Photos: Literature Sausage Dieter Roth 1968. Twentysix Gasoline Stations Ed Ruscha 1967. Felt Jonathan Ward 1997
Artists’ books are realised in a wide range of approaches, materials and designs. They can be handmade works, unique, or produced in small editions. The form has burst through the edges of its own conditional structure. Stephane Mallarme’s observation, made at the end of the nineteenth century, that “Everything, in the world, exists to end up in a book”, has today in a sense been fully realised, to the point at which the object that the term “book” once neatly delineated no longer remains so tightly constrained. Jacques Derrida has discussed the dissolution or end of the book, in an approach that also signals its total expansion, mutation and radical redefinition.
The artists’ book, then, may be any number of things. For every definition one might invent, there are surely others that contradict it. How then might one define such a conflicted and multiple object? What is important about “artists’ books” are not their erstwhile relation to the classical volume or traditional book, but, taking the received notion of the book only as a point of departure, how and why artists employ and redirect the form in order to make it something of their own. In the 1960s and 1970s a number of artists began to reinvent the terms of the then established model of art, bringing into emphasis its conceptual rather than material or technical features. Ed Ruscha and others in the USA and Europe saw the book as an avenue through which they could expand and reconfigure their work. The boundaries and sharp definitions of the limits of established media (as Cotter implies) dissolved, leading to a range of objects, of which “artists' books” is but one example. Although there were many earlier instances of books by artists, notably by those involved with groups such as the Russian and the Italian Futurists, De Stijl, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists, and on up to Ruscha and, a little later, those produced by Conceptual artist such as Ian Burn, recent years have seen a resurgence of the genre. The legacy of Conceptualism, in which British art schools are deeply steeped, includes an expansionist and exploratory component, the idea of innovation being paramount. The artist’s book can be a good way of producing a work as a one-off object, as a limited edition, or as a potentially limitless multiple object if the aim is to disseminate work far and wide.
References: Stephane Mallarme, excerpt from Divagations, 1897, included in Mallarme, The Poems, Penguin, 1977, p. 49
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; Dissemination, Athlone Press, 1981
by Peter Suchin, artist and a critic
Index, Scribble, Snapshot, Tract by Peter Suchin, available exclusively at KALEID editions.
