As we near the halfway point in our semester, we have spent most of our course searching for answers to how we define what is a book throughout our traditional history. What is interesting with this week of “Book as Idea” is taking into consideration books that do not present in a linear format or that are unconventional in the sense of not presenting language. As the relationship of form and content continues to unravel in the digital age, I found the bookish artwork by Doug Beube and Brian Dettmar particularly astounding as their altered book sculptures challenge our assumptive qualities about what a book should be. 

In discussing their work with Dr. Pressman, both book artists emphasize the cultural zeitgeist they find themselves in as they strip the book of its traditional utilitarian usage of reading in a linear fashion to create paper and book-based art that experiments with perception and meaning. Through such interactions with the book, Doug Beube describes, “The book as an object is generic in a sense. All books basically look the same: they’re rectangular, have a front and back cover, etc., so its form and format is almost (and I emphasize almost) immaterial to its content. I see the literary aspect of my art as a collaboration between me and the other creators involved in making the book…I consider these acts of engaging in conjunction with literary criticism—a way of building my own critique,” (3). As Beube’s work subverts the usual entry point of readers’ interactions with a book, he acknowledges the qualities that books have been standardized to meet that are often looked for subconsciously when deciding if an object is worthy of the “book” title. With his placed emphasis on how “form and format is almost immaterial to its content,” we know as scholars of the book how form, format, and content will always impact the meaning of the other, but Beube suggests a decreasing impact of form and format as modern printing and book production follows a familiar or “generic” idea of what a book is.

Though the book is not a very malleable object due to construction and low quality materials, Doug Beube and Brian Dettmar experiment with physicality to craft new meaning, redefine “reading” of the book, and as Dettmar suggests, “force a fluidity onto the book that isn’t intended,” (4). In pushing the book to its limits and thus adding additional texture to book analysis, the book’s authority is destabilized where readers are challenged to pursue atypical interactions with the book and think in a spatial pattern that does not follow the linear pattern of moving cover to cover. Considering our class discussions of how the book is not a stable medium, this act highlights such instability as it is made into both a collaboration and a critique as aforementioned by Beube. Through such sculptural interventions, the artists reinforce the book as a living object by fostering active conversation between the author, artist, and reader.