Books On Books

Bookmarking Book Art – Otis College of Art and Design

2018/09/182018/11/09Books On BooksLeave a comment

This 18-video playlist at the Otis College of Art and Design covers a 2014 exhibition highlighting around 120 works in the Artists Book Collection. The playlist contributes to the collection’s goal:

The goal of the Otis Artists’ Book Collection is not to create a comprehensive archive, but rather to provide a valuable teaching resource available to artists and students. Since the collection is available on only a limited basis, providing access to the books via an online image database is a continuing project, one that we hope will assist those with interest in researching our collection as well as the medium in general.

Some videos are better than others, and all benefit from viewing without the background music. Having handled both Susan E. King’s Lessons from the South and J. Meejin Moon’s Absence, I can vouch for the corresponding videos’ effectiveness.

The Lessons video could be closer to the experience of handling the work if the transitional zooming were replaced with a 360 circumferential shot or angled stills to reveal more of the work’s intricacies — for example, this overhead shot taken at the old Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC:

The Absence video comes much closer to a hands-on experience, but the exchange in the Comments section highlights how inclusion of some description by voiceover or bibliographic entry would aid viewers’ appreciation.

Treages 4 years ago
so it’s a city in a book?
REPLY
Vesper Von Lichtenstein 10 months ago
It’s a memorial to 9/11, and the cut out parts are the Two Towers going from the top down…at the end of the book you see the placement of the two towers within the context of the rest of the buildings on a city block. The music seems a bit… upbeat for such a somber book.

Critiques aside, the playlist and site warrant multiple revisits and a thanks to Otis College.

Bookmarking Book Art – Jan Reymond

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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.

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

2018/09/172023/11/17Books On BooksLeave a comment

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

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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!

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

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

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smithsonian-artits-books-homepage An 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

2018/09/152018/11/09Books On Books1 Comment

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

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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

2018/09/142020/06/25Books On BooksLeave a comment

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.

Published by Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1969)

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

2018/09/142019/02/21Books On BooksLeave a comment

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.