In my family, growing up it was a sin, probably even a mortal sin to ruin something. Ruin a new toy: sin; ruin your church clothes: sin; ruin a book, big sin. These days I sin a lot. My collage work is founded on cutting up vintage books, even those in mint condition.
Touching yourself was a topic for the confessional in our house, not the dinner table. But ruin or “wreck” something especially willfully-that was a “gravely immoral act,” a mortal sin in our house. Your punishment was shame and guilt affected in full view of the family.
To wit, I am consigned to Hell, again, gazing upon row after row and box after box of vintage books and antique pamphlets I’ve defaced, desecrated, torn and destroyed in pursuit of my art. I’m a collage artist and I’m particularly interested in anything printed during the 1950’s and 60’s, the postwar era. Every book in my studio from Uncle Wiggily and His Friends to Clinical Operative Dentistry to Firearms and Their Use has pages torn from it, whole sections yanked out, even books gutted of pages altogether leaving only the clothbound covers flapping about. (I utilize these as well)
So yeah, I’ve ruined a pantload of books in my day and I don’t regret a bit of it. Bring on the brimstone. My parents are none the wiser (dead) and my brothers and sisters have their own sins to sweat, probably.
I don’t mean to say it never gives me pause to pull out several pages from my Grays Anatomy, copyright 1949, especially if I’m foolish enough to research the book’s resale value on one of the many online used book sites. I don’t care-do you? Afterall, I bought the book for next to nothing at my favorite monthly sale put on by the Friends of the Pima County Public Library. The event itself is a bit of a penance. It’s a cheek-by-jowl petri dish of moderately polite jostling and silent space hogging. You jockey for a slim window view of just 12 inches of vertical shelving where the Friends display their vintage books for sale. Reading every title on every shelf is a delicate choreography of “Excuse me’s” and silent but effective squatting. As one shopper finishes checking their section, others glide stealthily into position for their turn(s).
The payoff for placing myself in the company of so many book spines and buttholes can be significant. Including: American School and University, a builder’s catalog of fixtures and equipment for outfitting high schools circa 1950. Injuries to the Teeth of Children (2 copies) features page after page of x-rays. Emily Post’s Etiquette is a treasure trove of midcentury propriety for the modern housewife. Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines are stuffed with news stories of atomic power and new home conveniences while the ads in the back promise, “Earn Big Money...Sharpening Lawn Mowers” Total retail value including the aforementioned Gray’s Anatomy: $400 or more. And I’ve “ruined” all of them.
Some collage artists prefer current, common, homemade and contemporary sources. These include Jane Davies, Laslo Antal and Raquel Van Haver. Progenitors of the form include Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauchesberg, John Baldessari, Man Ray and Max Ernst-just a brief and not thorough sampling with too many omissions-source..
And some of us like to use/abuse what others consider precious. (I blame at least some of my art destructive tendencies with collage materials on the Catholic Church-always a thorough and informative guide on what to do when you’ve elected to be bad.)
Author Susan Orlean famously explored her own feelings about the destruction of books in The Library Book. She vowed to burn one to understand better what it means to destroy a book. Orlean writes, Burning a book was incredibly hard for me to do. The problem was that I have never been able to do harm to a book...Many times I have stood over a trash can, holding a book with a torn cover and broken binding...I have let the trash can lid snap shut and walked away with the goddam book...A book feels like a thing alive in this moment...they take on a kind of human vitality...I have come to believe that books have souls.
Sheesh, I've been killing books now for decades. No apparent karmic cost.
My friend Kyle Johnston is a collage/assemblage artist and abstract painter. I wondered where he stood on cutting up books in the service of collage. Kyle said, "I have two libraries, the books I cut and the ones I don’t.” Kyle’s more than resplendent collection of art books is enviable on any level. I suspect they are all in the “Don’t Cut” pile. His “Haring” by Alexandra Kolossa is valued at $50 while his W. Eugene Smith: Photographs 1934-1975 by Mora comes in at $104 on Abebooks
The internet is awash with artists and bloggers fretting and fussing over the ethics of destroying vintage materials for the sake of art.
Margarete Miller, is a collage artist specializing in vintage ephemera. in a well-considered but perhaps overly polemical and analytical blogpost declares,
So is it ok to destroy an old book to use pages in collage art? Yes, it is, as long as you are using the pages wisely and with purpose. If you buy a used book for the intention of tearing it up to use in art, then begin to tear it up when you are in the process of creating. I don’t buy a used book, tear it up and make sets of pages that I will someday use in art projects; I leave it whole until I want to actually use it. It could turn out that I’ve decided I don’t want to use those pages after all...”
That’s a bit rigid for my taste. My philosophy of used book collaging is: if you like it, get it, leave it whole or cut it as you wish and whenever you’re done recycle just the pages. Book covers don’t recycle well.
Austin Kleon is a writer and visual artist best known for a three volume series of illustrated books of boosterism for artistic types including: Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work. He’s defaced and cut many a book in his day and has this to say about that:
“I have become less and less interested over time as books as fetish objects to be worshiped for their inherent magical powers. There is a magic to reading, but it comes mostly from the energies of the reader. A book is dormant until the reader comes along to bring it back to life...Do I feel guilty for cutting up these books? Not a bit. For one thing, I have clean, duplicate copies elsewhere on my shelves...”
I’m not sure duplicate mint copies are sufficient armor against moralists who decry destroying books but I’m simpatico with Kleon in his abuse of Gray’s Anatomy for which I have just a single now much shredded copy I dearly enjoy.
Perhaps the most salient example of all illustrating the dilemma of destruction for art’s sake is the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman who purchased a complete set of 80 prints in Goya’s Disaster of War series then systematically “rectified” each print by drawing clown faces and puppy heads on all the figures.
The key takeaway from all this discussion? Eff the purists. Get over it, (mostly) nobody cares. Go ahead, ruin books and “Make good art.”(Neil Gaiman)