Openings: Studies in Book Art

Cantos

Maríaflora Ceballos — 2024-12-28

Making Space

Keren Alfred — 2024-12-04

Heavy Lifting

Peter Tanner — 2024-12-28

Book Review of the artist book Heavy Lifting by Felicia Rice and Theresa Whitehill

The JAB Anthology: Selections from the Journal of Artists’ Books, 1994–2020

Molly Dotson — 2024-12-28

Book review of The JAB Anthology: Selections from the Journal of Artists’ Books, 1994–2020 by Molly E. Dotson.

“Daß wir allein dank des Imaginären kommunizieren”:

Constanze Fritzsch — 2025-12-19

The Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles holds one of the largest collections of samizdat artist books of the GDR outside of Germany. This collection allows to study these precious artist books that are often neglected by art historical scholarship. This study will focus on issues of autonomy and authenticity in relation to socialist realism vis a vis these books’ recourse to artistic practices of the avant-garde. As a result of the formalism controversy at the beginning of the 1950s, modernist art was long rejected by socialist realism as reactionary and formalist and therefore denied as an artistic reference. From the 1970s, however, there was a renewed openness to classical modernism. Especially in the artists' books and samizdat publications of the 1980s, there is a conspicuous appropriation of artistic practices from Dada and Surrealism. Since the avant-gardes, the concept of autonomy has been understood primarily as the artist's claim to self-expression and as the purification of the work of art from extra-artistic functions and claims, as well as the resulting self-referentiality of the work. This raises several questions. On the one hand, it seems possible to understand the work of these artists thanks to a concept of autonomy of the avant-gardes regarding their will to an artistic self-expression free from the dictates of the official discourse. On the other hand, they permanently undermine it by internalizing the fundamental ideas of socialist realism to actively act socially.

Broadening Access to Artists’ Books through Expanded Vocabularies and Metadata Enhancement

Allison McCormack — 2024-11-26

Though an increasing number of libraries are building artists’ books collections, problems persist with describing these resources in online library catalogs that use standardized terminology. A large number of creator, subject, and format terms are often required to provide adequate access for patrons, but library catalogers may not have the training to ascertain these characteristics through observation. To design a solution for this issue, a special collections cataloger and a book arts faculty member are collaborating to remediate existing catalog records by combining the hands-on knowledge of working book artists with the controlled vocabulary expertise of catalogers. The enhanced records are also being used to support a public-facing, searchable database of book art terminology that facilitates common language between artists, patrons, and librarians who may describe the same bookmaking technique or visual characteristic in different ways. By outlining their steps and workflows, the project team seeks to build a model that other institutions collecting and curating artists’ books can use to enhance their own collections. The impact of the new website and a qualitative analysis of the record enhancements will also be discussed.

From the Editor

Peter Tanner — 2024-11-26