Freedom of the Presses Artists Books in the Twenty-first Century (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Archaic Stillness of the Book
The Blue Notebook, 2021
"Knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in the object of the book itself, but in the experience rescued from the page and transformed again into experience, ... In the reader's own being." (Manguel, 2006: 91) Although the work of an artist, the artist book is often not immediately recognised or acknowledged as an artwork. However cleverly disguised as a novel, the often text-free and image-filled artist-made book navigates many fields: design and typography, bibliographic studies and librarianship, fine art, literature and poetry. To explore the slipperiness of its character, this paper looks closely at certain artist books as case studies, and considers whether the form and content of these hand-printed artworks present an opportunity to test conventions of both the book and the portrait. My book 'Picturing the Island' (2016) presents a portrait of Central Pacific islands, while Alison Alder’s 'Sleep of Doubt' (2015) is populated by screenprinted portraits of contemporary Australian politicians. Both artists have discovered that when a book is hand-made, the signifying power of this familiar form changes. After establishing this possibility of new knowledge, which is particularly significant in the face of wearisome political cynicism and the overabundance of images, this paper will then propose the artist book as a contemporary art object that presents possibilities for optimism, intimacy and specificity.
NOTES ON THE MATERIALITY AND SPIRITUALITY OF BOOKS AND THEIR BEING IN THE WORLD
Notes on the Materiality and Spirituality of Books and Their Being in the World, 2020
As an object, the book has a material condition. On the surface, it is a collection of printed leaves held between two covers. The graphics, colours and design are aspects partaking of its aesthetic dimension. However, beyond this materiality, with all its aesthetic qualities, the book has an intrinsic capacity of undergoing changes in its status. Gabriel Liiceanu, a Romanian philosopher, argues that the book is an imploring object. It begs to be opened, read, and thus brought to life. Therefore, the book is an object with a special fate, which necessarily depends on the whims and moods of the Reader who, by merely opening and reading it, changes its ontological status, breathes life onto it and saves it from an improper state of being, as Liiceanu argues. The book's status as an object is exceptional in this situation. As an object, the book is a treasure trove. The big drama of any book is that of being sentenced to a life in prison between its covers, while its big fortune is to become a spiritual and cultural presence in the mind and soul of the Reader.
Textual Distortion, 2017
Distortion is the moment at which the physical means of transmitting a text irrupt into a reader's experience of it. I will discuss distortion here as a phenomenon occurring in printed materials, but I do not wish to exclude other recognisable instances such as static in a radio signal, or white noise on a cathode-ray-tube television screen. To speak of distortion as an impairment, however, is to confirm the Platonic priority of another book-object. As textual scholars have shown, locating this authoritative ur-text can be, to say the least, difficult. Distortion is not a condition befalling individual textual artefacts (‘book-objects’) here and there: there is no non-distorted reading. In fact, a belief in non-distorted reading amounts to believing in pure, transparent mediation that leaves no trace of itself on the mediated. Leaving aside for the purposes of this essay the profound political implications of placing the labour of mediation under erasure, I will offer here a heuristic of distortion. Absent such a heuristic, ‘distorted’ book-objects and their texts will always be treated as degraded derivatives. The corollary of that treatment is to elevate an unknown, possibly non-existent ur-text to a position of unimpeachable authority, and to degrade both the experience of reading and of the embodied text and reader. We can solve the problem of distortion by placing the irreducible phenomenological singularity of the book-object at the centre of our experience of a text. This is existential reading: you are reading what you are reading and not anything else.
The Artists Book in General, the Altered Book in Particular
This study broadly investigates the artist's book as a form of visual expression, placing particular emphasis on the altered book. The project gives a short history of the artist's book, accedes to the complexities of attempting to define this art form, as well as providing a postmodern context for altered books.
2020
The book is dead" is a proclamation frequently heard today, almost to the point of banality. Since the conceptualisation of a hypothetical proto-hypertext device called Memex in 1945, there have countless commentaries on both sides of the bookish aisle defending the survival or predicting the inevitable demise of the physical book. On one hand, the book has battle scars to prove its tenacity -it has survived the onslaught of radio, television, and internet, all of which were predicted to eliminate it. On the other hand, it is undeniable that many people have switched to reading on electronic devices and the relentless advancement of technology forebodes a future where the physical book has no place in society except as an object of curiosity. Many studies surrounding this debate have focused on the reading experience and usages of the physical book as compared to its digital counterpart. For instance, highlights the disadvantages of reading on screens, including the risks of multitasking and being distracted. She further argues that such reading habits discourage deep reading and may affect the way we approach reading in future.
Originally in PKn , letnik 35, st 1, published by the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia ,June 2012 in print pp.3-19
This article juxtaposes the idea of the book in the traditional academic context to the book’s latest technological manifestation as e-reader that uses E-Ink technology, mimes the clarity of a printed book, and offers wireless connectivity. It considers the implications of connectivity for a new network readership, for the publishing industry, for the author-reader relationship, and for the very idea of authorship. The premise is that bound up with the changes that the object-book undergoes are our deeply held conceptions of subjectivity and agency
The Cover of a Book is the Beginning of a Journey
There is a slideshow available on the conference page for 'Traditional and emerging formats of artists' books: Where do we go from here?': http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/news-archive/contrad09/julianclare.htm A dialogue with Julian Warren about The Cover of a Book is the Beginning of a Journey, a process-based exhibition curated from Arnolfini’s bookworks collection. This was first shown at Arnolfini in autumn 2009 and has since toured to Walsall Art Gallery and Leeds Metropolitan University gallery. As co-curators (with Performance Re-enactment Society, Tom Sowden and Sarah Bodman of UWE Bookarts) we were interested in artist’s books that went beyond the usual conventions of reading; books that unsettle the usual distinction between writer and reader, which distribute and generate action and performance: books to do. As part of the exhibition the PRS invited visitors to take part in a series of enactments in response to the book works. These took place over 5 Acts entitled ‘Things To Do With Books’, on Saturday afternoons.