Bookmarking Book Art – Jan Reymond

Since 2005 Reymond has created book art installations associated with the annual used book fair held in Romainmôtier, Switzerland.

The installation Rosace, highlighted above, enhances the architectural features of the village. (For commentary to accompany your visit to Rosace, see My Modern Met.) Another, more surreal installation Livritins populates the village with book-citizens (the “livritins”) engaged in exercise, descending from the church spire by umbrella gondolas, listening to a sermon, fishing, dancing and much more. That year, tourists would be forgiven for believing that all of the bookstore and library bookshelves in the village and canton stood empty.

Livritins (2012)
Jan Reymond

Bookmarking Book Art – “The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century”

The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century is a testament on where this art made of letters has been and where it goes. We have put a sharp focus on the word ‘new’ in our title, exploring how image manipulation, cut and paste, digital text and the internet have all influenced work in this area. One of the most exciting strands can be seen in the work of James Hoff and Eric Zboya who use algorithms and viruses to form work in which text is in the back – rather than foreground; the ghost of the machine of visual poetics. This isn’t a book that could have been made through simply surfing the web. We asked all 106 contributors to suggest names of poets or artists that we should consider for the book. Visual poets spiralled into more visual poets. We have looked at well over 500 possible candidates. Enjoy the knowledge with us.

Victoria Bean & Chris McCabe, editors

Among the Books On Books favorites included in this volume are Sam Winston, Julie Johnstone, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Vito Acconci. For a related MoMA exhibition of artists engaged in the material use of letters, words and language (Ecstatic Alphabets, Heaps of Language), click here.

Bookmarking Book Art – International Image Interoperability Framework

From Sexy Codicology (well, they must have thought the name would increase traffic).  Accessed May 1, 2017 11:17 PM.

Scholars and programmers from all over the world are working together on providing a technology that give researchers, and heritage enthusiasts, a rich and uniform experience when viewing digitized heritage. Most of all, they want to make it possible that as many digital collections as possible all work in the same way, so that any image from any museum or library can be seen in any viewer online, together with any other manuscript or artwork that is IIIF compliant! Side-by-side!

Click here

The International Image Interoperability Framework (“triple I eff“) began its efforts in 2011. As of September 2018, over 100 universities, libraries, cultural heritage institutions and open source software companies are participating. space

Click here

Some of those organizations hold book art collections. Imagine being able to examine an artist’s book “in the round”, to zoom in, to compare one artist’s flag book with another’s side by side. A query about whether any of those organizations plan to apply the technology to those collections has been sent.  

Bookmarking Book Art – Smithsonian Libraries Artists’ Books

smithsonian-artits-books-homepageAn easily searchable source.  The carousel of images in the home page‘s lower right-hand corner highlights some of the favorite artists at Books on Books:

The works in the collection are scattered across multiple sites in the DC area, so a careful online browse before traveling for a visit is advisable.

Bookmarking Book Art – Carol Burtner

Burtner’s whimsy seems irrepressible as is evident from this undated 100 Best Books, Abridged, composed of the first and last sentences from each of Random House Publishing’s “Best 100 Books of the 20th century” — and from her site’s motto – “Art for my sake”.

Bookmarking Book Art – Sowon Kwon

dongghab (20100
Sowon Kwon

From Contemporary Art Daily. A Daily Journal of International Exhibitions.  Artist: Sowon Kwon. Venue: Full Haus, Los Angeles. Date: September 2 – December 3, 2017. – Accessed November 25, 2017 8:37 AM.

Pictured above is the back cover of dongghab, a sort of self-portrait in book art in that its content derives from events occurring in 1963, the year of the artist’s birth. The back cover is not just “another conversation” with Ed Ruscha, but one with American culture, as is the book as a whole.

Books On Books Collection – Charles Agel

Why do some books of photography lodge themselves in our minds as book art or artist’s books? Ed Ruscha’s books have done that, so much so that it seems almost odd to call them photobooks, although their deadpan presentation as such is essential to their artistic status. Why do works like Sean Kernan’s The Secret Books and Abelardo Morell’s A Book of Books defy relegation to the coffee table?

Published by the Visual Studies Workshop (1998)

In juxtaposing his photos with text from John Lloyd Stephens, the 19th century explorer of Mesoamerica, Charles Agel positions Monuments to the Industrial Revolution (1998) as more than a book of photos.  Quite a different conceptualizing strategy from the typologizing pursued from the 1970s onward by Bernd and Hilla Becher, mentioned by photographer John Pfahl in his introduction to Monuments.

Seeking the differences and similarities in strategies of composing the works as well as those of composing the photos adds to the appreciation and understanding of them.

Bookmarking Book Art – Diane de Bournazel

Deep in the Bordeaux region, Diane de Bournazel creates livres d’artiste, sculptures and paintings and prints that will make you think of cave art, Hieronymus Bosch, Marc Chagall, Maurice Sendak, medieval tapestries, illuminated books and, finally, the distinctive art de Bournazel.

De Toutes Façons (2016) Diane de Bournazel
Planetarium (nd)
Diane de Bournazel

Bookmarking Book Art – Noela Mills

On the Mountains (2013)
Noela Mills
25x10mm

Notice how the threads in gradated colors create a reflective pathway into the foreground, the mountains and sky?

More about Noela Mills here.

Bookmarking Book Art – The Arnolfini Artist Book Collection

Containing over 700 items, the Arnolfini artists’ book collection is one of the largest UK collections of contemporary book art. It leans toward the 1970s and 1980s. The US-based Franklin Furnace Archive Artists Book Bibliography is representative, as are European works such as those of  Vito Acconci, Marcel Broodthaers, Stanley Brouwn, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbetts, Helen Douglas, Dieter Roth and Telfer Stokes.

Franklin Furnace Archive Artists Book Bibliography (1977)
Unbound notecards of artists’ books catalogues
3 v. ; 430 cards ; 11 x 16cm

    The collection is not without later representative works such as those by SooMin Leong, Jonathan Monk and Grayson Perry, but there seem to be no works after 2012. The Arnolfini, Bristol’s center for contemporary art, also hosts the biennial Bristol Artists Book Event.