Buzz Spector Offers a Look Inside the Use of Books as Art

Consider how different is the experience of reading from that of looking at art. Art is something seen in a public space where you are always conscious of your relation to other viewers. But reading is an intimate and un-self-conscious act. You hold the book at a distance of 14 inches from your eyes. Often, you allow the book to rest on your body, in places where you would permit only the touch of a lover.

Books fascinate Buzz Spector. Until quite recently, in fact, they have been the chief ingredients of his art, seen in a one-man show at Newport Harbor Art Museum earlier this year. By transforming books--by tearing out their pages, embedding them in plaster, painting on them or arranging them in particular ways--Spector has found ways of drawing attention to the rich metaphorical content and social use of books.

Spector, an affable transplanted Chicagoan, explained his discovery of books as an art medium in an intense, abstruse lecture laced with humorous asides to a group of art students at Cal State Fullerton on Tuesday. During the late ‘70s, when he was in his early 30s, Spector was making graphite drawings, and he bound some of them into books. He got the idea to create a wedge-shaped book with a composite image created by drawings on the visible edges of the pages, and he decided to make a model of the shape to show a professional bookbinder.

Looking through his library for a book to sacrifice for the project, he came upon “the most horribly repellent, disgusting book I owned”--the autobiography of a turn-of-the-century minister who treated hysterical women. (“He specialized in hands-on therapy,” Spector added puckishly, drawing laughter from the students.)

By the time he finished tearing out the pages to create the wedge shape, he was mesmerized by the sight of bits and pieces of words fluttering up from the fragmented pages. Although the text was destroyed, it was still a book, a strikingly tactile object. (“You can pet them like suede,” Spector said of the furry stubs of pages.)

He discovered that books also bear “a distinct similarity to a portion of the anatomy.” A feminist writer remarked on the vaginal imagery she saw in the open leaves. In a piece called “Mensum,” Spector set out blank open sketchbooks in a grid format and poured a stream of red paint down the center. That red trickle is a reference both to the female cycle and to the high-minded gestural painting associated with the overwhelmingly male Abstract Expressionists of the ‘50s. Although the image made with the paint is undeniably “feminine,” Spector said, it is inevitably also “part of the world of signs we all share.”

Books are also a kind of topography, he said. In his eyes, “when you tear pages out of a book” it’s “like a road cut through the Earth’s pages.” In his piece, “The Library of Paracelsus,” named for the medieval alchemist, there are two shelves. The top one holds 11 plump wedges made from paper he cut out of books; the bottom one holds 11 chunks of fossilized limestone. The pages, in other words, are as full of embedded knowledge as the limestone is full of fossils.

But how could someone who loves books want to destroy them, even in the name of art?

Spector, who used to design books for publishing houses, is used to hearing such objections. One of his early pieces involved tearing up a book dedicated to him by a former mentor at the University of Chicago--the famous art critic Harold Rosenberg, who had just died.

“People were shocked that I destroyed an irreplaceable token of a relationship, yet in fact I lessened the number of copies of ‘Art on the Edge’ by one,” Spector said. “Books are not what authors write; authors write texts.” In other words, there is only one text, but each edition of a book consists of thousands of identical copies.

Yet his work contains undeniable elements of melancholy and nostalgia, he said. In this age of throwaway paperbacks, he works with hardcover books exclusively. And although he proposes “the reconstruction of books in terms of art,” he admits that “only your sense that there are other copies saves what I do from more potent destruction.”

Some of his works involve no element of destruction, however. His “Rebus” works are made with whole books that have certain kinds of imagery on their covers or suggestive titles. In “The Running Tide,” 24 closed books spin an adventure yarn by means of images (a raft, waves, bubbles) and titles (“The Raft,” “Rolling Toward the Edge”). If you were to take the books from the shelf and read them to find out more, though, you’d be disappointed. The book with bubbles on its cover, for example, is the autobiography of Lawrence Welk.

Recently, Spector has begun to use objects other than books in his works. For “Hospitalite,” he baked loaves of bread in bedpans and hung them on the wall. The yeasty smell of freshly baked bread is not so very distant from the smell of urine, he observed, watching gallery visitors’ delight in the aroma quickly turn to disgust once they realized what the containers were. A confessed lover of puns--”They’re subversive, like a little bomb in the middle of a sentence”--Spector probably also enjoyed the play on words of bread pan and bedpan.

But the real meaning of the piece is something else entirely. Bread, Spector reminded his audience, is “the most symbolic food product.” We break bread with friends. The bread of the Eucharist symbolizes Christ’s body. Bedpans are one of the ultimate gestures of mercy and community between the healthy and the sick. In hospitals, they are offered and taken away so as “to preserve our humanity.” Viewed in this light, Spector said, “bread and bedpans mean the same thing.”