. . . a book done for its own sake and not for the information it contains. That is: it doesn't contain a lot of works, like a book of poems. It is a work. Its design and format reflect its content-they intermerge, interpenetrate. It might be any art: an artist's book could be music, photography, graphics, intermedial literature. The experience of reading it, viewing it, framing it-that is what the artist stresses in making it.

Dick Higgins 1

Joan Segerlind works in clay and artists' books. 2 The handbuilding in her clay work is paralleled in the handmaking of the book forms, as is the strongly textured surfaces and sculptural orientation in both media. More fundamentally, the two bodies of work are connected in "the only task that counts, namely, the slow and patient and disciplined search for the only form that fits the underlying experience." 3 It is the unity of form and experience in Segerlind's book works that I shall briefly address here.
Slinky - The Book, utilizes a metal Slinky(tm) as the basis for the work, with gut stretched over the spiral structure to carry the text. This results in an remarkably efficient book form, collapsing to a few cubic inches of volume, expanding to form a sculptural structure; in this exhibition the work is installed suspended from the ceiling to stretch perhaps 120 inches. Instead of the turning of pages presenting a discontinuous succession of page-spaces entailed in the codex format, the spiral of Slinky - The Book presents the reader with a continuous narrative space which, if held in the hand to read, contracts and expands and rotates about its axis with the process of reading. The text consists in terms evoked by the word 'slinky'.
In Full Circle, the process of facture of artworks is collapsed into the simultaneity of presentation of what is in effect at once sketchbook and journal of artworks projected and completed. Like Duchamp's Boîte-en-Valise, Full Circle is a retrospective compendium of replicas, here in the form of preliminary drawings and reproductions of finished works reproduced as emulsion transfer photographic prints on thin slabs of clay. The slipcase, a vertical rectangular solid topped by a barrel-vault-like half cylinder references a student's knapsack or a workman's lunch box, suitable forms for the work contained within.
V - Words consists in a text comprised of set of words with the initial letter V. A vocabulary lesson, the words are combined with appropriated images, rendered in black and white, on an inverted V-fold handmade book that opens, fan-like, to form a flat circle of images and accompanying text. A separate small single-fold codex booklet provides a list of the individual words, their definitions, and gives the attribution of their accompanying images:
 

Vacuous     Without content, empty, lacking ideas or intelligence
Albrect Durer Laughing Peasant Woman from South Tyrol

Small Fears consists of a book on sheets of black handmade paper approximately six inches in diameter, along with an accompanying cylindrical box approximately three inches by six inches. Each page has a brief narrative referencing personal fears, handwritten in white ink one per page:
 

after I saw the movie Psycho
I noticed that my hearing was very keen
when I took a bath
a shower was out of the question.

My ex-alcoholic friend said
blackouts while drinking were a bad sign
that road leads only down
and I don't want you to go there
I agreed with him.

 
I once met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains, Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Everything that was not green with moss was still black from the smoke of so many decades ago.
Poking about in the rubble, I found at times scraps of parchment that had drifted down from the scriptorium and the library and had survived like treasures buried in the earth; I began to collect them, as if I were going to piece together the torn pages of a book. 5

It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded. 8

Joan Segerlind received the Bachelor of Science in Applied Arts from Texas Technological University in 1962. After course work in studio art at Brookhaven College from 1993-1996, she began graduate work in ceramics and multidisiplinary works at Texas Woman's University. Her work was included in the 1998 Voertman Juried Art Exhibition, Denton; the North Texas Area Arts League Juried Fine Arts Awards Exhibition, Denton. She lives and works in Dallas.
 
 
 
 

1. 1 Dick Higgins, "A Preface," in ed. Joan Lyons, Artists' Books A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1987), pp.11-12. Return
   
2. 2 The artists' book is an art form in which the notion of an alternative space and the concept of time-based media combine with diverse elements of material cause and notational systems in a reflexive analytic of traditional narrative book forms. The florescence of artists' books in the 1960s and later is contemporaneous with the development of alternative exhibition spaces; the 'book-space' is likewise an alternative to traditional exhibition venues and publishing infrastructures, a means of avoiding the compromises the usual means of distribution may be regarded as entailing. Also developing in the 1960s and subsequently was performance and other time-based media as an alternative to the putatively spatial art forms. It must be remembered that the sixties was the period of collapse of the modernist paradigm, with its foundational belief in essentialism, reductivism, and purism founded on Lessing's Laokoön and reiterated in Greenberg's "Towards A Newer Laokoon," which conduced to a radical separation of visual and temporal arts. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, [initial publication 1766] trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laokoon," in John O'Brien, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. I, Perceptions and Judgments 1939-1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 23-38 [initial publication in Partisan Review July-August 1940]. What has come to be grasped in the postmodern turn in the temporality of the spatial arts and the spatiality of the temporal arts, especially in regard to viewer (or reader) response; indeed, the thematization of the metaphors employed in considering space and time has enjoyed a return of the repressed. Return
   
3. 3 Rudolf Arnheim, "Form and Content," Toward A Psychology of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 13. I do not mean to instantiate, by attending to the matter of congruence of form and experience, a réchauffe formalism. Return
   
4. 4 See Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Works of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. IV, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), p.423. Cf. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 131 n.3; Goodman prefers to regard tokens as 'replicas'. But as Goodman defines the term, "An inscription need not be an exact duplicate of another to be a replica, or true copy, of it." This move to 'replica' rather tham 'token' is problematic with respect to the notion of an edition, where one each copy to have sufficient similarity to every other that the text in each will be identical. Return
   
5. 5 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p.500. Return
   
6. 6 T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, line 431. Return
   
7. 7 For the concept of 'relay' and 'signal' see George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 17. Return
   
8. 8 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, 1977, 1978), p. 62. Return