Nearly three decades after its first printing, Book as Artwork 1960-1972 remains a widely-cited landmark in the critical literature on artists' books. Penned by the critic and curator Germano Celant to accompany an exhibition at Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London, it was the first critical consideration of the artist's book. A bibliography lists over 300 historic artist-produced publications from this golden age of the medium.
A vital survey of 32 internationally recognized artists who make books as part of their creative practice - features 500 images of these rarely seen works. The 'artist's book' has long been an important form of expression, and Artists Who Make Books showcases 32 internationally recognized artists who have integrated book production into their larger creative practice. This volume features a selection of books — many rarely seen — by every artist included, an accompanying text providing further context, and over 500 illustrations of covers and interior spreads. Insightful interviews with Tauba Auerbach, Paul Chan, and Walther König, and in-depth essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Lynda Morris round out this illuminating survey.
"Offering readers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from the 1950s to the present, this book highlights how the artist's book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to providing a broad overview of the artist's book form since 1945 and the many ongoing debates surrounding it, this book thinks through the challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose. It then turns to look at five case studies, detailing not only how each individual collaboration came to be but how all five together engage and challenge conventional ideals about art, subjectivity, poetry, and interpersonal relations, as well as complex social questions related to gender and race. Making several of these books, typically consigned to special collections libraries and museum archives, more available to a broad readership, the book aims to brings to light a whole genre of works that has been largely forgotten or neglected in critical scholarship and institutional exhibitions. As this study illustrates, the artist's book has been an especially rich site for both poets and painters to engage with the world around them and with each other since the mid-twentieth century and consequently deserves more scholarly and institutional attention than it has been previously granted"--
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) is best known as a media theorist—many consider him the founder of media studies—but he was also an important theorist of art. Though a near-household name for decades due to magazine interviews and TV specials, McLuhan remains an underappreciated yet fascinating figure in art history. His connections with the art of his own time were largely unexplored, until now. In Distant Early Warning, art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more surprisingly, that McLuhan’s work directly influenced the art and artists of his time. Kitnick builds the story of McLuhan’s entanglement with artists by carefully drawing out the connections among McLuhan, his theories, and the artists themselves. The story is packed with big names: Marcel Duchamp, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and others. Kitnick masterfully weaves this history with McLuhan’s own words and his provocative ideas about what art is and what artists should do, revealing McLuhan’s influence on the avant-garde through the confluence of art and theory. The illuminating result sheds light on new aspects of McLuhan, showing him not just as a theorist, or an influencer, but as a richly multifaceted figure who, among his many other accolades, affected multiple generations of artists and their works. The book finishes with Kitnick overlaying McLuhan’s ethos onto the state of contemporary and post-internet art. This final channeling of McLuhan is a swift and beautiful analysis, with a personal touch, of art’s recent transgressions and what its future may hold.
This book examines the use of image and text juxtapositions in conceptual art as a strategy for challenging several ideological and institutional demands placed on art. While conceptual art is generally identified by its use of language, this book makes clear exactly how language was used. In particular, it asks: How has the presence of language in a visual art context changed the ways art is talked about, theorised and produced? Image and Text in Conceptual Art demonstrates how artworks communicate in context and evaluates their critical potential. It discusses international case studies and draws resources from art history and theory, philosophy, discourse analysis, literary criticism and social semiotics. Engaging the critical and social dimensions of art, it proposes three methods of analysis that consider the work’s performative gesture, its logico-semantic relations and the rhetorical operations in the discursive creation of meaning. This book offers a comprehensive method of analysis that can be applied beyond conceptual art.
Published by the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach in association with Getty Publications The renowned Argentine conceptual artist David Lamelas (born 1946) has an expansive oeuvre of sensory, restive, and evocative work. This book, published to coincide with the first monographic exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States, offers an incisive look into Lamelas’s art. The guiding analytic theme is the artist’s adaptability to place and circumstance, which invariably influences his creative production. Lamelas left Argentina in the mid-1960s to study at Saint Martin’s in London. Since then, he has divided his time among various cities. While the typical narrative invoked about artists like Lamelas is one of “internationalism,” his nomadic movement from one place or conceptual framework to the next has always been more “postnational” than “international.”
"This is the first publication to explore the rich history of conceptual art in Britain during its most exciting and innovative period, from the mid 1960s to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. It examines how the early works of this period took the form of a challenge to art's traditional boundaries and how by the mid 1970s, focus had shifted away from issues of art and individual experience towards questions of politics and identity, using the languages of documentary, propaganda and advertising in the service of action."--Publisher description.
