The Artists’ Book: Twenty-Six Definitions
Alex Selenitsch
The name “artists books” brings together two complex systems – that of the artist and that of the book. These two systems overlap imperfectly, producing complex effects and create a situation wherein the artists book is a field of potential rather than a defined genre, even after 50 years or so of activity by hundreds of artists. Any attempt at defining the artists book as an object is futile as it is still – and may always be – a developing hypothesis. But a description of its potential seems to be a useful objective and that’s what I will try to do, broadly and quickly, today.
At the outset, it should be noted that the artists book has emerged from a wider cultural context. Roughly since WW2, high art in Europe and the US (and co-incidentally here as we shifted our compass points to New York rather than Paris or London) has dropped the need for representational conventions. Painters began to make paintings, not pictures, and then even abandoned painting. They became artists who made works of art which were real objects set in real space existing in real time. This shift meant that artists were no longer connected to specific genres and conventions. The strategies of abstract expressionism, pop art, concrete art, fluxus, minimalism and post minimalism were all cross-disciplinary or, rather, un-disciplinary. The world of manufacturing and consumption, or communications and media, became the new nature and the world of objects became the raw material for works. One of the objects lying around, particularly in the environs of a worker in culture, was the book.
At the same time, that is from 1945 onwards, the book’s status slowly shifted from being the privileged form of documentation to something else – perhaps entertainment and celebration. Documentation is now electronic and all of our records are now stored in silicon chips, not bound in paper files. This has released the book from its utilitarian duties. New information technologies have made book production a high-tech diffused cottage industry. Rather than being paper-less, we are paper-more. Old techniques such as etching, chemical photography, letter-press printing have not been replaced but transformed, just as the horse and the sailing boat are now high-tech leisure systems, not utilitarian infrastructure.
The book is a complex object set in a complex ambience. In no particular order, a book is PAPER, a BODY, a COPY, a CONGLOMERATE, a BATON (as in a relay race) and a FLOW of time.
PAPER is a multi-billion dollar global enterprise, and also a tiny hand-craft procedure. It involves trees, mills, ships, trucks, guillotines, petrol, electricity, lots of water and lots of chemicals. It can be made by the tonne or by the single sheet. In books, paper has many friends – inks, glues, metal, leather, string and cloth and there are many other possible co-materials.
BODY concerns our strange identification of author and book. Some cultures can see no difference between the two and our individualist mind-set is similar in that it likes to think that only one person - the author - is involved. In fact many kinds of people are involved, with the author in some kinds of books being possibly the least important.
COPY is a keyword for print. The standard book is our most authentic mass-produced identical object. We demand that all copies are exactly the same. It’s a demand we don’t make of any other object we produce, except perhaps for Coca Cola and McDonalds. But not all books are mass produced, and perhaps some of the most important, like ships' logs, recipe books or survey notebooks are more important than mass-produced paperbacks.
The book is a natural CONGLOMERATE and a natural conglomerator. The book naturally collates. Collections of all kinds are at home in books and can range from truly heterogenous material to stuff that has been carefully sifted by a single editor. But editor already implies a collection.
As a collector, the book might hold “everything” between its covers, but it is still a small object and very portable. It is able to be traded, bought or stolen, to be passed around from hand to hand like a BATON and moved around like money, or a virus.
And when a book is opened by a reader, the multiple narratives of text, images and pages spill out and are released into the imagination. The FLOW of time is there in the text via the chain of letters and works, but also through the rhythm of turning pages, which can go backwards and forwards or even be scattered, as in the use of a dictionary.
These properties of the book do not naturally sit together, but they are all true. And artists can be described in the same way, as PROFESSIONALS, as individual VOICES, as PRODUCERS, as a COLLABORATORS or co-worker, as EXHIBITORS and as COMPOSERS.
As creative PROFESSIONALS, there are artists, but also crafters and designers. These are categories of jobs with different production modes and techniques and often completely different discourses. Yet all three kinds of professions produce artists books and nearly always relate these to the discourses of their own profession.
Nevertheless, in each job category, we ask the creative individual to be evident through a VOICE: an instantly recognisable style or aesthetic that gives all the work by a single artist the illusion of a body. We even call it “a body of work”.
The dialectic between such individuals and the values of standard, anonymous, mass production is as old as mass production itself. Self-publishing, mail art, interventions in commercial printing processes and almost everything hand-made contribute to this argument, with the unique and spontaneous set against the standard and predictable. Within this argument, artists are PRODUCERS.
Many artists work in teams. This can be done within strict guidelines, like the demarcations in opera, films – and books. The aim of artists working together to produce a single idea as COLLABORATORS is more recent, but is widespread and acknowledges that the way to generate ideas is through conversation.
Works made by artists are destined to be shown, heard and read. An artist who just makes and is not an EXHIBITOR is not discharging their responsibility. Yet the gallery for the visual artist is often as much of an impediment as a vehicle; the same might be said for publishers in the case of writers.
Then there is the subject of, or rather the composition of, time. Every artist is potentially such a COMPOSER as no medium or genre in owns this dimension. Duration can be given an image and an experience in architecture, music, visual arts of all kinds, in dance, in film and just as easily it can be shut down to stasis, to no movement, to no time at all.
So it’s against this delta of tendencies that I will now offer 26 little definitions of the artists book. And just as I’ve used a duality in pairing artists and books, this time I’ll use another bookish technique that has appealed to many scratchers as well as scribblers. This is the alphabet. But the duality is by no means gone. As I announce each definition, you should be able to quickly bring to mind a counter book, that is, an artist’s book that contradicts the definition being given. None of these definitions is adequate on its own. I imagine that if a book-like object coincides with, say, any seven of the definitions, then it is an artists book. Or better still, any seven definitions adequately set out the field of discourse which is the artists book.
So A is for AFFORDABILITY. Against the $5000.00 that is the starting visual artists canvas in a white cube gallery, the artists book is $5, $50 or $500. The artists book is an artwork that can be bought out of petty cash.
B is for BINDING, which should not be confused with stitching and gluing. The artists book partially fixes a number of similar pieces together so that they can individually wiggle, or wander.
C is for COPY: the number of copies is a rough guide to the kind of book it is. But more importantly, an artists book is an artwork that several (or many) people can examine at the same time, but in different places.
D is for DISTRIBUTION. Art has its exclusive and limited outlets, but the artists book is a parasite that is distributed through any host that will do.
E is for EVERYONE; everyone has handled book since they were babies, and can therefore recognise what an artist has done with it. An artists book is an artwork of which no-one has asked: “what is it?”
F is for FOLD, as in folded paper. The artists book is a large idea folded into a small lump so that it can be unfolded and then folded back.
G is for GATHERING of various skills and talents, and of materials and procedures. The artists book takes the colophon and spreads it through the whole book.
H is for HYBRID. The artists book is not a novel, is not a painting, is not a sculpture, but something else that echoes all of these things. (but see K…below)
I is for INDIVIDUAL. More than any other kind of artwork, the artists book is a 1:1 experience for the reader/viewer/unfolder. The artists book is a command performance for every reader.
J is for JUXTAPOSE, with painter against poet, printer against paper and so on. The artists book is a coalition of enemies (as the Viennese Werkbund was once described).
K is for KINAESTHESIA, the sense of movement. An artists book is an invitation to a choreography of unfolding. The artists book is a branch of dance, not literature or painting.
L is for LUXURY, not as in expensive but as in excessive, either too much or not enough (to echo John Cage). The artists book is excessive in at least one quality, better so if in all.
M is for MUTATION. Every new artists book is a surprise and shows what a book could be. An artists book demonstrates what every previous book has missed.
N is for NARRATIVE. Generally, the narrator is thought of as a person talking, but in an artists book this slips over into the book. In an artists book, the book is the narrator and the story at the same time.
O is for OPAQUE, as in the opposite of transparent. The artists book always gets in the way.
P is for PRINT. This is the greatest overlap between artists and crafters, between studios and factories. The artist book has this mantra: positive/negative; recto/verso; front/back; black/white.
Q is for QUESTION. The artists book questions the book, and thereby questions all the other things that “the book” stands for.
R is for READING, which is the trace of a line through conventionalised space. The artists book is meant to be read, which for us here means that it guides us from left to right (or against it).
S is for SHAPE, SIZE and SCALE. The ordinary book is a thick rectangle of thin sheets which can be held in a hand. The artists book measures the hand and rhymes it.
T is for TIME. In an ordinary book, time flows in the reader’s imagination. When an artists book is unfolded, time occupies the surrounding space.
U is for UNIQUE, as in the unique copy. In an artists book, the unique moment of reading is taken back into the unique moment of making.
V is for VULNERABLE. Books are fragile and easy to mark and tear and artists books must be handled to completely understand them. The artists book longs for white gloves and, when in custody, longs to be free of them.
W is for WORD and WRITING, the most arrogant of human traces. The artists book puts the word (and writing) in its place, as marks on a surface.
X is for un-eXhibitable. At best, an artists book can be put in a glass case and shown at one opening. But, the artists book cannot dance on its own.
Y is for YAWN. The artists book is a new genre, but is no guarantee of art. Can the artists book be as boring as hell, as predictable as heaven and still be an artists book?
Z is for zero, which is a degree that cannot be reached because the book and art are complex systems. The degree zero of an artists book is Fahrenheit 451, and between 0 and 451 there are a lot of degrees.
As all of these definitions suggest exceptions which are specific artists books, I will end by presenting, or rather performing, a specific book. Further, because the works in this exhibition are so silent, I’ve chosen one which brings out the acoustic properties of a book. The book is sounds by Keith Godard, an American graphic designer, but one who has book links with the fluxus artist Emmett Williams. I bought the book in 1974 for US$3.50 in the bookshop of the San Francisco Museum of Art and carried it in my travelling luggage across the United States and into England, from where I posted it to Australia a year or so later. Its colophon reads:
“Except for what you are reading on this page, this book has no words or printed images. It is as the title suggests a book of sounds. The pages in sequence make a quiet drama of subtle noises. By turning, rustling and fumbling the pages, you will find all that is intended.”
(The book begins with four felt-like sheets, then proceeds through seven pages of glacime, three of thin tracing paper, six of yellow-trace, three of brown paper, four of thick and stiff semi-transparent paper, three of alfoil bonded to paper and ends with two pages connected with a Velcro button, which gives a tearing sound as the full-stop of the book and which suggests a further sound world of tears, cuts and crumpling ...)
Alex Selenitsch
asele@unimelb.edu.au
Alex Selenitsch is a Melbourne-based poet and architect and a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne.