Blood on Paper - the Art of the Book

V&A: Blood on Paper Exhibition:

This free exhibition on from the 15th April to the 29th June 2008 showcases contemporary work by modern day artists who are trying to challenger the concept of what exactly is a book.

The area is split into four different sections. Section one has works by artists including Matisse, Picasso, Miro and a giant "book" by Anselm Keifer titled "The Secret Life Of Plants", which looks to be constructed out of giant sheets of lead. In section two works by Damien Hurst and Ed Ruscha look at Christian iconography and artistic creation according to the leaflet anyway. Personally I think the book of "Stains", 1969 by Ed Ruscha is just plain weird! Who else makes a book of stains that contains apple juice, their own blood, urine and sperm and can class it as being art?? If this is a book and it is art then I think I will be making my next book from a roll of used toilet paper.

Only in the world of art can people get away with so many things, by using complete dribble to explain something that generally has no explanation and I should know. When doing art we were constantly told to give everything an explanation. Even though most of the things we created were because they came from the heart, a moment of inspiration or just out of the plain love of it.


Anyway! In the room there was one quite nicely bound book Isamu Noguchi titled "18 drawings, 18 photographs" (above). It was in a concertina design, nicely bound with fabric and used some nice thick paper/ card and just looked nice and neat. This could also be said about Eduardo Chillida's "Reflections" (below), which can all be stored in to a nice compartment.

Another piece of work in this section was by Francis Bacon, that wasn't exactly a book but his suitcase with various things he had collected from his travels over the years, but it was all quite nice to look at.

In the third section were works by Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons etc... That specialise in poetry and use modern and ancient materials and techniques, including papyrus, paper, plastic and photography. Cai Guo-Quaing's "Danger Book: Suicide Fireworks" is an exploding book filmed on a projection.

In the 4th section are works by Keifer, Vital, Caro and Anish Kapoor that look at the contemporary development of the idea of the book at an art form. Where Kapoor has carefully carved through paper to make something interesting, which resembles the crack in the Tate Modern. Work by Caro titled "Open Secret" (below) doesn't represent a book at all and are forms created from metal.


All in all I thought this exhibition might inspire me a little to give my current projects some form of identity, but they did nothing and I wish that the ticket person would have sold me a ticket for the China Design Now exhibition in the same place, which I still wish to see :) But I am not big on books so if you like books then you may enjoy this exhibit! In fact i'm going to go back on myself and say really it wasn't that bad at all :P

All images are from the V&A's website, as you are not allowed to take photos in the exhibition.