The confrontation of materiality and immateriality of signs: reflections on Japanese culture by Roland Barthes and Veronika Schäpers

Abstract

Approaching the artist’s book Praise of the Taifun by German artist Veronika Schäpers from a standpoint highly informed by Roland Barthes’s thoughts while at the same time drawing from reception theory (Iser, Jauß), this essay suggests a semiotic reading of artist’s books that pays close attention to their respective semiotic ‘openness’, interstices, and interspaces that produce a noteworthy ambiguity especially in works that negotiate the cultural differences between Japanese culture and ‘Western’ cultures.