Lucy Carolan reviews Embodied Books: Experiencing the Health Humanities through Artists’ Books by Darian Goldin Stahl (Peter Lang, 2024).
Embodied Books opens with a passage in which Goldin Stahl succinctly reminds us that the notion of books as bodies, and from there our embodied relations to them, is baked into the language we use to describe and think of them. Books have headbands, wraps, jackets and leathery skins that dress head, spine, back, joint, and so on. Although Embodied Books as a hard copy is typical of mass-produced academic publications (with shiny, stiff card cover, and familiar page layouts on ordinary paper stock), it begins by prompting awareness of it as a tactile object, a helpful preparation for the ensuing discussion of more remarkable bookworks.
Following the introduction there are six chapters, each with a clear emphasis. Chapter 1 begins with addressing the question of what artists’ books are — or rather, following Joanna Drucker’s argument, that it’s easier to understand what they are if one considers what they are not — and initiates discussion of what they can do and how they can be read. Chapter 2 provides concise historical context for medically themed contemporary artists’ books, and how they relate to other book objects such as comics and zines. Chapter 3 outlines how artists use ‘bookness’ — what Drucker alternatively defines as ‘the idea of the book’ (Drucker, 123) — to critique medical hegemony and materially counter “the lack of […] first-person perspectives in the formation of healthcare knowledge” (Goldin Stahl, 62). Chapter 4 is an instructive deep dive into how Goldin Stahl’s artist book Fieldnotes: How to Be With (2020) emerged from her doctoral research, convincingly arguing for its legitimacy as a piece of humanities scholarship in and of itself, despite its unusual form. Chapter 5 offers a further case study in the practice and legacy of book artist Martha Hall, with particular focus on how her works were activated by her during her lifetime (in her exchanges with her oncologists, for example), and how they continue to be mobilised as objects of study and aids to empathic reflection in medical education. Finally, Chapter 6 details and analyses the successful testing of ‘Book as Body’ workshops, designed to introduce artists’ book making as a generative research method of potent potential relevance to health and medical humanities.
Knowledge-making and Creative Practice
Goldin Stahl’s ambitions for this book are that it can appeal to an audience that encompasses artists, humanities scholars, healthcare professionals, patients and publics beyond. To this end she discusses artists’ books as a medium, proposing ways of critically appraising artists’ practice-centred research which is also applicable to books produced by non-artists, and provides clear instruction about how this kind of book making can (similarly to zines, but with additional advantages) be applied as an arts-based activity in health and medical humanities research. With respect to the latter, the book may be of particular interest to ‘material turn’ scholars, as one of the key questions Goldin Stahl addresses is how the experience of making and engaging with artists’ books, as “hermeneutical objects” (Goldin Stahl, 6), can manifest aspects of bodily subjectivity and facilitate understanding.
An important aspect of this book, then, is the strength of its advocacy for creative practice as something that not only transmits but generates knowledge; that thinking through materials, processes and gestures can reveal alternative and complementary knowledges to textual (academic) forms of understanding. This is foregrounded throughout but comes across most clearly in Chapter 6 as Goldin Stahl recounts the outcomes of participant engagement with a series of practical workshops she ran in 2019. After quoting some of their responses (e.g. “[The workshop] was great because I think the book is really a kind of bridge between the feeling and the knowledge.”), she writes that
the materials themselves generated the links between ideas. Released from the confines of channeling all research through language, this embodied way of approaching research furthers the notion that tacit knowledge can reveal itself in the midst of artistic practices (Goldin Stahl, 173, original emphasis).
Of course, images, materials, gestures and forms are also language, that we ‘read’ in order to tease out meaning, often by projecting ourselves into them, as the close reading of varied works throughout Embodied Books also demonstrates. The language Goldin Stahl is referring to in the above quote is the kind I’m using in this review, and that she’s also used in her book: the language of interpretive or critical secondary sources. But words, in the form of a large series of unusual questions (Goldin Stahl, 154-156), also prompt workshop participants towards thinking differently about bodily sensation in symptoms. The application of this phenomenologically informed approach resulted in varied material expressions of ineffable lived experience, and for readers wishing to try it for themselves, Goldin Stahl has generously provided detailed information about the pedagogy she’s devised.
Sensory Expressions
There are a couple of claims in the book that I found difficult to fully accept. One suggests that hand crafted artists’ books are somehow superior to those produced in other ways. This implies a constraint that Goldin Stahl herself rejects when she writes that “the issue of what artists’ books are and how they intersect with medicine and the body is hardly settled — and that’s a good thing” (Goldin Stahl, p.52) since strict categorisations of what a medium is and can do restrict imaginative and expressive potentialities. I do understand why Goldin Stahl emphasises the handmade: as an example, in Erin K. Schmidt’s The Unfinished Blanket (2016), crochet envelops a small book with a pregnancy ultrasound scan as its cover; the softness of yarn, crocheted not for the reader but the artists’ miscarried baby, transforms an otherwise impersonal medical image into something poignant. But crafting by hand isn’t the only way to ‘touch’ a reader.
Similarly, artists’ books are not the only available medium, and the other claim I have qualms about is that artists’ books are in a unique position to fill epistemological gaps. While I agree that they can be powerful objects, and that “academic reliance on text neglects sensory ways of knowing” (Goldin Stahl, 98), it doesn’t necessarily follow that this is “a gap that artists’ books are exceptionally suited to fill” (ibid.), and I see no need to stress their value over other expressive approaches. In 1995, British artist Helen Chadwick did a very similar residency to the one that in part informed Goldin Stahl’s Fieldnotes, and Nebula (1996), the work that Chadwick produced, is also a potent response to embryology and IVF, even though it’s not an artists’ book.
But these are very small oversteps in an otherwise wholly compelling book. Though Goldin Stahl presents an example of a work that can’t be handled — the intriguing Cryobook Archives (2010-present) by Tangy Duff, made with animal and ethically donated human flesh (Goldin Stahl, 68-70) — I agree with her that most artists’ books tend to be accessible, in that they are (mostly) intended to be handled in ways that (most) other artworks are not. They can be appealingly familiar in their ‘bookness’, even while their forms and the materials they’re formed of may surprise. Plentiful illustrations throughout Embodied Books greatly aid our ability to imagine how the works depicted (and from there others that are described) can be spaces of intimate encounters between authors and audiences. Goldin Stahl flips Elizabeth Grosz’s ‘body as book’ — “a body as a text which is as complicated and indeterminate as any manuscript” (Goldin Stahl, 20: Grosz, 1994) — to propose books as bodies, or more particularly, artists’ books that are expressly intended to evoke embodied experiences of illness and dis-ease. The multi-sensoriality of cogent artists’ books gives texture, scent, mass, weight — gives body — to subjective experiences difficult to otherwise perceive and express.
‘Research-Creation’ in the Health and Medical Humanities
While the focus of this volume is the specific medium of artists’ books, I also read it as an appeal to the humanities (and through these to the medical sciences) on behalf of the visual arts, eloquently and passionately advocating the value of practice-as-research (or the Canadian ‘research-creation’, Goldin Stahl, 86) in compelling ways. Artists’ books that are pertinent to the health and medical humanities are a niche subcategory of a medium that is arguably a fairly marginal and relative newcomer to the arts: if this weren’t so there might be less need for this book about them, and it’s timely in that it supports growing interest in the medium such as at Wellcome, where collection of artists’ books only began in 2016. So Embodied Books is of importance, in that it brings this art form and practice-as-research with this medium to critical attention in ways that build on existing scholarship — by, for example, Stella Bolaki, in Illness as Many Narratives (2017) — with the interesting difference that Goldin Stahl is herself an artist practitioner. This perspective enriches the text, adding a layer of insight that, in itself, is a valuable contribution to the Health and Medical Humanities.
Of course, none of this — Embodied Books, and my review of it — is a substitute for making and/or engaging with artists’ books in person and, like Goldin Stahl, I encourage people not familiar with them to give them a go. Wellcome has five of her beautiful works in its collection, and some of the books discussed in Embodied Books (such as those by Martha Hall) are in a University of Kent special collection based on the exhibition Prescriptions (2016). And for further reading see Stella Bolaki’s recent chapter ‘Bound to Matter: Artists’ Books and Illness Experience’ in the 2023 Routledge book The Experimental Book Object: Materiality, Media, Design, edited by Sami Sjöberg, Mikko Keskinen and Arja Karhumaa.
About the author
Dr Lucy Carolan is an artist and independent ECR. Her recently completed creative practice doctoral research, Picturing Clouds of Unknowing: Photography, Lostness, and Cognitive Decline, was centred in how visualising aspects of cognitive decline in dementia can inform understandings of its existential ambiguities.
References
Bolaki, S. 2016. Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture. Edinburgh University Press.
Bolaki, S. 2023. ‘Bound to Matter: Artists’ Books and Illness Experience’. In Sjöberg, Sami; Keskinen, Mikko; Karhumaa, Arja; eds. The Experimental Book Object: Materiality, Media, Design. Routledge.
Drucker, J. 2004. The Century of Artists’ Books. Granary Books.
Duff, T. 2012. ‘Cryobook Archives’. Canadian Journal of Communication. DOI: https://cjc.utppublishing.com/doi/10.22230/cjc.2012v37n1a2532
Goldin Stahl, D. 2024. Embodied Books: Experiencing the Health Humanities through Artists’ Books. Peter Lang.
Goldin Stahl, D. 2024. Embodied Books: Binding Together Illness, Art, and Learning. [Online.] [N.D.] Available from: https://www.embodiedbooks.com/
Grosz, E. 1994. Volatile Bodies. Indiana University Press.
