Can’t Touch This: International Artist Book Triennial Vilnius, at the Morgan

No one goes to an art exhibition expecting to be able to touch the art. But at the 10th International Artist Book Triennial Vilnius, on view at the Morgan Conservatory, it’s necessary to remind people. The reason, of course, is that books are best experienced by turning their pages. Artist books, though, are art, and fragile, and unless otherwise noted therefore should only be touched by their owners, and by curators.

Regardless, this is an opportunity for Cleveland book artists and bibliophiles to see what peers from around the world are doing in that medium. The Artist Book Triennial Vilnius gets its name from the location and syntax of its home, Vilnius, Lithuania. It is an international touring show, stopping in Leipzig, Germany; Venice, Italy; Vilnius, Lithuania; Köln, Germany; Granada, Spain; Vercelli, Italy; and Oslo, Norway. The Morgan is the last of three stops in the US. There are no Cleveland-based artists. It came here on the recommendation of one of its jurors, Timothy Frerich, an artist and professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, who is familiar at the Morgan for having exhibited and taught classes there.

The jury chose 77 books from 29 countries for the whole Triennial; 31 of them are on view at the Morgan. Winner of the top prize in the show was Jeong-Eun Lee, of South Korea. Honorary prizes went to Barbara Beisinghoff (Germany), Carmelo Cacciato (Italy), Eeva Louhio (Finland), Ema Shin (Australia), and Yuko Wada (Japan). Of those, Wada’s is the only one represented in the Morgan’s iteration of the Triennial.

As many book arts exhibitions do, this one explores the reaches of what a book is, or can be, or what belongs in such a show. It’s not as reaching on that front as some exhibits or collections familiar in Cleveland. Art Books Cleveland’s retrospectives, for example, have included hand-cranked kinetic sculptural representations of content, elaborate pop-ups, book dioramas and other inventions. Neither is it a show that focuses on a specific aspect of book arts, such as binding styles or printing techniques, which are key skills. For the purposes of the Vilnius triennial, an “artist’s book is a conceptual book, which from the beginning to the end is created by an artist.” It does provide a survey window on what others around the world are doing under the umbrella term, Book Arts.

Several of the books can be fully appreciated without touching. James Thurman’s Suite: The Question is a sculptural work that directly addresses the exhibition’s theme, To Be. It’s made with an altered paperback copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The book is held open by a miniature figure on a pedestal, his arm outreached and holding a skull, unmistakably identifying the title character whose To Be, or Not To Be speech is one of the most famous in all of English literature. Those lines actually happen in the Nunnery scene—not the represented Graveyard scene in which Hamlet addresses the skull, “Alas, poor Yorick …” But no matter. It’s a witty connection to the theme, and a good way into the world of how books can mean, and how form can connect to content.

Another work that does communicate its full message without being touched is Roberta Vaigeltaite-V.’s sculptural form, I Can’t Be Here Anymore—a copper plate opening like the cover of a book, as if to reveal its contents: a shard of plate glass fused and draped over a large steel nail. Vaigeltaite-V. is on the six-member, international jury for the show.

Carole Kunstadt’s Valle de la Meuse: An Environmental Paradigm gets closer to the paradigm of a book with pages: it’s a folio of antique postcards, images of mountainside townscapes from the region of France near Belgium and Luxembourg, cut and re-woven, with their folded paper box. Antique postcards invariably evoke nostalgia. By re-weaving them, Kustadt alludes to the patchwork of memory, the incompleteness, the accentuated, forgotten, and incomplete details that make it lovely and unreliable.

In another baby step toward the conventional book, Yuko Wada’s honorable mention-winning Concurrence and Repulsion is an accordion fold book, with holes cut into its opaque pages, patched by stitching in translucent paper. The stitching leaves threads at loose ends, and the translucent windows tease a view of the future with their blurry passage of light, but we can never know what’s coming. Such as it is, to be.

There are several books on view that offer complete (or nearly so) access to their contents by the way they are presented—either accordion folds stretched open, or with multiple pages spread for viewing. Examples include Canadian artist JoAnn Lanneville’s Plis et Repli (Fold and Scrunch); Brazil-based Mara Caruso and Gralha Azul Group’s Journey Into Myself, and Japanese artist Motoko Tachikawa’s Weed. We Are Still Here.

On the other hand, Swedish artist Dalia Lopez Madrona’s To Be To Be To Be gives just enough of a peak inside to make viewers curious what they’d find if they could open it and turn the pages. In text that could refer to the whole show, one of its visible pages reads, “to be a woman / what matters / most is / what is on the inside.”

The Morgan addressed the “hands-off” aspect of the Triennial by providing a few hands-on examples, including one of my own, and an example of Bob Herbst’s exceedingly fine document, The Carrie Furnaces, a book of gorgeous, hand-pulled photograveur prints with letterpress text about the historic Carrie Blast Furnaces, near Pittsburgh. In those cases, you can pick up the books and look through.

Northeast Ohio has a strong book arts community, with not one, but two well-established non-profit letterpress / print / book arts studios: The Morgan Conservatory as well as Zygote Press. Additionally, Artist Books Cleveland is a collective focused on the contemporary craft, and the Northern Ohio Bibliophilic Society and the Rowfant Club both focus on historic examples. Finally, major institutions, including Cleveland Public Library and Cleveland Institute of Art have significant collections of artist books. So there are a lot of people in Northeast Ohio who should be interested in this show. It’s on view May 23 – June 28.

10th International Artist Book Triennial, Vilnius
May 23 – June 28, 2025
Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory
1754 E. 47th Street
Cleveland, Ohio 44103
216.361.9255
10 am – 4 pm Tuesday – Saturday. Free.