Artists' Books
The artists' books held by the University of Westminster Library at the Harrow campus can be seen here: https://aparsons474.wordpress.com
Artists. Books. Separate entities, worlds apart. Artists make works: Artists' works. Authors write books: Authors' books. What happens if we gloss over the middle terms, to form Artists' (works. Authors') Books, and subsequently erase them, to form Artists' Books. Is this an imperial step, an attempt by artists to claim for themselves the status of 'author'? Authors of their own destiny...?
Photograph: Eleri Kyfffin:
Is 'a book' a number of pages attached to one another in some way, as suggested by the Tate on its Artists' books collection page?
Is an artist's book simply a book made by an artist? Or is there a further assumption of playing with the parameters of the book; and furthermore is this simply playing with the book as 'form' (the formal qualities of 'the book') or with the book as cultural seme (the cultural resonances of 'the book')
Given the distinction between 'book' and 'codex', is this playing with the parameters simply playing with those of the codex form (or the codex as cultural seme as well)?
If the book as form and book as cultural seme are already under assault from the implications of digital technologies, undermining the sequentiality, narrativity and logical nature of the book, shifting it towards a kind of digital rhizomaticity, do artists' books reinforce that assault but take it in the direction of a material rhizomaticity (assemblage?), rather than a digital one?
In either case, the linear, sequential order implicit in the book is being questioned, digitally in one direction, materially, in another direction.
[The status of the author is at stake; the existence of the author is in question]. Can these two directions be combined, to form what might be called a 'complete assault' on the book as (material) form and as cultural seme (its sense-making capacity). [Or, is it, rather, an assault on the author, as 'sovereign individual'?]
What other terms are necessary to make the required distinctions? Book as work of art; Picture book? Illustrated book?Bad Puns, Semantic Shifts and Communication Registers
Book of matches: Paradise regained
Love matches
Love letters: see Simon Garfield's book on the history of typography, Just my type: a book about fonts, reviewed in True to Type: How We Fell in Love With Our Letters
Typographics
Letters of communication
The epistolary novel
Book as 'container' (of content): handbag; bag of hands
Book as commodity: mass produced; manufactured; priced; costed; sold; best-seller
noteBook
Information and Communication: Play-ful
Postmodern-is-m; Postmodern-was-m
Prospero and his books
