Artist's book

• 1. Introduction

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  An artist's book is a work of art that uses the book itself as its medium. Not the text inside it, not the images it contains, but the book as an object, a form, a physical experience. It can be a codex with pages you turn, or a scroll, a fold-out, a concertina, or a box of loose items. It can be mass-produced in thousands of copies, or it can exist as a single, unrepeatable thing in the world.

  The form has no clean definition. Scholars have debated it for decades, and the debate has not settled. One working definition that circulates among practitioners is this: an artist's book is any book or book-like object over the final appearance of which an artist has had a high degree of control, and where the book is intended as a work of art in itself. But even that formulation leaves enormous room for disagreement.

  What is not in dispute is this: something happened in the twentieth century that turned the book from a vehicle for ideas into an idea in its own right. To understand how that happened, you have to go back to a poet and printer in London in the late eighteenth century, a man who wrote his own books, illustrated his own books, printed his own books, and bound them with his own hands.

• 2. William Blake's Foundation

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  William Blake was born in 1757 and died in 1827, and in those seven decades he laid down a set of principles that artists are still working with today. Songs of Innocence and of Experience is perhaps the most famous example: written, illustrated, printed, coloured, and bound by Blake and his wife Catherine together, it was a work in which handwritten text and images merged into something entirely new.

  Most writers on the subject of artist's books trace a direct line from Blake to the present. His practice of self-publishing and self-distribution, his fusion of text with image and physical form, his creation of works without obvious precedents: all of these would become defining features of the medium centuries later. The book was not a container for his art. The book was the art.

  The tradition Blake began had deep roots in European manuscript culture, stretching back to the Book of Kells and the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry in the early medieval period. But those earlier books were devotional and aristocratic objects. Blake turned the book into something personal, oppositional, and self-controlled. That combination proved unusually durable.

• 3. The Avant-Garde Era

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  On the front page of the French daily newspaper Le Figaro in 1909, the Italian poet and provocateur Filippo Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto. The placement was a calculated act of publicity: not a gallery, not a literary journal, but the mass press. Marinetti, who lived from 1876 to 1944, then toured Europe, and wherever he went, artists began making pamphlets, manifestos, and experimental books.

  In London, his visit directly led Wyndham Lewis to found the Vorticist movement. The Vorticists produced the literary magazine BLAST, an early example of a modernist periodical. The painter David Bomberg's book Russian Ballet, published in 1919, wove a single carefully spaced text with abstract colour lithographs, and became a landmark in the history of English-language artists' books.

  The most radical offshoot of Futurist principles, however, emerged in Russia. Centered in Moscow around the Gileia Group of Transrational poets, which included David and Nikolai Burliuk, Elena Guro, Vasili Kamenski, and Velimir Khlebnikov, the Russian Futurists produced a sustained body of artists' books that challenged every assumption of conventional book production. Works like Worldbackwards from 1912 and Universal War from 1916 used hand-written text integrated with expressive lithographs and collage elements. Some books used wallpaper as material, carbon copying as a printing method, or random page sequencing as a binding strategy, ensuring that no two copies would carry exactly the same meaning.

  After the Russian Revolution, Russian Futurism evolved into Constructivism. El Lissitzky's For The Voice, published in 1922, had a direct impact on avant-garde movements across Europe, including Dada in Zurich and Berlin, the Bauhaus in Weimar, and De Stijl in the Netherlands. Kurt Schwitters and Kate Steinitz's book The Scarecrow, from 1925, stands as one artifact of that cross-pollinating ferment.

• 4. Dada, Surrealism, and Dissent

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  Dada began at the Cabaret Voltaire, founded by a group of artists in exile 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, the movement placed artists' books, periodicals, manifestoes, and absurdist theatre at its core.

  Berlin Dada, started by Richard Huelsenbeck after he left Zurich in 1917, published some of the movement's most provocative artists' books. George Grosz's The Face of the Dominant Class, published in 1921, presented a series of politically motivated satirical lithographs targeting the German bourgeoisie.

  Surrealism took a different path. Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte, completed in 1934, assembled collages from images found in Victorian books to create something that subverted the very tradition it borrowed from. Marcel Duchamp went further still: his cover for Le Surrealisme in 1947 featured a tactile, three-dimensional pink breast made of rubber. It was not a picture of a breast. It was a breast attached to a book. The object insisted on being handled.

  One figure who operated somewhat apart from these movements was the Russian writer and artist Alexei Remizov. Drawing on medieval Russian literature, Remizov combined dreams, observed reality, and pure whimsy in his artist books, creating a body of work that did not fit neatly into any manifesto.

• 5. Roth, Ruscha, and the Modern Form

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  Dieter Roth, who lived from 1930 to 1998, is often credited with defining the modern artist's book. Working through the 1950s and 1960s, he produced a series of works that systematically took apart the authority of the codex form. His Picture Book from 1957 had holes cut through its pages, allowing a viewer to see multiple pages simultaneously. He was also the first artist to recycle found books: comic books, printer's end papers, newspapers, including the Daily Mirror in 1961 and AC in 1964.

  Roth's books began as extremely small editions produced in Iceland. Over time, the German publisher Hansjorg Mayer reprinted them together in the 1970s, making them more widely available than the work of any comparable artist in the latter half of the century.

  Almost at the same moment, across the Atlantic, Ed Ruscha was working in California. Born in 1937, Ruscha printed his first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, in 1963. The initial run was 400 copies. By the end of the decade, he had printed nearly 4,000. The book documented a banal drive on Route 66 between his home in Los Angeles and his parents' home in Oklahoma, drawing on the American tradition of photographic travelogues, including Robert Frank's The Americans. Ruscha followed it with Every Building on the Sunset Strip in 1966 and Royal Road Test in 1967, a series of books that treated the ordinary and the documentary as legitimate artistic territory.

  A Swiss artist working in the same period, Warja Honegger-Lavater, also produced artists' books contemporaneously with both Roth and Ruscha, a reminder that the form was developing in parallel across multiple countries.

• 6. Fluxus and Democratic Access

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  George Maciunas was born in Lithuania in 1931. He set up the AG Gallery in New York in 1961, intending to sell books and multiples by artists he admired. The gallery closed within a year, apparently without selling a single item. The collective he had assembled survived the failure.

  That collective was Fluxus, which had grown out of John Cage's Experimental Composition classes held from 1957 to 1959 at the New School for Social Research. Its ever-changing roster included George Brecht, Joseph Beuys, Davi Det Hompson, Daniel Spoerri, Yoko Ono, Emmett Williams, and Nam June Paik. Maciunas died in 1978.

  George Brecht's Water Yam from 1963 collected a series of scores in a box. Yoko Ono's Grapefruit, published in 1964, collected similar scores in a bound book. Both objects occupied the uncertain territory between artwork and instruction manual. Dieter Roth contributed Literature Sausage to the Fluxus orbit: each copy was made from a pulped book mixed with onions and spices, then stuffed into sausage skin. Literally a book, but impossible to read.

  The Fluxus embrace of what was called the democratic multiple, a term associated with the scholar Johanna Drucker, meant producing artists' books in high edition numbers to reach everyday people rather than gallery visitors. The goal was not rarity or prestige but wider participation. Artists' books proliferated through the 1960s and 1970s as one expression of broader social and political activism, and independent art publishing emerged as an alternative to gallery and museum access.

• 7. Conceptual Art and Institutions

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  In January 1969, the curator Seth Siegelaub organized an exhibition in rented office space in New York City. The exhibition contained nothing except a stack of artists' books. The catalog for the show, titled January 5-31, 1969, featured predominantly text-based work by Lawrence Weiner, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Robert Barry. It was a statement about where art could live.

  Sol LeWitt's Brick Wall from 1977 simply chronicled shadows as they moved across a brick wall. Kozlowski's Reality from 1972 took a section of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and removed every word, leaving only the punctuation. Maurizio Nannucci's M/40, a work of 92 typesetting pages from 1967, and his Definizioni/Definitions from 1970, both used the book as a space for conceptual inquiry rather than narrative.

  By the early 1970s, institutions had begun to take notice. The Center for Book Arts in New York was founded. Library and museum collections built new classification systems for artists' books and expanded their holdings. A group exhibition at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia in 1973 is notable for a specific reason: its catalog is, according to Stefan Klima's Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature, the first place the term Artist's Book appeared in print.

  Feminist artists adopted the form actively beginning in the same decade. The Women's Studio Workshop in New York and the Women's Graphic Center at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, the latter founded by graphic designer Sheila de Bretteville, gave women artists spaces to work and explore feminist themes through the book. Bookstores specializing in artists' books opened in this period: Ecart in Geneva in 1968, Art Metropole in Toronto in 1974, Other Books and So in Amsterdam in 1975, and Printed Matter in New York in 1976. The Library of Congress formally adopted the term artists books in 1980, adding it to its list of established subjects.

  The Journal of Artists' Books was founded in 1994 to raise the level of critical inquiry about the form. That same year, a National Book Art Exhibition called Art ex libris was held at Artspace Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, with support from the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

• 8. The Contemporary Landscape

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  As the form expanded, some of its original characteristics blurred. Artists like Cy Twombly and Anselm Kiefer moved toward unique, handcrafted books, deliberately reacting against the mass-produced small editions that had defined earlier generations. Albert Oehlen, while keeping artists' books central to his practice, produced works closer in spirit to Victorian sketchbooks. Meanwhile, a return to cheap mass production emerged from the early 1990s, with artists like Mark Pawson and Karen Reimer making affordability and reproducibility the point.

  Contemporary artists who have made the book a significant part of their practice include William Wegman, Bob Cobbing, Martin Kippenberger, Raymond Pettibon, and Suze Rotolo. Book artists working in pop-up and three-dimensional formats include Carol Barton, Hedi Kyle, Julie Chen, and Susan Joy Share.

  The recent surge in production and dissemination of artists' books is closely linked to art book fairs, a phenomenon that has grown in intensity and geographic reach since the turn of the twenty-first century. Tony White has documented fairs operating in Los Angeles, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, and Mexico City, as well as the Codex International Book Art Fair, the I Never Read, Art Book Fair Basel, the MISS Read Artist Book Fair in Berlin, and Offprint in Paris and London. The Codex Foundation began its own biennial Book Fair and Symposium in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007, drawing collectors, producers, and academics.

  Printed Matter in New York, which has been active since 1976, continues as both a retail destination and a distributor for artists' books, giving individual artists a platform that operates independently of galleries. Institutions devoted to teaching the form include the San Francisco Center for the Book, Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, and Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. The complete collection of the International Society of Copier Artists Quarterlies, which ran from April 1982 to June 2003, is housed and catalogued at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the Florida Atlantic University library.