Ulises Carrión: The New Art of Making Books

 

Ulises Carrión wrote 'The New Art of Making Books' to conceive new strategies to disseminate and distribute art from the mid-seventies, and the emphasis he placed on reinventing the uses, forms and appearances of the book as a device for action. It also looks to acknowledge and highlight Carrión’s capacity for conceiving publishing as a relational practice and understanding the archive as a set of performance protocols from which to reorder, or at least shake up, the art system.

These are a few of my favourite 'tips' that I aim to consider when writing and structuring my migraine publication:

WHAT A BOOK IS 

A book is a sequence of spaces. Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment - a book is also a sequence of moments. A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words.

In the old art the writer writes texts. In the new art the writer makes books. To make a book is to actualize its ideal space-time sequence by means of the creation of a parallel sequence of signs, be it linguistic or other.

PROSE AND POETRY 

In an old book all the pages are the same. When writing the text, the writer followed only the sequential laws of language, which are not the sequential laws of books. Words might be different on every page; but every page is, as such, identical with the preceding ones and with those that follow. In the new art every page is different; every page is an individualized element of a structure (the book) wherein it has a particular function to fulfill.

THE SPACE 

For years, many years, poets have intensively and efficiently exploited the spatial possibilities of poetry. But only the so-called concrete or, later, visual poetry, has openly declared this. Verses ending halfway on the page, verses having a wider or a narrower margin, verses being separated from the following one by a bigger or smaller space - all this is exploitation of space. This is not to say that a text is poetry because it uses space in this or that way, but that using space is a characteristic of written poetry. The space is the music of the unsung poetry

https://www.serraglia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Ulises-Carrion-The-New-Art-of-Making-Books1.pdf

https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/activities/new-art-making-books