Books vs. Art: Naming Altered Texts

Book?

Or art?

When reading the section of Writing Machines that detailed Kaye’s interest in artists’ books and her treatment of Tom Phillip’s book A Humument, I was reminded of my recent discovery of Oak Mot, an artist book by the actor Crispin Glover (he plays Micheal J. Fox's dad in Back to the Future).  One of the presentations at the conference I recently attended analyzed Oak Mot (Crispin’s version) and its divergences from the original similar to the way that Hayles' did with Phillip’s text. After encountering these two different artist’s books and the respective criticism that accompanied them, I was struck by the difference between the two analyses and the ways in which their attention to the original novel affected their reading of the altered text. In Hayles' discussion of A Humument, there seems to be a strong connection between the characters in Mallock’s original book and Hayles analysis of Phillips work. She even uses specific quotes from A Human Document to reveal certain ways that Phillips is interacting with Mallock’s novel in his erasure (84, 85).

Hayles' reading interested me mainly because of the degree to which it diverged from the reading of Glover’s work, Oak Mot, which dealt very little with the original novel. I believe one of the reasons for this difference may come from the language that the two critics used to refer to their objects of study. Hayles refers to these reconfigured texts as artists “books” but the presenter at my conference (who actually had an argument with Glover over this very issue) insisted that Oak Mot was a piece of art and not a book or novel. 

This difference becomes even more interesting when thinking about Hayles' ideas about materiality and the influence of computer software on writing and culture. If something as simple as the difference between a piece of “art” and a “book” could affect the reading of these reconfigured texts, then how much more does something like a complex computer program configured in a certain way affect the way that we write and even think? For example, why does Microsoft Word, by far the most popular writing program, function in no way like a piece of paper? Although there are certain things considered very important that Word can accomplish such as spell check and word count that a piece of paper cannot, in what ways has this computer program affected our writing? Does it matter that we cannot turn the paper a certain way when we write? Or that we do not read our work in our own handwriting anymore? Does it even matter? I’m not sure, but I believe that Hayles is correct in her position that attention to materiality is nothing new and we should not stop considering it now even if it something strange and complicated to people more familiar with words than with computer code.