Book-Art
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Alternative Publishing

Books by "Artists" (1983)

“Artist’s Books” is an epithet new to art discourse, and the question of what it means, or what it includes, is less evident than one might think. Tim Guest, a young Canadian who edited Books by Artists (1981) and organized the exhibition accompanying it, writes that his subject is “artworks which exist within the formal structure of the book” and he later speaks of “books which are intended to be artworks in themselves.” That seems definite and clear, until the reader discovers that this book, as well as the exhibition, is really about something else—not books as art objects, per se, but creative books made by people with acceptable visual arts reputations. Indicatively, after speaking intelligently about such issues as inventive page design, alternatives in the paginated presentation of information and experiments in binding—after shrewdly asserting that the current “tendency towards cross-fertilization also allows an artist to belong to no explicit discipline while referring to many”—Guest switches track, without announcing that he is doing so, without revealing that he is limiting his discussion and thus his exhibition only to those artistic books produced by a certain class of people.

This limitation explains not only his inclusions but the omissions. In fact, artists in many fields, not just visual arts, are making alternative books—books that differ in size, in shape, that are filled with materials other than evenly justified horizontal lines of type, punctuated by occasional illustrations. Some of the most artistic books known to me—“book- art books” I prefer to call them—are by Paul Zelevansky, Gerhard Ruhm, José Luis Castillejo, Adele Aldridge, David Arnold, Peter Barnett, Melody Sumner, Emmett Williams, Manfred Mohr, Jean-François Bory, Madeline Gins, Raymond Federman, Tom Ockerse, J Marks, R. Murray Schafer, none of whom are included, let alone mentioned, here (even though the last is a Canadian treasure), one supposes, because they do not have acceptable visual arts credentials, they do not hustle the visual arts scene, they did not go to an art college. For instance, Dick Higgins, an adventurous book-artist, is mentioned only for his collaboration with Wolf Vostell, a well-known Berlin visual artist, and not for his own extraordinary books.

This book closes with a longer essay by Germano Celent, a prolific Italian art critic, with a penchant for dropping strings of hot names in lieu of explanations or detailed evidence. Celant admits that the subject is not really the book as an artwork, or book-art, but something else—books made by prominent visual artists. Thus, in Celant’s scheme, Andy Warhol is credited as the first “artist” to produce his own exhibition catalogue (at Stockholm’s Moderna Musset, in l968), as if that should be considered an important achievement, or as if there had not been a tradition of lesser-known creative figures producing books about their own work. Thus, this book/exhibition is another example of the weak-minded fads of using the epithet “artist” to mean just visual artists and of talking about an emerging art not in terms of genuine critical categories, but in biographical categories. (What is important is not what you do, but where you came from or where you went to school; the results, if not the purpose, of this approach is nothing less than snobbery.) Biographical categories also have the merchandizing advantage of being more accessible to the buying public than art categories. (“New York school” was easier to sell than “abstract expressionism.”) Books by Artists would have more integrity if its title identified its real subject—Books by Visual Artists—which is not at all identical with the far more interesting contemporary art of alternative, artistic books.