Bronwyn Law Viljoen on Extraordinary Art Books

Do you publish art books or make them?

I publish art books, but that also means I’m very involved in making them. I work closely with the book designers, the writers, the artists – everybody who’s part of making an art book come into being.

And how did you come to it?

I had just finished my PhD and was working as an archivist in the New York University library, which included a collection of papers which had belonged to this guy who had been an avant garde theatre agent, promoter and producer. He collected everything from taxi stubs to amazing theatre posters. I made a small exhibition out of the collection, went on to do an internship at a place called Aperture that published art books, started writing about them in magazines, and then met this South African publisher called David Krut. We went out for lunch and he suggested there might be some free lance work for me back in Johannesburg. By the end of lunch he’d asked me to run the publishing arm of his company.

So in at the deep end?

Yes.

Tell me about your first book, Eikoh Hosoe’s, Ba Ra Kei/Ordeal by Roses.

It’s a beautiful book, originally published in the mid sixties. It arose out of this very unusual collaboration between the photographer, Eikoh Hosoe, and the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Hosoe had been commissioned to do a portrait of Mishima for a collection of essays. Well the portrait was one thing, but Hosoe took a lot of other photographs. They became a document of Mishima’s fascination with his own body. These two men produced an extraordinary book together, but on the eve of its publication, Mishima – who was obsessed with purity and the way of the Samurai – committed ritual suicide. Eikoh Hosoe realised subsequently that this book had been part of a testament, a will, a preparation for the suicide. I think Mishima was 38 when he did it.

Why did he kill himself?

It’s difficult to say. He had an odd childhood – he was raised by his grandmother. He was very isolated as a child. Later he was a very prolific writer. He wrote over 40 novels, he was an actor, he wrote drama, he wrote essays. But he was also obsessed with his own physicality. He was a weight trainer, he did sword fighting – he even established a private army.

A real army?

Yeah. He tried to bring off a coup in Japan. He tried to depose the military government in order to re-establish the old imperial government and emperor. But of course he completely failed and this is more or less at the time of his suicide. He did the suicide by having one of his young protégées behead him with a sword.

Ouch.

So this book is deeply erotic – fascinating. The photography’s extraordinary. There are a couple of other remarkable characters related to this book that I don’t have time to go into now. I’m interested in a number of Japanese photographers, but I first encountered Mishima when I read one of his short stories in a collection and it was a story about ritual suicide: an army officer who had dishonoured himself and who impaled himself on his sword. And his wife has to commit suicide with him.

A phenomenal narcissist.

A very conservative man.

So what next?

Let’s talk about The Hundred Headless Woman. I’m interested in the connection between photography and print-making – engravings - because somewhere way back when photography took the place of print-making as the principle medium for illustration.

In the newspapers?

In the newspapers. A hundred and fifty years ago engraving was the way you illustrated the world. So these days, if you read the news, you’re looking at photography. But in any case, this book, “The Hundred Headless Woman” by Max Ernst was published in 1929 and it’s a classic surrealist book. It almost completely incomprehensible, but it’s absolutely brilliant! It’s made up of these collages which he culled from 18th and 19th century story books. It’s sort of like an early graphic novel but in a completely whacked out style. You have an engraving of a bird and a bird’s claw grasping a picture and the caption is, “Loplop the swallow returns”. There’s another engraving of a woman being abducted and carried off in a carriage and the caption here is “nothing will stop this passing smile which accompanies heterosexual crime.”

So a bit of raunchy post-war Dada?

Post-First World War, yes, originally published in French. I actually have a first American edition which came out in 1981, translated by Ernst’s wife, Dorothea Tanning. Ernest was married to some interesting women, including Peggy Guggenheim, but Tanning was a surrealist painter and published a couple of novels and poetry. She was also a print maker. She was still making lithographs and etchings in the mid 1990’s.

Why’s it called A Hundred Headless Woman?

Well the French is “La Femme 100 Têtes” where the “100” would be “cent” which sounds like “sans” – which of course means “without”. So I guess The Hundred Headless Woman teases that pun apart. And there are a lot of women in this strange book!

What’s your third book?

I think we should go to Rembrandt’s Nose.