CHICAGO — Ever read “Betonbuch”?
Don’t look for it on Amazon.
Only 100 copies exist. And actually, no one has read it. Not a single copy has even been cracked. Literally. The author was the German artist Wolf Vostell, best remembered as part of the Fluxus artist community of the 1960s and 1970s whose experimental acts questioned the process and materials of traditional art. He’s known in Chicago for once encasing a 1957 Cadillac in concrete for a Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition. (That piece, “Concrete Traffic,” can still be found in a parking garage in Hyde Park.) Soon after, he wrote a short book about his future plans, though being the Fluxus artist he was, Vostell decided to encase each copy in its own rectangular block of concrete.
About six years ago, a copy of “Betonbuch” found its way into the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library on 57th Street. But it came with two questions: First, how could they be sure there was a book inside that concrete? According to Elizabeth Frengel, curator of rare books, it was scanned with ultrasound and X-ray machines; Argonne National Laboratory also did a spectral analysis. Every test came back the same: inconclusive.
That didn’t even address their second question:
Is this even a book?
“I mean, is it when you have to smash it to read it?” Frengel asked.
“Betonbuch,” though, was useful in one regard: It spurred conversation at the library about, well, what is a book? You assume a library would know. You assume you know.
“But Is It a Book?,” a new exhibition open to the public at the Regenstein through late April, pushes back gently at those broad assumptions. When you enter the gallery, the exhibition text asks if you know what a book is, and if you know for sure, “turn back to the gallery door and conclude your visit to this exhibition.” (Seriously, it says this.) Consider it academia’s answer to the “Is It Cake?” internet meme turned Netflix show. In fact, the exhibition itself, designed by Chicago artist Chelsea Kaufman, questions how a traditional gallery show flows. They call it a “Choosable Path Exhibition.” Meaning, each section asks a question: Do you think a book needs pages? Text? Binding? If you do, go over there. If not, go over there.
Spoiler: Most of the four dozen or so items on display are rare books.
But then again ... maybe not?
Is your Kindle a book? Is an audiobook a book if the text only exists as sound waves? Frengel considers the exhibition, in one aspect, “a pocket history of the evolution of book technology,” but in another, a study of how designers have always pushed the boundaries of a physical object that so many of us long ago agreed looks a certain way.
The evidence (which Frengel culled from the Regenstein’s rare book collection) arguably better considers books as poetry: There’s a natural history book that incorporates strands of dried moss. And a contemporary rendering of a Quipu, a kind of Incan scroll of fabric that conveys text through knots and strings. An accordion of a book by the Swiss artist Warja Lavater retells Grimm’s fairy tales using a long row of abstracted symbols. Also, it feels right to include a 19th century parlor game that asks players to collect cards featuring the characters in Charles Dickens books — win the right cards, land the right characters and you have a narrative in your hands. There’s even a Russian fairy tale told by a Scottish artist who uses silhouettes arranged into a three-dimensional cube, forcing its “reader” (the exhibit notes) to question where a story begins and ends.
It’s easy to get hung up on the idea of a book as fundamentally a narrative captured between covers. That said, as Kaufman pointed out, even the loose shape of the exhibition itself was inspired by the choose-your-own-adventure paperbacks she consumed as a child, books that debunked the rigidity of narrative. “Asking people to choose a path in this show, we’re asking them to actively analyze what’s before them,” she said.
A King James Bible here, printed in London in 1611, is a doorstop. It screams book.
As does an Old Testament from the 18th century, on parchment scroll.
If you’re wondering why this matters, consider the postage-size clay tablet that greets you at the front of the exhibit. It holds a contract for barley and dates to 3000-2030 BC. A bit larger and that “page” is not so different from the screen of an e-reader or a smartphone holding entire libraries. They all contain a narrative. And not one bears a resemblance to the beautiful nested books of Chicago’s Hannah Batsel (included in the exhibit), or “Building Stories” by Chicago’s Chris Ware (not included), which tells the story of an apartment complex using a game board, flip books, newspapers, pamphlets.
Each in their own way suggests that what a book should be — supposedly known since the 4th century, when loose pages tucked in a binding became standard — is undecided.
Frengel wanted to include a devotional book exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, woven from textiles, using an early punchcard machine. But there’s only so much room in an exhibition. Besides, there are 360,000 traditionally-bound books in the Regenstein special collections. Not including one iffy chunk of concrete.
“But Is It a Book?” runs through April 28 in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, 1100 E. 57th St.; hours 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, opens 10:30 a.m. Wednesdays. Free; visitors without a UChicago ID can access the Special Collections gallery by obtaining a visitor pass from the ID and Privileges Office to the left of the entrance lobby (photo ID required); more information at www.lib.uchicago.edu and www.lib.uchicago.edu/scrc/exhibits.
