essay by Alisa Golden


Feeling a little rounded at the corners? So full of extra words you can’t express yourself properly? Then it’s time for you to experience the transformative powers of Dr. Lisa F. Kokin. Never mind that she just plays one in the studio: she’s a miracle-worker, art-doctor, a master of fine and found arts with a specialty in breathing new life into old books. Currently, she’s been collecting books with a self-help bent, giving them makeovers their authors never dreamed of.

A quest is at the root of these books. Self-help suggests a desire for something that one doesn’t have. In this case we, the viewers, are drawn in to become the seekers. Even without asking we get an infusion of imagination, a shot of ingenuity, a surprise in every piece, not to mention beauty and humor for the taking.

 Book pieces get shaped and tied together lyrically, like magical ferns, flowers, or insects such as in the all black and leafy My Answer and the colorful How to Be. A third piece, Fe, which is a fragment of a book title in English, means “faith” or “belief” in Spanish and is tied into a long cylindrical form that hangs from the ceiling; the leafy shapes suggest questioning eyes looking around the room for answers.            
Exploding in a huge, bright spiral of flowers, Panacea Plus fills our vision with psychedelic color, promising to cure what ails us. Kokin points out that if a panacea is a remedy, a cure, an end in itself, what more can there be? When asked, she explains that the title is derived from a label she saw on a mattress in a skilled nursing facility. The irony is in ascribing the word “panacea” to a mattress, an elder care nursing home, and to self-help books. Clearly, if a cure for old age existed, the companies behind these services and products would be folding right and left. By using the spiral, Kokin taps into the meaning of an ancient symbol, which is often connected to the galaxy, birth-death-rebirth, fertility, and the sun. A spinning spiral could also conjure up dizzying images of hypnosis, a powerful self-help practice. Art is good for my soul, art is good for my soul, art is good for my soul.

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, a hanging bouquet of bold red flowers, is a cheerful panacea in itself until we read: Diet, Medicine, Health Without, Pulling Your Own Strings, and begin worrying about what parts of ourselves we should be working on next.
How To Be, with its limited palette of blues, greens, and yellows works like a painting as our eyes travel around the piece. On the other hand, there is much more than surface here; this is a self-help garden with an edge created by words: My Mother, Be Careful, Reach for, Helping You, Mad, and Diet. Once again, the form and content rub against each other, creating tension and multiple meanings.
The gold and silver foil-stamped spines look both luminous and ludicrous in this juxtaposed light. We all like shiny, but hate to admit it. Kokin easily taps into this contradiction, as she does with all the content in her work. She can take the everyday—even the most ridiculous of the everyday—and make us see it differently. The discarded book insides and outsides become a monochromatic quilt in Fou, (another English word fragment which means “crazy” in French) with shiny as a terrific accent to the white and ivory components. With her choices, she shows and tells us that the backs of the shapes are as interesting to her as the fronts.

Kokin says that the most popular colors for covers of self-help books are black, red, and blue, which explains why she was able to collect so much material to use for the miraculous Fret. This is a good example of how she playfully makes pieces that circle back on themselves. Book spines become an exquisite bright red and blue quilt in Fret, which plays on the description of “fret” as an ornamental pattern (such as a Greek key) as well as the verb to fret about something, which might lead you to a self-help book, which is what it’s made of anyway. As always, Kokin’s patience and care are obvious through her meticulous craft of assembling, sewing, stringing, wrapping, gluing, and tying. It is evident that she enjoys these tasks as well. She has to, or she would not be able to make them herself without help.
We get vicarious and transgressive pleasure from books Kokin upholsters with mull (bookbinding mesh), glues shut, and gives new, anagram titles. I Feel Bad About My Neck becomes Baa Doubt Fickle Enemy. The Courage to Be Rich morphs into Huge Itch to Race or Be. We absorb more comfort from one quick glance than we ever could from bulldozing through the chapters ourselves. Who needs that fickle enemy, anyway? Get over it. Let it go.

The Merchant of Venus (yes, you read correctly, that’s “Venus”) relies on the healing power of laughter by showcasing words detached from their source and rearranged to form new advice, original poems or fictional publications such as “The / 120-Year / You Want / Love / Plan” and “The Ultimate / Venus / Mars / Venus / Mars and Venus / How To Live / Story.” Having noticed more Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus in the free book bins than any other self-help title, Kokin puts them to better use by taking them out of circulation and out of circular files. She creates her own planet where images orbit around the words, and where relationships are much more complex than that which meets the eye.
The heartfelt dedications in Drop have been both excised from the books and poignantly preserved. As we admire this tear-shaped wallhanging, we start questioning what it means to receive a self-help book from a well-meaning friend or relative. Do we look like we need help? Has someone sworn it worked for her or him and is sure it will work for us? Is a gift of a self-help book a hint? Is it read more than once? Perhaps the answer lies in that the books are in pristine condition when Kokin finds them: they appear to be read once, if at all. And here they are, preserved in more than pristine condition for us: their shapes and forms are evocative and inspiring. Instead of becoming landfill, they have the power to live forever as art.

It is clear that Kokin relishes both the challenge and the joy of using all parts of the book: the paper can be pulped and shaped; the mull sewn into tapestries; the covers stuffed into football-petaled flowers or sewn into quilts, and the headbands turned into flowers. These are all talismans and tokens of hope and beauty and change and reminders that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. Come on in and take a look at the remedies of Lisa Kokin. You will positively feel much better!

Alisa Golden is the author of Creating Handmade Books (Sterling, 1998) and Making Handmade Books (Lark, 2011), among others. She has been creating handmade books under the imprint, never mind the press since 1983 and teaches bookmaking and printmaking at California College of the Arts. Golden has been sharing monthly vegetarian lunches with Lisa Kokin since 2006.