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Artists' books have a long history now, even if defined within parameters of modern art and culture. We can trace their beginnings to William Blake's work, or that of the 19th century fine press movements, turn of the century elaborate editions, and early 20th-century avant-garde experiments. This is a history can be stretched further, of course, but the distinctive profile of modernism has its own claim on the autonomous, secular object and paradigms of artistic identity and rarified, original production.
In the 20th century, book arts proliferate, and definitions, genres, and approaches to the book as a work of art expand exponentially. Nonetheless, a sense of traditions and precedents remains somewhat elusive. What are the touchstones? The references we think help define our understanding of the field of artists' books? What works might we each individually want to call to collective attention? The exemplary works project is meant to facilitate this task and in the process, help foster an environment for critical discussion. Exemplary works call forth a critical language, a vocabulary that helps define our appreciation of how a book functions as a work of art, what it does, how it structures the internal dialogue of components into a dynamic whole.
The task of critical work is to produce insightful readings of aesthetic artifacts deemed worthy of attention by virtue of their combination of conceptual and formal properties. Nothing more, nothing less. The word "critical" refers to acts of informed description, readings that put a work into play in relation to other works. This is the foundation of scholarship and criticism. One of the challenges we have as a field is to call each other's attention to works we consider exemplary, and to demonstrate through critical discussion precisely what the outstanding properties of such works might be. How, in fact, does a book do its work as art?
As ABsOnline begins operation, it will rapidly expand to include a selection of such exemplary works. These are books that are singularly outstanding examples of a particular approach to artists' books. They are all exemplary in some regard. But they are often radically different from each other in order to demonstrate that artists books are defined by no particular production methodology, aesthetic persuasion, themes, or approaches, but that like all areas of art-making, are complex aesthetic artifacts that cannot be prescribed by any finite set of rules.
I define artists' books very simply--as original works of art made in the book format.They can be editioned or unique, in the codex format or not, and use any of the many available means of production.
The task of identifying an exemplary work is simple--it is a book that everyone should know? Why? What ideas does it embody and how does it do this?
I suggest propose one exemplary work to make my point, Michael Goodman's delightful, ephemeral How to Make An Artist's Book. Smart and funny, the tiny codex, printed offset at Nexus Press, makes trenchant arguments about the clichés of artists' book production in the 1980s. Humor is a fine rhetorical form, catching us by surprise, making us acknowledge our own blind spots. Goodman's piece succinctly summarizes the trends of the time--towards self-confessional, pseudo-documentary, pretentiously conceptual books, each of which was conceived by its own author as completely unique. Exposing the systemic, broad-based uniformity of artists' ideas of uniqueness demonstrates dramatically the extent to which a community of artists, within a particular histio-socio demographic, was drawing on a single set or pool of ideas.
The purpose of criticism is to call attention to the assumptions on which creative and scholarly work gets done. Every time someone walks into an artists' book class or press and says, gee, I have an idea, I'd like to do a book with translucent overlays--as if they are the first person ever to have had that idea, it just shows again the extent to which the field of practice could be enriched by a sound critical foundation. One might set out to make a movie, write a song, paint a picture without knowing anything about the history of aesthetic forms in such media--but why? Critical scavenging, scholarly nourishment--looking at the work of predecessors and learning from it? The history of art and culture is a record of this process.
Goodman's clever book shows the way ideas circulate through artist's own practices, often without their own self-conscious awareness. We used to called this the production of a subject within a system of signs, but that was when people read theory. Now we can say that Goodman gives us a good wake-up call to pay attention to where ideas come from for our work. Establishing a critical legacy of exemplary works, ones whose parameters inform our own or have already defined a field within which we are situating ourselves, unwittingly or not, seems basic. Goodman shows that it can be done as fun, through creative and witty means, in a tiny little meta-work that is still relevant decades after it was produced. All of those clichés are still true!