A book as a metaphor for the beginning and end of the human subject

From the Artist's Diary: new exhibition at the Hermann Struck Museum, Haifa

A book is an object; a book is an idea. Books draw inspiration from revolutions, histories, and religions. What does it mean to make a book? Making a book means acquiring power over an object. Books are powerful items, containing entire worlds. They allow us to move through time and space, occupying many places simultaneously. Books rise above physical dimensions, allowing the reader to meet people of different periods and places, some of whom have yet to be born.

Maya Attoun. An artist book in the form of a weekly planner, 2018. Courtesy of the artist

From a different perspective, a book is a narrative and a life story, acting as a metaphor for the beginning and end of the human subject. It is also a multiplicity of potential and actual lives, as well as a workshop for the forging of thoughts and feelings. Michael Sheringham, a scholar of autobiographies in French literature, explains the idea of the book as a multi-faceted metaphor for the human subject: "On the one hand, the book is solid, portable, voluminous, legible, authoritative, permanent: a monument, a mausoleum. […] But, on the other hand, the book is also voluminous in an earlier sense: 'full of turnings or windings, containing or consisting of many coils or convolutions.'”

In this context, the present exhibition seeks to examine the relationship between the book and the human subject – a connection rooted far back in time. In many autobiographies, the relation between the self and the book involves a deep sense of identification, an ambition to realize a life project through writing. When writing an autobiography, the connection between the subject and the book is particularly intimate: a whole life is written and compressed into one volume, which represents and embodies the writer. The subject writes him- or herself, until finally becoming a book.

Peter Jacob Maltz. Journey Notes, Ink and Tipp-Ex on paper, 2007. Courtesy of the artist

The books in this exhibition afford the viewer a journey into the depths of the self, in light of the contemporary global reality. Each artist deals in his own way with questions of belonging and national, familial, and individual identity, in the contemporary world of art and media. With regard to the artistic activity of Hermann Struck, who considered the artist's book a companion of the artist throughout his life, the exhibition examines artists' diaries as visual lifelong travelogues – a tool of observation that combines a non-verbal diary with a written one.

What is it that turns a book into a metaphor for the subject? The answer seems to lie in the book's duality: the fact that it is an inanimate object like all objects, yet one endowed with a symbolic life by means of its written contents (words, ideas, thoughts), whose value and existence are beyond the letters' ink traces. The book stands for the individual, who also exists simultaneously in a physical body and in symbolic worlds.

Etamar Beglikter. Brainless, 2008. TTreated Book - Encyclopedia Hebraica. Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Uri Grun

Participating artists: Avraham Eilat, Maya Attoun, Boaz Arad, Andi Arnovitz, Etamar Beglikter, Michal Bachi, Addam Yekutieli (Know Hope), Noa Yekutieli, Ra’anan Harlap, Zvi Tolkovsky, Peter Jacob Maltz, Shahar Sarig, Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim, Hagar Cygler, Adva Karni, Hermann Struck, Merav Shinn Ben-Alon and Hilla Spitzer

                          Curator: Svetlana Reingold

                         Hermann Struck Museum, Haifa

    Opening: Thursday, 08.11.18     Closing: Sunday, 12.05.19