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Book Art Theory

Capitalizing on the interdisciplinary nature of the field, this blog calls attention to criticism and theory about the book as a medium and/or subject in works of art and, more generally, about book art. It seeks to encourage dialogue, solicit comments, and create a generative space for new ideas from critics and theorists of various fields regarding the aesthetic, semiotic, haptic, cognitive, historical, and other features that distinguish these works and their function in ethical, political, and social matters.

To contribute to the list of underrepresented voices in the book arts, see CBAA Book Art + Social Justice Resource List.

  • 01 Dec 2016 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

    The jumping off point for this post comes from two previous posts. The first from Richard Minsky’s comments to Susan Viguers’s “The Artist Book and the Sailor Suit,” in which he wrote that in the 1970s the term ”artists’ books” generally referred to inexpensive books produced offset, photocopy, etc., often labeled “democratic multiples,” also called “visual literature.” The second, from Tate Shaw’s “Seeking Pluralism in Books-As-Art,” in which he writes about the importance of creating work out of an authentic, personal experience as opposed to using secondary sources (even when these secondary sources are used out of a desire to empathize).

    For me, these two seemingly disparate thought lines come together around a questioning of the “precious” in artists' book activities. Specifically, I wonder if it is possible that the tendency towards the highly aesthetic in artists’ book production might interfere with or inhibit the creation of work based in authentic, personal experience?

    I am not interested in denouncing highly aesthetic artists’ books; rather, I am wondering about how we as artists’ book makers interact with our own materials, how the value we place on the materials of production might influence what we are willing to communicate through them. My teenage daughter has repeatedly implored me not to buy her beautifully bound blank books in which to write or draw in because their “specialness” puts her under pressure to create work of like quality, thus interrupting her natural creative expression. Might fine art materials, printing, binding, etc. be more appropriate for certain kinds of expression than others?

    I believe unequivocally that works incorporating secondary source texts are important and that they should continue to be used because they can reveal deeply important aspects of human experience. I also think that each of us has the opportunity to speak directly to our own personal experience and make work which is relevant and deeply moving, but that often it is not made for one reason or another. Certainly, it takes courage to create autobiographical work. And it requires respecting one’s own voice in a most personal way. Is there a specific time for autobiographic work in an artists’ creative arc (e.g., when one is “young”) which comes to an end (e.g., when one is “mature”)? Or is speaking out of authentic, personal experience less valued than more formal, “objective” (read: secondary sources) strategies?

    Bringing together the threads of these conceptual and formal questions, I look to the zine as a means with a low overhead in terms of preciousness. I believe in the form for its democratic potential (one only needs to use a xerox machine, cut, fold, and staple/sew), but also for the incredible potential to harness the creative power of the book (extended meaning through sequence, time, intimacy, interactivity, portability, etc.). It is almost like a book without the book. And the historical link with Fluxus and in general the European conceptual book work, not to mention the punk rock fanzine, is certainly to be embraced. Let us not be seduced by aesthetics (exclusively). Also, let this fall not into narrowly prescriptive identity politics, but instead open up possibilities for all. 


  • 15 Nov 2016 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

    In 2008, Denison University hosted the traveling exhibition Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, curated by Dr. Nada Shabout, a native of Iraq and Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas.  Isis Nusair, a colleague of mine at Denison at the time and a friend of Nada's had arranged for the exhibition and because of my interest in books invited me to speak as part of the related programming.  Having recently read Dard Hunter's Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, I was aware that what is now Bagdad had been the epicenter of paper-making in the 8th Century and was the home of the first paper mill (papermaking later spread to Damascus, Egypt, and Morocco and eventually to Europe, albeit 500 years later).  Needless to say, I was excited to be part of the programming and especially excited to see the work of the sixteen artists whose books made up the exhibition.

    Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. The books were unbelievably contemporary in terms of their aesthetics and simultaneously were frequently intensely powerful in their radical content, commenting on the Iraq war and the subsequent fallout.  So many different formats were represented, from rough painted boards to sumptuous gold lettered paper. Not all of the books were as innovative as the ones I remember most. However, the quantity of work that was superlative was incredibly high and the quality far from the decorative Arabic arts that saturates much of Western consciousnesses.

    In speaking with Isis of my enthusiasm and awe for the work, she mentioned that she was a close acquaintance of Rafa al-Nasir, one of the more interesting artists represented in Dafatir, and she asked me if I would be interested in visiting him in Jordan and speaking with some of the other artists represented. I jumped at the occasion and the following summer I landed in the Middle East to visit Palestine and to meet with Iraqi artists, many of whom were living in Jordan.

    What I discovered was that a single individual (Dia al-Azzawi) had elicited many of these book works from the Iraqi artists he knew or had even mentored.  This raises the question for me, can curation be considered a form of authorship?  If one person prompts original creations from ten bookmakers addressing a political system, a moment in time, or an aspect of the book itself, mightn't that person not in a sense be their author?  I don't want to stretch things particularly thin, but certainly there is something going on here that goes beyond curation—rather, the curator brings the work out of the artists and into being.  Not to over-dramatize, but don't each of you who teach have examples of work that you consider to be robust and important from students that would never have made the work without your instigation and critical support?

    Where am I going here? During this trip, I visited Damascus for a week and it reminded me of Berkeley California in the 1960's with people selling books on the streets and kids serving tea in the parks (I also spoke to people who explained how everything was not as it seemed and that the price of dissent was prison). Now Damascus and much of Syria has been destroyed. The change came suddenly. I never would have expected that the places I walked and the people whose homes I visited then would be transformed only a couple of years later. And we have just invited a force for change into the white house that has as much potential to destroy as any we've elected into office in our history.

    In Bridget's September Post, What Is Critical Now?, she quotes Booklyn: “In the 21st Century, where taking an activist stance involves preventing the possible destruction of the entire planet’s ecosystem, discussing the use of art and bookmaking as a tool for human and ecological rights and actions becomes urgent and unavoidable.”

    Could we have possibly foreseen a Donald Trump Presidency from the optimism of Arab Spring 8 years ago?  Now more than perhaps ever before do Booklyn's words ring true.  So my question is, can we from our positions facilitate a national production of books, an outpouring that speaks to the political agency that we must take in this time?  Can we come together to co-create/curate a traveling exhibition of books and book initiatives with the guidance of the excellent criteria Bridget has posted which together speaks to this political moment and to the voices this regime does not represent?


  • 01 Nov 2016 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

    A salient characteristic of artists' books is the way in which the physical elements—binding, paper, type, image-are creatively united within a conceptual framework. This distinguishes artists' books from non-artists' books—either standard books, on the one hand, or the livre d'artiste on the other. Innovation within the area of artists' books can be physical (new material usages, new binding techniques, etc.) or conceptual (new ways of thinking about a book).  

    The more the emphasis on conceptual innovation, the looser the adherence must be to traditional forms: books have become sculptural, they have become mass produced, they have become unbound. They usually remain haptic, though, so performance, film, and musical composition are not commonly conceived of as conceptual extensions of the artists' book, but as distinct forms unto themselves.

    How vital is the haptic aspect of a book to the artists' book enterprise? Can the conceptual innovation extend out so far that a book might lose its form entirely and become an idea rather than an object? Or perhaps more pertinent, what role might digital technologies play in extending the boundaries of what we understand to be artists' books?  

    I am drawn to this question for a couple of reasons: 1) code can bring together text, images, and interactivity in a way that is more book-like than any other non-haptic medium. 2) with the rise of tablets and ebooks which function as containers resembling standard books, mightn't we as a community subvert this technology for artistic ends?

    In 2013 I gave a CBAA talk at Mill's College entitled, "What is a Digital Artists' Book, Anyway?" (subsequently published in JAB 32) in which I encouraged familiarity with the Electronic Literature Organization because such rich developments involving text, image, and interactivity are coming from this quarter. More recently, the 2016 CBAA members exhibit in Nashville, TN featured a work by Ian Hatcher and Amaranth Borsuk that was tablet-based and other CBAA members have been involved in hybrid projects as well, so I am not suggesting this as entirely new ground.  Rather, I am interested in widening the discussion. 

    I recognize that for many in the CBAA community, leaving behind the tactile quality of the book for a cold electronic device which so many of us associate with attention draining social media might be a hard sell. Luckily, I'm not a salesman though. Rather, I am interested in this nascent technology for its parallel with the development of the book as a communication device which we artists then adapted for our own ends: the artists' book. Clearly, a different set of tools is required to develop an app than creating an artists' book. However, just as an artists' book can be a powerful tool for creative expression and formal experimentation, so too can this new technology be. And many of the conceptual concerns that go into creating an artists' book are inherent to generating creative work in this new technology as well. As an interesting note relating to what is haptic, despite the virtual quality of web-based media (eg, intangible), touch screen devices, interactive screen-based media now have a strangely tactile quality—but are they haptic?

    As food for thought, I am posting three links that exemplify how artists' book-like this screen-based form lends itself towards. These web-based examples span from the late nineties to the early 2000's, since much of this type of work now is app-based due to the technology shift from desktop to mobile devices. The first project, oooxxxooo by Juliet Martin (1997)*, I specifically selected because it is low-tech (rather than having an intimidatingly slick interface), because of the way that the browser we are all familiar with has been approached creatively in a way very different from commerce/information-based web sites, and because of the innovative formal experimentation using text and native code-based imagery. The second piece, Peter Horvath's Life Is Like Water (2002), is not interactive as in Juliet Martin's piece, but rather is an innovative example of how the web-based form can be usurped for artistic purposes. Lastly, Alan Bigelow's This Is Not a Poem (2010) is a very successful conceptual work using text, image, sound, and interactivity.

    *Juliet's piece is no longer on her website; however, because it is purely HTML based, I have it on my website for teaching purposes.

    I welcome your thoughts, comments, insights….


  • 15 Oct 2016 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

    After much discussion the CBAA Book Art Theory Blog Committee has modified the Mission Statement that appears at the top of this blog’s home page. Here is the original version:

    Capitalizing on the interdisciplinary nature of the field, this blog calls attention to current criticism and theory about the artist’s book and seeks to encourage dialogue, solicit comments, and create a generative space for new ideas from critics and theorists of various fields.

    After her March 15 blog post “IT’S 2016,” Julie Leonard questioned the absence of "book art" in the statement. Susan Viguers, Committee Chair, polled the Committee to see if adding “and book art” after “artist’s book” was a matter that needed discussion.

    I observed that

    a. Susan’s February 15 post, “THE ARTIST BOOK AND THE SAILOR SUIT,” which addressed the term "artist's book," discussed dropping the 's from artist and adding the s to books (artist books) when the plural is indicated.

    b. "Artist books" is a subgenre (subfield?) of Book Art, along with "fine press," "sculptural bookworks," "bookbinding," etc. If not mentioning many, why single one out?

    c. Book Art Theory is a critical analysis of the features that distinguish an artifact as "Book Art" and its functioning in the world.

    This responds to Tate Shaw’s June 1 post, "WHAT DOES THEORY WANT?" We see it in Bridget Elmer’s August 1 post, “BOOK ART AND SOCIAL PRACTICE” and Emily Larned’s September 15 post “PUBLISHING AS (SOCIALLY ENGAGED) ARTISTIC PRACTICE.”

    Susan suggested we keep "artist book" in the blog's mission statement because "book art" is so general, so encompassing, that it doesn't give sufficient focus. She saw book art as a Venn diagram with the artist book having a central position. I noted that the term "artist book(s)" is undefined: some people (myself included) apply it exclusively to visual literature, some apply it to sculptural bookworks, altered books, or any book-like object made by an artist.

    The Committee tweaked the statement and voted to adopt the following version:

    Capitalizing on the interdisciplinary nature of the field, this blog calls attention to criticism and theory about the book as a medium and/or subject in works of art and, more generally, about book art. It seeks to encourage dialogue, solicit comments, and create a generative space for new ideas from critics and theorists of various fields regarding the aesthetic, semiotic, haptic, cognitive, historical, and other features that distinguish these works and their function in ethical, political, and social matters.

    Comments on this statement are encouraged. Click “Add comment” at the bottom of this post.

    If you would like to write a post addressing any of these notions, please email blog@collegebookart.org.

    At the 2017 CBAA Annual Meeting in Tallahassee January 13-14 I will be moderating an audience participation session titled Book Art Theory Roundtable: A Live Extension of a Virtual Collaboration featuring Openings Editor Inge Bruggeman, Book Art Theory Blog Editor Susan Viguers and book art theorist Gary Frost.


  • 01 Oct 2016 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

    There’s a popular misconception about the relationship of artworks and texts. Every so often I am engaged in conversation with someone holding the view that language and its components, paragraphs, sentences, words, and letters, are entirely separate entities from pictures or sculptures. The argument runs something like this: “When I look at a picture I recognize its subjects (or elements, or spaces behind, in front, and between things), but in the real world I never see words as things.” The variation of this line of thought, accommodating sculpture, would offer me: “Sculptures resemble things in the world, but sculptures of words only add a third dimension to something I prefer to read (on the apparently two-dimensional plane of a page, say).” In each of these cases the premise is that what we do when we look at artworks in two-, three-, or four-dimensions is scan them for things we recognize, as if naming those things was the purpose for our looking in the first place.

    It’s worth reminding everyone that the history of art includes a long tradition of artworks incorporating language, including Pharaonic hieroglyphs, painted initials of illuminated manuscripts, sacred lettering in altarpieces, or inscriptions carved in stone. In Modern art history we encounter the scraps of newspaper in the earliest Cubist collages, the exploding letterforms in Futurist paintings, and the bits of signage in Pop. Of course, since the rise of Conceptual Art in the 1960s, we’re invited to view artworks whose medium is language itself.

    
The notion that artworks operate without language is itself a conceit of a modernist art theory that proposes the responsibility of all the arts is to aspire toward their essential and unique characteristics. Such proscriptions endorse a kind of categorizing as itself a condition for artistic quality, as if any art is in the world in order merely to clarify its difference from the cluttered overlapping experiences of daily life.

    Think about two kinds of looking that we reserve for esthetic experience: scanning and reading. The look we bestow on surfaces is a scanning gaze; the rest of what we do is reading, which surrounds us as page, screen, signage, and inscription. The experience of reading text on an art work requires only a momentary shift of consciousness from our scanning of its other affects. We can be equally absorbed in a visually compelling artwork or a really good book, but the duration of this interest is apt to be strikingly different, since the absorption of reading arises within the duration of pages, whose successive turnings are slices of time through text.

    Other sites of language, such as signage, invite varying degrees of consideration of the materiality within which we read a given sign’s necessary words. I say “necessary” here because signs are also warnings or alerts capable of effecting the direction of our movement through the day. “Coffee” in neon makes a statement about flavor; “RR XING” on painted metal calls attention to our general welfare. Still other artworks offer us words in books or booklike objects, adding the segmentation of pages to such work’s other material properties. The page is the basic module of reading, but it only rarely holds the entirety of a text. One page starts a narrative, another concludes it. In between, so many parcels of language, each interrupted by the bottom of the page.

    What every book as art, whether as object or as pages, has as common property is the attachment of both scanning and reading to memory. Our memory of reading is invoked by the presence of language, just as our recognition of forms is an operation of memory. What can be profound here is how the situation of the book, its interplay of forms and materials, can momentarily interrupt both our habits of recognition and of reading. The strangeness of something not already known is, in this context, opportunity to experience an essence that is within all the arts; of another’s mind at work, another’s passions made sharable.


  • 15 Sep 2016 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

    Now is the time of the network—whether digital, social, or global trade. Increasingly we’re aware of how individual artifacts are a product of, and function in, highly complex and interconnected systems. These contextual systems—rather than the artifacts themselves—seem increasingly worthy of our attention. 

    I suggest that at this cultural moment, rather than discussing the book as a work of art, we turn our focus to publishing as an artistic practice, analyzing the contextual systems of processes and networks, rather than a sole resulting object.

    This is not a new idea. It’s been 30 years since Simon Cutts organized The Artist Publisher: A Survey exhibition at the Crafts Council Gallery (London), and his collected snippets of writing on the subject were published by Granary Press as Some Forms of Availability: Critical Passages on the Book and Publication in 2007. (This delightful book was favorably reviewed by Brad Freeman in JAB 23 [spring 2008], and I too highly recommend it.) In various passages throughout, Cutts suggests that the emphasis on the “artist’s book” has eclipsed that of artists’ publishing, the more interesting of the two. Publishing, Cutts writes, is a much more thorough activity, as it offers a way of life.

    Certainly artists have been publishing for centuries. William Blake; the Pre-Raphaelites and The Germ; the Arts & Crafts periodicals The Hobby Horse and The Studio in addition to the books of William Morris; the Vienna Secession and Ver Sacrum, the many publications of Futurism, Constructivism, Vorticism, Dada, Surrealism, and the Situationists; little magazines; Fluxus; the books of Conceptualism; zines; digital books: artists’ publishing has always been more varied than simply the artist’s book. Many modern and contemporary art movements focused on ephemera and the periodical rather than the book. I think of Sarah Bodman’s diagram, depicting “Artists’ Publishing” as the umbrella term, with “artists’ books” on a tree branch underneath. 

    But when we’re parsing “artist’s book” vs. “artists’ periodicals,” we’re still focusing on artifacts. What about critically considering all of the surrounding processes and practices of publishing as artistic practice? 

    There’s a brand-new book that examines the tremendous popularity of artist publishing in the 21st century, edited by Annette Gilbert and published by the always timely Sternberg Press (Berlin-New York). (Whenever I become interested in a subject, I find that Sternberg has recently published a book on it.) Publishing as Artistic Practice (2016) collects contributions by different contemporary artist-publishers. In the introduction, Gilbert summarizes some recent research in this area of publishing as artistic practice, including Delphine Bedel, Antoine Lefebvre, Bernhard Cella, Eva Weinmayer, Nick Thurston, Hannes Bajohar, and Alessandro Ludovico, among others. (Already the introduction provides a helpful bibliography for further reading.)

    The first chapter, by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, discusses the 1960-1970 historical precedents of Simon Cutts / Coracle Press, Dick Higgins / Something Else Press, Dieter Rot, Ed Ruscha, etc., but Gilbert’s introduction situates the recent resurgence of publishing as part of the larger “practice turn” of contemporary art in the past decade. Publishing as artistic practice is a “complex field of practices marked by countless patterns, interdependencies, and nested hierarchies” (12). Gilbert reminds us that “publishing still remains untheorized,” (9) whether in studies of the book (in which we would locate the book arts as well as artists’ books), or in the study of literature. She cites Michael Bhaskar as someone who has offered some insights on the subject, stating that publishers are “not just producers of books but filters for content and constructors of amplificatory frames” (11). 

    Certainly, considering publishing as the artistic activity at hand—rather than the making of books-as-objects—offers a stronger connection to social engagement, a recent theme of this blog. Social engagement is not essential to the production of the book as an art object; many book artists do not consider it. But: social engagement is integral to publishing. Publishing, the making of a public, is necessarily social.

    As Craig Mod suggests, “we need to start thinking differently about what books are and how they are produced. […] we need to reconsider the whole approach to the process of making a book into the thing it is: the creation, the consumption, and everything that happens around and in between” (12).

    Often, the interdisciplinary nature of the book is heralded as essential to its understanding. Whether one considers oneself “an artist who makes books” or “a practitioner of the book arts,” is not that identity just one component of the larger framework of publishing? 

    How essential to one’s book arts / artist’s book / artistic publishing practice are the inter-related processes of

    selecting?

    research?

    writing?

    editing?

    typography?

    image-making?

    mark-making?

    composition?

    appropriation?

    graphic design?

    communication?

    correspondence?

    collaboration?

    determining edition size?

    sourcing materials?

    making materials?

    identifying vendors?

    printing? 

    binding?

    shipping?

    pricing?

    warehousing?

    marketing?

    determining an audience?

    promotion?

    distribution?

    circulation?

    appearances at fairs, bookshops, zine shops, etc?

    exhibition?

    curatorial concerns?

    building relationships?

    reception?

    determining impact?

    sequentiality: how each book informs the next?

    Aren’t all of these areas worthy of attention/consideration as part of the praxis surrounding the “art of the book?” Wouldn’t the work of the field be exponentially enriched if each of these aspects were as carefully considered as the paper, binding, or printing?


  • 01 Sep 2016 12:00 AM | Deleted user

    While contemplating this question, I discovered a timely reflection by journalist and critic Megan Voeller in the August 25-31, 2016 issue of Creative Loafing: Tampa Bay, our local independent weekly.

    I learned that you haven’t really seen something until you have written about it, and that such deep looking is a practice of empathy. (17)

    The article’s title, “Goodbye. Hello. A few words on the way out of town,” which references her unfortunate (for us) departure from this region, also struck a chord.

    Over ten years have passed since Johanna Drucker suggested “three basic questions that can be used to assess any artist’s book” in her oft-referenced and much-debated article, "Critical Issues / Exemplary Works," in The Bonefolder 1, no. 2 (Spring 2005).

    • What was the project set by the artist?
    • How did the work transform, develop, or present that project?
    • How does this project work as a book? (4)

    Drucker immediately asserts a fourth, “even more fundamental question” that should be asked first.

    • Who is the initiator of this project? (5)

    In our evolving list of critical questions for evaluating book art, which has been generated over the past two weeks by readers of this blog, I see contemporary echoes of these concerns, which clearly remain fundamental despite the passage of over a decade. Similarly, we see the re-emergence of a critical concern with “the haptic,” most recently in Tim Mosely’s article, “The Haptic and the Emerging Critical Discourse on Artists Books” in the Journal of Artists’ Books, no. 39 (Spring 2016). Interestingly, this concern was first raised by Gary Frost, in response to Drucker, with his article “Reading by Hand: The haptic evaluation of artists’ books,” in The Bonefolder, 2, no. 1 (Fall 2005). Goodbye. Hello.

    Instead of presenting a compiled list of our questions, as I originally intended to do with this post, I would like to focus on just a few of these critical concerns and offer several more, which have recently emerged (or re-emerged) with immediacy.

    Let us first consider Elizabeth Kealy-Morris’s questions.

    • Why this book, in this way, to communicate this now? Why did this story need to be told this way? With all the storytelling methods available, why was the handmade artist's book the chosen visual and material form of representation?

    These questions invite us to consider both the specificity of the artist’s book as a form, and the potential for expansion within and beyond it. In terms of critical questions, I believe that we have specificity covered. As for expansion, in his 2015 book, Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artist’s book (London: Uniform Books, 2015), Michael Hampton presents us with fifty works, “showcasing the artists’ book not as a by-product of the book per se, but both its antecedent and post-digital flowering… the manifold traits and studio processes inherent to the artists’ book bursting from their stitched sheath, cheerfully pollinating the whole gamut of reading impedimenta and spaces” (17). I agree with Tate Shaw in his review of Hampton’s book for Afterimage 43, no. 5 (March 2016) that “the spirit of wanting the artist's book to be in communication with disciplines other than itself… provides a rush of vitality” (29). In that spirit, I’d like to add the following critical question to our list, integrating Hampton’s concerns, and honoring the echo of Dick Higgins that I hear in his words.

    • Does the work engage the transdisciplinary nature of the book and its potential as an area of intermedia?

    I continue to hear the echo of Higgins in Booklyn’s recent and urgent call for us “to incorporate social engagement into art and bookmaking” (“Print Media and Social Practice”). Booklyn asserts, “In the 21st Century, where taking an activist stance involves preventing the possible destruction of the entire planet’s ecosystem, discussing the use of art and bookmaking as a tool for human and ecological rights and actions becomes urgent and unavoidable.” I agree that a contemporary integration of book art and social practice is imperative and I offer their words, in the form of a question, to add to our evolving list.

    • Does the work provide an intellectual and aesthetic experience that will inspire the reader to profoundly engage with the subject matter and perhaps catalyze action?

    Because I agree with Voeller and Shaw that empathy is an essential practice and often a pre-cursor to profound engagement, I offer the following mash-up of their thoughts regarding empathy as a follow-up question.

    • Does the work invite deep looking and/or reading–a practice of empathy that reveals another way of thinking?

    And finally, I would like to conclude with Susan Viguers's question regarding access.

    • To what extent does the intended audience have access to the work (more particularly, to the intended experience of it)?

    As Mary Tasillo, co-founder of Book Bombs, so adeptly observed in 2011, when I initially asked her to consider the evaluative questions posed by Temporary Services, “As book artists, [these] evaluative questions must not only be applied to the book work itself, but to the context of the work, the models of distribution. We cannot separate work and context and at the same time answer the proposed questions honestly.”

    I consider these questions, addressing transdisciplinarity, social engagement, empathy, and access, to be critical, contemporary, and complementary to the fundamental and time-tested concerns of authorship, intention, content/form, sequence, pacing, reveal, craft, and the haptic. I hope that our list will continue to evolve, and I look forward to answering all of these questions, honestly, together.


  • 15 Aug 2016 12:00 AM | Deleted user

    In his post to the Book Art Theory blog on June 1st of this year, Tate Shaw asked us the question, "What does theory want?" I agree with Barb Tetenbaum's comment that this is a "chewy question," and I'd like to speak to Dean Dass's comment regarding the need for "close reading of key books," which Shaw proposes as one of several potential answers. Dass stresses the problem of choosing these key books, "Always a good idea! But wait, no one agrees on what those are…" I would assert that we do not need, nor should we want, to agree.

    At this point in our field, we are certainly not at a loss for book art that invites close reading. As Julie Leonard reminded us in her March 15th post, "It's 2016," and "the 'canon of artists' is here to be studied and mined." We also now have at our fingertips a variety of resources for the "critical terminology" and "descriptive vocabulary" that Johanna Drucker called for in 2005. Artists' Books Online and the Artists' Books Thesaurus are two such resources.

    I agree with Leonard that we need an "accounting" of these resources, and CBAA is well-positioned to be the host venue for such an effort. A variety of Resource Lists are already in place on our website, including chronologies of prominent works from which we can build. We also host a growing collection of Book Art Links, to which we could add online resources for critical terminology and descriptive vocabulary. This is all within our reach.

    With generations of book art to mine, and a shared vocabulary defined, I think it's time for us to chew on this: What are the critical questions that we should be asking?

    I am inspired by the constant dialogue around this issue within the field of socially engaged art, which, as I asserted with my last post, seems to be experiencing a parallel and intersecting evolution with ours. Returning to one of the projects that I believe successfully inhabits that intersection, I'd like to share a set of questions proposed by Temporary Services in the Art and Social Practices Workbook "to help in evaluating an artistic project that includes other people who are not the artists, or in some way relies on its meaning being generated from the production of social experience."

    • Does the work empower more people than just the authors of the work?
    • Does the work foster egalitarian relationships, access to resources, a shift in thinking, or surplus for a larger group of people?
    • Does the work abate competition, abusive power and class structures, or other barriers typically found in gallery or museum settings?
    • Does the work seek broader audiences than just those educated about and familiar with contemporary art?
    • Does the work trigger a collective imagination that can dream of other possible worlds while it understands the current one with eyes wide open?

    I admire this brief and brave list, and I return to it often as I continue to pursue my interest in the relationship between book art and social practice. For Temporary Services, these questions get to the heart of the matter and offer "an in-depth way of assessing art works" in their porous field. It seems to me that these questions avoid the pitfalls of asserting key works or continuing to debate terminology. They are straightforward and complex. They invite critique and spark meaningful debate. Most importantly, they are not presented as the questions to be asked, but some questions to be asked.

    I'd like to follow suit. Over the next two weeks, I will generate a list of some critical questions that I believe to be helpful in evaluating book art. I encourage other CBAA members and readers of this blog to do the same, and I invite them to share their questions by posting to the comments section below. For my next post on September 1st, I will present the compiled results of this exercise. My hope is that this list of questions will serve as a jumping off point for close readings of artists’ books, and that those close readings will inevitably generate additional critical questions–all of which I believe that theory most definitely wants.


  • 01 Aug 2016 12:00 AM | Deleted user

    With this post, I would like to revisit a conversation that began over five years ago at the 2011 CBAA Conference in Bloomington, Indiana. At that conference, in a presentation entitled Relational Continuum: The Book as "Lasting Encounter," I departed from Nicolas Bourriaud's theory of Relational Aesthetics and asserted the critical importance of considering book art through a relational lens. At this moment, with the American presidential election looming and with potent evidence of collective discontent erupting across the globe, I find myself returning to that assertion.

    This time around, I'd like to free us from Bourriaud's oft-contested jargon. As Daniel Grant explains in his recent New York Times article, "defining social practice is no easy thing." For the sake of reigniting this conversation, I will ground us in the following definition, offered up by the Art and Social Practice MFA program at Portland State University, in a blog post about their weekly Likewise Fridays events.

    "Art and Social Practice is an artistic approach that emphasizes collaboration, shared authorship, public participation, site-specificity, and interdisciplinarity. It is often presented in non-art locations, and has no media or formal boundaries."

    Since my original inquiry in 2011, I have been interested in how our field intersects with this artistic approach, as many of these emphases are so often relevant when considering the book as an art form. As such, I am driven to compile examples of book art that can also be considered as social practice.

    With the intention of building a bibliography to continue this inquiry, I will share a few projects that exemplify my understanding of book art as social practice. Beneath each project, I provide excerpts quoted directly from the artist(s) describing their work. The sources for these excerpts can be visited by clicking on the title links included for each project. I invite comments, including those that interrogate my choices and those that suggest additions to this growing list.

    Books by Sheryl Oring
    "Sheryl Oring examines critical social issues through projects that incorporate old and new media to tell stories, examine public opinion and foster open exchange. Using tools typically employed by journalists (the camera, the typewriter, the pen, the interview and the archive) she builds on experience in her former profession to create installations, performances, artist books and internet-based works."

    Book Bombs by Mary Tasillo and Michelle Wilson
    "BOOK BOMBS re-contextualizes public spaces, particularly park benches, empty lots, and abandoned buildings, drawing on the history of guerrilla art, graffiti traditions, and the artist multiple. Our site-based interventions highlight the social and environmental issues of a location, such as homelessness and endangered and invasive plants ecologies, through explorations of handmade paper, wheat pasted prints, and zines."

    Combat Paper
    "Transforming military uniforms into handmade paper since 2007. . . Through papermaking workshops, veterans use their uniforms worn in service to create works of art. The uniforms are cut up, beaten into a pulp and formed into sheets of paper. Participants use the transformative process of papermaking to reclaim their uniforms as art and express their experiences with the military."

    Publications by Temporary Services
    "Publishing has been a regular part of our practice since we began in 1998. We have provided a large number of our booklets, books, poster-booklets, newspapers and other publications for free during exhibitions, in public situations, and below as PDFs for you to download. In 2008 we took steps to make our publishing economically viable and to be able to provide greater support for artists, groups, and their work. To this end, we started Half Letter Press a publishing imprint and online store."

    Streetopia by various artists, published by Booklyn
    "Streetopia (the book) is an assemblage of works by twenty-four current and former San Francisco artists tentatively associated with the San Francisco Bay Area "Mission School" or "New Mission School" Art movements. It serves as a stand-alone extension of the Streetopia exhibition at the Luggage Store Gallery in SF in May and June of 2012."

    Unbound by Jessica Peterson
    "Unbound is a limited edition artists’ book which honors the veterans of Prince Edward County’s 1959 school lock out. All 100 copies of the book were letterpress-printed on handmade paper in a single month, produced collaboratively by community members in Farmville and faculty and students at Longwood University. The book was conceived and designed by artist Jessica Peterson and recounts the closing of the public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, from 1959 to 1964. Unbound tells this story of these events with timelines, archival evidence, and collected narratives from the veterans of the closings. Gold stars flow through each page, one star for each person whose life was permanently altered by the school closings."


  • 15 Jul 2016 12:00 AM | Deleted user

    Like a lot of people I’m struggling to find ways to process the shootings starting last month in Orlando through Dallas over the past weekend. Personally, I go to my bookshelves looking for signs of humanity to buoy me up in these times.

    Adrian Octavius Walker’s My Lens Our Ferguson is a simple photo-bookwork about the protests following the shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. It is a brief but more intimate look at the protests and the events than mass media reported. One image in the middle of the book depicts a parade-like march at near twilight so the people are virtually backlit and made more stark in flat black shapes with animated shadows on the asphalt. One of the African Americans marching raises a sign that reads, “I am an American.”

    In the opening of Clarissa Sligh’s photo-bookwork Voyage(r): Tourist Map to Japan on the flight, still uncertain about her desire to travel to Japan, she writes, “As African American/I know nothing about it/Care even less.” Toward the end of the book in a section called The Supper she tells a story about a host who “could hardly wait to tell me how happy he was to have me as a guest in his house and that he had seen the movie Roots which he had thoroughly enjoyed and had found educational. Having grown up a Southern black girl, I smiled and told him graciously that I had seen Shogun and had experienced it in the same way. He laughed and said, ‘Of course that was totally fictionalized.’ ‘Then of course you must understand that Roots was created the same way,’ I replied. We all laughed together as it sank in that Hollywood had provided us with our understanding of each other’s history. But even still it couldn’t prevent Roots and Shogun sitting down to dinner with us.”

    The imagery in Voyage(r) is all printed duotone in a range from black, dark purple, indigos and a light blue. It includes Sligh’s travel journal writings, drawings, and found material montaged together with photographs made on the trip. Many are of subjects stereotypical of the Japanese tourist experience—temples, school children, architecture, and sites including a visually violent climax at Hiroshima, which Sligh didn’t want to see but her partner insisted since his was the WWII generation that dropped the bomb. In one spread she uses typographically wavy text overlapping a photo of water assembled together with brush drawings of a Japanese temple to point at a portrait of herself: “There I am with the camera around my neck. How much of what I shoot is to confirm what National Geographic taught me to see?” she asks.

    At the near end of Voyage(r) the statement “Stereotypes make it hard to see who you are” is typeset over a close up of Sligh’s closed eyes.

    The term stereotype comes from printing, a metal printing plate cast from a mold in another material like plaster or papier-mâché.

    It’s the ubiquity and repetition of what is made from a mold cast that creates the blindness.


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