Books in Perpetual Becoming: A Conversation with Serge Chamchinov

Abstract

Books in Perpetual BecomingA Conversation with Serge Chamchinov Alice-Catherine Carls (bio) and Serge Chamchinov (bio) Serge Chamchinov is a man of many languages and a scientist, visual artist, writer, and book binder. He creates first, then self-promotes his books through book reviews, exhibitions, and poetry festivals. Through graphic reading and analytical typography, he develops recurring themes in a palimpsest of books, notebook series, or installations, each becoming part of an ephemeral structure, the "nomadic museum of the artist's book." Alice-Catherine Carls: Your work seems to use a method called "organic," as a plant that grows from a seed and develops little by little, especially one that is cultivated, to obtain not a fragile lily but a powerful and durable oak. The organic method in literature also starts from a seed. This is what I see in your work on Rimbaud. Starting from a poem, you develop books, translations, graphic works involving several authors, translators, and artists. The "drunken boat" seed considered as chaff by many of the poet's contemporaries survives and is doing well, thanks to your work of many years. The livre pauvre is a variant of the organic method that is more specific in scope since it is usually limited to one book with multiple authors. It too is for me one of the ways to shape the book of the future. Both the organic book and the livre pauvre have a genetic file and are unique, of course; their gathering of multiple voices is above all unifying, therefore of great magnitude. Click for larger view View full resolution Serge Chamchinov: For me, the term "organic" is mainly related to chemistry, which has a special place in my biography. I first studied chemistry at the university. The observation over long periods of time of experiments on the picturesque transformation of organic substances in flasks stimulated my imagination and gave me a taste for serial work. Even after I left this field to create my books, I kept this scientific spirit and interest in long-term experience. What fascinates me is the study of the smallest details and the development of a subject. Such an approach corresponds to my artistic projects like the one on Arthur Rimbaud's "The Drunken Boat." On the other hand, the concept of "later genesis," which I often elaborate in my books, opens the way for the book to be "in perpetual becoming." In my creations, I want to touch and even direct the future of the work. The goal is to program certain aspects of the artist's book so that they continue after the work is finished. Knowing, for example, how the support's color and structure will change over time, we can anticipate the visual effect in relation to the image installed on this support. Carls: Your books are out of the ordinary by their size, their appearance, the quality of their paper; from the first glance, the aesthetic of the fonts and the illustrations takes precedence. Taking them in hand is already a "transport" to this elsewhere that any reading promises. What method do you use to produce these books? Chamchinov: The first thing that happened to me in my youth was the discovery of reading as a process that not only follows the writing or the topic at hand but also opens the self. Very often I read books as the invention of something else than what was written. My thoughts were quite far away during such readings, and I discovered a world of the "distant interior," in the words of Henri Michaux. It is the traces of those journeys that I fix in my artist's books. While reading, I would take a pencil and make drawings, and I called it a "graphic reading" method. I developed it in my first artist's book [End Page 50] entitled Clef graphique pour le Château de K. [Kafka], which featured sixty-six drawings. A little later, I came across an article by Hermann Hesse, namely his "Essay on Reading" published in 1920 in the Vienna newspaper Neues Wiener Tagblatt. This article confirmed my thought that there is a form of reading where the...