The book as an artefact (original) (raw)

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.

The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access

2013

In this essay we argue that the medium of the book can be a material and conceptual means, both of criticising capitalism's commodification of knowledge (for example, in the form of the commercial incorporation of open access by feral and predatory publishers), and of opening up a space for thinking about politics. The book, then, is a political medium. As the history of the artist's book shows, it can be used to question, intervene in and disturb existing practices and institutions, and even offer radical, counter-institutional alternatives. Yet if the book's potential to question and disturb existing practices and institutions includes those associated with liberal democracy and the neoliberal knowledge economy (as is apparent from some of the more radical interventions occurring today under the name of open access), it also includes politics and with it the very idea of democracy. In other words, the book is a medium that can (and should) be 'rethought to serve new ends'; a medium through which politics itself can be rethought in an ongoing manner.

Artists' Books as Resistant Transmitters

Artists’ Books: Concept, Place, and a Quiet Revolution, 2019

Since the early 1970s, the origins of artists' books have been extensively discussed and documented (Drücker, Lauf, Lippard, Phillpot, Gilbert et al.), yet the genre continues to generate new questions and paradoxes regarding its place and status within the visual arts as a primary medium. Whilst the conception of contemporary artists' books lay in the medium's potential for dissemination via mass production and portability, opportunities for distribution remain limited to a select number of outlets worldwide or, as an alternative, through the growing in number but time-limited artists' book fairs, such as those established events in Barcelona, Berlin, Bristol, Leeds, London, New York and Seoul. In parallel with the development of screen-based digital technologies and social media platforms, we have experienced the exponential production of artists' books in contemporary art practice, craft and design; a quiet revolution that emerged from both the centre and the fringes of the art world over six decades ago, developing relatively quickly as a gallery commodity through artefact/exhibition catalogue cross-overs, and more recently as a significant discipline in its own right within educational establishments. This begs the question, why, in an era of potentially print-free communication, do we continue to pursue the possibilities of the physical book format? What can the traditional structures of the codex, the leporello, the single section or that most basic and satisfying action of creasing a sheet of paper-the folio-offer the tech-savvy audience or maker? But artists' publications offer alternative platforms for visual communication, resistant to formal forms of presentation, and they appeal to the hand and can question what it means to read in this digital age.

The Artist’s Book in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Walter Benjamin and the Artist’s Book

Arts

Walter Benjamin, who was familiar with the pre-Second World War avant-garde, argued that mechanization threatens the aura of art objects. The digital revolution has been seen as reconfirming Benjamin’s thesis, but the digital can be seen to reaffirm the value of the actual, physical artist’s book, and moreover, artists have exploited the digital—as technologies and subject matter—to make artists’ books.

Resignifying the book: Art objects as sites of resistance

2019

This paper focuses on a volatile object that resists traditional art historical and anthropological attempts at categorisation: the cardboard book of the cartonera publishing phenomenon. In the simplest terms, the 'livro cartonero' is a cardboard bound book, making literature accessible at an affordable price. Yet it is also an art object, the outcome of a method derived from artistic practice, which has come to be the vehicle of social intervention through exhibitions, from local community spaces to prestigious international museums and biennales. I’m interested in asking what do these books become in these other contexts. Can they instantiate spaces and frames of resistance?