Cultural Icon, Commodity or Endangered Species?
But for books, I might have had an impoverished childhood. Literature was the only artform I had access to, because books were available free of charge from the School of Arts library in the local township. Television came to town while I was still at school, but as our farm was off the local power grid, TV played no part in our lives. The printed word which left such an impression on my formative years seems also to have inspired a lifelong allegiance to the book.
At that time I was not aware of Ray Bradbury's futuristic novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), which envisages a totalitarian society where the written word is banned; it is illegal to harbour books of any kind, and squads of ‘firemen’ work full-time, tracking down and burning books. In Bradbury's fictional society, people are addicted to television, particularly interactive reality shows, and their homes are dominated by wall-sized screens. Shells inserted in the ears tune them in to transmissions and make them deaf to live communication.
Although it would be misguided to see popular television and mainstream cinema as the enemy of the book, in my mind the former are connected by a tenuous thread to the Minoan bull-leaping spectacle, the gladiators of the Roman arena, and Spain's corrida, surfacing in Hollywood as celluloid violence and spawning some of the programs that pass as home entertainment. Which is to say that popular culture involving some form of violent spectacle has been with us for a long time, as indeed has the book in some form.
Being a confirmed bibliophile, if not a full-blown bibliomane, I am one of those people who rush to queue at the doors of the biennial Alumni book sale at a local university – always one of the first on the scene, and one of the last to leave as they close the doors some days later. In the final minutes of one such sale, I noticed the volunteers whose tireless efforts help to make it such a success sweeping the remaining books from the trestles into black wheelie bins. Although I knew the answer to my question before I asked, it still made me reel slightly when my worst misgivings were confirmed.
At dead of night I returned to the scene of the sale, hoping to rescue a few more books, but the wheelie bins had already been spirited away, along with their contents. I remembered a scene from a documentary (yes, television does have its moments of epiphany) filmed in a refugee camp near the border of Chechnya. A teenage boy with a passion to learn English was shyly but proudly showing the journalist his most prized possessions: two well-worn copies of novels by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Some weeks later, carrying all this bibliophiliac baggage in my head, I attended the opening of an art exhibition by an acquaintance, Karl De Waal. Three works grouped together in a small space set off the kind of buzz of associations for me that the artist had possibly not anticipated when he planned the exhibition. Or had he?
On one wall, mounted on board, were two rows of books - all hard-cover editions in cloth binding, of uniform size, completely painted over in the same murky-chestnut acrylic as the board, so that no details of author or title were visible. The covers and pages had been glued down, although I noticed that at least one gallery-goer must have succumbed to a similar curiosity to my own and had tried to prise one open, without success.
The books fixed to a piece of board had lost all differentiating features and become a rigid, static, mute metaphor, or caricature, of – what? If a book is reduced to a generic representation of itself, in which the outward form is preserved but we have no means of gaining access to the contents, can we still speak of it as a book? Is a book the form or the content? The permanently closed books attached to the board were no longer meaningful as prospective reading-matter. However, insofar as they signified the book as cultural icon, they called up a chain of connotations for this reader, the legacy of encounters and experiences with other books. As physical objects, they were merely corpses whose spirit had fled, or been immured forever. It is, after all, the reader who breathes new life into the tale. ’Selected Works’, as it was titled, frustrated and provoked me. I was upset at having my access to the books sealed off, but at the same time intrigued by the implications of the work. Was I trying to read too much into it, I wondered.
On the adjacent wall, another exhibit was constantly surrounded by an opening-night swarm emitting quite a different frequency of energy. An installation that consisted of children's plastic TV sets mounted neatly in rows and columns, rather like the books, its surprise feature was the pornographic films that could be viewed by manually turning the knobs on the toy TV sets. If a viewer were dexterous enough, all the screens could be seen in motion simultaneously, and this seemed to produce an almost childlike enthusiasm for the new toy, manifested in much jockeying for position and twiddling of knobs as spectators entered into the fun. This was the most commercially successful piece on show, and attracted immediate offers from prospective acquirers.
It seemed paradoxical (and probably intentionally so) that the books, whose value resides in their individuality, had been rendered homogeneous, while the pornographic images, which were stereotypical and mechanical, were receiving the kind of attention more often reserved for the bizarre and the beautiful.
On the floor between these two works stood what had been an ordinary black wheelie bin, endowed with an unexpectedly exotic allure by the application of a mosaic, which transformed it into an artefact possessing visual charm. The bin was covered in meticulously-cut pieces of glazed ceramic tiles in red and turquoise, cobalt and jade, laid to form patterns and motifs reminiscent of the folk art of Central Asia. The colours and the bird-motifs danced and sang, making the commonplace domestic object so appealing that people clustered around it, surprised and delighted, attracted by the joyous spirit it seemed to emanate. The ultimate consumerist receptacle had never looked so good.
Here then, in this nest of three exhibits, was a concatenation of images that had embedded themselves in my own consciousness, but with a very different emphasis, deriving from the artist's perceptions and imagination and suggesting a multiplicity of possible new relationships.
In the interim I reflect that books, including their prototypes in the great libraries of the ancient world – such as those at Pergamon and Alexandria – have been around for a long time. The stories that systems of writing and the forms of the book were invented to record have been a salient feature of human activity for longer still, and even if books as we know them do not survive, stories undoubtedly will. Storytellers may find their work cut out for them if they want to keep pace with accelerating change, and at the same time preserve the essence of the human experience. The myriad forms such stories may take is surely an enriching thing.
As to the forms and metamorphoses that books may assume in the future, with trees becoming an endangered species, and, on the other hand, new technologies being developed for making paper, this story has multiple possible endings, mostly happy. But while books as such may be losing their iconic status for generations raised on digital technologies, I know that as long as my wits don’t fail me, I am highly unlikely to give up the book, or lose the familiar pang of desire that libraries, bookshops, Alumni book sales and people’s privately stocked bookshelves seem to inspire in me.