The book as shape-shifter is a possibility that runs throughout the work of London based artist Elisabeth S. Clark. The book has been performed as if a musical instrument, partially erased and reinvented as a score, and it has been buried in the driest desert on earth. In a 2011 installation at the Palais de Tokyo, the artist described discovering a first edition of Borges's The Book of Sand in a bookstore near the National Library of Argentina in Buenos Aires (where Borges once worked, and where Borges's character hides his Book of Sand). Later, Clark buried the first edition in the Atacama Desert.
In this interview, Clark discusses bookness and embodied experiences of reading, the impulse behind her “book concertos,” and the process of transforming the punctuation of Raymond Roussel’s long poem Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique into a score.
—Eva Heisler
What is a “book concerto?”
In musical terms, a concerto is where a solo instrument dialogues with an orchestra. My Book Concerto designates the book as solo instrument, accompanied by an ensemble of performers (orchestra). During the performance, I am interested not only in the cadence of reading but also in heightening the sounds that emerge from manipulating a book, such as a page turn or the rustling of pages or a final closure. I encourage my performers to not only treat their copy of the book like a score to be read but also as an instrument to perform.
In these performances, I am interested in turning an everyday book into a sculptural, physical, yet ephemeral manifestation. Each performer is invited to read a different page of the same book simultaneously. I also love this idea of an entire novel being read in such a short span of time through a collective endeavor and encounter. It feels representative of the prism of voices and interpretations that emerge from the experience of reading.
My Book Concerto performances also playfully integrate the word “penguin” in their titles. For instance, Book Concerto in One Act: for 75 Penguins. It’s a playful nod to the sponsorship and support I received from Penguin Books, which was an integral part of the presentation of the work. Particularly interested in the history, development, and pertinent place that Penguin paperbacks occupy in Britain’s evolving culture and identity, my desire to integrate Penguin paperbacks was to evoke their democratization of reading. Although I no longer solely use Penguin paperbacks in my performances, the “penguin” pun has stuck.
You are the conductor, right? At its simplest, conducting is beating time. How is a book concerto orchestrated? What does the score look like?
Each Book Concerto performance is orchestrated by a conductor, usually myself, although I have also enjoyed working with professional conductors. The conductor is instrumental in keeping the choreography tight and, as you say, in instilling the rhythm for the performance. The conductor sets the pace, directing his orchestra when to read, turn pages, and open or close the book.
Each performance is sonically powerful. When a group of people are invited to begin simultaneously reading the same book, the multiplicity of voices is very striking. In some cases, I have had as many as 62, 75, or 106 performers!
What begins as a collective cacophony of sound slowly fades, the sound diminishing, until only a few people are left reading. Comprehension emerges only at the very end, as a few fragments of text are heard from individual voices. I love this shift that happens in the performance—when the sound suddenly shifts (or flows) from the unintelligible to the intelligible. In these moments, a single reader, voice, and fragment of text pends movingly in the space. In that moment, the public turns private again, and the essence of what this is emerges anew: a reader and a book.
The orchestration has varied over the years, depending on the context or on the selected book. I have produced a score of each performance which documents those differentiating details between performances. For instance, some performances have unfolded through a series of acts that also included performers dispersed around the space, reading their parts aloud as they walked. A couple of performances have been performed in silence. Such a collective, silent intervention can be equally powerful, sculpturally and sonically, in the right public setting. The rehearsals prior to performances are incredibly enjoyable and bring home the communal aspects of the work.
The choice of book for each performance also affects the cadence of each performance. As time has gone on, this is something I have become increasingly interested in: syncopating the sound of a novel vs. poetry vs. more experimental prose. On a couple occasions, I have also had two languages being simultaneously read.
For the project Between Words, you take a work by Raymond Roussel and reproduce only the author’s punctuation. Why Roussel’s poem as opposed to another author’s work?
Roussel’s poem, Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique, is so complex, perhaps more of a literary puzzle and a precursor of the Oulipo. The layers of parenthetical interludes particularly fascinated me. And the footnotes! A poem with so many footnotes! I spent a long time perusing Roussel’s original manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. His striking use of parentheses were particularly eccentric, yet meticulous, too. In some of the late manuscript drafts, the printed text (the poem) is overlaid with handwritten punctuation, coupled with underscoring notes, such as “triple parenthèse” or “quadruple parenthèse,” to avoid omissions or errors.
I was drawn to this cipher of parentheses that guided the reader to become more spatially and materially aware of the textual object (as a book work). The parenthetical interludes create a linear interruption making one more aware of the physical act of reading and navigating this malleable oeuvre.
Meanwhile, I was also interested in exploring this space of in-between, by making visible a more invisible part of his writing process. It’s a different kind of topography of language, a landscape in subtraction, that immerses the reader into a poetical and emotional fabric of linguistic structures and textures, between and beyond words.
This distilled version makes visible the more discreet, sometimes forgotten parts of language’s construction, drawing attention to this in-between.
Later, you use Between Words as a score for Between Words: Piece for 4 Instruments. Can you explain how the punctuation marks are translated into sound?
My project Between Words was initiated by a very simple gesture: conceal all words to make visible the punctuation. In isolation, this sea of dangling punctuation became strikingly sonorous. It was like a landscape of sizzling grammar.
This led me to eventually retranslate Between Words as a score, arranged in four movements (mirroring the four cantos of the poem). What is little known or discussed is that Raymond Roussel was a musician prior to turning to poetry. It came to my attention that the linguistic structures he devised in this complex poem were comparable to musical structures.
A number of things prompted my score. One was the discovery of Jacques Sivan’s edition of Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique (Editions Léo Scheer, 2004). Roussel had wished to publish his poem in color though he never had the means to do so during his lifetime. Sivan’s multicolored edition illuminated Roussel’s original intentions. Suddenly, the poem becomes more navigable and materially very rich. My retranslated score takes these colors as a starting point, each color consequently corresponding to a different voice or musical instrument within the text.
As for how the punctuation marks are translated into sound—this has been widely discussed and frequently revisited! The score, duration, direction, etc., remain flexible, an open work, a graphic score. The process of translation for performance is always a collaboration: musicians, vocalists, even a professional conductor, have interpreted and performed the score. The interpretations are vastly different: some ascribe musical notes to the punctuation, and others explore this inability to speak, say, and articulate through voice or gesture.
I’m interested in how this notation is as sonorous as it is silent—and in maintaining this tension. Punctuation is traditionally a marker of silence, breath, or an interval between words (also directing the intonation of words and/or voice). Here, in isolation, punctuation becomes incredibly sonorous on the page and throws up inherent questions about what these punctuation “notes” might sound like: Is it silence or sound, breath or a musical note, thought or utterance, the spoken or the space and rests between the invisible words? This project specifically wishes to further investigate these questions, dichotomies, and interstices.
You have several works that reference Borges’s The Book of Sand, an anthology of short stories first published as El libro de arena, the title story of which features a book that extends infinitely backwards and forwards. Is this imaginary book, as described by Borges in his story “The Book of Sand,” a touchstone for you?
Absolutely.
Stéphane Mallarmé’s words spring to mind: “Un livre ne commence ni ne finit: tout au plus fait-il semblant.”
“A book neither begins nor ends; at most it merely seems to.” This is my own translation of Mallarmé’s solitary inscription found on one page of his manuscript.
Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I suppose this work (this gesture) became my own response to Borges's seminal short story, as a way of opening up and out a piece of literature into space and time. It became a provokingly material (re)vision (or expansion?) of a familiar text.
When I stumbled across a first edition of Borges's El libro de arena, only a stone’s throw away from the National Library of Argentina in Buenos Aires (where the book now lies, so the fable goes), I couldn’t help but feel I may have stumbled upon a national treasure. My own text work recounts this journey, my search across the dusty shelves of the National Library, my time spent with this first edition which resulted in an impulse similar to that described by Borges: the need for riddance. Except, I chose to lose this book to another kind of “forest”—the Atacama Desert, deemed the driest desert in the world. It seemed a fitting place to bury the book—or, perhaps, to archive this seminal edition.
Many of your projects explore the experience of a book as an object that offers an experience in time, the book as a passing of time—the time of the reader and the time of a narrative.
Yes, both these passages of time are important to me and starting points I explore in my art practice.
There’s a lot I could unpack in your observation. I try and give materiality to these passages of time, opening up spaces for translation, interpretation, but also for the performativity of reading. It also involves finding new material forms to present that which is formless.
Many years ago, I discovered that the etymology of “book” is connected to “writing paper,” and thus to the page. Biblion, the Greek word for “book,” derived from biblios, “the internal bark of the papyrus and thus the paper.” Biblion was designated as a support for writing irrespective of its surface, function, or format. This etymology is of interest for it reveals a considerable change of emphasis from our original conception of a “book.” By displacing the book from a finished, bound, and delimited entity or work (oeuvre) to something merely supporting the act of writing—a form of “writing paper”—the page, it would seem, prevails as the essential, elemental crux, awakening inquiry, process, and redefinition. This discovery has never ceased to fizz, fizzle, and flicker in me, as I approach the act of making. It is a key notion I regularly return to in my art practice and research. Perhaps because it suggests a sort of undoing, and a reconsideration of all these elemental parts.
In the piece Afterword (2016), you imagine what has happened to the book. Can you tell me more about this piece?
In 2015, five and a half years after I buried a first edition of Borges's Book of Sand in the Atacama Desert, I discovered in a newspaper article some astonishing news: seven years’ worth of rain had descended on this desert virtually overnight. For a place that in parts hadn’t seen any rainfall for 400 years, these heavy thunderstorms dramatically changed the landscape. Dormant seeds started blooming from the grains of the barren desert. More storms then followed in August of the same year. This led to a rare climatic phenomenon—a flowering desert, in double bloom. By late September, the desert was transformed into carpets of pinks and purples, whites and blues, as millions of seeds of annual plants germinated.
In that moment, sitting at my kitchen table, drinking coffee, whilst reading this article, I wished I could have jumped on a plane to the Atacama Desert! I decided to write an Afterword to When I buried the Book of Sand; a handwritten note in electric pink, another leaf for this story.
I couldn’t help but wonder where and in what condition now lies The Book of Sand I buried. Has it quite literally turned to sand and then to seed and is perhaps now flowering?
Borges once said that a library is meant to be enjoyed as if it were a garden. In a strange way, the library and garden and desert collide in this landscape. The Book of Sand buried in the driest desert in the world, now blooming.
I am curious about Words that don’t keep still, your series of letterpress prints. Can you tell me more about those “words that don’t keep still”?
This is an ongoing work. These texts first derived from a work entitled One Thousand and One Nights (2012). It is a series of very short texts (suspended fragments) that I would project each night from the window of a domestic space onto a facing public wall (for example, from a Parisian apartment or in Medellín, Colombia from a kitchen windowsill). New words would appear each night, escaping their window and becoming illuminated on the overlooking façade. In their suspended form, they would draw, propose, tell, consider, dream, sketch . . . These fragments of text were visible from the street and could be seen by passers-by. Like a poetic, localised tweet from your bedroom or kitchen window.
These texts were later collated and then presented as a series of letterpress prints. I named this letterpress edition Words that don’t keep still since these strings of words became like negative sculptures, traces of motion, documentation in the present tense, transforming a short sentence into an imaginary picture or recreating an impression of an ephemeral moment.
I haven’t yet reached my one thousand and one nights; it is a project I am still working on, slowly. My ambition for this work is for it to continue travelling around the world periodically, into a new night, and out of a new window.
