at the State Library’s website.