Christopher A. Walker
Bookwork After New Media
Spring 2012
Research Report: Quarantine
Summary and Description:
Quarantine is an accordion book published in 2011 in a limited edition of forty-two copies.
Designed and assembled by Charles Hobson and published by Pacific Editions, this artist’s book
takes as its inspiration Eavan Boland’s poem of the same title, published in her 2001 collection
Against Love Poetry. The book’s 18 pages include a title page, five pages each containing a
single stanza of Boland’s poem, and three monotype images of shamanic fetishes in highresolution digital print and retouched in pastel (Figure 3). Additionally, the centerfold contains a
bay and a fir twig “grafted” together, bound with twine, and held against a digital print of a
snowy background. The centerfold is flanked on either side by Stonehenge paper (black cotton
paper that resembles vellum) hand-painted with acrylic to resemble the night sky (Figure 4). The
dust jacket is a digital print of bare trees in snow and the book comes bound in a black box with
a lid (Figure 1). The poem is printed letterpress in 12 point Palatino by JR Press. Dimensions are
9 x 6.5 x 2.25 inches.
Figure 1. Digital print dust jacket and black drop-front box with lid.
Figure 2. Title page, monotype image, and centerfold.
Figure 3. Monotype image of shamanic fetish in high-resolution digital print.
Figure 4. Centerfold with bound bay and fir twigs.
Research Context:
Reading Quarantine benefits from multiple disciplinary approaches including literary studies,
material book studies, and art history, especially as informed by the history of artist’s books.
Boland’s poem tells of a young husband and wife who left an Irish workhouse in 1847 during
Great Famine. In addition to formal analysis, Boland’s poem highlights literature’s mediation of
historical events. Likewise, Quarantine’s assemblage of multiple paper types and use of digital,
letterpress, and hand-craft processes demands inquiry into the relation between text and its
material substrate. In Hobson’s work, we can see the echo of Drucker’s observation that “Artist’s
books are in some ways the quintessential late twentieth century artform: interdisciplinary,
unruly, loosed from the constraints of traditional media/genre definitions, and formal
considerations into a free form play with images, ideas, texts and structures” (184). “Unruly”
objects, such as Quarantine, interrogate the categories of “book” and “reading,” and require
investigation at the intersection of disciplines with diverse trajectories.
Technical Analysis:
Quarantine is positioned midway between book and art exhibit. The book calls attention to
reading and viewing as social practices. As Hobson notes, accordion books “allow both an
intimate viewing experience and a group viewing experience to take place” (Hobson). Thus, the
book reveals the degree to which book-binding either solicits or discourages connection and
conversation and offers to open up the reading of Boland’s poem, complicating the
“boundedness” of the work.
This gesture toward connection resonates with Boland’s poem which meditates upon the
possibilities of human connection. Boland writes:
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins
of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
This scene is central to Hobson’s project and key to understanding the centerfold. Remembering
his initial conception of the project as he looked out on a winter field, Hobson states:
“Contemplating the scene of trees and snow led to the notion of ‘grafting’—the practice of
joining together the branches of two different species, a notion spawned by the line of the poem
in which ‘her feet were held against his breastbone’ so that he could give her the last warmth of
his body” (Hobson). Thus, the binding of the bay and fir twigs cast against the night sky is an
uncanny representation of woman and man. The twigs literally stand out from the book, opening
it up both materially and socially, requiring the that book be held upright, not laid flat.
Furthermore, the grafted bay and fir trigs nested in the center of the accordion (Figure 4) call
attention to the fragility of the both the codex and print more generally, highlighting the
inevitable decay of the material object fashioned from wood pulp and the tenuous status of items
that have been stitched, grafted, bound, and held together. The twigs, like book binding, are a
bringing together of disparate objects to make a unity. In this way, Quarantine performs an
archeology of the origins of the book.
At the same time, however, Hobson’s method entails complex methods of layered representation.
While Boland’s poem is a mimetic exercise in historical inquiry, the inclusion of both the grafted
twigs and high-definition digital prints of the shamanic fetishes present a series of symbolic
substitutes wherein the vitality of life itself is investigated. The layering is furthered in Hobson’s
use of monotyping. The practice involves painting on a “flat thin surface such as copper or
plexiglass” which is then pressed on paper. Hobson makes use of the method for the
“luminosity” of the final image which allows “for the play of chance and accident” (Hobson).
Yet, the images in Quarantine are high-definition digital prints of the monotypes. Thus, the book
offers the poem, grafted twigs of the centerfold, and the pictures of the monotypes as different
representations the husband’s “last gift” to the wife—the giving of oneself to another.
Evaluation of Opportunities in the Context of Bookwork After New Media:
Quarantine is a useful site for questioning reading as a social practice and the manner in which
that practice is mediated by the material form of the book. Additionally, the multiple, complex
procedures used in its production—digital and letterpress, mechanical and handcraft—and the
insertion of the grafted twigs, situate this work squarely inside the category of mechanically
reproduced books, but also as a peculiar hold-out. It is a book that, like the shamanic fetishes of
the monotypes, entices the reader with an auratic experience that gestures beyond itself toward
connection with others, and beyond the mechanical and digital processes that go into its making.
Further Reading:
Drucker, Johanna. “Offset: The Work of Mechanical Art in the Age of Electronic
(Re)production.” Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics. New
York: Granary Books, 1998. 184-9. Print.
Hobson, Charles. “About the Artist.” Pacific Editions, n. d. Web. 11 June 2012.