What is an artist’s book?

This article appeared in State of the Art, Issue 4, November 1992-February 1993. Author: Noreen Grahame

An exhibition from Germany of book objects and artists’ books, entitled Das Buch: Art in Book Form, is on view at the Art Gallery of Western Australia from 10 December to 17 January, 1993, following a successful tour in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. The exhibition has been brought to Australia by the Goethe Institute on behalf of the Institute für Auslandsbeziehungen.

Das Buch, as a major exhibition of book art, sparked the perennial question: what is an artist’s book?

Artists’ books and artists’ books exhibitions have all but been ignored by art reviewers and are not generally understood by the art public. This may be due partly to the difficulty of defining this genre of art. Even the experts are reluctant to do so.

Artists’ books can be described simply as books which have been made by artists. In fact, Marcel Duchamp once said just that. They are, however, not books about art, but artworks in themselves; artworks contained within the formal covers of the book form, but not bound by accepted conventions of book publishing.

During the changing social and political climate of the 1960s and the early 1970s, artists rediscovered the book. Pavel Büchler wrote, ‘…The Gutenberg revolution marked the beginning of the mechanical era, in which art has moved into galleries and museums, and books have come out of scriptoria and monasteries into the bookshop (on their way to the railway bookstall and the supermarket). Until some twenty years ago the relationship (between visual art and the book) was quite clear.’[i]

The book became the most appropriate vehicle for artists to record and disseminate their ideas and artworks. A kind of declaration of independence – an exhibition without a space. The advent of the Xerox made it possible for artists to self-publish; also, the popularity of paperbacks made book printing less expensive and artists could produce repeatable art (misprinted as ‘respectable’ in the article causing many to question me about what I meant by respectable art) to reach a wider audience in exactly the manner they wanted. Thus, they hoped the public would be able to experience art in a form in which it was conceived.

More and more artists turned to making books. They began experimenting with the boundaries of visual art and literature. They also began experimenting with the book format, with the shape and the size of the book.

In Europe and the USA, artists such as Dieter Roth, Edward Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner and Marcel Broodthaers were making books.

In 1957 Dieter Roth founded his own press, forlag ed, in Iceland and began publishing books. He experimented with offset printing and collaborated with his publisher to design books with slits cut through the pages, holes, shapes, printed colours, comic-book images and drawings, and he solved the problem of printing, binding and boxing. The majority of Roth’s books have been self-published, with small and numbered editions.

Some of his experiments with the book form led him towards making book objects. In 1961 he produced a book object, Literaturewurst, a sausage skin filled with shredded newspaper mixed with water and gelatin, 40 x 9 cm and published in an edition of 50. It was an artist’s book in the shape of a sausage – the staple diet in Germany and Switzerland. Most of Roth’s books have been re-published in standard format in editions of 1,000.

Another artist who published artists’ books in numbered editions and then re-published them is Edward Ruscha. In 1962 he published his first book, Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, in an edition of 400 numbered copies. Five years later he reprinted it in an edition of 500 copies, which were not numbered; in 1969, a third edition of 3000 came out. His decision to reprint was an acknowledgement of the irrelevance of the limited edition book.

Exhibition catalogues also became artists’ books – or catalogues-as-artwork. Amongst Marcel Broodthaers’ many artist’s books is Moule Oeufs Frites Pot Charbon, created for his 1966 exhibition at the Wide White Space Gallery in Amsterdam. Another of his books, A Voyage on the North Sea is full of mystery and, through a sequence of details of a 19th century Romantic painting of a ship at sea, forces the viewer to read the clues given in the imagery.

Pavel Büchler writes in Turning Over the Pages, ‘The employment of new mediums, materials and processes meant it became increasingly difficult to find a definition for a work of art among the classical art historical categories of painting, sculpture and architecture…New categories had to be defined for the new mediums including the ‘new’ book. Used in the context of art it could no longer remain just a book.’[ii]

Noreen Grahame

grahame galleries and editions, Brisbane. October 1992

[i] Pavel Büchler 1986, Turning Over the Pages, exhibition catalogue Kettle’s Yard Gallery, UK.

 

[ii] ibid