Artists Books

Visual and cultural analysis of Meiji shōnen kaiko 明治少年懐古 (Reminiscences of a Meiji youth, 1944), an illustrated book that nostalgically recalls Japan's late nineteenth and early twentieth century period of modernization. The book is in the Pulverer Collection of Japanese illustrated books of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and is featured on The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book website. My commentary, along with a complete set of readable images of the book, may be found here: http://pulverer.si.edu/node/440/title/1.

Essay published in Ways of Working: A Rate of Exchange, Cambridge: Wysing Arts Centre, Publish and be Damned and Unrealised Projects, 2013. Available to purchase at http://www.wysingartscentre.org/shop/shop_item/ways_of_working_a_rate_of_exchange

Encyclopedias are tomes of articles and subjects on any and every topic of accumulated, verifiable knowledge.  They differ to dictionaries in that a linguistic, alphabetical listing of words is limiting.  This form of classification may leave the meaning-seeker lacking in contextualized understanding and association. But this encyclopedia is different.
Here, when a volume discusses printing, one can run fingers down the impressions left by the printing press, and touch the unevenness of ink. Or, a book on artists’ stamps has samples of these intimate artworks, gathered from around the world.  Therefore, the curious thing with this particular collection is the way information is presented, the change information has undergone in the hands of an artist.  It presents in real time, an original artifact; how artists and writers interpret and intimately engage with facts – a demonstration of how artists think and decode subject matter in their own unique ways.  And, this installation continually proves to be an area ripe for artistic collaboration - a body of work made possible through world wide collective adventure.

본 연구는 디지털시대의 뉴미디어(new media)에서 대두되는 인터렉티비티
(interactivity)를 낡은 매체(old media)인 그림책에서 찾아보고자 하는 관점에
서부터 출발하였다. 이러한 관점은 곧 독자가 그림책을 읽을 때 어떠한 인터
렉티비티로 교감을 하게 되는지에 대한 질문으로 연결 되었고, 그림책 중에서
도 아티스트 북(Artist’ book)의 성격을 가진 그림책을 교감의 대상 매체로 분
석하였다. 단순히 ‘그림책’이 아니라 ‘아티스트 북으로서의 그림책’이라고 수식
하는 것은 일반 어린이용 동화책으로서의 그림책뿐 아니라 작가가 매체의 특
성을 전적으로 활용하여 독자에게 보다 심미적인 경험을 나누고자 하는 의도
가 담긴 작품으로서의 그림책을 분석해보고 싶었기 때문이다. 아티스트 북과
그림책은 ‘책’이라는 매체로서의 뿌리는 같지만, 그 예술적 표현의 관점과 창
작의 과정, 결과적으로 표현되어지는 창작물의 정체성에 있어서 분명 차이가
존재한다. 그리고 본 논문에서는 이 두 영역이 교차되는 예술매체를 통해 내
면적으로 경험하게 되는 상호작용을 ‘상상적 인터렉티비티’라고 정의하고, 그
특성을 분석해본다. 정지된 이미지로 표현 된 글과 그림이 특정한 맥락을 갖
고 책으로서 엮어진 그림책 안에는 다양한 인지적 ‘틈’이 발생하게 되는데, 본
연구에서 집중적으로 다루어지는 ‘상상적 인터렉티비티’는 그림책에서 발견되
는 이 틈으로부터 비롯된다. 그리고 이러한 틈의 영역은 ‘그림과 그림 사이’,
‘글과 그림 사이’, ‘페이지와 페이지 사이’로 분류하여 연구하였다.

This study began with the perception of searching its ‘interactivity’
that is used often in new media, through picture books that are
considered as old media in the digital era. In this aspect, it leads to a
question of what kind of interactivity do readers experience through
picture books, and more specifically, the picture books characterized as
artists’ books. By focusing on this subject matter, ‘picture books as
artists’ books’, the study perceives picture books not only as children’s
books but also as ‘artistic media’ that intends to be interactive between
the artists and its readers. Although artists’ books and picture books
come from the same root of ‘books’, they are distinguished by their
artistic values, identities, and ways of expression. Through this artistic
media, the study is to focus on its psychological experience as
interactivity, so-called, ‘imaginative interactivity’ and analyzes its
characteristic values. On the surface of picture books, all images of text
and drawings are still, and they are bound as layers of pages in a form of books. Within this structure of picture books, various types of
cognitive ‘gap’ occur and this area is where the imaginative
interactivity mainly activates. In this study, the area of gap is defined
as ‘in-between pictures’, ‘between text and pictures’, and ‘in-between
pages.’

In the age of the novel, we read fiction sequentially and unselfconsciously. This practice requires us to ignore the materiality and appearance of books, for these factors disrupt narrative absorption. "The Look of the Book" explores specific books from England and America whose visual and material characteristics resist and redefine habitual experiences of reading prose. These specimens connect word and image in the book format, and they therefore resist the theories of critics since Gotthold Lessing that have separated visual and verbal modes. Lessing's contemporary, Laurence Sterne, uses visual elements in Tristram Shandy (1760–67) to digress from the reading sequence while furthering the overall narrative. Sterne's techniques also establish a taxonomy of the book's constituent variables. In the twentieth century, as bookmaking technologies became more widely accessible, a printing renaissance brought artists into book design. Vanessa Bell creates images and...

Volume co-edited with Isabelle Chol
Les Espaces du livre / Spaces of the Book
Supports et acteurs de la création texte / image (XXe–XXIe
siècles)
Materials and Agents of the Text/Image Creation (20th–21st Centuries)
http://www.peterlang.com?431903

This study is an investigation of the livre d'artiste as a strategic instrument in the cultural battle during the German Occupation of France and subsequently during France's post– Second World War reconstruction. Specifically, it examines how a loose network of artists, writers and publishers called on their aesthetic ingenuity through their livres d'artistes to circumvent the German censors, who attempted to suppress decades of French cultural freedom. The examination centres on a selected cluster of war–related livres d'artistes to identify patterns and relationships between these works and the surrounding events to extract some of the underlying issues that have previously gone undetected. Focusing on the wartime livres d'artistes of Pierre Bonnard, Jean Fautrier, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Georges Rouault, the analysis reveals the rich variety of disguised codes and symbols that these artists embedded into their livres d'artistes to protest the atrocities around them and to provide the French people with hope for the future. Using the publisher Tériade's illustrated books as examples, this study examines how some French artists who opposed the Occupation reached out to the past through the medievalist idiom, a source of French cultural leadership, for their cultural defence of France. In doing so, the evolution of Tériade's modernised mutation of the medieval manuscript, the manuscrit moderne, is revealed. In addition, this thesis asserts that when viewed through the prism of his illustrated books, together with his determination to remain in France, Matisse emerges as a " silent activist " in opposition to the Vichy and Nazi regimes. Using a specially designed database, this research reveals a hitherto unreported postwar resurgence of the livre d'artiste, which is a notable response to the call by French authorities to reclaim the nation's prewar artistic leadership. What emerges from this thesis is a greater understanding of the role of the livre d'artiste as an important cultural instrument in this momentous period of France's history.

The inventor of the positive/negative process for photography, 19th century polymath Henry Fox Talbot, was so enthusiastic about the potential for his discovery that he made a prediction for a future where, 'Every man [would be] his own printer and publisher' (Talbot 1839:HS/17/289). Now, 170 years on, Fox Talbot's prediction is being realised. From the beginning of the process the value of the photographic image as a form of communication was instantly recognised, and photographs became a necessary and popular addition to books. The design and production of these books was usually overseen by the entrepreneurial and editorial control of a publisher. Book publishing required a raft of specialist tasks to be carried out under the control of production teams. This complicated structure usually alienated photographers from engaging in their own publishing ventures. Over time the book, consisting mainly of photographs, became known as the photobook and developed into an inst...

Improvisation is a way of knowing that is experiential, pivotal to the body’s movement and growth in the world, allowing us to manage constraint and freedom in a rich world of possibility. Within this paper we trace a trajectory from improvisation in life to improvisation in art. By focusing on practitioners who work with improvisation in precise ways in the fields of anthropology, ecology, visual art and music, we explore how improvisation and experiential knowledge are profoundly interconnected. To achieve this, we use the four characteristics of improvisation developed by Ingold and Hallam (anthropologists) as a framework for the evaluation of art practices of improvisation including the authors’ own project work. We expand the framework through Dewey’s analysis of art as experience. The article concludes with an evaluation of how the techniques and processes of improvisation from the case examples may be useful ways to shed light on the workings of experiential knowledge

Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Actual Occasion is the third in a series of three novellas emerging from a writing practice that taps the cusp of consciousness between dreaming and waking. An Actual Occasion revisits the viral transitioning of the becoming rat-woman from Last Year at Betty and Bob's: A Novelty (vol. 1 in the trilogy). The adventure focuses on the Gritta’s, a gang of artists on retreat in the Dolomite Mountains, as they engage with the idiosyncratic, keeper of the keys, Roberta. Her other-worldly Café Arcadia, a magical cathedral of voluminous aphorism, is an archival refuge and durational homage to Benjaminian storytelling. This futurist fairy-tale is tinged with a curious mix of 19th-century feminist idioms and a queer, post-pandemic sanguinity.

This forward-thinking collection brings together over sixty essays that invoke images to summon, interpret, and argue with visual studies and its neighboring fields such as art history, media studies, visual anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, and aesthetics. The product of a multi-year collaboration between graduate students from around the world, spearheaded by James Elkins, this one-of-a-kind anthology is a truly international, interdisciplinary point of entry into cutting-edge visual studies research. The book is fluid in relation to disciplines; it is frequently inventive in relation to guiding theories; it is unpredictable in its allegiance and interest in the past of the discipline—reflecting the ongoing growth of visual studies.

The author presents a postdoctoral research on the art exhibition in the form of a virtual artist's book. The purpose of this research was to conduct theoretical research on new trends in art curation and virtual artists' book, in addition to creating an art exhibition in digital format intended to be displayed in museums and other cultural venues. As a result, a hybrid book in augmented reality was created, named as “Acropolis Remix”, which can be exhibited in galleries, museums, libraries, gardens, private homes, etc.

Resenha do livro de artista pioneiro, publicado pelo brasileiro Aloísio Magalhães em parceria com o estadunidense Eugene Feldman em 1957. O autor do texto, Clifton Meador, é um experiente artista-impressor e faz uma análise do livro considerando aspectos de sua produção gráfica, apontando os recursos utilizados pelos artistas para atingir o resultado desejado. O texto inclui a transcrição de depoimentos dos artistas, em especial um famoso texto de Feldman em que ele compara a impressoraoffset a uma ferramenta artística como um lápis ou um pincel.

Dall’osservazione dello spazio urbano della città di Roma, effettuato fra gennaio 2011 e giugno 2012, sono stati censiti e documentati 247 graffiti. Ciò che viene presentato in questo saggio è una prima analisi tematica del materiale raccolto. A questa centrale riflessione se ne accompagnano altre incentrate sul contributo che lo studio del graffitismo, osservato e documentato nello spazio urbano e linguistico della capitale italiana, può offrire relativamente a tematiche quali, per esempio, il rapporto diamesico fra lingua scritta e parlata, l’analisi delle varietà giovanili, le interferenze del dialetto e la creazione di neologismi.

Simon Woolham's artists' bookwork is concerned primarily with occupied spaces and the narratives that unfold within them. His drawings of school playing fields, junked underpasses and the like often contain texts with the tone of a dialogue. Through these glimpses of speech the dilapidated environments come to life in a skint version of enchantment.

Que potencialidade ainda mantém a poesia concreta? O que pode permitir que essa poética continue intervindo no presente? Restabelecendo o vínculo com as tendências construtivas que surgem no Brasil da metade do século XX e tomando a poesia concreta como referência multidimensional, evidenciamos alguns conflitos inscritos entre as políticas estéticas e o projeto político dessa poesia para propor outra genealogia que não se baseia somente na sua análise formal, mas que
busca entender como essa estética radical penetra no social, na rua, no cotidiano, nos meios de comunicação e reverbera nas redes artísticas alternativas. Indicamos também algumas discussões que tentaram constituir e delimitar a poesia concreta, contrapostas às suas derivas, que subvertem definições e enquadres temporais designados pela historiografia literária. Assim, a primeira parte apresenta um panorama macropolítico no qual esta e outras produções se inscrevem para, nos capítulos seguintes, apontar formas de resistência micropolíticas.

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Which potentiality remains from concrete poetry? What can allow it to keep intervening in the present? By re-establishing its connections with constructive art tendencies that emerged in Brazil since the 1950s, and taking concrete poetry as a multidimensional experience, some conflicts inscribed on the politics of aesthetics are exposed here to put forward a different genealogy of its political project, which is not based on a formal analysis only. Instead, what is important here is how those radical aesthetics perverts the social structure, the public sphere, the common, and the mass media communication, echoing in other alternative artistic networks. Some discussions that attempted to restrict concrete poetry in an opposite way of its aims are also pointed out to subvert definitions and bring down the temporal frame of literary historiography. In this way, the first section proposes a macro-political panorama of this poetic production, and in the following chapters, some different ways of micropolitical resistance are emphasized.

This article discusses a Leverhulme residency undertaken by the author Julie Brixey-Williams in 2003–4 at the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland. Notions of medical visibility were explored through practice-led investigations under the umbrella title, Traces of the Invisible, that concentrated on making concrete, visible responses to the hidden or intangible elements of the anesthetist’s working life in areas such as sleep, breath, pain and genetic markers. Rosebud is a unique nine-foot concertina bookwork created after reading the entire story of The Sleeping Beauty into an anesthetic machine. This essay expands upon the concepts and material responses that led to the making of the book with particular reference to how the book’s structure forms a relationship to language and the body-as-site, whilst operating as a sculptural object that raises the visibility of the anesthetic profession. Fairy tales and their telling, including stories of enchanted sleep, tr...

Das Alphabet als Dispositiv bietet Verfassern und Nutzern von Enzyklopädien, Lexika und Wörterbüchern unschätzbar praktische Vorteile, wenn es um ein effizientes Arrangement großer Informationsmengen geht. Daneben gibt es Texte, deren Verfasser sich der alphabetischen Form bedienen, weil sie sich um ihrer selbst und ihrer Implikationen willen für sie interessieren: ›Literarische‹ Wörterbücher und Vokabellisten, Lexikonromane, enzyklopädische Darstellungen von Gegenständen, über die primär geschrieben wird, um sie in einen alphabetisch organisierten Text aufzunehmen, ja die möglicherweise eigens für diese Darstellung erfunden wurden. Der vorliegende Band versammelt die Beiträge einer Tagung an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum zum Thema „Lexikographik als künstlerisch-literarische Schreibweise“, die sich aus verschiedenen Perspektiven mit den Beziehungen zwischen Alphabet, Konzepten der Enzyklopädistik, Verfahren der Lexikographik und der Wörterbuchproduktion sowie mit deren Bedeutung für Literatur und Kunst auseinandersetzen. Die lange Geschichte ästhetischer Gestaltungen des Buchstäblichen und alphabetbezogener Darstellungsverfahren steht dabei ebenso im Blick wie die Konvergenzen von wissenspoetologischen, sprachreflexiven und ästhetischen Interessen.

This book is an anthology of Mark Edward’s creative practice-led projects. It transmits and communicates his research through varied artistic means, primarily contemporary dance, immersive art installation, drag performance, and photography. Through the innovative practice of 'mesearch', in which the author is both theoriser and theorised, this study delivers a personal, creative narration, combining reflections and emotions in relation to self and performance. Instead of being an attempt to undervalue or challenge the accepted notions of style within academic research, it promotes a freedom of expression which allows greater fluidity between the researcher, the performer, and the writer.

Since 2006, Jack Ginsberg, the internationally renowned private collector of artists’ books and I have set about creating a database of every artist’s book produced in South Africa. By isolating the South African books in the Ginsberg Collection as well as the books I had come across in my research, we began to construct not only a bespoke database but also a wild bibliographic dream. It was hoped that this dream would gain such momentum within the South African book arts community that awareness of its existence as an index of a fledgling activity might promote the making of more objects which would then surpass the database’s ability to keep up with production. One of the most well documented problems facing appropriate mechanisms for the cataloguing for artists’ books is grappling with the hybrid nature of the items to be catalogued, each of which claims some territory within the disputed space of the book arts. This paper examines the progress of our database and discusses probl...

RESUMEN: El presente texto expone las diferentes estrategias formativas llevadas a cabo para la enseñanza de la producción de libros-arte (libros de artista) y otros proyectos editoriales a nivel de posgrado (máster). En ese sentido, se describen diferentes proyectos desarrollados dentro de la Maestría en Estudios y Procesos Creativos en Arte y Diseño (MEPCAD), adscrita a la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua, México), y las experiencias pedagógicas que de ellos se derivan. Específicamente, se exponen dos casos: Frankenstein: tras el relato de lo monstruoso, edición experimental basada en métodos de creación aleatoria, colectiva y colaborativa, y didácticas para la creación de libros de artista fundamentadas poéticamente en la hermenéutica analógica y en la metodología de la investigación basada en la práctica (IBA). Ambas son estrategias de enseñanza- aprendizaje que nos han permitido canalizar varios retos en una misma línea de tiempo, coadyuvando en la construcción ...

This resource is comprised of five short films which utilize the exhibition space as an opportunity for debate. Each film takes a key critical position in art and demonstrates the understandings that can be generated about an artwork. The exhibition 'Passages' is here discussed by ...

Sean Johnston has written a timely and much needed book about the history of holography—a “high‐tech” science that emerged in the mid‐1960s out of the shadows of Cold War secrecy to fascinate the wider scientific community and the general public. Using tiny ...

Although the Fluxus art (non-)movement is often read as a historical phenomenon, the breadth of its innovations and complexities actively thwarts linear and circumscribed viewpoints. The notion of Fluxus incorporates contradiction in challenging and enduringly generative ways. More than five decades after its emergence, this special issue of OnCurating entitled Fluxus Perspectives seeks to re-examine the influence, roles, and effects of Fluxus via a wide range of scholarly perspectives. The editors Martin Patrick and Dorothee Richter asked notable writers from different locations, generations, and viewpoints, all of whom having written about Fluxus before, to offer their thoughts on its significance, particularly in relation to contemporary art. With its emphasis upon events, festivals, and exhibitions, Fluxus may also be interpreted as an important, prescient forerunner of contemporary strategies of curating. Contributions by Simon Anderson, Jordan Carter, Kevin Concannon, Ken Friedman, Natilee Harren, John Held, Jr., Hannah B Higgins, Hanna B. Hölling, Natasha Lushetich, Billie Maciunas, Peter van der Meijden, Ann Noël, Martin Patrick, Dorothee Richter, Henar Rivière, Julia Robinson, Owen F. Smith, Weronika Trojanska, and Emmett Williams.