—2—

What the Book Arts Can Teach Us About Sacred Texts:

The Aesthetic Dimension of Scripture

S. Brent Plate

Religion and art became separated in the modern age, or so the secular-
ized story goes. But looking at a history of books, including their artistic
creation, we find interesting ongoing parallels occurring between reli-
gious and artistic texts. Illustrations and scripts, bindings and papers,
printmaking and performance, all serve artistic and religious ends. The
artistic and the religious are tied together, ultimately, by appealing to the
senses, bringing texts and reading into the realm of the aesthetic (Gk. aes-
thetikos: pertaining to sense perception). Books are powerful and enjoy-
able as well as dangerous and condemned, because they are felt, seen,
tasted, heard, and touched. By looking at contemporary “book arts” and
noting their sensual affects, we can understand “sacred texts” in better
ways. Ultimately we find modern secular arts are not so far from reli-
gious experiences. Examples come from modern book artists such as John
Latham, Brian Dettmer, Luigi Serafini, Meg Hitchcock, and Guy Laramée.

My hope lies in the materiality of language, in the fact that words are things
too, are a kind of nature. … Everything physical takes precedence: rhythm,
weight, mass, shape, and then the paper on which one writes, the trail of
ink, the book. Maurice Blanchot (1995, 327)
What is it about the Encyclopedia Britannica that draws such reverence and
revolt? Such respect and ridicule? Weight. Mass. Spine. Space. Symbol of
knowledge and social advancement. But also emblem of an older age of
knowledge. In 2012, after 244-years of printing the oldest, continuously
published encyclopedia in the world, the Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.,
announced it would no longer publish printed editions.

S. Brent Plate Associate Professor by special appointment in Religious Studies and Cin-
ema & Media Studies, at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and is the manag-
ing editor of the journal, Material Religion.

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 What the Book Arts Can Teach Us About Sacred Texts

Figure 2.1 Julian Baggini, Bibliocide. 2013. Video Still.

In response, British philosopher Julian Baggini staged what he called a

“bibliocide” with a set of encyclopedias that belonged to his family. The
volumes had been sitting in plastic tubs for years, filled with mold. He takes
them out and performs a non-nostalgic ceremony, stacking them, dosing
with lighter fluid, and watching them burn (Figure 2.1). In a short video,
Baggini’s words accompany the burning. He calls it a “funeral pyre,” as he
reads the “liturgy of the spine,” turning not just “ashes to ashes,” but “Arctic
to Biosphere, Birds to Chess, Chicago to Death, Decorative to Edison,” and
so on. As the mass of volumes burns, the philosopher indicates their sym-
bolic value and that in their burning we are also saying goodbye to older
forms of authority, ways of gathering information, and “books as precious
objects to be looked after,” “books as status symbols.” It’s a great liturgical
performance made by a self-professed atheist.1
In the same year, Quebecoise artist Guy Laramée created his own homage
to/destruction of the Encyclopedia Britannica in a work called Adieu (Figure
2.2). He glued together a set of encyclopedia volumes and, as he does with
books, uses them as a sculptural medium to create landscapes whittled out
of the pages. The volumes are cut into, carved, and formed into something
new, at the same time as their bookish use is destroyed. Besides being beau-
tiful sculptures, part of the concept is to show the ways knowledge and lan-
guage are ideally meant to open out into space, into a larger environment.
The use of old books is key to his work since in days past “people made books
that would last, because knowledge was still sacred.”
This encyclo-mourning/sculpting/burning was in play well before the
Britannica, Inc. announced its cessation of print. Already in the 1960s,
1. The video of Baggini’s “Bibliocide” can be see at: https://youtu.be/cuakjcMGneI,
accessed 10 October, 2016. A short essay was also published (Baggini 2013).

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 S. Brent Plate

Figure 2.2 Guy Laramée, Adieu. 2013. Photo and permission by Guy Laramée.
www.guylaramee.com
British artist John Latham was toying with the encyclopedia’s gravitas, its
generative work of knowledge, even as he portrayed it against its own best
interests. Between 1964–1968 he staged a series of what can only be called
rituals, in which he stacked a 3-meter high pile of reference books, often
including a set of encyclopedias, and lit them on fire. He conducted these
rituals in public spaces: outside the British Museum and outside the Senate
House in London, for example. This was a time when Nazi book burning was
still fresh in the cultural memory.
A few years later, Latham turned again to the encyclopedia, but this time
in a different medium. His 1971 work, Encyclopedia Britannica, is a 16mm film
in which every frame of the film corresponds to one page of the massive
reference work. The camera ran at a speed of seventeen frames per second
(and thus seventeen images flash before the viewers’ eyes every second)
and so any text becomes unreadable. Latham takes a universal reference
work that supplies access to great knowledge, but renders unusable for its
intended sense. Instead, the book becomes object, and conjures a different
mode of visual perception.
I begin with these approaches to the Encyclopedia Britannica for a few rea-
sons that set out the interests of this article. First, the artworks can roughly
be linked together through the term “book arts,” that is, art that uses books
as its primary medium, whether using pre-made books for sculptures and
performances or making new books artistically. I’ll discuss this further in
the next section, alongside an initial definition of sacred texts. Second, book
arts question how books can be used in sacred ways, turning us away from
semantic meanings of texts toward aesthetic engagement with the material-

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ity, and hence sensuality, of books. With the book arts as a guide, and a sur-
vey of a number of recent artists working in the field, the following section
develops an “aesthetic dimension of sacred texts,” noting the connection
to the senses and the ongoing need for rituals. Creating artworks through
the use of books makes broader social, cultural, and religious comments
about knowledge production and forms of power, and ultimately extends
our definition of sacred texts.
Books arts and sacred texts in the modern world
“Book arts” is an ambiguous term, and takes its place alongside a number
of other ambiguous phrases such as artists’ books and livre d’artiste (Drucker
2004), fine bookmaking and book objects (Phillpot 2013), and the recent neol-
ogism “blooks,” objects that are made to look like books but have other uses
(Dubansky 2016). Surveying much of the artwork and critical responses to it,
Garrett Stewart uses the term “bookwork” since these objects do something,
they perform (Stewart 2011). Cutting across some of these other categories,
what I am grouping together here under the name “book arts” has two inter-
related characteristics. First, the artworks use books as a primary medium,
either as the end product (what is usually, strictly speaking, called an “art-
ists’ book,” a created work usually of paper and binding that takes its final
form as a book), or using ready-made books as the means to a sculptural, per-
formative, and/or conceptual end (as in the examples of Baggini, Laramée,
and Latham). The former might be thought of as the “craft” of bookmaking,
while the latter is part of artistic “expression,” though I’d hesitate to draw
too strong a distinction between them. I’m interested in artworks that could
be found in museums as easily as in the special collections of a library. What
I do not include are examples of “fine printing” or “editorial editions” of
books, or what might generally come from the tradition of the livre d’artiste.
Second, and closely related, the book arts I am looking at, to use the
words of Johanna Drucker, interrogate “the conceptual or material form of
the book as part of its intention, thematic interests, or production activities”
(Drucker 2004, 3). In one form or other, I’m interested in those arts that call
the very understanding of the book and related issues of reading into ques-
tion, asking not only what it is, but also what it does. I mean this in both con-
ceptual and material aspects. These questions arise out of a particular late
or post-modernist environment in which the status of the book’s authority
has been called into question—the cessation of printing the Encyclopedia
Britannica being emblematic of this epochal shift. In and through these mod-
ern interrogations we can begin to rethink a definition of sacred texts. To
do so, I turn to the second key term in my title.

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Sacred texts are found in many religious traditions around the world,
with substantial variations (see especially Myrvold 2010, 2–5; cf. Bowker
2014; Levering 1989). In some traditions (e.g., Protestant Christianity and
Sunni Islam) the texts are considered foundational to the tradition itself,
given through direct communication from a single God. In other traditions
(e.g., Mahayana Buddhism, Jainism) the texts are “sacred” not because they
come directly from on high, but because they are useful for teaching and
may point toward enlightenment. Some texts are understood to be pri-
marily “oral” (e.g., the Quran, the Vedas), while others are at their essence
in scripted, bound form (e.g., The Golden Plates of the Book of Mormon,
Guru Granth Sahib). At the risk of reductionism, and strange as it may be to
make such a definition in a “journal of sacred texts,” I here offer a heuristic
definition of sacred texts that may be useful in thinking about the place of
texts, and books, in religious life. At the very least, it is the definition I am
thinking about in relation to the arguments in this article. By sacred texts,
I initially mean:
• a collection of words and symbols,
• that are written, etched, printed, spoken, or chanted,
• hold authority and provide meaning,
• prescribe behaviors for relating to human and/or superhuman
beings,
• are embedded in a particular tradition,
• are valued by a community of adherents,
• who perform rituals with and through the text,
• and the material texts are tied to a conceptual, social imaginary.
This definition includes the Bible and Talmud, but it is broad enough to
include encyclopedias and national constitutions. Note too that the mate-
rial form of a “text” is broader than “books,” and can include recitations,
scrolls, and loose leafs, but the bound shape of the book has become one of
the most prominent forms of sacred text in the modern world, so even, for
example, the oral nature of the Quran is often encountered by Muslims in
book form. And modernity is the setting for my argument.
In the modern age, with high literacy rates, cheap print, and mass trans-
portation leading to changes in the material mode of book production, sacred
texts have undergone massive conceptual changes. In modernity, books, and
human relations to them, have been drastically altered. The relationship has
become disembodied, at least as believed on a conceptual level, as if texts
were only static words on a page that needed to be read and comprehended

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by a mind. As the medieval art historian Michael Camille suggests, “Perhaps

only today, with the fast-approaching ‘death of the book’ and after centuries
of idealist incorporeal aesthetics that denied the body in favor of a myth of
pure mind, are we able to begin to appreciate and partially recover the cul-
tural history of this submerged corporeality that links textuality to the five
senses” (Camille 1998, 42). Camille, among other medievalists, has sought to
recover the different relations to texts in the past, highlighting the sensual
apprehension of books by literate and illiterate persons alike.
One of the key elements in the contemporary, late/post-modern recov-
ery of the relation between the senses and texts has to do with the role of
books within rituals. Scholar of Sikh traditions and material texts, Kristina
Myrvold, states: “At the junction of ritual and texts we also find a vital ten-
sion between tradition and modernity. Ritual practices do not fade away
or disappear in the face of modernization, but rather transform and even
become revitalized. … People may reclaim tradition by inventing rituals that
respond to their needs in a rapidly changing world” (Myrvold 2010, 8). Sacred
texts are partly defined based on their content, but they are also part of liv-
ing traditions, and people use the texts within performative environments.
This revitalization is part of what Baggini, Latham, and Laramée are up
to with their book arts, as their secular performances begin edging toward
the religious and the ritualistic. At least, as I’m arguing here, their artworks
give us the opportunity to reconceptualize the nature and function of books,
and thus reconceptualize the place of sacred texts, not as words simply to be
semantically meaningful, but as sensuous, emotional, sometimes even beau-
tiful, engagements. Writing about his performance piece, Baggini states, “no
matter how much I try to frame my act of bibliocide positively, I still can’t
shake the feeling that I did something wrong. If any secular object deserves
the status of the sacred, surely it is the book, which aside from all those prac-
tical innovations that feed, clothe, warm and heal us, is the most important
human creation of all time” (Baggini). Precisely in and through his taboo
ritual, the sacrality of books, as material objects, comes to the forefront,
revealing their long time lofty status in the social imaginary. I suggest that
it is an artistic impulse that allows rituals to be reinvented and traditions
revitalized. The book arts provide a way to reimagine the place of sacred
texts, particularly as they touch on the aesthetic dimension.
The aesthetic dimension of sacred texts
As the limits of modernity have been glimpsed, if not altogether surpassed,
there have been several new modes of research that have resituated the role
of the book in the past and present. One of these has been a growing inter-

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est in the materiality of sacred texts, thinking through the ways texts look
and feel, and how they find their way into rituals, not as instruction manuals
but as objects to be used in performances. Much of this research was nicely
summed up in the 2006 article, “The Three Dimensions of Scriptures” by
James Watts. In his helpful taxonomy there are what he calls the semantic,
performative, and iconic dimensions. As Watts puts it: “The semantic dimension
of scriptures has to do with the meaning of what is written, and thus includes
all aspects of interpretation and commentary as well as appeals to the text’s
contents in preaching and other forms of persuasive rhetoric” (141). This
dimension is generally how religious studies—and related scholarly fields
from biblical studies to history—has approached texts in the past, something
along the lines of what Camille called an “idealist incorporeal aesthetics.”
But new approaches to sacred texts have begun to uncover the material ele-
ments of textuality, something that religious practitioners have long under-
stood. So, Watts relates two further dimensions: “The performative dimension
of scriptures has to do with the performance of what is written. … The iconic
dimension of scriptures finds expression in the physical form, ritual manipu-
lation, and artistic representation of scriptures” (141–142).
Here I am adding a fourth, interconnected dimension I’ll call the “aes-
thetic dimension,” taken from the Greek etymology of aesthetikos that
relates it to “sense perception.” The aesthetic dimension signals the sen-
sual connection between human bodies and texts, intersecting with each of
the three other dimensions, but emphasizing all the senses and not only the
visual. By using the term “aesthetic,” I also mean to trigger what we mod-
erns commonly think of when we use that term, that is, the connotation of
aesthetics as related to the arts. It is this two-part aspect of the aesthetic
(sense perception and art) that I mean to evoke.
The aesthetic dimension, like the other three dimensions, sometimes
intersects with, sometimes overlays, sometimes lie dormant, and other
times stands at the fore of the others. For example, there is no semantic
dimension without ears and eyes. Even if one is struggling for the seemingly
“invisible” meaning of translations and contexts, texts are perceived pri-
marily through the eyes in modern scholarly thought, and secondarily the
ears. Even so, most semantic approaches, like most biblical studies, operate
in an aesthetic vacuum, presuming scholars’ brains are directly download-
ing deep meaning—no senses needed. Or so it is believed.
The iconic dimension on first glance points merely to the eyes. However,
icons in the traditional sense of Christianity’s Eastern Orthodoxy—which is
to say nothing of enacting darshan in South Asia or baraka in North African
Sufi contexts—is very much about the other senses as well. As Bissera

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Pentchava’s work on the Sensual Icon in Byzantium details, one connects

to icons through the lips as well as the eyes, through the nostrils that sniff
the incense and ears that hear the prayers occurring in the presence of the
icon (Pentchava 2010). Icons, and thus also iconic texts, are always already
multi-sensual. And much of the aesthetic dimension can be seen in the per-
formative dimension of scripture. But I think it useful to bracket out and
highlight the sensorium, that in-between, liminal locus that, as I’ve argued
elsewhere, is the crux of religious experience itself. The senses form what
I’ve called the “skin of religion,” a semi-permeable membrane that mediates
input and output, the flows of religious behavior and belief, and the crea-
tion of sacred environments (Plate 2011). We use the senses at home altars
and great pilgrimage sites, in private devotions and in megachurches. And
we can only engage with books, pages, and texts, when we use our senses.
Artists and their books
The examples of the Encyclopedia Britannica already move us in several aes-
thetic directions as books are embedded in new forms of myth, ritual, and
symbol, engaged by people’s bodies. Here I explore several further exam-
ples of book arts which provoke questions about the nature and function
of sacred texts. For heuristic purposes, I have outlined three categories of
book arts, providing brief descriptions of the categories and giving three
examples of artists in each category. The aim is not to provide an exhaus-
tive overview of book arts, but to stimulate further thinking about the ways
artists have used and created books, and how that might impact an under-
standing of sacred texts.
The book as medium and means
John Latham used books as sculptural elements beginning in the 1950s. In
works such as Bible and Belief System, both from 1959, Latham disfigures, par-
tially destroys, and then mounts old books in sculptural fixity to generate
questions about stale knowledge and about information as static. Library
and gallery alike can create an immobile culture. So he started working
beyond sculpture to create performance pieces like the “skoob” project. As
part of his critique of books and social knowledge production, during this
time he also critiqued an art world and art theory that emphasized for-
malism (Abstract Expressionism and then minimalism were the reigning
champions of artistic styles), especially as articulated by one of the most
prominent art critics at the time: Clement Greenberg.
In August 1966, Latham gathered with some students at his home. They
took a library copy of Greenberg’s book, Art and Culture, tore it into tiny

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bits, chewed the paper and spit it out. They collected the discarded mate-
rial, added yeast, and let it ferment. Latham had checked the book out from
the library at St Martin’s School of Art, where he was teaching at the time,
and eventually the book came to be overdue. Latham went to the library
and gave them a small phial of the masticated material, returning what he
called the “essence” of the book. For this performance he was subsequently
dismissed from his teaching post at St Martin’s. Nonetheless, he created an
artistic document of the performance, included letters from the library and
the phial, and collected it all in a work titled Still and Chew: Art and Culture
1966–1967. It is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New
York.2
Beginning in 1990, Latham turned to the sacred books of Western reli-
gions and began to create sculptures, incorporating Qurans, Bibles, Torahs,
and Talmuds into the work. In the process of creating his artworks he chal-
lenged commonly held notions of the sacredness of these texts. This was
his “God is Great” series, with most versions containing one or more sacred
texts, cut in half, with each piece glued to both sides of a glass plate so that
the books have the appearance of being sliced through with the glass. These
were conceptual works that depended on book destruction as their trigger.
In 2005, “God is Great (#2)”—consisting of a Quran, Bible, and Talmud vol-
ume sliced through with a glass plate—was about to be put on display at Tate
Modern, but museum officials took it down before anyone saw it because
they were afraid of “offending” anyone in an age of Islamist terrorism. More
recently, at the Portikus Gallery in Frankfurt in 2014, three men (sometimes
identified as “Islamist” though that wasn’t entirely clear) entered the gal-
lery, agitated the workers, and stole the Quran from the installation, “God
is Great (#4),” one of the last works Latham made before he died in 2006.
In these instances, an inert, three-dimensional sculpture stirs emotions,
prompting bodily action by others.
Throughout his career, Latham challenged the status of books by disfigur-
ing them and thus attempting to “free” a culture that had grown compla-
cent with its acceptance of books, sacred and otherwise, as a key form of
knowledge. As one commentator of John Latham sums up the artist’s work
with books:
The printed book and its ongoing twentieth-century identity crisis was
Latham’s muse, and the trail of dismembered, mutilated volumes he left

2. From Tate Gallery. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/and-word-was-

made-art Accessed 14 March 2016. Latham critiqued what he called the “Mental Fur-
niture Industry.” He saw books as the repositories of a kind of static knowledge that is
uncritical and lacking intuition.

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behind him was not evidence of destruction, but of a sustained effort to rethink
and reinvent. He probed, pushed, and stretched its boundaries, ferociously
experimenting with new forms it might assume. Battered and charred, his
books were no longer quite themselves, but a variety of strange, unread-
able, hybrid and inter-medial objects. (Partington 2014, 72; emphasis added)
Between sacred and profane, but also between library and museum, destruc-
tion and regeneration, Latham’s experiments with books draw attention to
what books have come to mean in broad cultural parlance.
Guy Laramée picks up on many of the same themes as Latham, though he
executes his work in strikingly different ways, moving us further toward an
aesthetic and ritualized approach to books and knowledge. Laramée says,
“In a way, what I do belongs to sacrifice, in the anthropological lore. In the
sacrifice, the victim becomes sacred precisely because she is sacrificed. So
these books that nobody cared about anymore become sacred objects in a
way, because I transform them into art.”3 Destruction is tied to sacrifice.
Death becomes ritualized and through this, transformations might occur.
In other works and writings, Laramée has created a mythology of a peo-
ple he calls the “Biblios.” “Once upon a time there was a tribe that collected
words,” Laramée starts his story. “The Biblios had all sorts of words and
when some were lacking they made up more.” Laramée goes on to tell how
they were at first an oral people, but the Biblios eventually discovered writ-
ing, which led to books, which led to collecting, which led to them creating
imposing library structures in which they all lived. To connect with each
other they had to excavate through the books, creating massive tunnels.
This allowed them to be with each other, but as a result, many words were
lost in the tunnel digging. In the end, Laramée says, “It’s generally agreed
that the Biblios perished under the weight of their knowledge.”4
Neither Laramée nor Latham are against knowledge per se. They are cri-
tiquing a stale and overly-amassed knowledge, and they see these problems
most glaringly in the form of the modern printed book. For Laramée, the
books become landscapes, with the negative spaces cut away to suggest ero-
sion, just as his “destruction” allows an opening of the book into a larger
space beyond (Figure 2.3).
Similar to Laramée, Brian Dettmer has found old books to be useful objects
through which to reinterpret the past, while pointing toward the future. He
too participated in memorializing the end of the encyclopedia in his 2012
piece Tower #1, a work that creates a tower of encyclopedias in ways simi-
lar to Latham’s skoob towers, though Dettmer’s books were “destroyed”
3. http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/guy-laramee
4. http://www.guylaramee.com/index.php/biblios/biblios/ accessed 14 March 2016.

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 S. Brent Plate

Figure 2.3 Guy Laramée, The Holy Bible (The Arid Road to Freedom). 2015. Photo and
permission by Guy Laramée, www.guylaramee.com .

not through fire but by knife. Dettmer finds old books and goes page by
page, cutting through a book with an x-acto knife, revealing images, words,
and ultimately relations across and between the pages. Though he does
not necessarily read the books before he begins his work, Dettmer offers
an “interpretation” of the books as he cuts into them. He works through
encyclopedias, bibles (e.g., The Picture Bible, 2005; Figure 2.4), classic liter-
ary works like Tristan Shandy, as well as old medical textbooks, highlighting
words and images that stand out, excavating themes that are found by enact-
ing the texts. He discusses his method as “a more tactile way of learning by
actually having an experience with the material” (quoted in Brown 2008).
In a TED talk he gave in 2014 to a group of youth, Dettmer comments on
why people seem to be disturbed by the destruction of books, even in an
artistic fashion such as his. It is because, he suggests, “we think of books as
living things. . . . They are created to relate to our body. . . . they also have
the potential to continue to grow, to become new things.”5 Dettmer’s books
then, are aesthetic objects, bodies that correspond to human bodies, and
the connection is an aesthetic one.
Each of these artists, and many others as well, work through processes
of, as one commentator put it, “excavation, surgery, erasure, and mutila-
tion” (Martin n.d., 4). Through these sometimes taboo activities, new vari-
ations of the sacred emerge. The book is sacrificed, giving new takes on life
by the artists as well as the audiences who come to interact with the works.
5. https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_dettmer_old_books_reborn_as_intricate_art

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Figure 2.4 Brian Dettmer, Picture Bible. 2005. Photo and permission by Brian Dettmer.

Artists’ books
I switch here from artists who take “found” books and carve into them to
form something new, to artists who are creating their own books from the
ground up. This is what is more properly termed “artists’ books,” works that
begin from raw materials to create a book, generally with pages that are
bound together in a codex form. Here “books” (this term is used especially
loosely in this instance) are not the means to a final product but are the final
product themselves. And here, instead of a certain element of “destruction,”
we find creation. Like the previous grouping, the artists noted here connect
books with larger forces of space, culture, and identity.
Islam Aly has created a number of books that reflect and comment on
Arabic and Muslim modes of knowledge and ritual. Books such as Marginalia

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Figure 2.5 a-d. Islam Aly, Orientation Cube. Photo and permission by Islam Aly.

1 (2013) and 28 Letters (2013) use Arabic calligraphy styles and laser cutting
techniques to create negative spaces in pages made from flax paper. The
Arabic characters are the empty spaces in the page, cut away from the book
itself. The relation of letters to page is inverted, as Aly takes older forms of
artistic forms and styles and reframes them. He states, “I wish to explore
new ways to use the rich structures of historical books in contemporary
artists’ book practice and incorporate contemporary content into strictly
historical structures.”6 In each of these, the cut out characters are legible,
though not entirely readable, turning semantic meanings into aesthetic
engagements.
In 2014, Aly made Orientation Cube, a book with Johannot paper pages,
laser-engraved edges, bound in plexi-glass, with Coptic stitching, and placed
in a folding box (Figures 2.5a-d). Aly discusses how his book is made in
light of the Kaaba, the ancient shrine that stands at the center of the Great
Mosque in Mecca. In the artwork, he says, “A tiny black cube is positioned
at the center of the inner back board, around which are concentric circles
cut in the thirty sections of the book to reflect the process of circumambula-
tion.” As with Laramée’s works, book space and geographical space coincide;
the book becomes a landscape, an embodied world that connects with the
bodies of the audience. And like good ritual, it is a condensation of space and
time, a way of focusing energies. “Reading” a book in this instance involves
opening the box, unfolding the pages, even playing with the designs to cre-
ate a space that is mindful of prayerful orientation.
6. http://www.islamaly.com/about.html

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Figure 2.6 Robert Kirschbaum, The 42-Letter Name. Permission by Robert Kirschbaum.

Not unlike Aly, Robert Kirschbaum’s The 42-Letter Name is an artist’s book
that mixes and merges book pages with architectural space. In Kirschbaum’s
case, he begins with the idea of words, more specifically the idea of one
particular word, a mystical 42-letter name of God found in Jewish prayer
traditions. On first glance, the pages are simple line drawings, geometric
cube shapes that seem in want of adding up to something, a “fragment of
creation” as the artist considers. And indeed, the three-dimensional spaces
that they cubically conjure in their final form of a nine-square grid is remi-
niscent of Ezekiel’s geometrical, symmetrical vision of the third Temple in
Jerusalem (Ezekiel 40-47). “Following the grid pattern,” Kirschbaum says,
“I then begin to carve out, weigh, transform, permute, and depict forms ini-
tially intended to function as plans for discrete objects that are fragments
of a more perfect whole” (Kirschbaum 2009, n.p.; Figure 2.6).
Kirschbaum’s “book” bends toward architecture, and in a fascinating
mode of comparative, interreligious analysis we find him working from
a Jewish perspective but also coming to the geometry of the “cube” as an
ideal form, similar to the Kaaba of Mecca (kaaba literally means “cube”).
He’s drawing on Ezekiel’s description of the Temple, but here Kirschbaum
subtracts parts of the complete cube in each rendering, showing the incom-
plete nature of the world today. There are fragments that can mystically be
“read” together, adding up to a harmonious whole, though perhaps only in
an ideal form.
While there is little to semantically read in the examples given so far,
other artists bring us closer to the literate and semantic dimensions by chan-
neling our energies toward the words on pages, even though this is a long
way from literate reading. Jan Owen’s Prayer Palimpsest (2013), as one exam-

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ple, is a handmade book of twenty-six pages, sewn together with a Hollytex

cover. Inspired by calligraphy styles from Asia and medieval European manu-
scripts, she handwrites a collection of prayers and poems with Sumi ink. The
resulting work has a good deal of legibility—the individual letters and words
are decipherable—though it would be difficult to sit and read for long. Apart
from literal reading, the book becomes an object to be looked at, while the
polyester pages provide a slightly jarring effect, most unlike the paper typi-
cally used in manuscripts, and foreign to the fingers of most readers.
With these examples of artists’ books, we begin to suspect that in the
modern age, the act of reading itself might be in question as much as the
object of the book. Reading goes beyond pure vision, as the precisely devel-
oped visual typefaces of modern books give way to pages that are translu-
cent, shot through with multiple layers, or made to be part of a construction
set, fingered and touched.
The book’s imaginary
The last group of artists I’ll note brings us further into the imaginary, from
the physicality of the artists’ book as we have just seen, to the ideality of
characters, books, and readability. These artworks rely on the imaginary of
legible characters, as well as the imaginary of the book; the book itself being
a concept that is based on an object. Ultimately, to approach many of these
works, we the audiences/participants must believe and imagine that books
have a bounded nature, and that the characters inscribed within them lead
to words, which lead to sentences that mean something on a semantic level.
Seguing from Jan Owen’s work, Sher offers a telling contrast. Like Owen,
Sher creates a compact “book” that is lovely to behold, shows the signs of
handmade creation, and creates the sense of a personal, devotional work.
And yet Sher puts much of that into question with her 2013 piece, Blog
(Figure 2.7). Several years ago, Elizabeth Sher was in an arts residence in
Barcelona and began to write in an automatic language on a daily basis. She
made up the characters, which look a lot like Chinese characters for those
of us who don’t know anything about Chinese, and each day this practice
solidified for her. Intriguingly, in an age of New Media she thought of her-
self not as writing/journaling but as “blogging.” And then she turned her
automatic writing back into an old medium by writing with a bamboo pen,
using sepia ink, and writing on rice paper. In a further transformation, she
turned the written pages into a scroll, rolled it and placed it in a plain pine-
wood box, conjuring Jewish burial, and in Hebrew lettering wrote the word
“blog” on the top. In each permutation, ideas are suggested, not symbolized,
relying on the imaginary of the audience to make connections.

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 What the Book Arts Can Teach Us About Sacred Texts

Figure 2.7 Elizabeth Sher. Blog. 2013. Permission by Elizabeth Sher.

Taking automatic writing to a severe degree, we note the Codex

Seraphanianus, produced from 1976 to 1978 in Rome by designer and artist
Luigi Serafini. The book is 360-pages of undecipherable writings and bizarre
images. It looks like an encyclopedia, with naturalist drawings, and the hint
of technical details. But these are fantastical images, and unreadable text.
Serafini, under the influence of psychedelic drugs and long travels, saw him-
self as a medium to the characters, surrealistically not in control of what
he was producing at the time. Ultimately, unlike the other works I have
noted, which are handmade in small artist’s sets, Serafini’s work was mass-
produced by a number of publishing houses around the world. Prominent
literary figures such as Roland Barthes and Italo Calvino, among others,
have written about it (see Taylor 2007).
In this case, it is not the imaginary of the book that is in question, but
the imaginary of semantic meaning. For decades, scholars and tech-geeks
have tried to de-code the Codex, certain that among the scribblings is a
legitimate alphabet with coherent commentary. Serafini himself has said
there is no hidden meaning in the text (it is, he says, “asemic”) though this

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Figure 2.8 Meg Hitchcock, Throne: The Book of Revelation. 2012. Permission by Meg Hitchcock.

hasn’t stopped many from seeking its Rosetta Stone, the key that will allow
the unlocking of the meaning. After all, we must have semantic meaning!
The Codex Seraphanianus seems to hold out a secret for a careful hermeneut
to decode. The text appeals to the mystery-solving attitude of the literary
scholar.
Finally, I turn to Meg Hitchcock, who brings us back to legibility and
semantic meaning, while relying on an imaginary idea of a book that is
necessary to bring her transformations to light. Hitchcock comes from a
fundamentalist Christian upbringing, and so knows what it is to have a
high regard for the Bible. As she moved away from her background, she
still retained a respect for sacred texts, and uses them throughout her art-
works as she takes one sacred text, cuts out letters from it, then takes the
letters and glues them into another configuration that spells out passages
from another sacred text. For example, the 2012 work, Throne: The Book of
Revelation, (Figure 2.8) reads literally as the book of Revelation from the
Christian Bible: starting at top left is chapter one, verse one, and extend-

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 What the Book Arts Can Teach Us About Sacred Texts

ing to the end of chapter 22 at the bottom of the picture. All of the letters
(Roman characters, in English) were initially cut from pages of an English
translation of the Quran. Then, at the center is a mandala-type form that
contains “The Throne Verse” from the Quran (ayat al-kursi; 2:225), and all
of these characters were cut from a Christian Bible. The result is an image
that can be looked at, but also read. Its conceptual hook is based on the idea
that there was an intact Quran and Bible that were cut up and its constitu-
ent parts reordered into another whole.
Between destruction and creation, Hitchcock’s work, like many others
I have discussed here, challenges the ideal concept of books and literal
meanings by bringing us to aesthetically encounter a grouping of symbols
that are visible and tangible. The physicality of letters, pages, and bind-
ings affects an experience that is not always congruent with the ideality
we keep in our mind as we confront these pieces. To get at the discrepan-
cies between body and mind, and between aesthetics and semantics, ritual
is again invoked, even when this ritual is the artist working in their studio.
The painstaking work of cutting out thousands of individual letters and
repasting them in another place is a long process, which Hitchcock makes
clear is also a meditative process.
Conclusions: Redefining sacred texts
In the arts, as in religious rituals (see the other contributions in this vol-
ume for examples) if not in libraries, books are chewed up and spit out, set
aflame, fondled, dug into, cut up, and gazed upon, as bodies engage their
artistic forms and intellectual aspirations. There has been a widespread and
increasing artistic interest in books in the past half century that reflects
an anxiety and excitement over the “death of the book,” which also spells
a certain end of reading. Books are now sculptural matter and fodder for
performance, but also a final hoped-for form that requires pages, bindings,
symbolic markings, and a lot of decisions about how to put all that together.
Meanwhile, the artists are clearly engaging in larger cultural comment and
critique about the status of knowledge and the role of media, and through
their creative destructions they point toward new inventions of texts in the
material world and social imaginary alike.
Many of the artists noted here have been challenged and critiqued
for their destruction of books. Even the YouTube site for Julian Baggini’s
Bibliocide is filled with vindictive comments about how awful it is that
Baggini burned those encyclopedias. There is a secular imaginary of the
book as sacred in the contemporary world, and this attitude is not merely
directed toward “sacred” texts. The destruction is a sacrifice, as so many of

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the artists note, which is always destruction, demise, and death. But what
is going on is something less like desecration and more like the sacred act of
deconsecration. The “con” is crucial here, as it is for religious traditions. To
take something apart, and do it ritualistically, is to “deconsecrate.” It is a
sacred activity. Something comes from the sacrifice.
And while these artists are creating, destroying, and provoking in new
ways, for new sets of media consumers, aesthetic engagement with books
has been around since there have been sacred texts. Michelle Brown speaks
to the imagery of the fourteenth-century, “Holkham Bible Picture Book,”
in ways that resonate across many sacred texts, and into the modern age:
To view [the Holkham Bible] merely as a religious picture book, designed to
help instruct an illiterate audience in the basics of Bible stories, is to miss
the point of the work that marks a radical shift in modes of communica-
tion. It is to mistake an early Flash Gordon comic strip for George Lucas’s
Star Wars epic. For during the early fourteenth century, when the book was
made, artists and spiritual directors were taking art into spheres as innova-
tive as film would prove to be seven centuries later . . . Art, like music, can
provide an immediacy and profundity of access to the senses and to emo-
tional response. (Brown 2007, 1)
Similarly, describing the engagement with medieval books by the liter-
ate and illiterate alike, Michael Camille notes how, “Reading a text was a
charged somatic experience in which every turn of the page was sensa-
tional, from the feel of the flesh and hair side of the parchment on one’s
fingertips to the lubricious labial mouthing of the written words with one’s
tongue” (Camille 1998, 38). “Reading” has long been a multi-sensual affair.
This article is connected with the others in this volume which outline the
myriads ways that texts are sensually engaged. We don’t need the book arts
to tell us this, we just need to go back to review the place of text in religious
traditions. Yet, my suggestion is that if we begin from the insights of book
arts and then turn to look at sacred texts, we will ask different questions.
We might pay better attention to the bindings, the literal and legible along-
side the non-sensical and translucent.
So, what makes a text sacred? Recall my initial comments at the begin-
ning of this article. In the end, I want to amend the definition to include the
aesthetic dimension. Thus, a sacred text is:
a collection of words and symbols, that are written, etched, printed, spoken,
or chanted, hold authority and provide meaning, prescribe behaviors for
relating to human and/or superhuman beings, are embedded in a particu-
lar tradition, are valued by a community of adherents, who perform ritu-
als with and through the material texts that are tied to a conceptual, social
imaginary, and appeals to the senses of human bodies.

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The sacred is in part created within the material texts’ sensual appeal to the
bodies of people: whether by bonfire, ingesting, hearing, looking, or even
reading the books. The aesthetic dimension is not merely the “artistic” ele-
ment. However, through the arts we begin to see the “sensational” element
of aesthetics, the ways the material books in all their myriad forms appeal to
the sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touch of the human body.
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