I recently got my thesis deposit updated on the UWE repository page; you should now be able to download a copy should you wish, from http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/18767/
Here’s the abstract:
A practice-centred view of artists’ books, coupled with a descriptive vocabulary/structure from formal criticism helps us to engage with some of the most insoluble problems of artists’ books criticism. Our history does not necessarily point towards a centring definition or identity for artists’ books, but towards a practice that always engages with other forms and identities. This engagement, rather than a solid identity from which to speak offers a way out of the artists’ books ‘ghetto’. This is already prevalent in practice, but requires additional narration and reflection to become part of our critical apparatus.
Thus, a dialogue of formal and practice-centred critical engagement with artists’ books is proposed. But this is prey to deconstructive reverses in the interpenetration and co-dependency of its valent terms. Similarly, I present dichotomies of strategic and tactical forms of practice. The tensions held thus in play I evoke as metaphorical, and a hermeneutics of ‘metaphorical practice’ narrates the artist’s relationship to these terms. Metaphor is employed as a means to model the creative tension of terms thus held in proximity.
Thirteen interviews are used to examine uses of metaphor as a way of artists pursuing practice in books, including ‘the book-as-space/time’,’ the analogue self enacted through books, the ‘promise of reading’, etc. These are shown to exhibit a metaphorical consistency of practice that opens up some of the tensions a more formalist view of artists’ books indicates, but cannot explain. The research makes explicit certain tacit practices of artists’ books’ practice, in doing so offering a model for its interpretation through the extended significance of metaphor in artistic practice. This is offered in the hopes of suggesting new approaches to some of the tensions proving insoluble to the critical functions of the field as it stood at the time of research.
Bon voyage!