Jenneke Adema & Gary Hall
Janneke Adema is the author of the OAPEN report Overview of Open Access Models for eBooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2010), and co-author of OAPEN – Open Access Publishing in European Networks: Report on Best Practices and Recommendations (2010). She has published in New Review of Academic Librarianship, Krisis. Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, and LOGOS: The Journal of the World Book Community, and is currently writing a PhD in the Department of Media and Communication at Coventry University.
Gary Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts, Coventry University. He is author of Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (2008) and Culture in Bits (2002), co-editor of Culture Machine, and co-founder of Open Humanities Press. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Angelaki, Cultural Politics, Cultural Studies, The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, and The Oxford Literary Review.
‘(Im)materialities of Text: The Book as a Form of Political & Conceptual Resistance in Art & Academia’
In this paper we explore how the book plays a double role in art and academia, as material object and as conceptual metaphor. Within these spheres, the book has functioned as a political tool for the construction of an alternative future, both materially and conceptually. As JohannaDrucker states, then: ‘the book can be rethought to serve new ends.’[i] At the same time, however, the book is also constrained in many ways: not only by its material dimensions and characteristics; but also by the institutions, practices, and political economies in which it is embedded and incorporated. If it is to continue to serve new ends as a political tool, the material and cultural constitution of the book therefore needs to be continually rethought and reassessed. To illustrate and explore further this politics of the book, this paper focuses on a comparative case study of the artist’s book and the scholarly monograph. Specifically, it draws on a comparison between the development the artist’s book went through in the 1960s and 70s, and some of the changes the scholarly monograph is undergoing now as it increasingly enters the realm of the digital.
In this first draft, we begin by looking at how, in an art context, the form and concept of the book has been used as a political tool to critique established institutions and the underlying notions that support them, building on the work of Johanna Drucker, Ulises Carrión and Lucy Lippard among others. For instance, with the rise of offset printing and cheaper production methods and printing techniques in the 1960s, there was an increase in access to the production and distribution of artist books. This in turn led to new functions for the artist’s book as a political tool: to democratize art; to critique the status quo of the gallery system; and, influenced by the rise of independent small press literary publishing, to circumvent the established publishing or book distribution systems.[ii] But these changes in the materiality and distribution of the codex book—as an artistic product and as a medium—also led to a renewed interest in questions to do with the nature of both art and the book. The artist book played a quintessential role in the Conceptual Art movement, for example, and in the thinking behind the dematerialization of art and the art object. At the same time book artists and theorists explored the specific materiality of the artist’s book and its dual nature of being materially bound and also conceptual open-ended.
However, as we will argue more clearly in the final version of this paper, the technological innovations that triggered change and embodied hope in the 60s and 70s with respect to the production and distribution of the artist book, were in the end not enough to sustain permanent change in the art world. Although they clearly had the potential to bring about change, in the end activist artists found that they unable to elude the cultural practices and institutions surrounding the artist book, and that in some ways they even ended up merely repeating them.
Circumventing Established Institutions
The art theorist Lucy Lippard highlights two important reasons behind the attraction of the book as an artistic medium when she comments that artist’s books are ‘considered by many the easiest way out of the art world and into the hearth of a broader audience.’[iii] Books became an increasingly popular medium of artistic expression during the 60s and 70s with their perceived potential ability to subvert the gallery system and to present art as a form of hope, a democratic multiple accessible to all with the power to break down the walls separating high and low culture. Many artist-led and controlled initiatives were established during this period to provide a forum for those artists who were excluded from the traditional institutions of the gallery and museum world. An important aspect of this rise of independent art structures and publishing were artists’ books.[iv] For many artists, such books embodied the idea of being able to control all aspects of one’s work, outside of (commercial) institutional settings, and of having direct access to potential publics without the need of intermediaries. Jo Anne Paschall, for instance, co-founder of renowned book art press, Nexus Press, narrates how the latter was initially set up by a group of Atlanta art students in 1973 after they experienced the frustration of having their work censored by their campus gallery. From this experience these students decided to take power into their own hands and establish the Nexus Photographic Cooperative.[v]
This movement of artists toward liberating themselves from the (commercial) gallery system by, amongst other things, publishing and exhibiting in artist books was by no means an easy transition however. Artists needed to come to terms with the idea that publishing their own work was not vanity self-publishing, but was rather fundamental to an artist controlling her or his own work.[vi] This is what Moore and Hendricks have referred to as the power and potential of ‘the page as an alternative space’.[vii] Producing, publishing and distributing your own artist book was from this perspective a sign of autonomy and independence, a means to affect society directly.[viii] Accordingly, many artists created their own publishing imprints or worked together with newly founded artist book publishers and printers. Clive Phillpot calls this the rise of the ‘artist-printer’. The main goal of these kinds of independent (often non-commercial) publisher-printer-artist collectives was to make experimental, innovative work as opposed to making a profit.[ix] Artist books fitted in well with the profile of what Drucker in this respect calls the mythology surrounding the ‘activist artists’, and the idea of the book as a tool of independent, activist thought.[x]
One big conceptual challenge to the gallery system came with the use of the book as a platform for exhibiting original work (itself an extension of Andre Malroux’s idea of the museum without walls). Curator Seth Siegelaub was among the first to publish his artists instead of exhibiting them. According to art historian Germano Celant, Siegelaub was in this sense ‘the first to allow complete operative and informative liberty to artists’.[xi] The Xerox Book and March 1-31, 1969, featuring work by Sol Lewitt, Robert Barry, Douglas Hueber, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and other international artists, are both examples of artist books where the book (or the catalogue) itself is the exhibition. As Moore and Hendricks point out, this offers all kinds of benefits compared to traditional exhibitions: ‘This book is the exhibition, easily transportable without the need for expensive physical space, insurance, endless technical problems or other impediments. In this form it is relatively permanent and, fifteen years later, is still being seen by the public.’[xii] With the rise and development of the artist book, the page is no longer just represented but can also be an alternative, mobile space for the presentation of original art work. As Brian Wallis argues, artists’ books served as an alternative space in themselves and at the same time they functioned within a network of alternative spaces too, spaces such asFranklin Furnace and Printed Matter, which published and distributed artists books and were set up by artists themselves (Martha Wilson, Sol LeWitt, and Lucy Lippard). Next to publishing and supporting artists’ books, these venues offered space for often highly politicized, critical, experimental, and performance art.[xiii]
The rise of artists’ books was very much underpinned by developments in technology, with the mimeo and offset revolution providing artists with direct access to quick and inexpensive methods of printing.[xiv] As James Langdon states, ‘[i]ndustrial production changed the function of the book decisively, as it quickened the process of standardization of books.’[xv] The paperback revolution of the 60s was thus a big impetus for experimentation with artists’ books as an alternative form.[xvi] However, as Drucker has argued—without downplaying the importance of cheaper technologies—we need to take care not to be too technologically deterministic, as the specific climate of the 50s and 60s, and overall changes in the art world also played important roles in the development of artists’ books.[xvii]
Another aspect of the critique of established art-institutions associated with the development of artists’ book during this period concerned the way the latter commodify art objects. Ed Ruscha is frequently mentioned as an exemplary artist in this respect, someone who, because he kept his titles in print over a prolonged period of time, actively subverted the art-commodity system and criticized the deluxe limited editions of livres d’artistes and fetishizaton of the art object.[xviii] As Lippard argues, the artist book was used to interrogate the ways in which the art market uses art as a commodity within a capitalist society. Notwithstanding its own development away from being purely an art object, the artists’ book can be used as a cheap way to convey ideas that can then be easily multiplied.[xix] This critique was part of a larger engagement with the art business and the politics surrounding the institutionalized art system, the conceptual consequences of which we will discuss further on.[xx]
The Book as a Democratic Medium
The artist book, then, because of both its specific characteristics – it is mobile, accessible, and enduring – and the innovations in print technology after WWII, was seen as having the potential to reach a wider audience outside the traditional art world. The artist book was also regarded as having the power to break down the barriers between high and low culture, using the techniques of mass media to enable artists to argue for their own alternative goals, something which offered all kinds of political possibilities.[xxi] Because the artist book conveyed a high degree of artistic autonomy, artists had a much more controlled say in how their art reached their audiences, eluding the mediating intermediaries of the gallery and museum system, and offering a much larger role to the audience who were able to interact directly with the art object.[xxii] In this respect Lucy Lippard even went so far as to envision a future where artist’s books would be readily available as part of mass consumer culture, at ‘supermarkets, drugstores and airports’.[xxiii]
As Drucker has noted, the idea of the book as a real democratic multiple came into being only after 1945. She argues that in the main it was those technological developments that were generated by 19th century industrial modes of printing that moved the book out of the realm of the expensive and labor-intensive rare commodity. Only in the 20th century could the idea or vision of the mass-produced book as a ‘democratic multiple’ really take hold.[xxiv] But we need to add to this the fact that the concept of the democratic multiple developed in a climate of political activism and social consciousness. In this respect, the democratic multiple was part of the overall dematerialization of art and a new emphasis on process.[xxv] As Drucker makes clear, then, the utopian vision of the artist book as an affordable democratic art form fitted in well with the general mythology of the time.[xxvi]
Conceptual Experimentation
‘The books documented in The Century of Artist Books transform the condition of bookness, and complicate it’, Drucker writes in the introduction to her volume on the history of artists books.[xxvii] This reflexivity of the book on its own nature is one of the essential characteristics of what makes a book an artist book. The revolution in printing technologies after WWII thus made for a reassessment of the book form. These reassessments focused on a few aspects in particular: on the specific nature of the materiality of the book; on the book as a dematerialized idea; and on the notions and practices underlying (uses of) the book.
When it came to reassessing the materiality of the book, many experiments with artist books tried to escape the linearity brought about by the codex form’s (sequential) constraints, something which has conditioned both writing and reading. One of the most important theorists as far as thinking the materiality of the book in the period after 1945 is concerned is undoubtedly Ulises Carrión. He sees the book as a specific set of conditions that should be (or require to be) responded to.[xxviii] Carrión positions the book as an object, as a container and sequence of spaces (instead of just a text). The codex is a form that needs to be responded to in what he prefers to calls ‘bookworks’, which are ‘books in which the book form, a coherent sequence of pages, determines conditions of reading that are intrinsic to the work.’[xxix] In this sense artist books interrogate the conceptual form of the book, or the structure and the meaning of the book as form.[xxx]
But the book is also a metaphor, a symbol and an icon to respond to.[xxxi] In this respect it is hard to establish a definition or set of characteristics for artists books as their nature keeps changing. As Bowden states: ‘What a book is can be challenged’.[xxxii] Drucker, meanwhile, is at pains to point out that the book is open for innovation, although it has its constraints: ‘The convention of the book is both its constrained meanings (as literacy, the law, text and so forth) and the space of new work (the blank page, the void, the empty place).’ Books ‘mutate, expand, transform’. In this sense Drucker regards the transformed book as an intervention, something which reflects the inherent critique book experiments embody with respect to their own constitution.[xxxiii] It is a tension between a fixed material shape on the one hand, and a conceptually open form that enables such restraints to be continually reassessed on the other hand. One way of examining the structures that make up the book reflexively is by disturbing those structures. Materially, the page is finite, but metaphorically it is infinite as a result of being potentially different on each respective viewing.
As well as experimenting with the material form and structure of the book, many of the artists involved in creating artist books were interested in the dematerialization of art, experimenting for instance with cheap, throwaway, and easily multiplied copies (often working under the influence of the Conceptual Art movement and the associated developments in performance art).[xxxiv] On a more conceptual level the possibility of the objectness (or the lack of it) of the artist book was interrogated in particular. As Carrión has argued, the sequential form of the book is very good in showing or embodying process.[xxxv] Indeed, an important aspect of the dematerialization of the book form is that with the rise of Conceptual Art, art works were no longer seen as deriving their identities from their medial characteristics. Instead, their identities came from their conceptual premises.[xxxvi] From this point of view, artists’ books can be understood as intermedia, using different media, technologies and materials, and synthesizing them, breaking down the barriers between different media in the process.[xxxvii] Lippard and Chandler focus on this development whereby art is perceived as a conceptual statement in their seminal article on the dematerialization of art. They write about how, with the rise of what they call ‘ultra-conceptual art’ (a category in which certain artist books can be included), the emphasis came increasingly to lie on the thinking process as such. Here, the object becomes merely the end product of an important and meaningful process. In this sense art is valued as idea and as action.[xxxviii] Art becomes language, instruction.
Finally, as part of their constitution artists’ books can be seen to have challenged certain notions and practices related to the book that we otherwise too easily take for granted. Many such books challenge the reader for instance to look at the page differently.[xxxix] Certainly, Carrion was very concerned with the thought that readers might consume books passively, unaware of their specific mediality as a medium.[xl]Brian Wallis provides an interesting overview of how postmodern artists’ books critique some of the most established notions surrounding the book by subverting those very same notions:
But other forms of speaking and writing also embody a subversive potential. Many authors of postmodern artists’ books use conventional forms (such as interviews, monologues, jokes, dream narratives, and parables) critically, as new ways to oppose the imposed narrative structures, the unquestioned hierarchy of characters, and the easy closure of much conventional literature. In place of traditional expository writing or even experimental texts, these artists’ books posit a wholly different approach to textual production that challenges accepted sites, structures, and meanings of discourse. In place of aesthetic innovation, these writers employ appropriation and reuse of existing voices, styles, and genres; in place of the coherence of the conventional text, they favor a form that is fragmentary, inconclusive, digressive, and interpenetrated with other texts; in place of the omnipotent author, they acknowledge a collectivity of voices and active participation of the reader; in place of the new or the original, they accept an understanding of language and stories as “already written” and shaped by social and political conditions.[xli]
In this sense artists’ books were part of the postmodern critique of authorship and of the authority of the work as embedded within certain dominant discourses and practices. In this respect Drucker emphasizes the importance of the artist book’s ability to reflect on the cultural status of the book. But the relationship between the book and reading, and how the physical nature of the book can change the way we read was also an important topic for artists. Many experiments with artists’ books focused on the interaction between author, reader and book, and offered an alternative, not necessarily linear, reading experience.[xlii]
At the same time many such readerly interventions constituted a critique of what Foucault called the author function. Carrión writes about how in books of the new art, as he calls them, words no longer transmit an author’s intention. Instead, authors can use other people’s words as an element of the book as a whole. From this point of view, he sees plagiarism as lying at the basis of creativity. As far as artists’ books are concerned, it is not about the artist’s intention, for Carrión but testing the meaning of language. It is the reader that creates the meaning and understands through her or his specific meaning-extraction. In this respect every book requires a different reading.[xliii] Books, then, are about experiencing; they can be seen as events requiring active participation, opening up possibilities to the reader.[xliv]
The Inhibitions of Medial Change
All that said, it gradually became apparent – for some this realisation occurred during the 60s and 70s, for others it only came about later – that the ability of artists’ books as a political tool to bring about institutional change in the art world and to question both the concept of the book and art as an object, was not of long-term duration. With respect to the democratization of the artist book Lucy Lippard noted that, by loosing its distance, there was also a chance of it loosing its critical function:
The only danger is that, with an expanding audience and an increased popularity with collectors, the artist’s book will fall back into its edition de luxe or coffee table origin, as has already happened in the few cases when such books have been co-opted by commercial publishers and transformed into glossy, pricey products.[xlv]
One of the main problems with the idea of artists’ books as a democratic medium was that it was hard for artists to compete with mass culture without running into the danger of imitating it.[xlvi] But it was also difficult for artists’ books in this vision to be too avant-garde or experimental as they then wouldn’t have been accessible to the general public.
Carrión was one of the biggest critics of the idea that artists’ books should be somehow able to subvert the gallery system. In his ‘Bookworks Revisited’ he shows how the hope surrounding the potential of the book as a medium was based on a gross misunderstanding of the mechanisms underlying the art world. He focuses his critique on the idea that the artist book is a cheap object, for the cheapness of an object has no relationship with the value or quality of the artwork in a market context. Moreover, an artist book is not necessarily cheap to produce. A whole edition of artists’ books is actually a more accurate reflection of the costs, not a single edition. The idea that the artist book can do without any intermediaries is another misconception Carrión attacks. Instead of circumventing the gallery system, he states, book artists merely adopt another set of intermediaries: publishers and book critics. The innocence of the artist book as a utopian, autonomous tool is in this sense long lost, Carrión argues.[xlvii]
Ten years later Stewart Cauley updated Carrión’s predictions and critiques, arguing that they have largely come true. As an art form and medium artists’ books haven’t been able, to avoid market mechanisms and the celebrity cult of the art system.[xlviii] By paraphrasing artists’ book theorist Clive Phillpot, Cauley is able to show that by the end of the 80s the field of artists’ publications had lost most of its experimental impetus, and had become (more like) an institution itself, imitating the gallery and museum system it was initially designed to subvert.[xlix]Drucker confirms this. Paraphrasing Lippard, she states that artist books found it difficult initially to set up an alternative system, as they had to do without organized distribution, review mechanisms, or funding schemes. When they did eventually manage to establish these structures in the 70s they in many ways mirrored rather than subverted the institutions they were supposed to critique.[l] Cauley points the finger at the book community itself, particularly the fact that they focused more on the concept and structure of the book, rather than using the book form to make critical political statements. The idea that artist books were disconnected from mainstream institutional systems was also debunked as a myth. As Drucker argues, many artist books were developed in cooperation with museums or galleries, who saw them not as subversive mechanisms, but as cheap tools for gathering additional publicity.[li]
[i] Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artist Books, New York, Granary Books, 1995, pp. 49.
[ii] Barbara Moore and Jon Hendricks, ‘The Page as an Alternative Space. 1950 to 1969’, in Joan Lyons (ed), Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, Rochester, New York, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985, p. 94. James Langdon (ed), Book, Birmingham, Eastside Projects, 2010. Different kinds of distribution systems were used to circumvent existing systems, such as using mail to distribute one’s artwork.
[iii] Lucy R. Lippard, ‘The Artist’s Book Goes Public’, in Joan Lyons (ed), Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, Rochester, New York, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985, p. 45.
[iv] Joan Lyons, ‘Introduction’ in Joan Lyons (ed), Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, Rochester, New York, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985, p. 7.
[v] Jo Anne Paschall ‘Nexus Press: A view from the Loading Dock’, in Charles Alexander (ed), Talking the Boundless Book: Art, Language, & the Book Arts. Essays from Art & Language: Re-reading the Boundless Book. A Minnesota Center for book arts symposium, Minneapolis, 1995, pp. 91-92.
[vi] Moore and Hendricks, ‘The page as an Alternative Space’, pp. 90-91.
[vii] Ibid, p. 87.
[viii] Pavel Büchler, ‘Books as Books’, in Jane Rolo & Ian Hunt (eds), Bookworks: A Partial History and Sourcebook, Book Works, London, 1996.
[ix] Clive Phillpot, ‘Some Contemporary Artists and their Books’, in Cornelia Lauf and Clive Phillpot (eds), Artist/author. Contemporary artists’ books, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, American Federation of Arts, 1998, pp. 128-129.
[x] Drucker, The Century of Artist Books, pp. 7-8.
[xi] Germano Celant, Book as Artwork 1960/1972, Brooklyn, New York, 6 Decades, 2010, p. 40.
[xii] Moore & Hendricks, ‘The page as an alternative space’, p. 94.
[xiii] Brian Wallis, ‘The Artist’s Book and Postmodernism’, in Cornelia Lauf & Clive Phillpot (eds), Artist/author. Contemporary Artists’ Books, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, American Federation of Arts, 1998.
[xiv] Drucker, The Century of Artist Books, p. 6. As amongst others Drucker and Ekdahl have shown, the Russian Futurists at the beginning of the 20th century were the first to use the new technologies to produce artists’ books as a means of independence and critique. Drucker, The Century of Artist Books, p. 47; Janis Ekdahl, ‘Artists’ Books and Beyond: The Library of the Museum of Modern Art As A Curatorial and Research Resource’, Inspel 33, 1994, p. 243.
[xv] James Langdon (ed), Book, Birmingham, Eastside Projects, 2010.
[xvi] Moore & Hendricks, ‘The Page as an Alternative Space’, pp. 94-95.
[xvii] Drucker, The Century of Artist Books, p. 69.
[xviii] The irony being that Ruscha’s books have now become fetishized art-objects themselves.
[xix] Lippard, ‘The Artist’s Book goes Public’, p. 45.
[xx] Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books’, in Joan Lyons (ed), Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, Rochester, New York, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985, p. 100; Wallis, ‘The Artist’s Book and Postmodernism’.
[xxi] Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. Although as Lucy Lippard remarked there was a discrepancy between the characteristics of the medium which had the potential to break down walls, and the actual content of most of the artist books which was highly experimental and avant-garde, putting-off potential outside-art world readers/consumers. Lippard, ‘The Artist’s book goes public’, p. 48.
[xxii] Lippard, ‘Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books’, p. 100.
[xxiii] Lippard, ‘The Artist’s Book Goes Public’, p. 48.
[xxiv] Drucker, The Century of Artist Books, p. 69.
[xxv] Ibid, p. 72.
[xxvi] Johanna Drucker, ‘Artists‘ Books and the Cultural Status of the Book’, Journal of Communication, 44, 1994; Wallis, ‘The Artist’s Book and Postmodernism’.
[xxvii] Drucker, The Century of Artist Books, p. xi.
[xxviii] Langdon (ed), Book.
[xxix] Ulises Carrión, ‘Bookworks Revisited’, in Langdon (ed), Book.
[xxx] Drucker, The Century of Artist Books, pp. 3-4.
[xxxi] Ibid, p. 360.
[xxxii] Sarah Bodman & Tom Sowden, A Manifesto For The Book, Bristol, Impact Press, 2010, p. 9.
[xxxiii] Drucker, The Century of Artist Books.
[xxxiv] Wallis, ‘The artist’s book and postmodernism’. Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.
[xxxv] Carrión, ‘Bookworks Revisited’.
[xxxvi] Drucker, ‘Artists‘ Books and the Cultural Status of the Book’.
[xxxvii] ‘Introduction’, in Jane Rolo & Ian Hunt (eds), Bookworks: A Partial History and Sourcebook, Book Works, London, 1996. Büchler, ‘Books as Books’, pp. 14-15.
[xxxviii] Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art, Art International, 12:2, February 1968.
[xxxix] Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.
[xl] Langdon (ed), Book.
[xli] Wallis, ‘The Artist’s Book and Postmodernism’.
[xlii] ‘Introduction’, in Rolo & Hunt (eds), Bookworks.
[xliii] Ulises Carrión, ‘The New Art of Making Books’, in James Langdon (ed), Book.
[xliv] Büchler, ‘Books as Books’.
[xlv] Lippard, ‘The Artist’s Book Goes Public’, pp. 47-48.
[xlvi] Stewart Cauley, ‘Bookworks for the ’90s’, Afterimage, Vol. 25 Issue 6, May/Jun98.
[xlvii] Carrión, ‘Bookworks Revisited’; Drucker, ‘Artists‘ Books and the Cultural Status of the Book’.
[xlviii] Cauley, ‘Bookworks for the ’90s’.
[xlix] Ibid.
[l] Drucker, The Century of Artist Books.
[li] Ibid, p78.
Archiving Cultures
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© 2012 Archiving Cultures
There’s much about this draft that I found attractive. It’s intellectually lively. But I did find myself asking the “So what?” question at the end: what are the implications, practical and/or intellectual, of the is paper? Where does it lead us?
Hello Janneke and Gary
I read your paper with great interest and pleasure as someone who shares your fascination with the place of politics in the artists’ book, and with the politics of the book form more widely. Most years I attend two London bookfairs, Publish and Be Damned and the Anarchist Bookfair. With their tendencies toward the artists’ book and the political tract respectively, these fairs feed two poles of my intellectual and book-fetishist tastes for small press publishing, but I often lament that there is not more crossover between them! In the end, it is the conjunction of political thought with the strange aesthetic qualities of the communist pamphlet that appeals to me the most. But I wonder what would happen if some of the more singular experiments in political thought and in the form of the artists’ book came into relation with each other more frequently. (By this I certainly don’t refer to a general aestheticisation of radical media—that process tends to coalesce around a limited set of styles and images to produce rather uninspiring results.)
What I take from your paper is that the field of the artists’ book might be the best place to start for investigating that possibility, since the founding condition of this field is critical interrogation of the form, medium, metaphor, and concept of the book. This is why it is an intriguing and important field of critical, aesthetic production—precisely that it *does* focus ‘more on the concept and structure of the book, rather than using the book form to make critical political statements’ (to reverse the logic of the critique of the artists’ book that you cite at the end of your paper). It is hence in its engagement with the properties of the book that you locate the politics of the artists’ book: the relative ease of production and distribution allowing artists to circumvent commercial art institutions; the page becoming alternative space; its emphasis on process troubling the producer/consumer divide; its mobility and affordability challenging the rarity of the art work with the democratic multiple; its textual capabilities allowing for a deconstruction of the author function, and so on (I would add to these points the question of the politics of sensation, which is lost if the artists’ book goes too far in the direction of the ‘dematerialisation’ of art). Of course, this politics of form has not occurred without a strong emphasis on content also (to risk an unproductive separation between content and form for a moment), and it is clear from reading Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books and Gwen Allen’s Artists’ Magazines that the politics of urbanism and sexuality, for instance, had an important place in the development of the artists’ book—when I think of the artists’ book, 1970s New York City is never far from my mind (I mean that in a good way!).
It is probably through the conjunction of the critique of book form and such aspects of lived politics that the artists’ book is most interesting and challenging as a political entity (it goes without saying that it is challenging in more ways than its politics). But all the same, I find some of the ways the politics of the artists’ book are framed in this field to be rather unsatisfying. And I want to ask you about this, with regard to the question of the commodity form of the book. The artists’ book often claims to critically foreground the nature of the book as commodity, but at the same time it seems to champion as *political* what are in fact *commodity* attributes of the book. The notion of the ‘democratic multiple’, for instance, seems to rely too much on the commodity attributes of standardization and iterability (and this becomes more marked if we recall that it was in the book industry that these essential attributes of the commodity form were first born). The quotation you give from Lucy Lippard is notable in this regard: her vision of a future where artists’ books would become a part of mass consumer culture, readily available at ‘supermarkets, drugstores and airports’. I have no overriding objection to purchasing books in supermarkets—my problem is if this is asserted as politics, for then ‘politics’ risks confirming capital, rather than troubling it. I guess what I’m suggesting is that the politics of the artists’ book could benefit not from having more ‘overt political statements’, but from a closer attention to its commercial form. My question to you is, have you encountered artists’ books that have moved beyond the model of the ‘democratic multiple’ in this regard, or approaches to the democratic multiple that are more progressive than the way I have characterized it?
Moving to a second question, I’m struck by an implicit sense in your paper that the time of the artists’ book (as a political entity) may be over—you remark that predictions ‘have come true’, that ‘artists’ books haven’t been able’ to avoid market mechanisms and the art system. Perhaps this is asking a question of the part of your paper to come, but what for you might be the important points of intervention for the artists’ book today, if it is to stay a vital political entity? Or to ask a slightly different question, are there developments in the field of the book that extend the concern of the artists’ book—critical interrogation of the form, medium, metaphor, and concept—into new realms, perhaps realms that would not best be characterised as artists’ books?
Hi Jenneke and Gary,
Just wondering about the subversion / containment or art versus commoditization model of political resistance you appear to be adopting. You conclude by saying “”Ten years later Stewart Cauley updated Carrión’s predictions and critiques, arguing that they have largely come true. As an art form and medium artists’ books haven’t been able, to avoid market mechanisms and the celebrity cult of the art system.” Given that artists books are part of a market from the start, wouldn’t Carrion’s prediction necessarily hold true? The logic of your model implies that experimentation / resistance will always be co-opted / contained (or mostly so). Does your model allow for any other result along a sort of subversive, sort of contained axis? I was thinking that your shift to the (im)materiality of the book might allow you to reconsider the market itself as (im)material, to read the spectrality of capital as analyzed by Marx and Derrida (on Marx. Btw, if you don’t now a book called The Self-Reflexive Page, you might want to take a look at it. It’s a kind of documentation of pages from all kinds of experimental literature. In any case, I like (im)materiality. There was a conference on this very topic at Yale last year and, well, I gave a paper at UF a few years ago entitled “What’s the Matter with (Im)Materiality?”
Best,
Richard
Here is a link to a review of The Self-Reflexive Page.
http://www.mottodistribution.com/site/?p=5845
You may find this book, Books on Books,even more compelling:
http://www.mottodistribution.com/shop/books-on-books.html
You can see, I think, another thing happening in relation to print publishing going on around the same time. As people started thinking about moving literature from books and into conceptual art and into digital media. Conceptual literature that is based on a sort of procedure might be seen as an effort to wrench the text from the print concept and transform it into a set of operations, a code, small, mobile, internal… that can be set into motion to produce literary effects: to unlock a poetic experience.
In addition, you have the actual creation of literary hypertexts, generative poems, visual poems, hypermedia works, etc. Even a cursory glace at the field will show you a group of writers jumping head first into the development of a kind of writing that refuses to be reproduced as print.
And then you juxtapose this to the world of print publishing, which is like the record industry and the fashion industry…. picking which stars or which pantone color is going to top the charts this season, and then engineering their meteoric rise through the back door. I mean, look at the recent discovery about Herman Cain spending campaign cash on his own book. He writes a book, buys thousands of copies of it to promote himself, uses the sales to jockey for chart position, etc. Even University Presses are being asked to make decisions based on profit, rather than knowledge. I mean, as much as I enjoy reading Zizek’s work…. do we really need 40-plus books by the guy in English? How about 10, and then 30 other people I never heard of before. There are enough dissertations out there, believe me. But I think we’d do just as well by having an academic lottery…. pick ten busted adjuncts and publish their dissertations. (Or, do what Gary is doing, and open up spaces for people to publish).
I think the method of resistance, then, is always in play. I like books. I want to see them published. I want people to read them. But I want to make sure people are reading the right kind of books in the right way, which is to say, art and the hope for resistance offered by books, and books and the hope for resistance offered by the digital…. they are all in play. If creative writers can connect with and cultivate a new audience without getting gobbled up, they should do it. It’s not because print in and of itself is bad, it’s because print is great! And financial wizards know it’s great, so they are trying to suck every last bit of value out of it before pithcing into the bonfire and messing something else up. Some people run from that system into the digital, some people try to replicate the print mode while freeing themselves from the market, and others try to find ways to make it work from within. But I think most people who like books don’t like what’s happening to them. But books and their alternatives are not enough to carry the general project of literacy and critical thought forward. Just as criticism used to be a mechanism for critical thought, rather than promotion (though, publicity was a significant side effect), literacy was considered to be political necessity for a democratic society (rather than something that would simply help bosses tell workers what to do and marketers tell us what to buy, though that was also a side effect).
So, to get to my point…. Maybe the way that artists with books built institutions that replicated the art world offers us lessons. If you can build institutions around a practice of resistance, then let’s build different institutions. What if the real lesson is that, when we see tactical resistance, we need to follow the tactical move with strategic moves? I know from my literary background that people tend to appreciate critiques of the canon because we all have our grievances…. but they get edgy when you start putting reading lists back together, without making all of the same mistakes… but maybe this is what we need to do? If we can’t do the hard work of building a reading list, how can we manage the harder work of building educational, archival and publishing institutions on the shoulders of those first critical steps? How do we do the hardest work of all? Building a functional society? And, I think, for instance, all of the activity coming out of Culture Machine, Liquid Books, OHP are certainly moves along these lines. If we don’t do it… we’ll keep on getting slaughtered in our beds.
Hi Davin,
You wrote “But I want to make sure people are reading the right kind of books in the right way. . . ” How do you propsose to do that? And could you saya little about what you mean here by “resistance?” Are you artculatng a paradox here? To resist is to read rightly?
Anthony, Nick, Richard, thanks for all of your great remarks and suggestions and for your engagement with the questions Gary and I are slowly trying to uncover and explore in this very tentative first attempt to connect the politics of the artist’s book with the current developments in Open Access book publishing. In this respect, Anthony, let me try to explain where this is leading and what we feel the implications are of studying artists’ books for the present scholarly communication system, and what the relevance is of looking at these topics from a comparative historical perspective. In many ways, and as Nick has already argued, the artist book offers a widely diverse array of examples for studying the relation between conceptual and material experiments with the book format and political thought. It is a relation that, as we still have to argue in further instalments of this paper, are only slowly and only now, in the digital realm, coming to be explored in academic book publishing to any significant degree. In this respect academic publishing could be said to have has lagged behind some of the more radical experiments with the book form and with the politics of the book that have taken place in other domains. One of the most interesting realms in which such radical experiments have been undertaken is that of artists’ books of the 60s and 70s. But one could look at Conceptual Poetry in this respect too, although the latter is something that would need further and more detailed exploration and is probably better left to another time as far as this online symposium is concerned.
Now, at first sight, some of developments that are currently taking place in academic book publishing would appear to resemble many of those we tried to sketch with respect to the artist book. As this symposium could be said to bear witness, digital publishing likewise provides interested parties with an opportunity to subvert the existing publishing system, to experiment with using new media to publish (in this case) academic books in new ways and forms, and in the process challenge and bring into question established ideas of the (printed) codex book.
But the comparison could perhaps be pushed further. For just as the artists’ book of the 60s and 70s eventually went in directions that lacked a clear political or critical agenda and ended up being integrated into (instead of subverting) the established systems of publication and distribution, is there not a danger of something similar happening with regard to many alternative forms of digital publishing today?
In response to Richard, the question then is, do we see this incorporation and falling away of a critical agenda as an inevitable development? For us, the answer would be no, or at least that it doesn’t have to be. Consequently, our analysis is focused on trying to provide a more hopeful account of how a critical interrogation of the book can indeed continue without being uncritically co-opted into more conventional arrangements.
At the same time, our analysis is trying to avoid simply lapsing into that state of affairs Nick draws attention to, in which experiments with form and concept become primarily about experimenting as such. In this scenario conceptual formal experiments and the more politically informed developments that are made with respect to academic book distribution become disentangled from each other. As a result, the political element tends to get subsumed into a publishing climate that is possibly more progressive, but which is not radically altered. In this sense what we are arguing for is a politics of the book that is concerned with critically exploring some of the fundamental notions on which the book is based, conceptually and materially, in the wider institutional, political and economical setting of both the scholarly and the art world. In this sense, as Nick rightly claims, it is necessary to ‘locate the politics of the artists’ book in its engagement with the properties of the book’. We would recommend a similar stance be adopted with regard to the scholarly book.
Let me try and explain what we mean by referring to the case of Open Access publishing which , in the final version of this paper, will be the focus of its second part. The ideals that were, and to a large extent still are, part of Open Access independent and academic-led book publishing were related to a widespread desire amongst many academics to: increase accessibility to (specialized) humanities research; argue for the importance of sharing research results in a more immediate and direct way; and to offer an alternative to, and stand up against, the large, established, profit-led, commercial publishing houses that have come to dominate the field. However, this new Open Access way of publishing and distributing books was also seen by some as an initial first step toward more specialized and experimental forms of publishing and research; forms for which, as many proponents of Open Access publishing argued, commercial and heavily print-based systems of distributions barely allowed any space.
Now, one might argue that, as happened with artists’ books after the 60s and 70s, the political project of offering increased accessibility through digital distribution runs the risk of becoming cut off from some of the more conceptual, experimental aims of Open Access publishing. This is firstly apparent in the way openness and Open Access advocates have, as a strategic gesture, increasingly come to focus on making research accessible first and foremost. Efforts designed to make Open Access material available for others to (re)use, copy, reproduce and distribute in any medium, as well as to use it to make and distribute derivative works, along with experiments with the form of the book, are increasingly being seen very much as secondary objectives, and even by some as diluting and complicating the primary goal of accessibility. For example, of the books presently available online Open Access, only a minority are available under what has became known as the Budapest-Bethesda-Berlin or BBB definition of Open Access, with which nearly all open access proponents agree. In Both the Bethesda and Berlin definition, re-use of material is an essential aspect of the definition. One can be even more pessimistic perspective and argue that the political project to oppose and critique the current commercial, academic publishing model is being marginalised even further as versions of Open Access are increasingly seen by commercial publishers as just another means of making a profit. Here, openness is being adopted by these for-profit business as part of the neo-liberal discourse around the importance of transparency and of making scholarship and research more efficient, discoverable, accountable and hence useful.
At the same time, we can also see a rise in the number of experiments that are being undertaken with the form of the book but without an overtly expressed political philosophy or without a clearly articulated conceptual premise that might relate such experimentation back to the long history of critical engagements with the idea of the book. More and more the book in the Humanities, and in the digital humanities especially, is being explored as data or as a data object. Yet one of the risks of this exploration of research ‘beyond the concept of the book’, as it were, is that it is increasingly disconnected from a critique of the print-notions on which the book – and with it scholarly communication – is based. Explorations of this kind consequently run the risk of repeating such notions uncritically, albeit in a different context.
As Gary has written elsewhere online, ‘Something that is particularly noticeable about many instances of this turn to data-driven scholarship – especially after decades when the humanities have been heavily marked by a variety of critical theories: Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, post-Marxist – is just how difficult they find it to understand computing and the digital as much more than tools, techniques and resources, and thus how naive and lacking in meaningful critique they often are.’
In this respect, the problem with these forms of what might be conceived as highly experimental forms of scholarship, is that in replacing ideology and critique with methodology, they appear to find it hard to articulate exactly what the point of what they are doing actually is.
Although this is certainly not the case for all research in the Digital Humanities, because they lack this element of critical self-reflexivity the research practices of many projects in the realm of data-driven scholarship rather end up still being unknowingly governed and shaped by ideas, concepts and systems inherited from the world of the printed book.
To wrap up this long response, in which I only touched upon a few of your extremely helpful remarks, what we’re trying to explore in this paper, through a comparison between artists’ books and the situation of Open Access book publishing, is what a politics of intervention might mean for the book in the digital age, and how we can prevent such a politics from merely repeating already established practices and so losing its critical edge. Of course, this conjures up all kinds of questions we still need to explore further, such as the relationship between the materiality of the book and its political potential in the digital age, and in what sense the book as a specific entity/media/form is still a tool for critique at a time when it is increasingly merging with other media. What is the critical potential of the book-assemblage when it comes to arguing for alternative systems of scholarly communication? Finally, there is also a question that Nick has already touched upon: how can we ‘extend the concern of the artists’ book—critical interrogation of the form, medium, metaphor, and concept—into new realms, perhaps realms that would not best be characterised as artists’ books?
>Are you artculatng a paradox here? To resist is to read rightly?
I’m late for a night class, so pardon the terseness of my response. In a way, I think this is politics, figuring out the right way. We are resistant to these things, as we should be, which is really just another way of saying that we recognize the stakes in defining the “right” text to be read in the “right” way. And, of course, even calling it “right” is a bit over-the-top. Really, what I mean is that we are in the habit of interpreting things all the time, and we either keep our readings to ourselves, share them with others, or adopt someone else’s reading. But at the most basic level, we read, and to a degree we either buy the writer’s writing or we depart from it and forge our own interpretation. In any case, there is power and productivity in there. We operate by consenting to consensus or placing ourself in relation to each other via submission and domination. But if we do not engage in the consensus building process of talking about these things, odds are that we are either just telling people what to do or being told what to do. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
It makes sense. But if that is what we already and always doing, what need is there for theory? By the way, what do you think of a politics of dissensus? Ranciere’s work is of interest here, I think. His book Disagreement might be of use you given your thoughts about deliberation.
My thought is that theory can provide a bit more form and shared purpose to the process. We can see resistance operating at the broadest levels of cultural activity, following Fiske and Jenkins, we recognize that popular culture is often a zone of resistance. In some cases, this resistance is rather passive, in other cases, it leads to tangible cultural products. And I would argue that this is generally the case…. everywhere there is anomie, people make active decisions to cohere, cultivating a sense of subjectivity and grasping for an idea of social solidarity.
At the extreme fringe, you have even disgusting anti-social outbursts, say, like those of Brevik in Oslo, which are on their surface evidence of the most appallingly anti-human tendencies…. but lurking underneath, is a utopian vision, a dream of social belonging, the hope that by acting on what he saw as threats to the social order, the emergence of a stronger social order to follow. And, of course, he would be one of its chief protectors and prophets. Of course, this does not excuse what he has done. It is obviously deranged and tragic. But I think that the power of anomie is so great that, people, being socially inclined, will seek to repair the social through even desperate means. Even, as in the case of US political extremists of the Tea Party, they profess an utter disbelief in the society, government, and egalitarianism… their answer always rests on an appeal to society, typically through an invented history in which all Americans were Christian, they all worked hard, they were all patriotic, they all gave to charity, the poor always were uplifted, etc. Sure, this is not historically accurate, but if it were, it would be something of a utopia.
Criticism and theory provides an opportunity to offer a bit more focus to these scattered longings. While we often look at the tragedies of totalitarianism as failures of theory, we might do better to ask if totalitarianism is a failure of the totalizing theories of the individual mind sorting out anomie without a broad, engaged and responsive social democratic feedback mechanism. Your theory or my theory, in one sense, is no different from someone listening to the radio and deciding that the new Rihanna song sucks or rules. But the political allows us to sort through these various individually held impulses, place them into the context of history and the future, and to settle on which insights will develop into norms, rights, and obligations.
I am not familiar with Ranciere’s argument on dissensus. (Thank you for steering me in that direction). But a poorly formed thought based on my understanding of the two words is that consensus can only exist if dissensus is a real possibility, and that on matters where no consensus can be found, dissensus be articulated as clearly as possible, and left to stand as part of the social structure. In a way, a clearly articulate dissensus, which states this is what we will not do because we cannot agree to do it, is from a distant perspective a part of the social fabric, a recognition that there are things which matter to us, yet which cannot be accounted for in theory.
Very interesting thread here. I wanted to go back to the original discussion of ABs in the 1970s and the paradoxes of institutionalization of counter culture activities, and see if I can at least suggest one link with materiality. Remember that the forms and formats of ABs made in the orbit of Conceptualism marked their distinction from other publications by material codes. Their aspirations were linked to those material codes –that they might disperse, live mass market lives rather than elite, esoteric ones, and that they could pretend to a kind of proletariat production mode (inexpensive multiples). The paradoxes were there from the start — the need for capitalization up front made these “cheap” books prohibitively expensive for artists to produce without underwriting–but nonetheless, the material features mattered, signified, functioned to signal to a readership that this was counter culture material. Zines, underground comix, and journals, all thrived in the same milieu and moment, and all marked their distance from mainstream publishing through material means.
My question now is whether the material characteristics –style, format, computational power, any of the elements that comprise digital productions, can be distinguished through their material features in anything like the same manner. How does an establishment blog differ from an alternative one except in its content? I ask because the themes of resistance and subversion, such old legacies of romanticism and still the hallmark of much contemporary art practice engaged in a rhetoric of politics, has to sort out the relation to modes of production. I’m struck by the paradox of elaborately funded art projects dedicated to claims of resistance or subversion. Politics means change, change in the structure of power relations. So how do we conceive the relation to those relations within the materialities of digital production without falling into the same paradoxes (even, dare I say it, hypocrisies) of simply doing the same high theory=politics of the academic e.g. academic work? At least ABs had their moment of being outside the institutions, while high theory seems the palliative designer drug from within…. I know that probably seems too cynical–and theory, ways of thinking, are essential for the reimagining of political spheres and networks. But the re-institutionalization of ABs seems innocent by contrast to the insidiously institutional politics of theory. I know this will be an unpopular stance, but I come back to my basic question here–can material distinctions be marked and sustained in a digital environment the way they were in a print one? Or are the possibilities of rapid reappropriation, remediation, open access, and so on so vital that they overwhelm the fact that a blog’s political viewpoint is immaterial (literally) in relation to its communicative function?
n.b. I’m not standing up for ABs here — if I never see another $2500 pop-up book about political prisoners in a special collections library it won’t be too soon…
Johanna, I can only very attempt a very partial answer here. The material practices of independent projects can have an underpinning of resistance to them by way of platforms and languages. Certainly, open source development is a powerful counterweight to closed systems of publication. On top of that, you have a pretty hard time trying to lock content up and charge for it. In this resepct, there is a radical material reality that has tipped the balance in many ways. And, often this material practice carries with it certain ideological priorities. While certainly the zine and bootlegging cultures of an earlier era were friendlier to the commons than their commercial counterparts, for the first time we are seeing entire industries respond in radical ways… and we are seeing creators respond to this response by, for instance, publishing things under CC licenses, which is a activation and exploration of theory. Alongside all this free content is the google/facebook/big data strategy of shifting the commodity from the individual informational object to commitizing the act of reading.
I hope that “theorists” are on board with these changes, not because I think we need to bow to technology, but because increasingly those of us who are trained as theorists and scholars work without tenure, without full time jobs, and for institutions that see us increasingly instrumental terms.
In other words, theorists are not as insulated as we used to be. And, quite frankly, the vast majority of scholars, students, workers, and everyone else are finding themselves working for institutions, but not necessarily on the same side as those institutions.
I don’t know that we mark distinctions in the digital in a sustained way…. but I think, in terms of where history is headed, we might have to mark distinctions in a decisive way. In other words, maybe we are closer to techntonic institutional change than we think, if we get involved in the work of changing things.
We have, on the one hand, enormous access to information and tools for knowing. On the other hand, we are undergoing the transition to the Google version of “intellectual property.” So, it’s probably a good time to be having a political shift. And probably a better time to be thinking through the big issues of this shift, to steer them into a democratic direction.
Oh dear, theory seems to be getting a bit of hard time here. I can understand where people are coming from on this. However, I do think such ideas are something else we might want to take care around and pay careful attention to.
For example, it could also be argued that any attempt to simply move outside the institution is already an institutional move; that the idea there is an outside to the university, for example, is itself very much a university idea, one that for some is ‘as old as the university itself’. And what’s more, that this is an idea that theory can often help us to understand and think through.