Notes on Paper

Laura Harris

Laura Harris takes a dive into the history and cultural significance of paper, and the function it plays within our day-to-day lives.

As a writer for the Fourdrinier, and its parent gallery PAPER, it was only a matter of time until I took as my subject the very thing: Paper. The invention of paper is often dated back to 105 AD when Cai Lun, a dignitary serving the imperial Chinese court, created papery sheets from scraps of old rags, tree bark and fishing nets. Today’s paper by contrast, as the accompanying image shows, tends to be made up of a dense meshwork of plant or wood fibres. As a material, paper seemingly serves as a means-to-an-end, a surface to be imprinted on, a material, in and of itself, that bears little intrinsic significance. But what if we looked closer at paper as a cultural, as well as material, artefact? 

As I cast my mind about, thinking about this piece, I became sensitised to just how much work paper does in our social lives. From the receipts we get after shopping, to the wrapping paper maintaining a gift’s surprise, to the ballot paper we use to exercise our democratic rights, paper plays a part in countless social transactions. In the form of maps it helps us navigate the world, and, as instruments of colonialism, to shape the brutal course of history. In letters, it’s there when we conduct some of our most intimate acts of love and death – Virginia Woolf’s scrawled final note a most heart wrenching example. It upholds our socio-legal systems, like borders that let through only those able to produce the ‘right’ papers. From birth certificates, through title deeds, to last wills and testaments, paper officiates our journey through life and beyond.

Paper also does metaphorical heavy lifting for us. When someone says “papering over the cracks” we know exactly what they mean – a flimsy, tearable solution – and the judgement that it bears. Alex Kovacs, in his novel The Currency of Paper (2013) pulls on this metaphorical power of paper. The protagonist, Maximilian Sacheverell Hollingsworth, is obsessed with paper in all its forms – ‘newspapers and advertisements and bus tickets’ – but his obsession lands, predictably, on cash. The novel follows Hollingsworth’s career in forgery and amassing wealth, but without letting us forget that cash is nothing but paper with a promise imprinted on it. The house of cards, to use another papery metaphor, that we build through cash is seen, in The Currency of Paper, in all its fragility. 

It would be remis to draw on only this literary example of the weight of meaning that paper can bear in the arts. Of course, countless visual artists make work on and with paper; indeed, this is the very idea behind PAPER Gallery. But in thinking about visual artists that make work about paper, William Kentridge’s Second Hand Reading (2013) offers a remarkable example. The short film sees the artists’ sketches animated against the turning pages of the ‘Encyclopaedia of Mechanics.’ Figures run through the book, as phrases like ‘Let us enter the chapter’ or ‘Performing the meaning’s absence’ flicker past. For me, beyond the political content of much of Kentridge’s work, Second Hand Reading is a love-song to books as papery things, to pages as the fluttering of meanings half-caught. 

Kentridge reminds us that beyond what is written on paper, or what systems of meaning we insert it into, paper can be, as brute material, transportive. To think of paper like this can draw together objects as diverse as the surviving fragments of Sappho and counterculture zines from the 1980s. Of course, these are papers that are made to be read, but they also take on an almost talismanic power. The fragments of Sappho, for example, draw part of their enduring beauty from the fact that much of the paper (or papyrus, made of plant fibres) has been lost to history. The paper has interrupted the poetry, and together produced a new kind of charm. Likewise, the rough and ready aesthetic of 1980s counter-counter is captured and communicated by the xeroxed zines, so easy to hand out at gigs, collect in bedrooms, and build an identity through. Both examples show how the evocative power of paper itself contributes to how it is made meaningful. 

This talismanic power of paper is present in many Chinese and East Asian cultural practices. Take joss paper by way of example. Joss paper plays an important part in ancestral worship in Chinese traditional spiritual and religious practises, and is burnt in front of idols, shrines, or indeed anything that someone wishes to venerate. Burning joss paper is a way of ensuring ancestors are well-equipped with everything they need in the afterlife and is a cultural practice by which the living relate to the dead. The burning of joss paper is the creation of an ancestral offering. In this way, the paper is an active and irreducible participant in the relationship between living and dead. 

Paper is similarly inserted into East Asian calligraphic traditions. The ‘Four Treasures of the Study’ refers to the four vital pillars of certain cultures of calligraphy: the brush, ink, paper, and ink stone. Proper and authentic calligraphic practice demands that each of these elements is properly sourced from traditional producers. The rules and cultural conventions around this use of paper shows again the irreducible role that paper can play when it is elevated above its strict use-value. 

Of course, in the context of the UK (from where I write) my social life is littered with exactly the kind of use-value of paper that intrigued Hollingsworth – ‘newspapers and advertisements and bus tickets.’ Yet, the sheer proliferation of paper has a meaning of its own when seen in the context of environmental collapse. Worldwide consumption of paper has risen by 400% in the last 40 years; paper waste accounts for one fifth of all waste produced in the UK; and each year around 1% of green-house gas emissions are produced by the paper, pulp, and printing industries. At the same time, over four billion trees are felled each year to keep up with production. When we think about paper, and about meaning, we should also see papers’ role in the supply chains that keep our economy going at the expense of our planet. From this view, paper has another cultural meaning: it is a commodity, and as such it carries a value that drives the deleterious industry of paper. 

Paper links our everyday lives to huge existential questions of the lines between life and death, and the planetary threat we all face. It does so not because of what is written on it, but what our cultures do with it. As artists and art writers we venerate paper as part of our craft, but paper, broadly speaking, only rarely takes on cultural properties beyond what is imprinted on it. Instead, paper flutters through our everyday lives in ways we almost don’t notice. But where better than the Fourdrinier to issue an invitation to see paper as something more?