Readings of the Century

I'm working on a short piece of writing for the artists' books yearbook on ways to talk about artists' books. Here's a brief snapshot.

The one book everyone seems to have read about artists’ books, namely Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists Books, is open to readings that are less than helpful [regarding balancing the urge to define and the necessity for flexibility]. The book’s mission, to provide an identity for artists books and show how they’ve been important to almost every major art movement of the 20th Century, is highly successful. It’s too easy to read it and come away with the idea that one now has a pretty good idea of what artists’ books are. Drucker’s book is a bulwark for the identity of artists’ books. It is a critical foundation for making a claim that artists’ books are important. It’s too tempting simply to build on that foundation, I think. A different reading of the Century is of artists making books in concert with other processes, interests, forms and pursuits. Books are always a place where more than one thing, more than one role, is happening. They are always hybrids. If it’s the case the at the Century is the strongest case yet made for the identity of the artist’s book, it’s ironic that it also functions as a very compelling study of how that identity is always composed out of the shadows cast by other events and processes. It’s still true. The Century is an extremely useful survey, but its readers have often confused its function as a pedagogically- useful history with a functioning definition that they can use to  talk about books in the present. If we learn one thing from the Century, it should be that the books it describes arise not from definitions, but from collisions of materials, people and technology.

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[Law Dissertation]

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