J. Meejin Yoon

Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of Steingruber’s “Architectural Alphabet”

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What is it about artists’ books and architecture that they intersect so often? Architectural interiors and exteriors, ideas, themes, styles, landmark dwellings and edifices have found their metaphorical expression and embodiment in book art with such regularity that they make up a genre within the genre. Perhaps it is that, as Victor Hugo expresses it in Nôtre Dame de Paris (1831/1902),

… the human race has two books, two registers, two testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper. … The past must be reread upon these pages of marble. This book, written by architecture, must be admired and perused incessantly; but the grandeur of the edifice which printing erects in its turn must not be denied. (Book V, Chapter 2, p. 187)

Or perhaps it is even more fundamental. As Hugo asserts in his posthumous The Alps and the Pyrenees (1890/1895):

All letters were signs at first, and all signs were images at first…. Human society, the world, man as a whole, is in the alphabet…. A is the roof, the gable with its cross-beam, the arch, arx; … Z is the lightning, it is God. (pp. 64-65)

Beneath the mysticism and pareidolia, Hugo is on to something. Maybe the affinity of books and architecture lies in the origin of the raw material of books — the alphabet — whose second letter comes from a mark signifying shelter or house.

This wondering and wandering about the intersection of architecture and the artist’s book is prompted by the 250th anniversary of the publication of Johann David Steingruber’s Architectonisches Alphabeth(1773). This postcard-famous volume of print folios depicts architectural elevations and plans for residences in the shape of the letters of the alphabet. It is dedicated to Christian Friedrich Carl Alexander, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, not to be confused with the paying dedicatee of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt. By a baroque coincidence, however, the first Brandenburg concertos, the ones composed by Giuseppe Torelli and influencing Bach, are dedicated to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, then George Friedrich II, Alexander’s great-uncle who employed Torelli as court composer. Unlike Bach, however, Torelli received no direct payment for his composition. Steingruber too had to be satisfied with his payment as an appointee (court and public surveyor, and later principal architect of the board of works).

Steingruber may have felt he had good reason to be miffed. After all he had published the volume in installments at his own expense and made sure that the Margrave’s monogram (and that of Carolina Frederica, his wife) in building form appeared in the span above the roman arch on the title page. His elevations and plans draw attention to the heating, kitchen, toilet and servants’ arrangements as if conferring with a prospective client ready to commission one of these typographic palaces. Perhaps he was thinking, Who would not want a serif with a view? Or conduct guests on a tour of the bowl, capline, crossbar, stem, stroke and tail of the property? In a flourish that illustrates the intersection of book and architecture, the title page presents the title and subtitle inside an arch and serves double duty as a Table of Contents with thumbnail images of the letter-shaped buildings to come inscribed on the columns.

Munich, Bavarian State Library

To celebrate the Architectural Alphabet‘s 250th anniversary, this online essay/exhibition explores sixteen propositions about the affinity of architecture and artists’ books. Examples supporting each proposition include works from within and without the Books On Books Collection, and each example includes a link or links for additional views of the work. Every effort has been made to provide bibliographical (or webliographical?) links from WorldCat and the Internet Archive. The former will allow the reader to find local libraries that hold a copy of the exhibited work to be viewed in person; the latter will partly address the problem of broken links. Where broken links (or factual errors) do appear, readers are encouraged to alert the curator in the Comments section at the end of the essay/exhibition.

Proposition #1: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in the alphabet.

Architectural alphabet (1773/1972)
Johann David Steingruber
Published by Merrion Press.

Architectonisches Alphabeth (1773/1995)
Prepared by Joseph Kiermeier-Debre and Fritz Franz Vogel for Ravensburger Verlag.

Of course the first exhibit would be Steingruber’s Architectural Alphabet, but related works — before and after, published or built — will clamor for admission: Geofroy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529/1927/1998), Antonio Basoli’s Alfabeto Pittorico (1839/1998), Giovanni Battista de Pian’s Alphabetto Pittoresque (1842), and Daniel Libeskind’s Contemporary Jewish Museum (2000), whose form within the walls of a former power substation is composed of two Hebrew letters — the Yud and the Chet — which make up the word Chai (“Life”).

Left to right: Tory/Rogers, Basoli, Battista de Pian (Photos by Books On Books Collection), Libeskind (The Yud Gallery, Photo by Paul Dyer).

Lanore Cady’s Houses & Letters (1977) is another work supporting the proposition, in this case with calligraphy, watercolor and verse.

Houses & Letters: A Heritage in Architecture & Calligraphy (1977)
Lanore Cady

Proposition #2: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in telling stories.

As Daniel Libeskind has said, “For me, a building is a medium to tell a story.” Emily Speed’s Unfolding Architecture (2007) tells the tale of Gordon, a city dweller who witnesses the collapse of public buildings and, ultimately, his own home as the urban fabric begins to unfold around him — a story replicated by the housing’s structure and the book’s accordion fold.

Unfolding Architecture (2007)
Emily Speed

But Ulises Carrión denied that books are about narrative. Instead they are about space and time, which leads to the next proposition.

Proposition #3: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in space and time.

Olafur Eliasson’s Your House (2006) is a laser-cut model of his residence in Copenhagen at a scale of 1:85, which means that each page equates to a 220 mm section of the actual house. In the film Russian Ark (2003), Aleksandr Sokurov made cinematic history with his one continuous shot in 90 minutes, depicting a 17th century time traveller moving through different periods of history as he moves through the rooms of St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace. The film inspired Johan Hybschmann’s Book of Space (2009).

Your House (2006)
Olafur Eliasson

Book of Space (2009)
Johan Hybschmann

How do you read works like this? The size, weight and delicacy of Eliasson’s book and the fragility of Hybschmann’s book and its need for an armature to freeze-frame it defy a simple turning of pages. They must be turned slowly and carefully. Both works heed the task of the arts as posed by architect Juhani Pallasmaa for our age of speed: to defend the comprehensibility of time, its experiential plasticity, tactility and slowness (The Embodied Image, p. 78).

Proposition #4: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in process.

A trained architect and book artist, Marian Macken articulates and illustrates in her book Binding Space why and how the artist’s book can serve as an important tool for design, documentation and critique of architecture. Macken’s perceptive descriptions show how to observe materiality and its functioning and understand how they contribute to the making of art.

Investigating bookness results in the book becoming a highly productive intervening medium with which one can imagine, investigate, analyze, represent and exhibit particular qualities — haptically, and with narrative and ambiguity — of a built environment and the design process. Through the book, we read spatial practice anew (p. 163).

Reading Macken’s book will sharpen the ability of any reader or viewer to appreciate book art, especially her Ise Jingū: Beginning Repeated. Ise Jingū is a Shinto shrine complex in the Mie Prefecture, Japan. “Once every 20 years, since … the seventh century, every fence and building is completely rebuilt on an identical adjoining site, a practice of transposition known as shikinen-zōkan” (Binding Space, p. 101). For Macken, this ritualistic rebuilding poses architecture as performative process rather than as inert object; it “manifests the replication of a beginning, of a process” (p. 100).

Ise Jingū: Beginning Repeated (2011)
Marian Macken

Macken’s artwork consists of 61 loose sheets with a watermarked image within each, the number reflecting the 61 iterations of the shrine up until the making of this work of book art. The watermark is a perspective image based on Yoshio Watanabe’s photograph of the Inner Shrine, taken in 1953 on the occasion of the 59th rebuilding. The contrast of the watermark in kozo and the movement of its placement from one sheet to the next entice reflection on the phenomenon of representation and the architectural process of shikinen-zōkan.

Proposition #5: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in phenomenology.

Architects such as Alfredo Muñoz and his firm ABIBOO, Juhani Pallasmaa and Peter Zumthor are among those often associated with architectural phenomenology, concerned with perception psychology, focused on the primacy of sensory and experiential qualities. Norman Foster and phenomenology are not so often yoked, but 30 St Mary Axe: Diagrid (2009) and 30 St. Mary Axe: Cladding (2009)– Mandy Brannan’s treatments of his iconic London office tower (aka “the Gherkin”) that refocus the perception and experience of it — might prompt reconsideration.

Top: 30 St Mary Axe: Cladding (2009). Bottom: 30 St Mary Axe: Diagrid (2009)
Mandy Brannan

Proposition #6: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in geometry.

Sarah Bryant’s The Radiant Republic (2019) insightfully integrates Plato’s and Le Corbusier’s texts and ideas. The very physicality of the blond wood, linen cover, glass window, concrete representations of Platonic solids, embossed type and sewn papers could easily be a response to Juhani Pallasmaa’s comment: “The current overemphasis on the intellectual and conceptual dimensions of architecture contributes to the disappearance of its physical, sensual and embodied essence” (The Eyes of the Skin, p. 35).

The Radiant Republic (2019)
Sarah Bryant

Proposition #7: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in modelling.

Helen Malone’s Ten Books of Architecture (2017) takes a broad historical and, most important, haptic view of architecture from Vitruvius to Hadid. Each of the ten books is a bookwork that models its architectural subject.

Ten Books of Architecture (2017)
Helen Malone

Proposition #8: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in folding.

At the end of the 20th century, architects like Peter Eisenman, Jeffrey Kipnis and Greg Lynn latched on to computer-aided design and Gilles Deleuze’s Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (1988) / The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993). This led to real constructions such as Eisenman’s Rebstock Park in Frankfurt as well as to the seminal books Folding in Architecture (1993), edited by Lynn, and Folding Architecture 92003) by Sophia Vyzoviti.

Folded book pages rarely generate a work that rises above mere craft. Heather Hunter’s Observer Series: Architecture (2009) achieves the necessary height. It combines the altered book with an accordion book that incorporates a found poem composed of the words excised and folded outwards from the folded pages of The Observer’s Book of Architecture.

Observer Series: Architecture (2009)
Heather Hunter

Proposition #9: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in light.

Marlene MacCallum’s Theme and Permutation (2012) is a response to the permutations and variations over time in five houses built to a common plan in Townsite area of Corner Brook, Newfoundland. MacCallum used digital tools to translate the original film source of eight different window images from the houses. A tritone image of a single Townsite window under translucent pages opens the book. As the pages turn, new window images appear and layer over each other, darkening up to the book’s mid-point. In the center spread, two text blocks appear speaking to the history, architectural permutations and economic shifts of the Townsite area. The tonality begins to lighten over the ensuing new combinations of window layers. A third text block of personal narrative is introduced, and a tritone image of one of the Townsite windows in its original condition concludes the work.

Theme and Permutation (2012)
Marlene MacCallum

Proposition #10: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in perspective.

Cees Nagelkerke’s Piranesian Window (1996) resides in the Vedute Foundation’s collection of “spatial manuscripts”, invited works that must conform to the dimensions of the Gutenberg Bible. Piranesian Window‘s form and title capture multiple meanings of vedute (“views”). Views are things seen — which this spatial manuscript is. Views are prospects from which to see — which a window offers. Views are perspectives — for which Giambattista Piranesi’s etchings are famous. Views are thoughts held — which “Piranesian” implies (the work’s title could be that of a manuscript on art history and philosophy). Piranesi’s mid-eighteenth century etchings Vedute di Roma (“Views of Rome”) and Carceri d’invenzione (“Imaginary Prisons”) are the obvious sources of inspiration, but Nagelkerke provides an interview describing the dream source of the work:

– … Please, continue relating your dream …
– I wandered through vast ruins … along wrecked bridges … feeling remarkably at ease.
– How did you find the window in this windowless world?
– When a cool breeze wafted inside, I suddenly saw it. It showed a landscape, within the distance a city. There was complete tranquillity and harmony there, like in a painting by Piero della Francesca … I stood there for some considerable time and I became increasingly saddened, because I discovered that I was looking at something that had vanished forever.
– But how did you manage to take the window?
– I wanted to touch it … as a result, I immediately fell down. The gap left in the wall closed by itself … I picked it up and continued on my way, meeting people who spoke to me saying that I should leave the Carceri. I was taken to a gateway. No one looked at, or said anything about, the window… In the square where I found myself, there was an intense, chaotic commotion. The window still reflected something of the vast space I had left. The exterior showed traces of the wall in which it had been mounted. I looked through it and saw everyday life …

Piranesian Window (1996)
Cees Nagelkerke

Proposition #11: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in archaeology.

Mill: A journey around Cromford Mill, Derbyshire (2006) by Salt + Shaw (Paul Salt and Susan Shaw) is the result of the artists’ exploration of Cromford Mill in Derbyshire, the first water-powered, cotton-spinning mill developed by Richard Arkwright in 1771. Bound in a cover of recycled wooden library shelves, three plaster cast blocks and seven calico pocket pages containing hidden texts imply the hidden archaeological history to be found. The forensic-like casts are taken from interior surfaces, and the texts walk the reader step by step through each area of the mill.


Mill (2006)
Salt+Shaw

Proposition #12: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in assemblage and collage.

Based on an architectural installation at the Minnesota College for Art and Design and drawing on her photos of Ayvalik, Amsterdam, Florence, Istanbul, New York City, Rome, San Diego and Venice, Karen Wirth’s Paper Architecture (2017) certainly prompts a revisit to MoMA’s “Cut ’n’ Paste: From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City“, 10 July 2013 – 5 January 2015, to prove this proposition.

Paper Architecture (2017)
Karen Wirth

Proposition #13: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in luxe.

Early theorists, critics and artists of book art expended great effort to exclude livres d’artiste and deluxe productions from the definition of a form of art that struggled to find a name: artist’s book, artists’ books, bookworks, book art, etc. The spectrum from objects of conspicuous consumption to democratic multiples characterizes both architecture and book art. Antoni Gaudí’s architectural efforts easily span that spectrum — from his Casa Milà to his tiles found underfoot in Barcelona’s Passeig de Gràcia. Under the guidance of Juan José Lahuerta (chief curator at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia), the publisher Artika produced Gaudí Up Close (2020), enclosed in a wooden case with marble sculpture finished in paint, cement powder and anti-graffiti varnishes and lined with Naturlinnen fabric.

Gaudí Up Close (2020)
Published by Artika.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Proposition #14: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in the memorial.

As you turn the corner into Judenplatz in Vienna, Rachel Whiteread’s great cube appears showing only the fore edge of book after book. As you hold J. Meejin Yoon’s small white brick of paper and turn its thick pages, a small pinhole appears on the page. Then two larger square holes emerge, one of which falls over the pinhole. Page after page, the two square holes repeat, creating two small dark wells in the field of white, until on the last page they take their place in the cut-out schematic footprint of the city blocks and buildings surrounding the Twin Towers. Whiteread’s Nameless Library (2000) and Yoon’s Absence (2004) surely underscore this proposition of memorial.

Nameless Library (2000)
Rachel Whiteread
Photo: Books On Books.


Absence (2004)
© J. Meejin Yoon

Proposition #15: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in the sacred.

Jeffrey Morin and Steven Ferlauto’s Sacred Space (2003) is an intimate monument of book art. Made intimate by the content and texture of its book, made more intimate by the viewer’s having to construct the chapel. Made monumental by the echo of typographic history, made more monumental in Galileo Galilei’s echo from its floor: Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has created the universe.

Sacred Space (2003)
Jeffrey Morin and Steven Ferlauto

Proposition #16: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in collaboration.

In Victor Hugo’s Nôtre-Dame de Paris (1831), Archdeacon Claude Frollo points to the book in his hand and then to the cathedral and says, “This will kill that”. It is ironic that Hugo’s book (popularly known now by its English title The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame) was written in large part to save the then-decaying cathedral (post-Revolution, it served as a warehouse), and it succeeded. It is also ironic that, while the fictional character’s metaphor has a point about the book’s permanence of replicability outlasting the building’s permanence of stone, it misses the collaborative foundations of both.

Created by ten students at Scripps College under the direction of Kitty Maryatt, Arch (2010) reminds us that the creation of a book — even a work of book art — is a collaborative effort.

Arch (2010)
Kitty Maryatt, Jenny Karin Morrill, Ali Standish, Alycia Lang, Jennifer Wineke, Mandesha Marcus, Catherine Wang, Kathryn Hunt, Ilse Wogau, Jennifer Cohen, Winnie Ding
Photos: Books On Books Collection

Maryatt’s preface to Arch is entitled “Blueprint” and is brief enough to warrant citing in full:

Books are inherently architectonic. Studying architecture would naturally be profitable to students building their own books.

On January 17, 2010, just days before class was to start, the Los Angeles Times published a fascinating article on contemporary women architects, highlighting a striking building by Jeannie Gang.

Earlier this year, the brand-new President of Scripps College chose The Genius of Women as her inaugural theme. What serendipity! This gave us the perfect inspiration for our artist book: the genius of women architects.

After extensive research and class discussion, a mission statement for the book evolved:

Architecture, like books, is a delicate balancing act between stability and motion, interior and exterior, aesthetic values and structural practicalities.

Books, like building, are fundamentally inhabited spaces. They are incomplete without human interaction.

The first portals were built of post and lintel construction. A curved arch is more difficult: the keystone is needed at the apex to lock the other pieces into position. Building a book is a similarly difficult feat. — Professor Kitty Maryatt

Conclusion: The affinity of architecture and artists’ books lies in our attraction to the beauty of form.

No doubt the proximity of the need for shelter and the need for oral and written language have played some gravitational role of mutual attraction for architecture and books (and latterly artists’ books). But equally, both architecture and artists’ books speak to our attraction to the beauty of form. All of the examples above are re-offered here in support of this proposition. Look at them again.

“Architecture”, “art” and “the book” are all fluid concepts. So it should be no surprise that we arrive at the equally fluid similes: architecture is like book art, book art is like architecture.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in The Blue Notebook, Volume 16 No 2, Spring – Summer 2022.

Further Reading

Carrión, Ulises. 1975. “The New Art of Making Books”. Reprinted in Lyons, Joan. 1993. Artist’s books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press.

Côme, Tony. 2018. “The Typotectural Suites“, The Palace of Typographic Masonry. Accessed 5 April 2021.

Goldberger, Paul. 2008. Counterpoint: Daniel Libeskind. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag.

Hugo, Victor, and Jessie Haynes, trans. 1831 (1902). Nôtre Dame de Paris. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

Hugo, Victor, and Nathan Haskell Dole, trans. 1890 (1895). Victor Hugo’s Letters to His Wife and Others (The Alps and the Pyrenees). Boston, MA: Estes and Lauriat.

Lynn, Greg. 2004. Folding in Architecture Rev. ed. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy. See for references to Mario Carpo, Gilles Deleuze and Peter Eisenman.

Macken, Marian. 2018. Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice. London: Taylor and Francis.

McEwen, Hugh. 12 January 2012. Polyglot Buildings. Issuu. Accessed 13 March 2021.

Niessen, Richard. 2018. The Palace of Typographic Masonry. Leipzig: Spector Books.

Pallasmaa, Juhani. 1996. The Eyes of the Skin. London: Academy Editions.

Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2009. The Thinking Hand. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2011. The Embodied Image. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

Steingruber, Johann David. 1773 (1774). Architectonisches Alphabeth: bestehend in Dreysig … . Schwabach: Johann Gottlieb Mizler.

Tsimourdagkas, Chrysostomos. 2014. Typotecture: Histories, Theories and Digital Futures of Typographic Elements in Architectural Design. Doctoral dissertation, Royal College of Art, London. Accessed 13 March 2021.

Vyzoviti Sophia and BIS Publishers. 2016. Folding Architecture : Spatial Structural and Organizational Diagrams. 14th print ed. Amsterdam: BIS.

Williams, Elizabeth. 1989. “Architects Books: An Investigation in Binding and Building”, The Guild of Book Workers Journal. 27, 2: 21-31.

Books On Books Collection – Johan Hybschmann

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Book of Space (2009)

Book of Space (2009)
Johan Hybschmann
A4 sketchbook, laser cut watercolor paper, spray paint. brass and string. Perspex display case made by Hamar Acrylics with a sprayed mdf base, H360mm x W330 x D330 mm; Attachable brass frame and white thread for display. One of two. Acquired from the artist, 22 August 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

If you are familiar with Olafur Eliasson’s Your House (2006) or J. Meejin Yoon’s Absence (2004), you will applaud Johan Hybschmann’s Book of Space not only for its complexity and beauty but its audacious overcoming of any anxiety of influence. Inspired by Aleksandr Sokurov’s film Russian Ark, Hybschmann made Book of Space while at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. UCL. The film is famous for being made in one continuous shot with a SteadiCam. It begins with a silent black screen then the voice of an unseen narrator wondering where he is and how he got there, remembering vaguely some accident. Sounds of laughter swell, and a scene of party goers in early 19th century finery decamping from a coach onto a street outside the Hermitage bursts into our view and the narrator’s. They cannot see or hear the narrator. Following the party goers through a basement entrance, we come across another time traveller, Astolphe, the Marquis de Custine (1790-1857), who apparently can see and converse with the narrator and most of the other characters as he and the narrator move through the rooms of the gallery and Winter Palace and a jumble of centuries from one room to another featuring Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and even the 2002 directors of the Hermitage.

While the viewer’s primary sensory experience is the temporal surreality, Hybschmann’s interest lies

in the way that the camera never looks back. Even though the viewer never sees the full dimensions of these spaces, we are still left with a sense of coherence and wholeness. But what if the back of the room was mindblowingly different? It’s as if we constantly use the previous space to create an understanding of what should be behind us. The book is an attempt to spatially prolong that perceptual idea. (From interview with Geoff Manaugh)

Selecting two different spaces from the film sequence, Hybschmann drew layered silhouettes in constructed perspectives for each. Using an A4 watercolor sketchbook, he attached one space’s first silhouette to a page and laser-cut it into the leaf; then, turning to the next leaf, he attached the next silhouette layer, laser-cut it; and so on through the first half of the sketchbook’s leaves. The process was repeated in the second half of the book for the second selected space.

With age and travel, some pages have acquired a foxing-like “patina” of ash marks from the edges of the laser cuts. Previously incomplete cutouts, along with thin bars defining columns, windows, etc., have fallen into the gutter.

Further Reading

Deryabin, Andrey, Jens Meurer, Karsten Stöter, Anatoly Nikiforov, Aleksandr Sokurov, Sergeĭ Dontsov, Mariia Kuznetsova, et al. 2003. Russian ark. New York: Wellspring Media. Viewable here.

Henter, Andrea. 24 March 2011. “Johan Hybschmann: Book of Space“. Fadingpaper. Accessed 12 September 2018.

Jones, Jonathan. 28 March 2003. “90 Minutes that Shook the World“. The Guardian.

Macken, Marian. 2018. Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice. London and New York: Routledge.

Manaugh, Geoff. “Book of Space“. BLDGBLOG. 4 September 2009. Accessed 12 September 2018.

Martin, Karen. 1 June 2010. “Johann Hybschmann: Book of Space“. Bookleteer.

Images: courtesy of the artist.

Books On Books Collection – Antoine Lefebvre Éditions

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I Can’t Breathe (2015)

I Can’t Breathe (2015)
Antoine Lefebvre Éditions
Saddle-stitched with staples. Digital print. 16 pages. H218 x W178 mm. Edition of 100 copies. Acquired from the artist, 29 August 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

I Can’t Breathe is the first publication made under Lefebvre’s imprint. He labels it a “zine” and calls it a “gut reaction” to the murder of Eric Garner. Lefebvre is one of several book artists who have lifted up Garner’s last words or his name since 17 July 2014. The work makes its simple but powerful statement by bordering the cover’s monumental black square with white and enveloping the eleven utterances of Garner’s last words in a field of white.

Monument to the Third International (2015)

Monument to the Third International (2015)
Antoine Lefebvre Éditions
Book object, 200 x 150 x 50 mm (closed), 350 mm diameter (open). Edition of 12 + 4 AP, of which this is #4. Acquired from the artist, 29 August 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

The second work under his own imprint, this sculptural artist’s book pays homage to Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivist tower design for a monument to the Communist International, known as the Comintern or Third International, which lasted from 1919 to 1943.

When opened along its horizontal axis, the work echoes the shape of Tatin’s tower design. Also, when closed, the book’s fore-edge mimics the 1964 version of Dan Flavin’s “Monument” For V. Tatlin, bringing it into the category of “homage to an homage”, such as Michalis Pichler’s homage to Marcel Broodthaers’ homage to Stéphane Mallarmé or, from genres other than book art, Johan Karlsson’s homage to Vera Molnár’s homage to Albrecht Durer or, to stretch a point, Nam June Paik’s homage to Albers’ Homage to the Square or Andrew Wenrick’s homage to the same.

Tatin (1920), Flavin (1964), Lefebvre (2015)

Lefebvre’s Monument is a ludic masterpiece to be read with the hands as well as the eyes. Its physicality and whiteness might remind the viewer “The White Heat”, organized by Marc Straus. Held, or looked at, in its closed state, it might recall the more somber Absence by J. Meejin Yoo.

Opening the work.

Closing the work.

木 (2016)

木 (2016) Antoine Lefebvre H209 x W209 mm, 12 pages. Unnumbered edition of 250. Acquired from the artist, 2 October 2020. Photos of booklet: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

The kanji sign 木 on its own means “book”. During his residency at the Palais de Paris in Takasaki, Japan, Lefebvre became obsessed with the character and photographed it whenever he could. Eventually he not only created this work, influenced by Sol LeWitt’s PhotoGrids (1977), but used it to name his bookshop in Paris.

Artiste Éditeur (2018)

Lefebvre first came to this collection’s attention at the exhibition “Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox, Vienna, 28 January 2018”. His entry was an entire library —  La Bibliothèque Fantastique (2009-2013).

Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Lefebvre thinks of himself not as an artist and publisher but rather as an “artist publisher” — artiste éditeur — which is the title of the book based on his dissertation. Lefebvre not only expounds his thesis in the pages of the book, he demonstrates — or rather realizes — it in La Bibliothèque Fantastique (LBF).

Artiste Éditeur (2018)
Antoine Lefebvre
H297 x W210 mm, 176 pages.

The works in LBF appropriate covers, titles, images and arguments in a way to enacts conversations among the appropriated, with Lefebvre and with the reader. The works draw on a wide variety of artists and writers: Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Beuys, Jorge Luis Borges, Ulises Carrión, Noam Chomsky, August von Cieszkowski, Guy Debord, Jacques Derrida, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Ernst Gombrich, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Joseph Kosuth, Jacques Lacan, Marshall McLuhan, Stéphane Mallarmé, A. Mœglin-Delcroix, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean Paul Sartre, Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein and many others.

Photos of book: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

More than “drawing on” the appropriated, LBF draws their thoughts into the digital twentieth and twenty-first centuries conversation about artists’ books and book art. Two of Lefebvre’s more discursive contributions to LBF constitute an “artist publisher” statement and a manifesto for LBF and himself:

… the books of LBF have no predetermined physical existence, they exist in a state of potentiality on the web, awaiting to become. They cost nothing, you can get them without spending a penny. They have no ISBN either, because they are works of art. They have no color, so that they can be printed in any printer. That’s what LBF books don’t have, which is almost more important than what they do, because our approach is conceived as a negative of that which is habitually proposed by the market spectacle society. The idea is to show various poetic singularities as opposed to the flashy commodities which our society feeds us.

What the LBF books do have is above all a great freedom of content, revealing a very large and global conception of art. They contain all forms of expression usually found in print, i.e., drawing and photographs, as well as essays, novels, journalistic investigations etc.

The covers of LBF books are invariably appropriated from existing sources, the published artists just select one and use it as a cover for their book. The author’s name is deleted and replaced by the name of the artist, the name of the original publisher is also cleared since the new book is no longer its property. The artist can also change the title of the book to enhance it. The content of the book is completely open, the artist develops it through the pages to meet his or her project. The books are produced with bits and pieces from other books, developing a discourse on the ontology of the book. This project seeks to examine the nature of the book by submitting it to the approaches similar to those used by minimalist artists to test the limits of painting and art. The purpose of LBF is to explore the boundaries of what is a book and and what is not.

In 2015, Lefebvre chose Antoine Lefebvre Éditions as the name of his imprint and his artist name, but 2018 must have felt like his true annus natalis if not mirabilis. Not only did LBF appear in the Vienna exhibition and Artiste Éditeur arrive, he opened a shop in Paris and called it 本 \hon\ books. Even in his entrepreneurship, Lefebvre is an appropriator/hommageur. The name 本 \hon\ books pays homage to Japanese second-hand bookstores but also, and not surprisingly, to Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965). Like Kosuth’s work, the shop’s name provides the same information in three formats: an ideogram, its Japanese pronunciation, and its translation (本 = book).

Perhaps it is because he works, thinks and creates with equal comfort in the digital and physical worlds or that he is international in outlook and language or that he happily inhabits the multiple roles of artist publisher, collaborator, appropriator, impresario and entrepreneur — for whatever reason, Antoine Lefebvre and his work bring a welcome élan to book art and this collection.

Further Reading

Challis, Ivy. “Artist Interview: Antoine Lefebvre of Everything is Index Nothing is History”, Recession Art, n.d. Accessed 15 September 2020.

Gilbert, Annette (ed.). Publishing as Artistic Practice (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016).

Lefebvre, Antoine. Artiste Éditeur (Saint-Mâlo: Strandflat, 2018).

Lefebvre, Antoine. “I want to write a book“, La Bibliothèque Fantastique, 2011.

Lefebvre, Antoine. “La Bibliothèque Fantastique“, La Bibliothèque Fantastique, No. 13, 22 October 2009.

Matheny, Lynn Kellmanson. “Dan Flavin: A Retrospective”, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Accessed 15 September 2020.

Bookmarking Book Art – Architecture

Books On Books3 Comments

Architecture — be it theory, principles, practices or instances — inspires book art. Lay the book flat; you have a foundation. Open and turn it on its fore-edge; you have a roof beam or arcade. Stand it upright; you have a column or tower. Turn the front cover; you open a door. Put the text and types under a microscope; you have a cityscape. As the examples in this virtual exhibition show, architecture-inspired book art goes beyond these simple analogies.

There are seemingly unrelated texts that help considerably in going there. The Eyes of the Skin (2005) and The Embodied Image (2010) by Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, teacher and critic, are two of them. He writes as if he were an artist preparing an artist’s statement or descriptions of the book art below. The title of his earlier book gives away his alignment with the visual and tactile nature of book art. Pallasmaa’s two books will enrich anyone’s enjoyment of the works shown and mentioned here.

Update: There is also the directly related and superb work Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice (2018) by Marian Macken.

From the Books On Books Collection

Helen Malone

Malone’s Ten Books of Architecture is a good place to start in the collection. Like Pallasmaa, Malone takes a broad historical and, most important, haptic view of architecture from Vitruvius to Hadid. Each of the ten books is a bookwork that exemplifies its subject.

Photos: Books On Books Collection

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

The columns in this accordion book are made by embossing; the marbling effect comes from diluted Sumi ink.
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis

Adapted tunnel book with accordion sides
Photo: Books On Books Collection


A watercolour at the tunnel’s end to evoke the stained glass clerestory windows in the Basilique Saint-Denis, Paris
Photo: Books On Books Collection

The aspiration to fuse the cosmic and the human, divine and mortal, spiritual and material, combined with the systems of proportion and measure deriving simultaneously from the cosmic order and human figure, gave architectural geometries their meaning and deep sense of spiritual life. The Embodied Image, p. 23.

Leon Battista Alberti

Photo: Books On Books Collection

The texture of this book, its adapted accordion structure and Alberti’s words remind me of Geoffroy Tory’s Champ fleury: The Art and Science of the Proportion of the Attic or Ancient Roman Letters, According to the Human Body and Face  (1529) and its argument for finding the ideal shape of the letters in the human form and face. The alphabet as book art’s bones, bricks and beams?

And further apropos the link between the book and architecture, consider the connection that Vasari drew between Gutenberg and Alberti:

In the year 1457 [sic], when the very useful method of printing books was discovered by Johann Gutenberg the German, Leon Batista [sic], working on similar lines, discovered a way of tracing natural perspectives and of effecting the diminution of figures by means of an instrument, and likewise the method of enlarging small things and reproducing them on a greater scale; all ingenious inventions, useful to art and very beautiful. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 1, trans. Gaston Du C. de Vere (London: Medici Society/ Philip Lee Warner, 1912-1914), 494.

Filippo Brunelleschi

Photos: Books On Books Collection

In “An Architectural Confession”, Pallasmaa writes:

One’s most important teacher may have died half a millennium ago; one’s true mentor could well be Filippo Brunelleschi or Piero della Francesca. I believe that every serious artist — at the edge of his/her consciousness — addresses and offers his/her work to a superior colleague for approval. The Eyes of the Skin, p. 82.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

“A paradox of enrichment and reduction”
Photo: Books On Books Collection

“New technologies”
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Photo: Books On Books Collection

Le Corbusier

This curiously textured cube sits perfectly alongside Pallasmaa’s observation: “The basic geometric shapes have their symbolic connotations, but more important than their conventional meanings are their conceptual and visual organising powers” (The Embodied Image, p. 58).

Photo: Books On Books Collection

Photo: Books On Books Collection

Photo: Books On Books Collection

Photo: Books On Books Collection

I.M. Pei


A short trip around this small pyramid as a reminder of the entrances that were always on the far side of museums you visited
Photos: Books On Books Collection

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Photo: Books On Books Collection


“Reading” the perspex accordion invites reconfiguring your own hi-rise and skyline.
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Daniel Libeskind

It is no surprise that Pallasmaa has written extensively on Libeskind.
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Photo: Books On Books Collection

Photo: Books On Books Collection

Photo: Books On Books Collection

Zaha Hadid

This edition of Malone’s Ten Books is unique in its inclusion of Hadid, who is not mentioned in either of Pallasmaa’s books but whose artistry and turn to the organic and curves of nature certainly fit with their spirit.
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Malone’s Ten Books has a predecessor in Laura Davidson’s contribution to the 1994 Smithsonian show on book art inspired by its collection of rare science books (see section below). Although there is also Karen Wirth’s sculptural take on the Ten Books as well as Ron Keller’s take (see section below) on Palladio’s Fours Books of Architecture, which is Palladio’s take on Vitruvius, I have not found any other Vitruvian-inspired works of book art. (Pointers welcome.)

Mandy Brannan

These two works — 30 St Mary Axe: Diagrid (2009) and 30 St. Mary Axe: Cladding (2009) — are among several architecture-inspired works of book art that Brannan has created. The text in one of those several — Situated — could have come straight from Pallasmaa, Bachelard or Merleau-Ponty:

Being situated is generally considered to be part of being embodied, but it is useful to consider each perspective individually. The situated perspective emphasizes that intelligent behaviour derives from the environment and the agent’s interactions with it.

30 St Mary Axe: Diagrid (2009)
Mandy Brannan
London has nicknamed the building at 30 St. Mary Axe “the Gherkin”.
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Photo: Books On Books Collection

30 St. Mary Axe: Cladding (2009)
Mandy Brannan
Photo: Books On Books Collection

By integration of image, colour and structure, Brannan situates the “Gherkin’s” architecture in your hands.

Sarah Bryant

The Radiant Republic (2019)
Sarah Bryant
Photo: Books On Books Collection

In the The Radiant Republic (2019), Sarah Bryant (Big Jump Press) brings together concrete, wood, glass, paper, ink and embossed printing, sewn binding, box container and texts from Plato and Le Corbusier.


Note the embossed text on the verso. Across the five volumes, the embossed text is the same as that printed in ink, but it runs in fragments backwards from this last page of the last volume to the last page of the first volume.
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Bryant’s insightful integration of Plato’s and Le Corbusier’s texts and ideas and her setting them in the physicality of the blond wood, linen cover, embossed type and sewn papers could easily be a response to Pallasmaa’s comment in The Eyes of the Skin: “The current overemphasis on the intellectual and conceptual dimensions of architecture contributes to the disappearance of its physical, sensual and embodied essence.” (p. 35)

Helen Douglas and Telfer Stokes

Chinese Whispers (1975) is conceptual, visual and spatial narrative that takes the reader into a “game of embedded games”: a game of Chinese Whispers used by the artists to combine the process of making a book with the process of recovering an old cottage, making a corner cupboard, making jam, making ideas and making an exit.

Chinese Whispers (1975)
Helen Douglas and Telfer Stokes
Photo: Books On Books Collection

The selection of images above begins with the front cover’s photo of a patch of grass outside an abandoned farm building and ends with the back cover’s photo of the underside of the patch of grass. In between, the pages take the viewer through the trimmed hedge and the doorway into the room, through the building, the stocking of the shelves, using of the stock and closing of the shed cupboard, and so back to the other side of the patch of grass. As Stokes explained in the Journal of Artist’s Books (Vol. 12, 1999):

We started with the corner cupboard, that was the part that occupied our thinking most, that and the two colour vignettes (as we called them) printed on different stock. But then we started to think backward to what might be before the cupboard’s construction. To the thing before that, and the thing before that, and the thing before that which was cutting of the hedge and before that which was the boot brush which we called the hedgehog- that was where the book started. Then we started to photograph from that point forward, through the book.

The work blends the features of book structure, collage and montage to create something that resonates uncannily with Pallasmaa’s approving citations of Bachelard’s central idea of the hearth and domicile as central to our time-bound “being-in-the-world”.

Olafur Eliasson

Your House is a laser-cut model of Olafur Eliasson’s residence in Copenhagen at a scale of 1:85, which means that each page equates to a 220 mm section of the actual house. How do you read a work like this — physically? At the 22″ mark in this video, the pages fall in a cascade like a flipbook, but for the most part, their size, accumulated bulk and weight — and delicacy — defy that handling. As in the video below, they must be turned slowly and carefully. Your House heeds the task of the arts as posed by the architect Juhani Pallasmaa, “in our age of speed, …to defend the comprehensibility of time, its experiential plasticity, tactility and slowness” (The Embodied Image, p. 78).

Your House (2006)
Olafur Eliasson

Heather Hunter

Folded book pages rarely generate a work that rises above mere craft. Heather Hunter’s Observer Series: Architecture (2009) achieves the necessary height. It combines the altered book with an accordion book that incorporates a found poem composed of the words excised and folded outwards from the folded pages of The Observer’s Book of Architecture.

Observer Series: Architecture (2009)
Heather Hunter
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Photo: Books On Books Collection

The very fact of a found poem made of excised words that happen to fall at the folds shaping a column from a book on architecture chimes with the title of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

Marlene MacCallum

Chicago Octet (2014) by Marlene MacCallum embodies the collaborative creative approach often taken in architects’ practices. Collaborative working arises almost as frequently in book art. Think of Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay, Helen Malone and Jack Oudyn, Julie Chen and Clifton Meador, Robin Price and Daniel Kelm. Many more can be added. As described by MacCallum:

From May 19 – 26, 2014 a group of eight gathered at the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts for a final collaborative project. This event was organized by Clifton Meador and myself and included David Morrish, Scott McCarney, and four Grenfell Campus BFA (Visual Arts) grads, Stephen Evans, Maria Mercer, Virginia Mitford, and Meagan Musseau…. The letterpress printing consisted of a word selected by each participant printed on one of Scott’s folded structures. The images were a digital layering of every cityscape photograph that I made and then inkjet printed on top of the letterpress. The final folded structure was designed by Mary Clare Butler. The case was designed and built by Scott McCarney, the front cover embossment was by David Morrish and Clifton Meador.



Chicago Octet (2014)
Marlene MacCallum
Hand bound artist’s book with folded paper structure, letterpress and inkjet printing, 6.5 × 3 × 0.5 inches (closed dimension).
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Photo: Books On Books Collection

Chicago Octet fully unfolded, 17.5 × 11.5 inches
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Can you hear the traffic and sense the layers of experience? What Pallasmaa writes here of rock art in Africa and Australia reminds me of Chicago Octet (or is it vice versa?): “

At the same time that great works of art make us aware of time and the layering of culture, they halt time in images that are eternally new. … Regardless of the fact that these images may have been painted 50,000 years ago, … we can … hear the excited racket of the hunt. The Embodied Image, p. 109.

Salt + Shaw (Paul Salt and Susan Shaw)

Mill: A journey around Cromford Mill, Derbyshire (2006) is the result of the artists’ exploration of Cromford Mill in Derbyshire, the first water-powered, cotton-spinning mill developed by Richard Arkwright in 1771. Solid, plaster cast blocks are held softly between calico pages containing hidden texts, bound in recycled wooden library shelf covers that indicate there is history to be found within.

Mill: A journey around Cromford Mill, Derbyshire (2006)
Salt + Shaw (Paul Salt and Susan Shaw)
Photo: Books On Books Collection

Having Mill is like having the building inside your house.

Karen Wirth

Architecture plays more than an inspirational role in Karen Wirth’s portfolio. As mentioned above, she has created her own take on Vitruvius’ Ten Books. She designed the Gail See Staircase at Open Book and the Hiawatha Light Rail Station, both in Minneapolis. The collage work Paper Architecture is based on an architectural installation at the Minnesota Center for Arts Design and draws on Wirth’s photos of Ayvalik, Amsterdam, Florence, Istanbul, New York City, Rome, San Diego and Venice.

Paper Architecture (2017)
Karen Wirth
Photographs in the book © Karen Wirth
Photo: Books On Books Collection

In The Embodied Image, Pallasmaa singles out “the collaged image” as creating “a dense non-linear and associative narrative field through initially unrelated aggregates, as the fragments obtain new roles and significations through the context and dialogue with other image fragments” (pp.71-72). The materially disparate words in the title of Wirth’s work imply the dialogues she creates among paper, designs of letters and architecture, buildings across time and the globe, and photos tinted, four-colour, and black-and-white in palimpsest.

For Wirth’s own comments about the intersection of book art and architecture, see her interview with Betty Bright.

J. Meejin Yoon

Former professor and head of the Department of Architecture at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, Yoon is now Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University. She is also cofounder of Höweler + Yoon, a design-driven architecture practice. Absence appears to be her only work of book art so far.

When you hold this small white brick of paper and turn its thick pages, a small pinhole appears on the page. Then two larger square holes emerge, one of which falls over the pinhole. Page after page, the two square holes repeat, creating two small dark wells in the field of white, until on the last page they take their place in the cut-out schematic footprint of the city blocks and buildings surrounding the Twin Towers of New York City. What you hold in your hands at the end is an object of art and book of memorial prayer.

Absence (2003)
J. Meejin Yoon
Photo: Books On Books

Other sites, other works

Twice a semester, the Environmental Design Library at the University of California, Berkeley hosts “Hands On: An Evening with Artists’ Books”. In 2017, one evening’s theme was “Building on the Built”, illustrated by 25 works of book art. Organised by 23 Sandy Gallery in the same year, “BUILT“ was an international juried exhibition featuring 66 artist books by 51 artists examining the relationship between contemporary book art practices and architecture, engineering, landscape and construction.

Arranged alphabetically by artist’s name, this section provides links to favorites from these two exhibitions as well as other collections, exhibitions and installations.

James Allen: The Golden Section (2016), Architectural Graphics (2018)

Architectural Graphics (2018)
James Allen
Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Charlene Asato: Black & White (2013)

Alicia Bailey: Cities & Eyes (2016)

Carli Boisjolie: Places of Theirs (2016)

Amy Borezo: Raising the Supine Dome (2010)

Raising the Supine Dome (2010)
Amy Borezo
Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Inge Bruggeman: A Crisis Ethicist’s Directions for Use: Or How to be at Home in a Residence-cum-Laboratory (2003)

A Crisis Ethicist’s Directions for Use: Or How to be at Home in a Residence-cum-Laboratory (2003)
Inge Bruggeman
Photos: Courtesy of the artist

On her site, Bruggeman writes, “This book/box project is built around excerpts from Architectural Body by Madeline Gins and Arakawa…. incorporates a blueprint of their Bioscleave House as part of the imagery….”. Somewhat like A Clockwork Orange or perhaps more like Heideigger’s tomes, the Gins and Arakawa book is a challenge to the reader’s expectations of diction and syntax.

R D Burton: Structures II (2015)

Carol Chase Bjerke: Homage to Peter Mullin (2014)

Julie Chen and Barb Tetenbaum: Ode to a grand staircase (for four hands) (2011)

Susan Collard: Work in Great Cities (2011); Quixity (2017)

Guylaine Couture: Everyone Needs a Home (2017)

Laura Davidson: Ten Books of Vitruvius (1994), Venice : Piazza San Marco (2010)

Elsi Vassdal Ellis: Here is the church. Here is the Steeple. Here are questions for the people. (2017)

Alisa Golden: Woods in the City (2013)

Woods in the City (2013)
Alisa Golden
Photos: Courtesy of the artist

Christiane Grauert: Folding City (2016)

Karen Hanmer: The model architect: the panic of ’09 (2010)

Hongtao Zhou: Textscape-TONTSEN Eye (2019)

Textspace-TONTSEN Eye (2019)
Hongtao Zhou
Photos: Courtesy of the artist

Johan Hybschmann: Book of Space (2009)

Ronald Keller: Palladio, Andrea (1508-1580): excerpts from the four books on architecture (2008)

Louise Levergneux: Finding Home (2016)

Marlene MacCallum: Townsite House Bookwork (2006). See also Gail Tuttle, The Architectural Uncanny (Newfoundland: Sir Wilfred Grenfell College of Art Gallery, 2007).

Richard Minsky: Model of Buckminster Fuller’s Tetrascroll (1979). See also Polly Lada-Mocarski, Richard Minsky and Peter Seidler, “Book of the Century: Fuller’s Tetrascroll“, Craft Horizons, October 1977 (Vol. 7, No. 35). For one (very helpful) reading of Tetrascroll see Jessica Prinz’s “The ‘Non-Book’: New Dimensions in the Contemporary Artist’s Book” in The Artist’s Book: The Text and its Rivals, a special two-issue volume of Visible Language, Vol. 25, Nos. 2/3, edited by Renée Riese Hubert (Providence, RI: Rhode Island School of Design, 1991), pp. 286-89.

Marta Minujín: El Partenon de Libros (1983)

Howard Munson: The Architects (2018)

Sumi Perera: Building Blocks Book XVII (2017). Further information available at Saatchi Art.

Building Blocks Book XVII (2017)
Sumi Perera
Photos by artist’s permission

Going against the usual structure of the book, that of a beginning, a middle and an end, Perera provides a space for infinite possibilities and multiple authors, creating “modules that can be re-sequenced and re-aligned to develop variable permutations and encourage participatory involvement, to share the final editorial control with the viewer to transform the ever-evolving work”. These possibilities for variable permutations are no more evident than in her constantly evolving project, Building Blocks Book, and its numerous subsequent iterations including The Negative Space of Architecture and The House That Jack Never Built (2008). Once again we find Perera exploring human interaction, not only with the concepts and her quizzical ideas surrounding architectural and public spaces and how we build between and move within, but also the physical interaction with the artists’ books she produces – the rearrangement and reinsertion of pages which allow the audience and participants new opportunities and pathways to proceed. Through the positive and negative space of the page or the type font, the Underground versus over ground, the artist takes us on journeys that are at once fluid and at other times obstructive. In these cityscapes, the U-turn is as common as the page turn – a necessary rupture in a free-flowing narrative. Chris Taylor, From Book to Book (Leeds: Wild Pansy Press, 2008).

Maria G. Pisano: Tunnel Vision (2004), Hecatombe 9-11 (2007)

Laura Russell: Casa Mila (2006)

Marilyn Stablein: Grids, Lines, Blocks: Basics Tools to Build Linear Habitats (2017)

Barbara Strigel: Visible Cities (2016)

Nikki Thompson: A Tribute to Alvar Aalto (2008)

A Tribute to Alvar Aalto (2008)
Nikki Thompson
Photos: Courtesy of the artist

Andrew Topel: Blueprints (2012)

Christine Trexel: Building the Universe (2017)

Amanda Watson-Will: The Great Library (2011)

Rachel Whiteread: Nameless Library (2000)

Thomas Parker Williams: Spiral Dome: Sculptures in Paper and Steel (2016)

Spiral Dome: Sculptures in Paper and Steel (2016)
Thomas Parker Williams
Photos: Courtesy of the artist

Update: With the addition of Marian Macken’s book Binding Space, mentioned above, comes the Vedute Foundation, a collection of objects/manuscripts by artists/designers/architects created within the constraint that each work has the proportion of the Gutenberg Bible and the relationship of ‘Text’ and ‘Form’ as its subject. For this essay in Books On Books and for the Books On Books Collection’s acquisition of the Merrion edition of Johann David Steingruber’s Architectural Alphabet, the most apropos and favorite work in the Vedute collection is K (1996) by Peter Wilson.

K (1996)
Peter Wilson
“This contribution (a double volume) is based on the letter ‘K’ (an atom of language), materialised within the Gutenberg proportions in sturdy plywood. It is the responsibility of an architect not only to ‘give form’ but also to explore latent interiorities, potential spatialities. Here the ‘K’ interior has its own inherent geometric agenda − a tunnel, a tube, an inverting telescope (apex mirror). Object becomes instrument (a window to the antipodes even), a trigger for multiple ‘K’ vectors (textural and spatial).” Bolles+Wilson

Further Reading

23 Sandy Gallery. 2017. Built: an international exhibition of contemporary artist books, April 7-May 27, 2017. Portland, Oregon: 23 Sandy Gallery. “… examining the relationship between contemporary book art practices and architecture, engineering, landscape and construction as form, function and structure. Book artists took this opportunity to re-image the ways we as designers, of either books or buildings can inhabit and shape the world around us. Our disciplines have a natural synergy. After all, books and buildings are both kinetic, sequential, structural and time based. BUILT examines the relationship between the built and the book. BUILT features 66 artist books by 51 artists from across the country and as far away as Canada, United Kingdom and Australia.” Publisher’s website.

Sophia Kramer, “Variations of Vitruvius: Four Centuries of Bookbinding and Design”, The Met, 22 August 2018. This essay reviews and illustrates the conservation and rehousing of ninety-five copies of De Architectura libri decem (The Ten Books of Architecture) by Marcus Pollio in the collection of the Department of Drawings and Prints. They are part of a donation of 356 publications from the architect William Gedney Beatty (1869–1941). For book artists, the section on a 1556 edition with double volvelles to display a theater design should be of interest.

Macken, Marian. Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice (London: Taylor and Francis, 2018). A trained architect and book artist, Macken articulates and illustrates the how and why of the overlap between architecture and book art.

David Sume. The architectural nature of the illustrated books of Iliazd : (Ilia Zdanevich, 1894-1975, University of Montreal, 2019. This dissertation is a reminder that the importance of architecture to book art reaches back to the avant-garde and modernists of the early 20th century — and more important, that its importance may lie beneath the surface.

Elizabeth Williams, “Architects Books: An Investigation in Binding and Building”, The Guild of Book Workers Journal, Volume 27, Number 2, Fall 1989. This essay not only pursues the topic of architecture-inspired book art but turns it on its head. An adjunct professor at the time, Williams set her students the task of reading Ulises Carrión’s The New Art of Making Books (Nicosia: Aegean Editions, 2001) then, after touring a bindery, “to design the studio and dwelling spaces for a hand bookbinder on an urban site in Ann Arbor, Michigan”. But before producing the design, the students were asked “to assemble the pages [of the design brief and project statement] in a way that explored or challenged the concept of binding”. In other words, they had to create bookworks and then, inspired by that, create their building designs. Williams illustrates the essay with photos of the students’ bookworks. [Special thanks to Peter Verheyen for this reference.]

Bookmarking Book Art – Otis College of Art and Design

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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 – An Online Annotation of Germano Celant’s “Book as Artwork 1960/1972”

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Where to go to compare and contrast the book art in Germano Celant’s pioneering “catalogue” of the Nigel Greenwood Gallery exhibition in London (1972) with that of the last half century?

Being a sort of small and portable catalogue and curator’s explanation for the gallery’s exhibition of ca. 300 works, Celant’s Book as Artwork is arranged chronologically and then alphabetically by artist. Presumably it was organized to match the exhibition’s organization (note the year 1967 in upper left of the photograph below and the distinctive Hidalgo cover, fifth from the left). With no photographs of the works, Book as Artwork gives no easily accessible visual sense of the 300 works in that exhibition. If we had that starting visual touchpoint, it would be easier to “place” the period or individual works in relation to book art from the 80’s onward.

Book as Artwork 1960 – 1972 – Exhibition Nigel Greenwood Gallery B, 1972.

Stephen Bury’s Artists’ Books: The Book as a Work of Art, 1963 – 2000 (2015) includes, by design, only a handful of the artists and works selected for the Celano/Greenwood exhibition.

Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 (1973, 1997) — a “bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically” — comes as close as one might hope in black-and-white print for a starting visual touchpoint. Lippard’s scope, however, ranges beyond book art, so the number illustrated limits systematic visual comparison and contrast with the book art of the ensuing decades.

Phaidon’s Artists Who Make Books (2017) provides good coverage and bridges the 1960s to the 21st century. The essays and descriptions bring the book art off the page and into the mind’s hands.

Best of all is Lynda Morris’s mini-memoir of her role in organizing the Celant/Greenwood exhibition.

Germano had sent Nigel [Greenwood] a wonderful, arty handwritten letter in pink capitals … on December 22, 1970:

DEAR PUBLISHER I AM PREPARING FOR A NEW INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE A COMPLETE ANTHOLOGY OF BOOKS MADE DIRECTLY BY ARTISTS. 

…Nigel had met Germano and had his telephone number in Genoa. I was sitting beside him when he phoned and proposed Book as Artwork exhibition for September 1972. Germano immediately agreed.

For sources of book art since the close of the Celant/Greenwood exhibition, we are spoilt for choice. Print and digital, image-rich aggregations of book art abound. We can return to the Phaidon and Bury books. We can turn to the well-illustrated print and online publications from the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of Western England, online library collections such as the MassArt Library or Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, the websites of dealers such as Zucker Art Books displaying their wares, the dozens of websites for recurring book art fairs such as International Artist’s Books Triennial Vilnius (1997 – present) and CODEX International Book Fair (2007 – present) and community sites such as Artist Books 3.0. In the future, the Getty Research Institute‘s processing of the Steven Leiber Basement archive should also yield a rich source of images of works by the artists selected for the Celant/Greenwood exhibition. 

Present-day online access challenges Mallarmé’s dictum: ”Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.” Now it seems:

Everything in the world exists to end up on the web.

As far as that premise holds, this annotation and rearrangement of Celant’s bibliography — a “webliography” — offers an online starting point for connecting the book as artwork 1960/1972 with the book as artwork since. In providing some images of the works and links to images, the webliography offers anyone interested in book art the means to gain a more colored impression of the period’s book art.  That the primary impression is still black and white underscores the impact of xerographic technology on artists then as well as that of conceptualism driven by text or photograph. A webliographic approach also offers the opportunity to link the book art of the Celant exhibition with book-oriented Web-art or Net-art such as that of Amaranth Borsuk, Taeyoon Choi, Gunnar Green, Johannes Heldén, Bernhard Hopfengärtner and many others referenced below.

The reorganization here of Celant’s and Morris’s list — by artist alphabetically then chronologically — makes it easier to see the curators’ tendencies in selection as well as the influence of practical factors. The curators’ selection is obviously more Western, less Eastern European and even less Middle Eastern and Asian. Individuals’ prodigality surely played a role in whom and what was included. As Morris’s essay in the Phaidon book reveals, the geographical proximity of works available to be chosen played a role; so, too, the influence of the then-contemporary art network played a role (Atkinson, Beuys, Celant, Dwan, Greenwood, Hansjorg Mayer, Walther König, Maenz, Siegelaub, Sperone and the many other personalities of the Art-Language, Arte Povera, Conceptualist and Fluxus movements); and even the size of suitcases and availability of transport for bringing the artwork into the UK played a role. 

Generally the online links for the artists’/authors’ names lead to biographies, either in their official websites, Wikipedia or other news sources. Where an artist/author is listed multiple times, the links vary from instance to instance to provide a wider range of information about the individual and, in some cases (such as Dieter Rot’s), more images. The links behind the publishers’ names go to publishers’ websites or Wikipedia entries about them. The links that follow each entry resolve to images of the work, videos, audio, interviews or essays relevant to the work. For selected entries in Celant’s list, a compare/contrast takes the user to websites or works whose juxtaposition might shed light on the similarities or differences between the item in Celant’s list and book art of the subsequent decades.

The webliography also supports the haptically as well as digitally inclined. The links behind the titles of the works provide information on the nearest library location of the work (although not all titles could be located).  Be sure to enter your own location and refresh the results. 

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A “webliography” for

Germano Celant’s Books as Artworks 1960/1972

2nd edition, published by 6 Decades Books, 2010, and 1st edition published by Nigel Greenwood, Inc., 1972.

______. Manifestos. New York: Great Bear Pamphlets, 1966. [Contributors: Ay-O, Philip Corner, Robert Filliou, John Giorno, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Diter Rot, Jerome Rothenberg, Wolf Vostell, Robert Watts, and Emmett Williams] [Images] [Compare/contrast with Jessica Lack’s Why Are We ‘Artists’?: 100 World Art Manifestos, with Michael Pichler’s Publishing Manifestos and this review of Luca Lo Pinto’s exhibition “Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox, Vienna, 28 January 2018“]

Acconci, Vito. Transference: Roget’s Thesaurus. New York: 0 to 9 Books, 1969. [Image] [Video] [Essay] [Compare/contrast with Sam Winston’s Darwin, 2015]

Agnetti, Vincenzo. 14 Proposizioni sul Linguaggio Portatile. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1972. [originally published in Flash Art]

Andre, Barry, Huebler, Kosuth, LeWitt, Morris and Weiner.  The Xerox Book. New York: Seth Siegelaub, Jack Wendler, 1968. [Image] [Video, Jack Wendler] [Compare/contrast with Michael Mandiberg’s Print Wikipedia, 2015, and Paul Soulellis’ Library of the Printed Web, 2013 to present]

Andre, Carl. Seven Books of Notes and Poetry. New York: Dwan Gallery/Seth Siegelaub, 1969. [Images] [Essay on artist] [Video, Carl Andre] [Video, retrospective] [Compare/contrast with Sam Winston’s Dictionary Story Book, 2014]

Anselmo, Giovanni. Leggere. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1972. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Leilei Guo’s The Way, 2008]

Art & Language. Olivet Discourse. Paris: Templon Editeur, 1971. [Image]

Atkinson, Terry; Baldwin, Michael. Frameworks-Air Conditioning. Coventry: Art & Language Press, 1967. [Image] [Essay] [Video of Baldwin and Ramsden, Chicago symposium] [Compare/contrast with Taeyoon Choi’s “Zero & One”, 2017]

Art & Language – Poster for Air-Conditioning Show, 1971-1972
Colección MACBA. Consorcio MACBA. Depósito Philippe Méaille.

Atkinson, Terry; Baldwin, Michael. Hot-Warm-Cool-Cold. Coventry: Art & Language Press, 1967. [Image]

Atkinson, Terry; Baldwin, Michael. 22 Sentences: The French Army. Coventry: Precinct Publications, 1968. [Image]

Atkinson, Terry; Baldwin, Michael. Sunnybank. Coventry: Art & Language Press, 1969. [Image] [Compare/contrast with M.L. Van Nice’s Feast is in the Belly of the Beholder, 2010]

Atkinson, Terry; Baldwin, Michael. Theories of Ethics. New York: Art & Language Press, 1971. [Image]

Atkinson, Terry; Bainbridge, David; Baldwin, Michael; Harrison, Charles; Hurrell, Harold; Kosuth, Joseph. Art-Language. Cologne: Dumont Schauberg, 1972. [Essay] [Essay]

Image result for art & language: texte zum phänomen kunst und sprache [book]

Baldessari, John. Ingres and Other Parables. London: Studio International, 1972. [Image] [Also see Clare Lehmann’s entry on Baldessari in Artist’s Who Make Books, 2017, p.29]

Baldessari, John. Choosing: Green Beans. Milan: Edizioni Toselli, 1972. [Images][Compare/contrast with George Gessert’s Natural Selection, 1994]

Baldwin, Michael; Hurrell, Harold. Handbook to Ingot. New York, Coventry: Art & Language Press, 1971. [Image] [Video of Baldwin and Ramsden]

Barry, Robert. ”   “. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1970. [Images] [Essay] [Compare/contrast with Elisabeth Tonnard’s The Invisible Book, 2012]

Barry, Robert. Robert Barry 1969-71. Cologne: Gerd de Vries, 1971. [Compare/contrast with Elisabeth Tonnard’s A Dialogue in Useful Phrases, 2010]

Barry, Robert. Something Which Is…(30 Pieces as of 14th June 1971). Cologne: Paul Maenz, 1971. [Image]

Barry, Robert. Two Pieces. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1971.[Images]

Baruchello, Gianfranco. Mi viene in mente. Milan: Edizioni Galleria Schwarz, 1966. [Image] [Compare/contrast with Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground, 2014]

Becher, Bernd & Hilla. Anonyme Skulpturen. Dusseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle Verlag, 1970.  [Image] [Video] [Compare/contrast with Anselm Kiefer’s The Rhine, 1992-2013, and Helen Malone’s Ten Books on Architecture, 2012]

Blake, John. John Blake : recent work, 1969-71 : a travelling exhibition arranged by the Circulation Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1972. [Image] [Compare/contrast with Anouk Kruithof’s The Daily Exhaustion, 2010]

Bochner, Mel;  Cherix, Christophe. Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed As Art: Visual Arts Gallery, School of Visual Arts,December 2 – December 23, 1966 [New York]. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1997. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Johanna Drucker’s All: the Books I Never Wrote or Wrote and Never Published, 1962 to 2017]

Bochner, Mel. The Singer Notes. New York: Self-published, 1968. [Images] [Compare/contrast Bochner’s notes and drawings resulting from conversations with scientists and engineers at Singer Labs in New Jersey with the Smithsonian Libraries’ online exhibition Science and the Artist’s Book, 1995]

Bochner, Mel. Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography). New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970. [Images]

Bochner, Mel. Notes on Theory. Kingston, RI: University of Rhode Island, 1971. [Image]

Bochner, Mel. 11 Excerpts (1967 – 1970). Paris: Edition Sonnabend, 1972. [Images]

Boshier, Derek. 16 Situations. London: Idea Books, 1971. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Sascha Pohflepp’s and Chris Woebken’s Situated Sampling Set, 2017]

Derek Boshier, Situation 1 (from the ‘16 Situations’ series), photograph, 1971
See The Courtauld Institute blog.

Boyle, Mark. Journey to the Surface of the Earth. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1970. [Images and book by J.L. Locher] [Compare/contrast with New England Guild of Book Workers’ Geographies: New England Book Work, 2014]

Brecht, George. Fluxus No. 1 March 1964. New York: Valise eTRangLE, 1964. [Images]

Brecht, George. Chance-Imagery. New York: Something Else Press, 1966. [Images, including facsimiles] [Compare/contrast with Barb Tetenbaum’s and Julie Chen’s Artist’s Book Ideation Cards, 2013, and Paul Soulellis’s Chancebook #1 (Why Does It Hurt So Bad), 2013]

Brecht, George; Filliou, Robert. Games at the Cedilla, or the Cedilla Takes Off. New York: Something Else Press, 1967. [Images]

Brøgger, Stig. 21. marts 1969 = March 21 1969. Copenhagen: Jysk Kunstgalerie, 1969. [Second edition]

Broodthaers, Marcel. Image: un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Antwerp: Wide White Space, 1969. [Images] [Video] [Compare/contrast with Doug Beube’s Veil: Secret Wars of the C.I.A., 1996, J. Meejin Yoon’s Absence, 2004, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, 2010, Pauline Rafal’s Windows, 2014, and James Bridle’s Every Redaction, 2015]

Double-page spread Marcel Broodthaers Image: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, 1969

Brouwn, Stanley. 100 This Way Brouwn Problems for Computer IBM Model 95. Cologne: Walther König, 1970. [Essay] [Compare/contrast with Julie Johnstone’s 2-20% | 20-2cm, 2014]

Brouwn, Stanley. La Paz. Schiedam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970.[Image] [Images]

Brouwn, Stanley. Tatwan. Munich: Aktionsraum, 1970. [Images] [More images] [Compare/contrast with Craig Mod’s and Dan Rubin’s Koya Bound: Eight Days on the Kumano Kodo, 2016]

Brouwn, Stanley. Durch Komische Strahlen Gehen. Monchengladbach: Stadtisches Museum, 1970. [Image] [Image]

Brouwn, Stanley. Steps. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1971. [Image] [See also Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 57-58][Compare/contrast with James Bridle’s All Roads Lead to X, 2015; compare/contrast with Yu-Wen Yu’s Boston to Taipei ,2013]

Brouwn, Stanley. Afghanistan-Zambia. Aachen: Gegenverkehr e.V., Zentrum für aktuelle Kunst, 1971. [Image & essay] [Compare/contrast with James Bridle’s Where the F**k Was I?, 2011}

Brouwn, Stanley. One Step (IX-100X). Brussels: Galerie MTL, 1971. [Essay]

Brouwn, Stanley. 1 Step – 100,000 Steps. Amsterdam: Art & Project, 1972. [Image]

Buren, Daniel. Limites Critique. Paris: Yvon Lambert, 1970. [Images] [Site]

Burgin, Victor. Work and Commentary. London: Latimer Press, 1972.  [Image] [Video] [Essay] [Exhibition 2012]

Burgy, Donald. Art Ideas for the Year 4000. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1970. [Video] [Compare/contrast with Gunnar Green’s and Bernhard Hopfengärtner’s 75000 Futures, 2014]

Burgy, Donald. Contexts Completion Ideas. Krefeld: Schuring, 1971. [Compare/contrast with Praxis, Museum of Nonvisible Art, 2011]

Burn, Ian. Xerox Book. n.p.: Self-published, 1968. [Compare/contrast with Paul Soulellis’s Apparition of a distance, however near it may be, 2013]

Xerox Book (1968)
Ian Burn

Burn, Ian; Ramsden, Mel. Six Negatives. New York: Society for Theoretical Art, 1969. [Images] [Video of Baldwin and Ramsden]

Burn, Ian; Ramsden, Mel. Notes on Genealogies. Vol. 1, No. 2. New York: Art-Language, 1970. [Essay by Thomas Dreher]

From the National Gallery of Victoria
Melbourne, Australia

Burn, Ian; Cutforth, Roger; Ramsden, Mel. Proceedings. Vol. 1, No. 3. New York: Art-Language, 1970. [Essay by Jo Melvin]

Burn, Ian; Ramsden, Mel. Notes on Analyses (1). Coventry: Art-Language Press, 1970. [Image]

Burn, Ian; Ramsden, Mel. Stating and Nominating. New York: Art-Language, 1970.

Burn, Ian; Ramsden, Mel. The Grammarian. New York: Art-Language, 1970.[Image]

Byars, James Lee. 100,000 Minutes, or the Big Sample of Byars, or 1/2 an Autobiography, or the First Paper of Philosophy. Antwerp: Galerie Anny de Decker, 1969. [Images] [See also Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 75-77] [Compare/contrast with Johanna Drucker’s All: the Books I Never Wrote or Wrote and Never Published, 1962 to 2017]

Cage, John. Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Press, 1961. [Video] [Compare/contrast with Paul Soulellis’s 273 Relics for John Cage (A Likeness Is an Aid to Memory), 2011]

Cage, John. A Year from Monday. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Press, 1967.

Cage, John. Notations. New York: Something Else Press, 1969.

Cage, John. Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Things Worse) Continued, Part Three. New York: Great Bear Pamphlets, 1967. [Video] [Compare/contrast with Robin Price’s As You Continue, 2011]

Carlini, Alessandro; Lang, Karl. Prozess Art, Situation Art. Berlin: Self-published, 1971.

Castillejo, Jose Luis. The Book of I’s. Constance: Castillejo, 1969. [Images] [Video] [Audio]

Castillejo, Jose Luis. The Book of Eighteen Letters. Madrid: Artes Graficas Luis Peres, 1972. [Images] [Audio]

Chiari, Giuseppe. Senza Titolo, 1971. Milan: Edizioni Toselli, 1972. [Images] [More images]

Collins, James. Revision and Prescription. New York: 98 Greene Street, 1971. [Image]

Corner, Philip. Popular Entertainments. New York: Great Bear Pamphlets, 1967. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Andrew Savage’s Savage Presents Jean Michel Jarre, 2011]

Costa, Claudio. Estratti da Evoluzione-Involuzione. Genova: Edizioni Masnata, 1972. [Image]

Croce, Giancarlo. a  a’b’  b. Rome: Edizioni Gap, 1971.[Compare/contrast with Abra: The Living Book by Kate Durbin, Amaranth Borsuk and Ian Hatcher (2014)]

a  a’b’  b (1971)
Giancarlo Croce
19.3 x 18.5 cm, 48 pages + cover

a  a’b’  b (1971)
Giancarlo Croce
19.3 x 18.5 cm, 48 pages + cover

Cunningham, Merce. Changes: Notes on Choreography. New York: Something Else Press, 1968.

Cutforth, Roger. The Empire State Building. New York: Art Press, 1969. [Image] [Compare/contrast with Helen Malone’s Ten Books on Architecture, 2012, and Mandy Brannan’s 30 St Marys Axe, 2015]

Cutforth, Roger. The Visual Book. London: Lisson Gallery, 1970. [Image]

Cutforth, Roger. CN/ET/ESB: The Non-Art Project. New York: Self-published, 1971. [Image] [Compare/contrast with Helen Malone’s Ten Books on Architecture, 2012]

Darboven, Hanne. Xerox Book. Hamburg: Self-published, 1969.

Darboven, Hanne. 6 Manuskriptie 69. Dusseldorf: Michelpresse, 1969. [Image]

Darboven, Hanne. Das Jahr. n.p.: n.p., 1971. [Unable to locate]

Dibbets, Jan. Robin Redbreast’s Territory: Sculpture 1969, April — June. New York, Cologne: Siegelaub/Walther König, 1969. [Images] [More images] [Compare/contrast with Stephen Collis’ and Jordan Scott’s Decomp, 2013; with Marinus van Dijke’s Eye, 2013]

Dibbets, Jan. Perspective Correction. New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970. [Image] [Essay] [Compare/contrast with Wendy Wahl’s Laid Open, 2017]

Dibbets, Jan. 3.12.1971 t/m 16.1.1972. Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 1971.

Fabbris, Giorgio; Spiller, Giorgio. Assenza. Venice: Self-published.

Ferguson, Gerald. The Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged by Word Length and Alphabetized within Word Length. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1970. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Masumi Shibata’s UED (Uncertain English Dictionary), 2008]

Filliou, Robert. Ample Food for Stupid Thought. New York: Something Else Press, 1965. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Black Page catalogue from the Laurence Sterne Trust, 2009]

Filliou, Robert. Hand Show. Villingen: Saba-Studio, 1967. [Image] [Additional images]

Filliou, Robert. A Filliou Sampler. New York: Great Bear Pamphlets, 1967. [Image]

Filliou, Robert. 14 Chansons et 1 Charade. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1968. [Images] [Additional images]

Filliou, Robert (with Beuys, Brecht, Cage, Iannone, Kaprow, Marcelle, Patterson and Rot). Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts. Cologne: Walther König, 1970. [Images] [Video]

Fisher, Joel. Double Camouflage. Mansfield, OH: Mansfield Fine Arts Center, 1970. [Image] [Additional images]

Flynt, Henry. Down with Art. New York: Fluxpress, 1968. [Image] [Additional images] [Compare/contrast with Doug Beube’s Breaking the Codex, 2011]

Fulton, Hamish. The Sweet Grass Hills of Montana as seen from the Milk River of Alberta. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1971. [Image] [Additional images] [Compare/contrast with Helen Douglas’s The Pond at Deuchar, 2013]

Fulton, Hamish. Hollow Lane. London: Situation Publications, 1972. [Images] [Additional images]  [Video] [Compare/contrast with Craig Mod’s and Dan Rubin’s Koya Bound: Eight Days on the Kumano Kodo, 2016]

Gilbert & George. A Message from the Sculptors Gilbert & George. London: Art for All, 1970. [Image] [Additional images] [Video]

Gilbert & George. To Be with Art is All We Ask. London: Art for All, 1970. [Image] [Additional images] [Video]

Gilbert & George. The Pencil on Paper Descriptive Works. London: Art for All, 1970. [Additional images]

Gilbert & George. A Day in the Life of Gilbert & George. London: Art for All, 1971. [Image] [Additional images]

Gilbert & George. Oh, The Grand Old Duke of York. Lucerne: Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1972. [Image] [Additional images]

Gilbert & George. Side by Side. Cologne: Walther König, 1972. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Abra: The Living Book by Kate Durbin, Amaranth Borsuk and Ian Hatcher (2014)]

Graham, Dan. End Moments. New York: Self-published, 1969. [Image]

Graham, Dan. Two Parallel Essays. New York: Multiple, Inc., 1970. [Image] [Compare/contrast with Tom Abba’s These Pages Fall Like Ash, 2013.

Graham, Dan. Dan Graham. London/Cologne: Lisson Gallery/Walther König, 1972.

Graham, Rodney. Works 1963-1969. Cologne/New York: Walther König, 1970.

Greco, Sandro. Saper Sorridere. n.p.: Self-published, 1971. [Article]

Gregory, Kathe; Landis, Marilyn; Lewis, Russell; Crane, David; Kahn, Scott. Stolen. New York: Colorcraft Lithographers/Dwan Gallery, 1970. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Andrew Savage’s Stolen White Goods, 2006, and then Cristina Garrido’s intervention White Goods, 2011]

Hamilton, Richard. Polaroid Portraits, Volume One. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1972. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Anouk Kruithof’s The Daily Exhaustion, 2010]

Harvey, Michael. White Papers. New York: Self-published, 1971. [Images] [Additional images]

Hemsworth, Gerard. South West Coast of England. Amsterdam, London: X-One/Nigel Greenwood, 1970.

Hidalgo, Juan. Viaje a Argel. Madrid: Zaj, 1967. [Images] [More images]

Higgins, Dick. What are Legends: A Clarification. Calais, ME: Bern Porter, 1960. [Images]

Higgins, Dick. Jefferson’s Birthday / Postface. New York: Something Else Press, 1964. [Images]

Higgins, Dick. A Book about Love & War & Death, Canto One. New York: Great Bear Pamphlets, 1965. [Images] [Video]

Higgins, Dick. Foew and ombwhnw : a grammar of the mind and a phenomenology of love and a science of the arts as seen by a stalker of the wild mushroom. New York: Something Else Press, 1969. [Images] [Video]

Huebler, Douglas. Durata Duration. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1970. [Images] [Video] [Compare/contrast with Andrew Eason’s Clock Watching, 2006]

Huebler, Douglas. Location Piece #2. New York: Multiple, Inc., 1970. [Images] [More images] [Video] [Compare/contrast with Barbara Tetenbaum’s Mining My Ántonia; Excerpts, Drawings, and a Map, 2012]

Hurrell, Harold. Fluidic Device. Coventry: Art-Language, 1968. [Image]

Johnson, Ray. The Paper Snake. New York: Something Else Press, 1965. [Video of reprint edition]

Kaltenbach, Stephen. [Artforum Advertisements]. New York: Artforum, Issues dated November 1968 through December 1969. [Image] [Artslant interview]

Kaprow, Allan. Assemblage, Environments & Happenings. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1965. [Images] [Video]

Kaprow, Allan. Pose: Carrying Chairs through the City, Sitting Down Here and There, Photographed, Pix Left on Spot, Going On, March 22 1969-1970. New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970. [Images]

Knowles, Alison. By Alison Knowles. New York: Great Bear Pamphlets, 1965. [Images]

Kosuth, Joseph. Four Titled Abstracts [within S.M.S. Portfolio no. 3]. New York: Letter Edged in Black, Inc., 1968]. [Images] [More images]

Kosuth, Joseph. Function. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1970. [Images] [Additional images]

Kosuth, Joseph. Notebook on Water. New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970. [Images] [Additional images]

Kosuth, Joseph. The Sixth Investigation 1969, Proposition 14. Cologne: Gerd de Vries, 1971. [Image] [Video]

Kosuth, Joseph. The Sixth Investigation 1969, Proposition 2. Buenos Aires/Cologne: CAYC/Paul Maenz, 1971. [Video]

Lamelas, David. Publication. London: Nigel Greenwood, 1970. [Images] [Video]

Latham, John. Least Event/One-Second Drawings/Blind Work/24-Second Painting. London: Lisson Gallery, 1971. [Image] [Video] [Cover of the work indicates a publication date of 1970]

Law, Bob. 16 Drawings. London: Lisson Gallery, 1971. [Images] [Audio]

LeWitt, Sol. 49 Three Part Variations Using Three Different Kinds of Cubes, 1967-1968. Zurich: Editions Bischofberger, 1969. [Images] [Video]

LeWitt, Sol. Four Basic Kinds of Straight Lines. London: Studio International, 1969. [Images][Video] [Film][See also Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 171-172]

LeWitt, Sol. Schematic Drawings for Muybridge II, 1964. New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970. [Images] [Video, Veronica Roberts] [Video, Charles Haxthausen]

LeWitt, Sol. Four Basic Colours and their Combinations. London: Lisson Gallery, 1971. [Images]

Lole, Kevin; Smith, Paul. Handbook on Models. Coventry: Self-published, 1972. [Unable to locate a work of this title in WorldCat, but one with the title The Relativism of Emotion Handbook to the Model and same date of publication is described in Paul Robertson‘s “A Collection of Rare Art+ Language Books and Internal Documents – Many Unknown in Literature”, Gorebridge, Midlothian: Unoriginal Sins/Heart Fine Art, n.d.]

30 x 21cm, 50pp (printed recto only) plus printed card covers. Xerox inner pages as issued. The first and only edition of this theoretical work based on a physical model (electro-shock, photo beams and electronic buzzers) acting as metaphor for analogue, theoretical and representative models. Cover is very minority marked on the front and back cover has a faint diagonal crease else VG++. From the archive of David Rushton who believes only 10 or fewer of this book was published.

Long, Richard. Rain Dance. New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970. [Images]

Long, Richard. From Along a Riverbank. Amsterdam: Art & Project, 1971. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Helen Douglas’s Venetian Brocade, 2010]

Long, Richard. Two Sheepdogs Cross In and Out of the Passing Shadows the Clouds Drift Over the Hill with a Storm. London: Lisson Gallery, 1971. [Images][See also Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 175-176]

Maloney, Martin. Integuments. Brattleboro, VT: Press Work, 1969. [Image] [Video] [Additional outtakes]

Maloney, Martin. Fractionals. Brattleboro, VT: Press Work, 1970.

Maloney, Martin. Intervention (Five Days and Five Nights at the Galerie MTL). Brussels: Galerie MTL, 1970. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Sam Winston’s Darkness Visible, 2017]

Double-page spread from
Intervention (Five Days and Five Nights at the Galerie MTL), Martin Maloney
Brussels: Galerie MTL, 1970

Manzoni, Piero. The Life and Works. Glucksburg-Hamburg-Paris: Peterson Press, 1963. [Image] [Artspace essay] [Compare/contrast with Marc Straus’s White Heat exhibition, 2017]

Marchetti, Walter. Arpocrate Seduto sul Loto. Madrid: Zaj, 1968. [Images] [More images]

McLean, Bruce. King for a Day. London: Situation Publications, 1972. [Images]

Merz, Mario. Fibonacci 1202 Merz 1970. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1970. [Images] [Additional images] [Compare/contrast with Rutherford Witthus’ Anything is a Mirror, 2007, and Susan Happersett’s Box of Chaos, 2014]

Merz, Mario. Una somma reale e una somma di gente. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1972.

Morris, Robert. Continuous Project Altered Daily. New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970. [Images] [Additional images][Further additional images][Still more images]

Nauman, Bruce. Burning Small Fires.  San Francisco.: Self-published, 1968. [Images]

Display of Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, at Pliure: La Part du Feu, 2 February – 12 April 2015, Paris. Photo by Robert Bolick. Reflected in the lower left hand corner is the display of Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires; in the upper right corner, the film clip of Truffaut’s 1966 Fahrenheit 451; and in the upper left, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s La bibliotheque en feu, 1974.

Nauman, Bruce. Clea Rsky. n.p.: Self-published, 1969. [Images] [Additional images] [Compare/contrast with Anouk Kruithof’s Automagic, 2016]

Nauman, Bruce. Laair. New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970. [Images][Additional image]

N.E. Thing Company. A Portfolio of Piles. Vancouver: Self-published, 1968. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Alicia Martín’s Biografias, 2002 ongoing]

N.E. Thing Company. Trans VSI Connection NSCAD-NETCO. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, 1969. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Dennis Ashbaugh’s and William Gibson’s AGRIPPA: A Book of the Dead, 1992]

Oldenburg, Claes. Injun & Other Histories. New York: Great Bear Pamphlets, 1966. [Image]

Oldenburg, Claes. Store Days. New York: Something Else Press, 1968. [Images]

Oldenburg, Claes. Notes in Hand. London: Petersburg Press, 1971. [Images]

Ono, Yōko. Grapefruit. Tokyo, New York: Wunternaum, 1964. [Images]

©Yoko Ono

Oppenheim, Dennis. Flower Arrangement for Bruce Nauman. New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970.  [Images] [More images]

Paolini, Giulio. Cio che non ha limiti e che per sua stessa natura non ammette limiti di sorta. Turin: Self-published, 1968. [Image] [Another image] [More images]

Paolozzi, Eduardo. Metafisikal Translations. London: Kelpra Studios, 1962. [Images] [More images] [Compare/contrast with Francisco Prieto’s London 1827, 2001-13]

Paolozzi, Eduardo. ABBA ZABA. London: Hansjorg Mayer, 1970. [Image] [Images] [More images]

Penone, Giuseppe. Svolgere la Propria Pelle. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1971. [Image] [More images]

Phillips, Tom. A Humument. London: Tetrad Press, 1970. [Image] [More images] [Video] [Compare/contrast with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, 2010]

Phillips, Tom. Trailer. Dusseldorf: Hanjorg Mayer, 1971. [Image]

Pilkington, Philip; Rushton, David; Lole, Kevin; Smith, Paul. Concerning the Paradigm of Art. Zurich: Editions Bischofberger, 1971. [Last author’s name corrected from “Paul” to “Peter”] [From Paul Robertson, “A Collection of Rare Art+ Language Books and Internal Documents – Many Unknown in Literature”, Gorebridge, Midlothian: Unoriginal Sins/Heart Fine Art, n.d.

“30 x 21cm, 16pp (recto only). White card covers – with offset title. A text published by Bischofberger from a theoretical document written by Kevin Lole, Philip Pilkington, David Rushton and Peter Smith (formerly Analytical Art and by this time fully regarded as members of Art & Language) which applied Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift to art (the original theory by Kuhn being a view that revolutions in scientific thought only occurred when sufficient contrary evidence to the prevailing orthodoxy had mounted up and the original hypothesis could no longer explain the physical evidence emerging from empirical studies). It is worth noting that at this time Bischofberger bought a great deal of Art + Language material from the group and published other documents by them including some of the group’s rarest publications – storing many of the more three-dimensional works for later resale. Bischofberger did not print the books himself – rather Art and Language arranged design and publication in Coventry (for free using the University’s resources) and David Rushton drove the books over in a camper van to Switzerland (breaking down just on the edge of the city due to running out of petrol and having little money left, Rushton coasted the last mile down hill on an empty tank).

The limitations of these series of books are usually placed at c. 200 but Rushton remembers taking far fewer than that with him and this Analytical Art book was in fact only produced in 50 copies taken to Zurich plus a few retained by the artists in the UK.

That said this is one of ONLY 5 copies which were numbered in roman numerals (this one being III/V) and signed by ALL of the four writers in pencil on the first title page.”]

Pilkington, Philip; Rushton, David. Sample from a Topological Notebook. Coventry: Self-published, 1972. [Video] [From Paul Robertson, “A Collection of Rare Art+ Language Books and Internal Documents – Many Unknown in Literature”, Gorebridge, Midlothian: Unoriginal Sins/Heart Fine Art, n.d.

“30 x 21cm, 28pp carbon copy pages and printed cover. This was one of ONLY four copies made and published by the group – two copies being signed by David Rushton and Peter [sic] Pilkington and created from original typed sheets and two copies remaining unsigned and created (as here) using the carbon copies from the originals. These latter two examples were regarded by the group as artist’s proofs of the book. This is the only copy of this book available for sale anywhere as from the original four prices: one is in Paul Maenz’s archive and another two copies are in the hands of private collectors (who purchased them from ourselves). This copy is signed by David Rushton and Philip Pilkington and has been stamped on the inside front cover with the official Art & Language Stamp and also designated in blue ink “Second Copy”. Fine estate and clearly rare.”]

Pistoletto, Michelangelo. Le Ultime Parole Famose. Turin: Tipolito Piano, 1967. [Images] [Additional images]

Pistoletto, Michelangelo. L’uomo nero: Il lato insopportabile. Salerno: Rumma Editore, 1969. [Included in this anthology; searchable here] [Image] [Cover image] [Video] [Compare/contrast with Abigail Thomas’s Micro-Pages, 2010]

Prini, Emilio. Magnete. [included within Celant’s Arte Povera published by Praeger , 1969.] [Unable to verify this; an image of the work appears in Emanuela Nobile Mino’s article “Emilio Prini: Non creo, se è possibile”, Flash Art 50, 298 Dicembre 2011 – Gennaio 2012.]

Magnet / Photo Series / Group 2000 / September 1968 / (4 Phase) / Continuous Photographic Photographs Continuously Photographs Up to 20,000 Shots / Run Time work / 10 years / annual series of 20,000 elements / technique / black and white photography / leafs / 3 M / K 203 3 / each 30 x 40 / constant time setting diaphragm / fixed tilt stand / 1969 / camera used maintains the original value and adds to the artistic market.

Ramsden, Mel. The Black Book. [Unable to find a work under this title in WorldCat]

Ramsden, Mel. Abstract Relations. New York: Art-Language, 1968. Edition of 5. [Unable to find a work under this title in WorldCat; the 5 images on the left in this photograph from the Philippe Méaille private collection at MACBA come closest.]

‘ART & LANGUAGE Incomplet’ exhibition views, 2014. Photo: EOS-AF, Estudi Orpinell & Sánchez — Artesania Fotogràfica

100% Abstract (1968) Art & Language

Roehr, Peter. Ziffern: 10 Typomontagen 1965. Cologne: Gerd de Vries, 1970.

Ty-100 (1965)
Peter Roehr
Source: Artnet 29 October 2017

Rot, Dieter. BOK 2a. Reykjavik: forlag ed, 1960. [Images and essay] [Video, survey of Rot’s artist’s books]

Rot, Dieter. BOK 2b. Reykjavik: forlag ed, 1961. [Links in author’s name lead to image]

Rot, Dieter. BOK 3a. Reykjavik: forlag ed, 1961.

Rot, Dieter. BOK 3b. Reykjavik: forlag ed, 1961.

Rot, Dieter. BOK 3c. Reykjavik: forlag ed, 1961. [For images, see Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, p. 243]

Rot, Dieter. BOK 3d. Reykjavik: forlag ed, 1961. [Video link]

Rot, Dieter. BOK 4a. Reykjavik: forlag ed, 1961.

Rot, Dieter. BOK 5. Reykjavik: forlag ed, 1961.

Rot, Dieter. Dagblegt Bull No. 8. La Louvriere: A. Balthazar & P. Bury, 1961.

Rot, Dieter. Daily Mirror Book. Reykjavik: forlag ed, 1961. [For image, see Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 242-243][Compare/contrast with Vienna Romanée’s Data Sewing Project,  2011 to present]

Rot, Dieter. Mundunculum. Cologne: Dumont Schauberg, 1961.

Rot, Dieter. Book AC 1958-1964. New Haven: Ives-Sillman, 1964.

Rot, Dieter. Quadrat-blatt. Hilversum: Steendrukkerij de Jong, 1965.

Rot, Dieter. The Copley Book. Chicago: Bill and Norma Copley Foundation, 1965. [For image, see Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 243-245]

Rot, Dieter. Kölner Divisionen. Cologne: Galerie der Spiegel, 1965.

Rot, Dieter. Quick. Reykjavik: Self-published, 1965.

Rot, Dieter. Poetrie No. 1. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1966.

Rot, Dieter. Scheisse: Neue Gedichte von Dieter Rot. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1966.

Rot, Dieter. Die Blaue Flut. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1967.

Rot, Dieter. A Look into the Blue Tide, Part Two. New York: Great Bear Pamphlets, 1967.

Rot, Dieter. Siebdruckbilder (Screenprint Pictures 1-4). Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1967.

Rot, Dieter. Mundunculum (enlarged and corrected). Cologne: Dumont Schauberg, 1967.

Rot, Dieter. Poetrie 2 (301 kleine Wolken in Memoriam big J und big G : ein fingierter Bericht aus der inneren Fremde)Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1967.

Rot, Dieter. 80 Wolken, 1965-67. Stuttgart: E. Walther, 1967.

Rot, Dieter. Poeting 3/4 (Poeterei: Doppelnummer …). Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1968.

Rot, Dieter. Poemetrie. Cologne: Divers Press, 1968. [Image] [Compare/contrast with Robert Kalka’s Medium, 1995]

Poemetrie (no. 4 of the review Poeterei) (1968)
19 transparent plastic bags; letterpress, printed on both sides, filled with vanilla pudding and urine; plastic cover, back cover with signed drawing a.p. (ed. of 30 + 3 a.p.)
© Dieter Roth

Rot, Dieter; Williams, Emmett. Still More Shit — A Supplement. New York: Something Else Press, 1968. [Still more images]

Rot, Dieter. Die Kakausener Gemeine. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1968. [Images]

Rot, Dieter. Die Gesamte Scheisse/The Complete Shit. Berlin: Rainer Verlag, 1968. [Images]

Rot, Dieter. 246 Little Clouds. New York: Something Else Press, 1968. [Images]

Rot, Dieter. Little Tentative Recipe. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1969. [Images]

Little Tentative Recipe (1969)
Approx 800 rotaprints in colour.
8.8 x 8.8 x 8.8 cm. Adhesive binding wooden box. 100 unique pieces numbered.
© Dieter Roth

Rot, Dieter. Poetrie 5 to 1st. London: Hansjorg Mayer, 1969. [Images]

Rot, Dieter. Icelandic Leather. Reykjavik: Self-published, 1970. [Unable to locate by this title; may be referring to Volume 5, Bok 3 of the Collected Works]

Rot, Dieter. Snow. Stuttgart, Reykjavik, London: Wasserpresse Mayer, 1970. [Images]

Rot, Dieter. Postkartenblock (Postcard Pad). Cologne, London, Hellnar: Hansjorg Mayer, 1971. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Frances Kiernan’s All the Prints I Have Made, 2010]

Rot, Dieter. 2 Problems of Our Time: An Essay. Reykjavik: Verlag Reykjavik, 1971.

Rot, Dieter. Franz Eggenschwiler: The Young Man, the Man, His Time, His Work (until today 2.5.71), An Essay. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1971. [Images]

Rot, Dieter. Ideogramme. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1971.

Rot, Dieter. Smaller Works Part 1. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1971. [Volume 18 of Gesammelte Werke]

Rot, Dieter. Smaller Works Part 2. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer, 1971. [Volume 19 of Gesammelte Werke]

Rot, Dieter. Who Was Mozart. Reykjavik: Verlag Reykjavik, 1971.

Rot, Dieter. Who’s the One Who Doesn’t Know Who Mozart Was? Reykjavik: Verlag Reykjavik, 1971.

Rot, Dieter. A Question? Reykjavik: Verlag Reykjavik, 1971.

Ruppersberg, Allen. 23 Pieces. Los Angeles: Sunday Quality, 1969. [Images]

Ruppersberg, Allen. 24 Pieces. Los Angeles: Sunday Quality, 1970. [Images]

Ruscha, Ed. Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Los Angeles: Self-published, 1963. [Images] [Interview about the book][See also Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 251-252][Compare/contrast with Sowon Kwon’s Whiteowned Gasoline Stations, 2007, and Ginger Burrell’s Twentysix Charging Stations, 2014]

Ruscha, Ed. Various Small Fires. Los Angeles: Self-published, 1964. [Images]

Display of Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, at Pliure: La Part du Feu, 2 February – 12 April 2015, Paris. Photo by Robert Bolick. Reflected in the lower left hand corner is the display of Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires; in the upper right corner, the film clip of Truffaut’s 1966 Fahrenheit 451; and in the upper left, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s La bibliotheque en feu, 1974.

Ruscha, Ed. Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Los Angeles: Self-published, 1966. [Images] [Animation] [Compare/contrast with Every Item in the Artists’ Book Collection of the Banff Centre Paul D. Fleck Library & Archives, 2013 to the present, and James Bridle’s installation Every CCTV (CC), 2017, an extension of The Nor, 2014]

Ruscha, Ed. Thirtyfour Parking Lots. Los Angeles: Self-published, 1967. [Images] [Compare/contrast with James Bridle’s Drone Shadow Handbook, 2013]

Ruscha, Ed. Nine Swimming Pools (and a Broken Glass). Los Angeles: Self-Published, 1968.

Ruscha, Ed. Business Cards. Los Angeles: Heavy Industry Publications, 1968. [Images]

Ruscha, Ed. Stains. Los Angeles: Heavy Industry Publications, 1969. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Ellie Ga’s Classification of a Spit Stain, 2009]

Ruscha, Ed. Crackers. Los Angeles: Heavy Industry Publications, 1969. [Images]

Ruscha, Ed. Real Estate Opportunities. Los Angeles: Self-published, 1970. [Images]

Ruscha, Ed. Babycakes with Weights. New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970. [Images][See also Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 252-253]

Ruscha, Ed. A Few Palm Trees. Los Angeles: Heavy Industry Publications, 1971. [Images]

Ruscha, Ed. Records. Los Angeles: Heavy Industry Publications, 1971. [Images]

Ruscha, Ed. Dutch Details. Deventer: Octopus Foundation, 1971. [Images] [Video, more images and essay][See also Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 254-255]

Sonnier, Keith. Object Situation Object. Cologne, New York: Walther König, 1970. [Images] [Official website] [Video]

Spoerri, Daniel. Topographie Anecdotée du Hasard. Paris: Galerie Lawrence, 1962. [Images]

Spoerri, Daniel. An Anecdoted Topography of Chance. New York: Something Else Press, 1966. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Rutherford Witthus’ Anything is a Mirror, 2007]

Spoerri, Daniel. The Mythological Travels.... New York: Something Else Press, 1970. [Images]

Staeck, Klaus. Pornographie. Giessen: Anabas Verlag, 1971. [Images] [Official website]

Stezaker, John. Works, 1969 – 1971. London: Nigel Greenwood, 1972. [Compare/contrast with Doug Beube’s Speechless Series, 2015, Noriko Ambe’s Artist Books Project, 2009-13, and Scott Hazard’s Photo Constructs, 2011]

Stezaker, John. “0(A-F)” and Five Inherent Predicables. London: Nigel Greenwood, 1972.

Stezaker, John. “A” and Six Predicable Concepts. London: Nigel Greenwood, 1972.

Tacha, Athena. Heredity Study I, 1970-71. Oberlin, OH: Self-published, 1971. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Jan Fairbairn-Edwards’ Family Geology, 2015]

Tacha, Athena. Heredity Study II, 1970-71. Oberlin, OH: Self-published, 1971. [Images]

Tacha, Athena. Spatial Disorientation Staircases and Ramps 1971-72. Oberlin, OH: Self-published, 1972. [Image]

Titus-Carmel, Gerard. Joaquin’s Love Affair. Paris: Ericard Editeur, 1971. [Images]

Tuttle, Richard. 2 Books 1969. New York: Betty Parsons Gallery, 1969. [Images]

Van Elk, Ger. The Well-Shaven Cactus/Paul Klee um den Fisch, 1926/The Co-Founder of the Word OK/The Discovery of Sardines/The Symmetry of Diplomacy. Amsterdam: Art & Project, 1972. [Images] [More images ][Video]

Vautier, Ben. Le Livre Total: 13 propositions pour une nouvelle perception et conscience de l’objet livre. Nice: Self-published, 1963. [Image]

Vautier, Ben. Écrit pour la gloire à force de tourner en rond et d’être jaloux. Nice: Self-published, 1970. [Images]

Venet, Bernar. Astrophysics [within S.M.S. Portfolio no. 6]. New York: Letter Edged in Black Press, 1968. [Images]

Venet, Bernar. Exploited Subjects: Stimulated Raman Effect. New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970. [Images]

Walther, Franz Erhard. Objekte, Benutzen. Cologne: Walther König, 1968. [Images]

Warhol, Andy. A. New York: Grove Press, 1968. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books, 2013]

Warhol, Andy. Andy Warhol. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968. [Images]

Weiner, Lawrence. Statements. New York: Siegelaub, 1968. [Images][See also Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, p. 291]

Weiner, Lawrence. Traces. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1970. [Actual title is Tracce Traces.] [Images] [Compare/contrast Michael Winkler’s Word Art/Art Words, 1985]]

Weiner, Lawrence. 10 Works. Paris: Yvon Lambert, 1971. [Images][See also Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 293-294]

Weiner, Lawrence. 10 Obras. Buenos Aires: CAYC, 1971. [Images]

Weiner, Lawrence. Causality Affected and/or Effected. New York: Leo Castelli, 1971. [Images][See also Clare Lehmann’s entry in Artists Who Make Books, 2017, pp. 292-293]

Weiner, Lawrence. Flowed. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1971. [Images] [More images] [Compare/contrast with Demosthenes Agrafiotis’ The Chinese Notebook, 2015.

Weiner, Lawrence. Misschien door Verwijddering [Perhaps when removed]. Amsterdam: Art & Project, 1971. [Images]

Weiner, Lawrence. Quizas Cuando Removido [Perhaps when removed]. Buenos Aires: CAYC, 1971. [Edition of the work pirated and edited with the permission of Art & Project] [Image]

Weiner, Lawrence. Having Been Done At. Turin: Sperone Editore, 1972. [Images]

Weiner, Lawrence. Green as well as Blue as well as Red. London: Jack Wendler, 1972. [Full title is And/Or: Green as well as blue as well as red.] [Images]

Young, La Monte. An Anthology of Chance Operations. New York: La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow, 1963. [Contributors: Brecht, George; Cage, John; De Maria, Walter; Flynt, Henry; Higgins, Dick; Johnson, Ray; MacLow, Jackson; Morris, Robert; Ono, Yoko; Paik, Nam June; Rot, Dieter; Williams, Emmett; Young, La Monte; et al.] [Images] [Young soundtracks and video]

Young, La Monte; Zazeela, Marian. Selected Writing. Munich: Friedrich Publishers, 1969. [Images]

βΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβσβΟβς

Bookmarking Book Art – A “white book report” on “The White Heat” at MARC STRAUS

Books On Books1 Comment

Cardboard Box (White) for Invisible Text, “Called Back,” Epitaph for Emily Dickinson
Jeanne Silverthorne, 2017
Platinum silicone rubber, acid free paper, archival invisible ink
9 x 17 x 13 inches / 23 x 43 x 33 cm
Edition 1/3 with 1 A.P

Dare you see a soul at the white heat?
Then crouch within the door.
Red is the fire’s common tint;
But when the vivid ore
Has sated flame’s conditions,
Its quivering substance plays
Without a color but the light
Of unanointed blaze.
Least village boasts its blacksmith,
Whose anvil’s even din
Stands symbol for the finer forge
That soundless tugs within,
Refining these impatient ores
With hammer and with blaze,
Until the designated light
Repudiate the forge.    –  Emily Dickinson, Part One, Life, XXXIII

MARC STRAUS, the contemporary art gallery in the Lower East Side of New York, opened “an exhibition of white paintings and sculptures by an international selection of artists” on 3 June 2017. It runs through 3 July, and its title The White Heat comes from the first line of Dickinson’s poem above.

Books on Books offers this “white book report” on book art not included to put attendees in the mood for their experience of the works in white by artists such as

  • Damien Hirst
  • Nicole Eisenman
  • Enrico Castellani
  • Robert Barry
  • Fernanda Gomes
  • Antonio Santin
  • Jeanne Silverthorne
  • Joan Levison and others.

Book Faced Down – Embedded in Plaster, 1999
Found cook book and plaster block
Irwin Susskind, born 1935
34.6 x 20.9 x 6.5 cm (13 5/8 x 8 1/4 x 2 9/16 in.)
The Allan Chasanoff, B.A. 1961, Book Art Collection, curated with Doug Beube

Irwin Susskind‘s “Book Faced Down” is an example of the technique of mixed media – a stark white plaster block facing down the objectified cookbook –  to create book art. A piece of sheet cake, a cutting board?

Zurbarán’s Color Plates, 2011
Jonathan Callan
Chiseled book in perspex
46.4 × 71.1 × 5.7 cm

Jonathan Callan‘s piece denies viewers the colorful still lifes of Francisco de  Zurbarán and leaves them with this drained-of-color, chiselled double-page spread of a book on the artist.

Work of Linear – Actions, 2000
Noriko Ambe

Where Callan chisels away from the edges inward, Noriko Ambe carves from the inside almost to the edges in her work above.

Absence, 2004
J. Meejin Yoon

As the Straus exhibition notes, “In Chinese cultures, White is associated with Death.” In J. Meejin Yoon’s book Absence, the absence of color in a solid white block of thick stock cardboard pages and the “text” of one pinhole and two identical squares die-cut into each of its 120 pages – one for each story of New York’s Twin Towers including the antenna mast – lead the reader down through the missing buildings to the final page where the footprint of the absent structures ends in a die cut of the entire site of the World Trade Center.

Your House, 2006
Olafur Eliasson
Teixeira de Freitas, Lisboa, Portugal

Your House, 2006
Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson seems to have followed Yoon’s technical approach in Your House, 2006, although the effects are far more intricate.

Coral Colony, 2017 in progress
Julie K. Dodd

Untitled
Julie K. Dodd

Echoing Yoon’s somber note, Julie K. Dodd‘s paper and book art often dwell on environmental issues, such as the death of a coral colony above and the contours of the natural landscape versus manmade as shown in Untitled.

The Great Gathering,  VII The Time is Now, 2016
Chris Ruston
Photo credit: Chris Matthews

A more hopeful note is struck in the whiteness of Chris Ruston’s final “ammonite” book in the series The Great Gathering, inspired by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The mirror under the maker’s tools and the made thing implicate the viewer here and now in an optimistic ongoing evolutionary process of making and remaking.

Michael Mandiberg, Print Wikipedia, 2015
Exhibition “From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!” by the Denny Gallery, 261 Broome Street in New York City, 18 June through 11 July, 2015.

Where the white of Yoon’s and Dodd’s works evokes absence and the white of Ruston’s work evokes the blank invitation to singular creativity, Michael Mandiberg‘s installation of multiples, Print Wikipedia, evokes the plenitude of white noise that is our online lives.

Swiss Army Book
Swiss Army Book, 1990
M. L. Van Nice
Gift of Lois Pollard Price
National Museum of Women in the Arts

And just as technologically allusive, M.L. Van Nice‘s Swiss Army Book poses (tongue in cheek?) the single volume as somehow able to capture, store and transmit knowledge in ways it need not, albeit the meaning of the whiteness here is a bit elusive.

Legal Process Narrative, 1996
Werner Pfeiffer
Law Library, University of Connecticut at Storrs

Werner Pfeiffer’s works constitute an extensive treatment in white. The installation at UConn Storrs represents a small proportion of the works shown in retrospectives in the last ten years at Bucknell, Cornell and the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art. Pfeiffer’s works touch on censorship, and from his Cornell exhibition, he explains:

The objects I create are made with real books. They are not casts, nor are they sculpted imitations. At its core each piece has bound, printed pages. Glued together and painstakingly covered with gesso, they are silenced and sealed for good. I practice this destruction, this obvious censorship, simply as metaphor. It is to visualize, to demonstrate, to provoke. For these acts of violence are not about the damage done to stacks of paper, to books. The objects are about the harm inflicted on the human spirit. The ropes, the nails, the clamps, the hooks and knifes are real as well. They are symbols of pain, of torture, of suppression which are inevitably brought on by the censor’s act.

Knotty Story
Werner Pfeiffer

Difficult to Fit
Werner Pfeiffer

With the advent of ebooks, Pfeiffer celebrates the tangibility of the book with his white gessoed book objects and their punning titles as well as origami-like works such as Zig-Zag.

But back to the white works of art at the MARC STRAUSS gallery.  Book art is not entirely neglected. Following in their tradition since 1984, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (“Kids of Survival”) pondered, discussed and “jammed” on 1895 novella by H.G. Wells to produce THE TIME MACHINE (after H.G.Wells), which is included in the exhibition.

THE TIME MACHINE (after H.G. Wells)
Tim Rollins and K.O.S., 2013
Matte acrylic, pencil, book pages on canvas
4 parts, each: 12 x 12 inches / 30.5 x 30.5 cm
Overall: 24 x 24 inches / 61 x 61 cm
Courtesy Studio K.O.S. and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

According to the artists, “We believe that every total work of art is a time machine – a synthesis of a living past and present located in an object that can only be completed by the social experience of a viewer in the future. The total work of art exists in the invisible fourth dimension of space/time and it is this notion that unites the works in the exhibition. We paint on historic texts in the present so that they can haunt our futures.”

Suitably prepared? Jump in your time machine and head over to 299 Grand Street, on the Lower East Side in New York, and immerse yourself in “The White Heat“.