I have been thinking lately (and always) about the ways in which form impacts the experience of (and function of) an artwork. In particular, I have been contemplating how much information various forms can hold or communicate. Here, I would like to argue that artist books are especially equipped to help us understand more complex aspects of the human condition (or other themes and topics) than other artforms, because artist books can easily become part of the extended mind.
The extended mind is a term coined by Andy Clark and David Chalmers which explains that our minds do not stop at the barrier of our skulls, but instead our minds use the world around us to assist with thinking. This action is also known as “cognitive offloading.” There are three categories of offloading that our minds naturally do: we offload memory (like writing a reminder on paper), we offload computation (this is harder to explain but includes things like physically organizing/categorizing or turning things to make connections easier to spot), and we offload attention (like when you set an alarm so you don’t have to mentally track how much time has passed).
Regarding our memories, our brains can only hold around four different things in our working memory at a time. By using a pen and paper to help solve a math problem, the person solving a complex problem doesn’t have to remember all of the variables at once because they have offloaded the information to the paper, allowing them to focus on one step of the problem at a time. Making art is a way of cognitively offloading parts of an idea we are working through. The artwork holds a considerable amount of information so we do not have to remember it all at once, freeing us up to think about more complex ideas a little at a time, building a mental scaffolding.
Beth Sheehan, Reconstruction, 2023-24, litho and screenprint.
The artwork also becomes a place to cognitively offload computation. By working through the ideas in a physical form, we can more easily see the connections and outcomes of our thinking. For example, in my artwork titled “Reconstruction” (shown above), I am working through the idea that our memories are not fixed snapshots of the past because each time we recall a moment, we are actually reconstructing it and altering it. By making the print, I no longer have to imagine what that reconstruction might be like. Instead, there is something external for me to respond to. I have offloaded the memory reconstruction portion of my idea so that I can move on to the next implication. My artwork has become an embodied “if this…” so that I can now focus on answering the “then what” part of my conceptual explorations.
Going back to my earlier example, in the same way that using a pen and paper can allow someone to solve more complex equations, I think that making artist books allows us to understand more complex concepts (and communicate those concepts more effectively to our audience) because each aspect of the artist book is like having an additional sheet of paper to work out our math problem. But at a certain point, our brains will overload if we are attempting to tackle too complex of an idea, even with assistance from cognitive offloading, because of our brain’s limited working memory.
The way our minds alleviate this problem is by turning several pieces of associated information into singular chunks (yes, that is the official term the researchers use). For example, it is harder to remember the eight individual items in the sequence B-O-O-K-A-R-T-S, but our brains will form them into a chunk (the words “book arts”) which is now a singular bit of information.
Beth Sheehan, Between Tenses, 2017. Staple binding. Risograph printed.
Artist books do this chunking as part of their form and they do it more effectively than a singular print, painting, or sculpture can. When we look at a book, we will naturally pause at a spread in a codex to try to comprehend that individual spread before turning the page to contemplate the next chunk of visual information. But even with less straight-forward forms of artist books, the artist book medium lends itself to chunking huge amounts of information, making it more digestible.
Beth Sheehan, Memento, 2015-2022 Nine panels and a time-capsule in a clamshell box.
Using the example of my artist book titled “Memento,” (shown above), you can see that this work can hold more information than my “Reconstruction” print can, because it has more parts. But the additional information does not automatically lead to cognitive overload because the individual bits of information (each image, word, material, the size, the colors, the movement, etc.) get chunked in their relationship to each other and their separation from each other.
Our brains do this so well, you have probably already started to chunk parts of “Memento” together: perhaps the photographs in the box become one chunk, the time-capsule panel in the bottom of the box becomes another, and the clamshell box as a whole becomes a third. But those chunks are made of smaller chunks and the different configurations of chunking reveals a narrative within the work.
For example, the visual information such as the size of the photographs, their layout, their colors, and even the placement of the letterpress printed text in the margin gets chunked together and recategorized as referencing Polaroids. Because that chunk of information has been labeled, more information is revealed through association: Polaroids typically fade over time so the clamshell box may start to be interpreted as protective, but I have reproduced the Polaroids that go inside the box as archival inkjet prints while the Polaroid on the outside of the box is real and unprotected, fading each time I display the project.
To reiterate my point, because of the nature of artist books as complex vessels for information, they are uniquely equipped to help us understand huge concepts by organizing that information and holding it for us as an extension of our brains while we experience the artwork.
Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Chicago, IL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harland and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.
