Unbound: Beyond the codex, the book as process/experience/event

This article argues that the book as ‘process’ and ‘event’ requires a different understanding of ‘book’: one that acknowledges the impossibility of meaning residing in the final object alone. The finitude of the codex form is made a mockery of by the infinite dimensions of language, interpretation and time: this article extends that notion by exploring the process of making artists books as experience(s) that engage spatial/temporal/sensory attributes of making as being fully involved in their knowledge and meaning. Such books pose knowledge as an ‘event’: foregrounding the making and not the outcome. By example, the bookwork, Skinful (2003), questions the role of the materiality of the bound codex as object and examines how time and process operate in the book as a metaphor for emotional encounters. To complement this, The Cruelty of the Classical Canon (2014), expands the paradox of the material book as a container of knowledge explored through ‘brute’ encounters with making and experiencing such an object. Both books explore the relationship between the body/embodied thought in the book-as-process.