The Whiteness, An Unreadable Book

O Nature, and O soul of man!how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies!not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter,but has its cunning duplicate in mind.

“The Sphynx”

For an artist, dealing as I have, passionately, with Moby-Dick, to be associated with renowned Melville scholars is certainly intimidating. I must admit that my own approach to this great book is in no way literary. I feel all the more honoured to be asked to recall here my encounter with Herman Melville, and how I came to pay him tribute in the form of an artist’s book. This book is titled The Whiteness and was published toward the end of 2008.

The term “artist’s book” refers to a form that seems to resist any strict definition (see Drucker, “The Artist’s Book”). The concept covers a number of different works, which hover between the worlds of books and of art, so that their precise status, often questioned in past decades, still causes disputes among art historians.

In my work, I consider an artist’s book (or “livre d’artiste,” in the French tradition) to be a limited edition in which original etchings are meant to accompany a text. The number of copies varies from 10 to 55. The Whiteness, a deluxe edition published in 25 copies, gives licence to many inventive possibilities for textual appreciation with a freedom that no standard edition can afford. Choices of format, binding, paper, typeface, and layout, the use of blank spaces, and the presence or absence of etchings, all allow the reader to acquire a totally new vision of the text. Such works may seem better defined as interpretation than as illustration. The term “composition,” generally used for music as well as printing, is particularly well-suited in this case since the “harmony” of an artist’s book has more to do with a musician’s work than with that of an illustrator. Of course, such a conception has its dangers: if, for example, the chosen text is not solidly constructed and meaningful, it may not survive such treatment (needless to say, there was no such worry with Moby-Dick). An artist’s book allows for almost any technical choice, yet the choices must make sense and must be coherent.

Melville scholars may be shocked to know that I first read Moby-Dick only a few years ago. My mother, who is half American, happened to mention Melville’s great work to me, and although I have read many books, and had heard of the title, I had never read it.

There are several reasons. First, Moby-Dick is generally considered by the French public to be an adventure novel, a literary genre that usually does not appeal to me. Second, from what I had heard, I imagined that its topic could in no way be of interest: my relation to the sea is limited to the beach, and I have no interest in hunting or fishing, not to mention sailing, which I thoroughly dislike. Finally, the subjects of my paintings, drawings, or etchings are mostly still lives, scattered objects, or weeds and grasses, always somehow related to ground or air. For these reasons, The Whiteness can be said to be the unexpected result of a total surprise: I was carried away by Moby-Dick at first reading.

Like any fascination, mine with Moby-Dick remains partly mysterious, and I like to keep things this way throughout my several re-readings of this great book. “The Whiteness of the Whale” (Ch. 42) seems to represent the mystery in a concentrated form. Being so “Melville-deprived,” only later did I learn how famous this long meditation about whiteness has become. The more I read it, the more Melville seemed to express what I had been struggling with for years. I kept wondering how a novel about a frightful whale hunt could invoke the problems and questions painters cope with when facing reality.

Painters have always confronted the challenge of the blank space of canvas or paper. In drawing especially, the white background precedes any pencil or charcoal...