In making these books the typical exchange/relationship of client/designer is subverted because 1) the ‘client/commissioner’ is diverted from the ‘artistic’ exchanges of the book-making process 2) the exchange is directly between artist and designer 3) the artist, rather than the designer liaises with the editor/publisher/institution on matters of permission 4) there may be a nominal ‘editor’ but this role is defined by commissioning and editing written contributions, while arrangement and presentation and its implicate authorial concerns of transtextual modalities etc. are seen as outside of this 5) the artist and the designer are exploring the exhibitionary possibilities of the book as site of transposition 6) The editor/ institution may be unaware of the intentions and potential of the book-making collaboration, i.e. the book as exhibitionary space.
With the ‘Author Function’ certain discourses are ‘endowed’, while others are ‘deprived’ (Foucault, 2020: 211). These words are evocative as they convey privilege and exclusion, an insider and an outsider which defines the space and nature of my activity. This outsider-insider status is one of many dualities in my field of operation. The author’s name provides ‘narrative discourse’ as well as classification (ibid.: 210). This is evident for example in the Byrne books, where Gerard’s name on the cover frames and contextualises the enquiry, but also ultimately presents a fictional Byrne, as artist within an already existing context and framework. Barthes might refer to him as ‘paper author’, inscribed in his work (text) but appearing as a constituent character, or ‘guest’ (Barthes, 1977: 161). Muhle (2011: 176) indeed observes this of Byrne’s reenactments – that they are ‘a constructed or artificial reality, a discursive constellation that is composed of a network of texts, performances, events, discussions, interviews – it is, to quote Tony Smith’s words, an ‘artificial landscape’. Presenting Gerard’s practice in Images or Shadows is to present an ‘artificial landscape’: a network of artworks, exhibitions, institutions, writers, texts, foretexts, etc., where the books are not addendum or cataloguing of works in existence. Instead they are an exploration of the concerns of Byrne’s practice instrumentalised by and meeting with my practice enquiry. It is Gerard and his works that are obviously understood to be under discussion, yet there is a parallel authorship which brings the publication into being, even if the authorship of this goes unseen. The assumption appears to be that the role of the graphic designer is confined to one that ‘submits a single verbal message to a series of formal arrangements’ (Lupton, 1991: 45), and logically then the task would be to formally arrange a number of written texts (nine in this case), alongside an appropriate selection of representative images. We know from Barthes however ‘that a text is not a line of words releasing a single meaning… but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (1978: 146).