by Natalie Bennett

I can still remember the Eureka moment when I grasped that the book was a technology; when you think about it not as a given, but an artefact of time and place (and an artefact that even in my time has changed quite a lot – the relative cost has dropped enormously, and people now treat books far more casually than even a couple of decades ago.) Suddenly something that seemed a given was much more complex and interesting.

Forefronting the book, exploring its nature, understanding what it does to us and what we do to it, are at the centre of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book. It is meant entirely as a compliment to say that this could easily be at the Tate Modern – or even the Pompidou in Paris; this is an intellectually sophisticated exhibition, if an uneven and sometimes oddly selected one.

It begins with by far its most powerful, even haunting piece, Kiefer’s “The secret life of plants”, a huge, 2m-high “book” of lead sheets bound with cardboard. On the “pages are partial maps of the stars. The stars themselves are solid accretions of white, thick and chancelike, the human labels, long strings of numbers laid on them by Nasa, and the occasional galaxy names are roughly written on with removable tape, the cardboard binding and these are frail, ephemeral things but the lead and the stars that mark it might survive, you feel forever, to be read (as nothing else we could leave conceivably could be read) by a future alien long after human life has disappeared into oblivion. (I can’t find an image of this particular work, but it is broadly similar to this.)

Many parts of the exhibition are more traditional – artists simply illustrating books, fine art bound with words. Standout among these for me included the edition of Jane Eyre illustrated by Paula Rego (you might recognise the name from her wonderful Germaine Greer portrait in the National Portrait Gallery). Today it was open at the page that has the text describing Mr Rochester’s young French ward Adele charming lady visitors. Beside it is a powerful lithograph of an uncertain child sitting in the lap of a gowned but far from aristocratic lady. In the background are figures from a child’s nightmares, giant menacing nurses, and a scene of a woman being torn from her bed. Nearby is Louise Bourgeois’s etching of a spider, both beautiful and terrible and Balthus’s lithographs for Wuthering Heights nearby are equally dark.

But it is when the artists play with the book, mutilate, trap it, deform it, that this exhibition really gets interesting, and has an explanatory power.

I was taken by Richard Tuttles NotThePoint. It is, the programme notes suggest, based on the belly of a mandolin, but I took the clean, light wood as either crucifix or coffin, in which are trapped books, half buried, trapped in the smooth wood that is plugged shut with what looks at first glance like flowers, then taks a form of rough mud on closer inspection.

These are books closed, restricted, but Jean-Marc Bustamante’s Maison pour insomniaques is the opposite, a “book” made much, much more than text and images. This is a bedlike, pillowlike body of gray foam that opens to reveal five printed folders of dreams – some containing stark realist colour photographs, and also a plastic place setting that’s also the Toluca editions imprint.

This is cellulose made consciousness, but nearby Pierre Lecuire’s “Le Livre des Portes” has gone in the opposite direction – but to the physical reality of its origins. It has giant lettering on stiff, beautifully textured papryus, which still clearly bears the shape of the reeds that made its first form.

Over your head in the first two sections of this exhibition is perhaps a whole chapter of a book projected high on the walls, but here the flickering signifiers are made literal, dancing in jerky little movements around the wall like those of the monsters in eighties computer games. This is “Carmina Figurata”, a new commission by Charles Sandison – fun, if hardly a new idea.

So there’s much here to provoke thought, to explore the theme, but I really couldn’t made, in this context, much of Damien Hirst’s “New Religion”. Certainly it is a powerful piece, but while there are folders in the drawers, is this really about the book? Sometimes you can’t but feel that the curators have gone for name-dropping rather than focusing on the theme – Matisse, tick; Picasso, tick; Miro, tick.

Still, in the final room is one final powerful piece, Anthony Caro’s “Open Secret” sculptures, gold, silver and bronze giant, frozen books, the text made icon, object of veneration that no longer bears any relation to its contents. A possible fate, perhaps for the cellulose text in the age of the flickering signifier.

Postscript: I stumbled across a complementary exhibition in Room 74 Certain Trees: the constructed book, poem and object 1964 – 2008, containing the works of the poets and artists who are considered heirs to the Concrete Poetry movement of the 1960s. (This has also been shown in France and the Netherlands.)

Blood on Paper continues at the V&A (off the main entrance foyer) until June 29. Entry is free.

Other views: the Independent, Guardian and Art Daily.