Bookworks

Reading—can sometimes be about a book that has gone missing from its shelf. The realization that comes with the misplaced tome may hold more meaning than the flurry of words that used to greet us from its pages. It could be more convincing, at times, than the ideas wrapped within the text. This realization—that stories, histories, manifestos, mantras, tenets, and parables, are nothing but wishes if there is no device to hold them together—teaches us reading’s most important lesson: that the words are bound, quite literally, to an object.

Ringo Bunoan’s Bookworks explore this obvious but undetected ‘materiality’ of books. It is obvious in a sense that they are everywhere, always ‘right under our nose,’ so to speak. But they remain undetected every time they’re kept hidden behind the words or pictures printed. More importantly, they remain concealed under this overpowering force we call language.

Language, is what Roland Barthes ascribed to as a “ready-made instrument.” The same could be said of books, as a kind of device “that is handed down unchanged without anyone being obsessed with its novelty.” They serve their purpose, which is both universal and singular: as a platform where data can be recorded and shared. Keeping this in mind, Bunoan, as an artist who has continually explored the nature of ready-mades and found objects, wagers the idea of art-making through the book’s form, grappling with its components: spine, cover, pages, and most especially—its contents.

The book, as a standardized object, which has probably the most mutable content, is nothing but a vessel as demonstrated in Bunoan’s art. It can change at any moment, depending on its contents. Genres, styles, function, purpose, and meaning can be altered in an instant, depending on the words and pictures inserted within its pages. Bunoan takes this vessel-like quality of books even further—by re-structuring the manner in which contents are placed (or removed) while still fostering the essential purpose behind its form—as a platform for presenting ideas.

Ringo Bunoan’s books, in this sense, are about the same old form utilized in a new manner to generate new experiences. The results lead us into new kinds of objects, new contents, and furthermore—into new ways of reading.

Consider one of Bunoan’s earlier works in terms of exploring the form, called, Window, which is a book that had pages made from celluloid tint. The thin sheet of film replaces the usual bound paper, while its contents—it could be said—are the materiality of the tinted transparencies, echoing a kind of veiled truth that texts can sometimes generate through standardized prose.

In another work called, Spine, she presents several personal journals with their pages removed, leaving only the outer filaments of a book: the cover, the back, and the spine. It is a kind of erasure, rather than insertion. It undermines the very idea of attachment, since almost always, it is one’s precious thoughts and memories that make up journal pages. But in the midst of all these missing pages and in the way they were torn out, one could detect an action that lingered—that of writing. These books, even though they represent absence, evoke an intensely poignant act, which is the simultaneous confession and eradication of thoughts.

In one of her new works, called, Book of Black Drawings, an object is sealed inside a vitrine. It is an open book, where one can see how the pages had been blackened entirely by using pencils. There is a kind of immensity that can be drawn from the impenetrable object, a kind of fervent act that remains trapped inside the case, which would have involved several pencils exhausted up to the last grain. It is a book meant to be read at a certain distance where its contents can be absorbed through its wholeness, its uniformity, its condition, and its ‘objecthood.’ The blackened pages contain everything they supposed to mean: that content can dissolve into nothing but matter, and what is left for us to understand is perhaps nothing but these unattainable concepts.

Another of Bunoan’s work called, A Heap of Excess Knowledge, echoes the same sentiment of knowing and not knowing. Made from the trimmed excesses of school text books, she creates a mound that can be likened to a pile of leaves—parts that were cut off and had fallen from the source of knowledge. The atrociousness and divisiveness of this seemingly banal act—of trimming unwanted paper—presents arguments that can touch on selectiveness and superiority, the kind that creates class divisions and control. But on the other hand, it is also a meditation on content—in the assumption that there is knowledge, too, that can be found in the margins-- in its vacancy and in the void.

This brings us back to the act of reading, of deciphering content and meaning from an object or a scheme that presents itself to us as readable, as with a book’s. To say that language is absent in the books Bunoan creates as her art is a misreading. They are without words, but are not without any kind of text to communicate.

The language found in Bunoan’s Bookworks may be a language enveloped in mystery—that of art’s ever-changing resonances and enunciations. But it speaks in volumes: about memory, knowledge, and absence, which may be harder to communicate through words alone. And in the books that Bunoan presents, we are invited to look closer into the object, the artifact, and the activities that surround them. We are obliged to lift the pages through our senses, requiring us to read differently.