Artist's book


Artists' books are works of art that engage with and transform the form of a book. Some are mass-produced with multiple editions, and some in small editions, while others are produced as one-of-a-kind objects.
There is no single definition of an artist's book, and formulating a definition is cumbersome and subject to debate. Importantly, the creation of artists' books incorporates a variety of formats and genres. They have a complex history, with a particular focus and growth in contemporary artist movements. They also have recently grown in popularity, especially in art institutions, and have become popular in art library reference workshops. The exact definition and usage of artists' books has become more fluid and porous alongside the growth in popularity of artists' books.

Overview

Artists' books have employed a wide range of forms, including the traditional Codex form as well as less common forms like scrolls, fold-outs, concertinas or loose items contained in a box. Artists have been active in printing and book production for centuries, but the artist's book is primarily a late 20th-century form. Book forms were also created within earlier movements, such as Dada, Constructivism, Futurism, and Fluxus.
One suggested definition of an artist's book is as follows:
Generally, an artist's book is interactive, portable, movable, and easily shared. Some artists' books challenge the conventional book format and become sculptural objects. Artists' books also may be created in order to make art accessible to people outside of the formal contexts of galleries or museums.
Artists' books can be made from a variety of materials, including found objects. The VCU Book Arts LibGuide writes that the following methods and practices are common in artists' book production:
  • hand binding
  • letterpress printing
  • digital printing
  • photography
  • printmaking
  • calligraphy and hand lettering
  • painting and drawing
  • graphic designing
  • paper engineering
  • automated/machine production

    Early history

Origins of the form: William Blake

Whilst artists have been involved in the production of books in Europe since the early medieval period, most writers on the subject cite the English visionary artist and poet William Blake as the earliest direct antecedent.
Books such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience were written, illustrated, printed, coloured and bound by Blake and his wife Catherine, and the merging of handwritten texts and images created intensely vivid, original works without any obvious precedents. These works would set the tone for later artists' books, connecting self-publishing and self-distribution with the integration of text, image and form. All of these factors have remained key concepts in artists' books up to the present day.

Avant-garde production 1909–1937

As Europe plunged headlong towards World War I, various groups of avant-garde artists across the continent started to focus on pamphlets, posters, manifestos, and books. This was partially as a way to gain publicity within an increasingly print-dominated world, but also as a strategy to bypass traditional gallery systems. This allowed for the dissemination of new ideas and the creation of affordable work that might be seen by people who would not otherwise enter art galleries.
This move toward radicalism was exemplified by the Italian Futurists, and by Filippo Marinetti in particular. The publication of the "Futurist Manifesto", 1909, on the front cover of the French daily newspaper Le Figaro was an audacious coup de théâtre that resulted in international notoriety. Marinetti used the ensuing fame to tour Europe, kickstarting movements across the continent that all veered towards book-making and pamphleteering.
In London, for instance, Marinetti's visit directly precipitated Wyndham Lewis' founding of the Vorticist movement, whose literary magazine BLAST is an early example of a modernist periodical, while David Bomberg's book Russian Ballet, with its interspersing of a single carefully spaced text with abstract colour lithographs, is a landmark in the history of English language artists' books.

Russian Futurism, 1910–1917

Regarding the creation of artists' books, the most influential offshoot of futurist principles occurred in Russia. Centered in Moscow, around the Gileia Group of Transrational poets David and Nikolai Burliuk, Elena Guro, Vasili Kamenski and Velimir Khlebnikov, the Russian futurists created a sustained series of artists' books that challenged every assumption of orthodox book production. Whilst some of the books created by this group would be relatively straightforward typeset editions of poetry, many others played with form, structure, materials, and content that still seems contemporary.
Key works such as Worldbackwards, by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, Natalia Goncharova, Larionov Rogovin and Tatlin, Transrational Boog by Aliagrov and Kruchenykh & Olga Rozanova, and Universal War by Kruchenykh used hand-written text, integrated with expressive lithographs and collage elements, creating small editions with dramatic differences between individual copies. Other titles experimented with materials such as wallpaper, printing methods including carbon copying and hectographs, and binding methods including the random sequencing of pages, ensuring no two books would have the same contextual meaning. Marinetti visited in 1914, proselytizing on behalf of Futurist principles of speed, danger, and cacophony.
Russian futurism gradually evolved into Constructivism after the Russian Revolution, centered on the key figures of Malevich and Tatlin. Attempting to create a new proletarian art for a new communist epoch, constructivist books would also have a huge impact on other European avant-gardes, with design and text-based works such as El Lissitzky's For The Voice having a direct impact on groups inspired by or directly linked to communism. Dada in Zurich and Berlin, the Bauhaus in Weimar, and De Stijl in the Netherlands all printed numerous books, periodicals, and theoretical tracts within the newly emerging International Modernist style. Artists' books from this era include Kurt Schwitters and Kate Steinitz's book The Scarecrow, and Theo van Doesburg's periodical De Stijl.

Dada and Surrealism

was initially started at the Cabaret Voltaire, by a group of exiled artists in neutral Switzerland during World War I. Originally influenced by the sound poetry of Wassily Kandinsky, and the Blaue Reiter Almanac that Kandinsky had edited with Marc, artists' books, periodicals, manifestoes and absurdist theatre were central to each of Dada's main incarnations. Berlin Dada in particular, started by Richard Huelsenbeck after leaving Zurich in 1917, would publish a number of incendiary artists' books, such as George Grosz's The Face Of The Dominant Class, a series of politically motivated satirical lithographs about the German bourgeoisie.
Whilst concerned mainly with poetry and theory, Surrealism created a number of works that continued in the French tradition of the Livre d'Artiste, whilst simultaneously subverting it. Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté, collaging found images from Victorian books, is a famous example, as is Marcel Duchamp's cover for Le Surréalisme' featuring a tactile three-dimensional pink breast made of rubber.
One important Russian writer/artist who created artist books was Alexei Remizov. Drawing on medieval Russian literature, he creatively combined dreams, reality, and pure whimsy in his artist books.

After World War II; post-modernism and pop art

Regrouping the avant-garde

After World War II, many artists in Europe attempted to rebuild links beyond nationalist boundaries, and used the artist's book as a way of experimenting with form, disseminating ideas and forging links with like-minded groups in other countries.
After the war, a number of leading artists and poets started to explore the functions and forms of the book 'in a serious way'. Concrete poets in Brazil such as Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Cobra artists in the Netherlands and Denmark and the French Lettrists all began to systematically deconstruct the book. A fine example of the latter is Isidore Isou's Le Grand Désordre,, a work that challenges the viewer to reassemble the contents of an envelope back into a semblance of narrative. Two other examples of poet-artists whose work provided models for artists' books include Marcel Broodthaers and Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Yves Klein in France was similarly challenging Modernist integrity with a series of works such as Yves: Peintures and Dimanche which turned on issues of identity and duplicity. Other examples from this era include Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's two collaborations, Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires', two works of Psychogeography created from found magazines of Copenhagen and Paris respectively, collaged and then printed over in unrelated colours.

Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha

Often credited with defining the modern artist's book, Dieter Roth produced a series of works which systematically deconstructed the form of the book throughout the fifties and sixties. These disrupted the codex's authority by creating books with holes in, allowing the viewer to see more than one page at the same time. Roth was also the first artist to re-use found books: comic books, printer's end papers and newspapers. Although originally produced in Iceland in extremely small editions, Roth's books would be produced in increasingly large runs, through numerous publishers in Europe and North America, and would ultimately be reprinted together by the German publisher Hansjörg Mayer in the 1970s, making them more widely available in the last half-century than the work of any other comparable artist.
Almost contemporaneously in the United States, Ed Ruscha printed his first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, in 1963 in an edition of 400, but had printed almost 4000 copies by the end of the decade. The book is directly related to American photographic travelogues, such as Robert Frank's The Americans', but deals with a banal journey on route 66 between Ruscha's home in Los Angeles and his parents' in Oklahoma. Like Roth, Ruscha created a series of homogenous books throughout the sixties, including Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, and Royal Road Test, 1967.
A Swiss artist worth mentioning is Warja Honegger-Lavater, who created artists' books contemporaneously with Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha.