The tables charting my full bibliography and plan of work don’t work properly here, and are not included so you may want to
where they are included, or read on for the text alone…
Project Proposal
Metaphorising practice: artists’ books as artistic strategies.
1Aims:
- To undertake a series of artists’ books as a form of reflexive research in parallel to and informing other research methods.
- To derive understanding of artists’ books practice through a reflexive comparison of my own artistic practice with data from case studies.
- To propose novel understanding of the field of artists’ books as artworks and as a form of artistic practice, in complement to the existing critical material.
2Background
2.1Theoretical/methodological background
2.1.1Key theoretical concepts
There are some key theoretical texts informing my research which I refer to in greater detail in the assignment called ‘Key Texts’. Briefly, the research picks up on themes that run through the work of Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Bourdieu to examine questions of intention and legitimacy in artists’ book and asks if books enable a certain conscious manipulation of legitimation and intention.
Ricouer’s thought on hermeneutics informs my propositions regarding how
artistic practice uses books. Books are seen as allowing a site on
which reflection on practice can be performed. (My notes on Practice
and Cycle of Intention on my Taxonomy of Terms expand on this) and this
has significance in the ways in which artists configure their
reflection on their practice, by way of the character of books. Books
contain narrative discourse, and they have a particular cultural
identity (supplied partly through this narrative capability, and partly
through their own status as a culturally significant form) that allows
artists to employ metaphorising discourse within the book, and about
the book (and their work on the book). This metaphorising refers not
only to the narrative content of the book, but to the narrative content
of reflexive practice. The metaphor of the book has a heuristic yield
in producing identities for artists because of its intermedia qualities
of being neither one thing nor another, but both, and work on it
occasions the participation of people acting under a multitude of roles
as poet, artist, author, and so on. Ricoeur sees narrative
interpretation as the most important work we do in establishing our
identities vis a vis the world, since he sees both the interaction we
have with others and the reflection we perform on ourselves as
varieties of narrative. Within this, new meaning, new configuration
arises through new metaphor. The argument my research pursues involves
looking at artists’ books as just such a site of new metaphor, allowing
fresh meanings to filter into artistic practice.
Bourdieu writes of fields, practice and habitus, and my use of
Ricoeur’s narrative hermeneutics to describe artistic practice feed
into this. However, where Ricoeur usually sees practice and especially
habitus as less-than-conscious influences on the outward forms of
social identity, (as well as forming the component activities that
define a field) I would argue that reflexive practice on the part of
artists is explicitly about being conscious of behaviour and
positioning, and the strategies one pursues in one’s practice. This is
not to say conscious at all levels of all things, but certainly there
is an awareness of how legitimacy can be negotiated in its various
forms. Artists’ books, because of their widespread set of valencies,
operate across a wide area of the field of cultural production, and as
I have said, they occasion the work of people adopting a wide variety
of different roles. I would argue that to some extent that book artists
deliberately exploit the many faceted character of their medium to
create roles for themselves and to slip between roles (from printer to
poet to publisher, etc) and between visual syntaxes, as when two
concurrent books employ different print media and approaches.
Books have, I will argue, a metaphorising power that informs their
meaning in artists’ practice. Of course, this metaphorical capability
continues on into the contents and physical presence of the book, an
analysis of which tends less towards an ethnography of book artists and
towards an art historical or narratological exegesis. However, my
research will move from the effect of books on artists’ practice, to
their effect (or effectiveness) towards viewers, and critics. I hope to
trace the intentions that artists’ place on their work on towards the
reception accorded them by the public and in the formation of critical
opinion on the artists’ works. This plan reflects the three sorts of
legitimacy Bourdieu describes of approval from one’s peers, of mass
appeal and of the consecration bestowed by elites (in the case of
critical approval, this is an academic elite). It also traces the
journey of the book from the artists’ hands out into the world and, as
news of its success or otherwise reach the artist, back again, feeding
into the artists’ practice once again. This recapitulates themes
repeated in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of prefiguration (the work’s
existing meaning as part of the artist’s practice: artistic intention),
configuration (the work’s narrative, visual and physical signification,
also its reception and configuration into critical narrative) and its
refiguration (its return to the artist who takes stock of their
practice and intentions anew). In following this plan I hope to present
a more complete portrait of how I believe books to function as
metaphors with a heuristic yield to offer practice. I hope to outline
their effects as tools for introducing new metaphorical means for
creating approaches or roles that pursue intention and legitimacy.
2.1.2Key methodological intentions/structure
2.1.2.1Presuppositions, hermeneutics
The research is based on hermeneutic principles of investigation,
acknowledging my intimate involvement in the subject, and includes my
own work in the planning of the research and reflection. By planning a
structure that creates a point of departure based on my presuppositions
about the subject, and designing work that seeks actively to criticise
these presuppositions, it is hoped that a certain amount of
transparency as to my initial agenda can be achieved, so that the
character of my interpretation of the data can be more readily
assessed. Secondly, it may prove necessary to change my mind about key
presuppositions: this is, indeed, likely to prove the most fruitful
area of investigation. The research is planned as a number of ‘turns’,
from artist, to audience and back again, with potential for reference
and comparison to my own work throughout. I conceive of this structure
as a staging that can capture changes in the argument as it progresses,
with multiple layers of reflection within the structure of the inquiry
outlined by the theoretical boundaries described above. See also my
discussion of my intended methodology, below.
2.2The Field
2.2.1Critical characterisation of the literature
The above theoretical framework is not well-answered by the existing critical literature on artists’ books.
However, this research can only be meaningful if it relates, critically
or otherwise, to the material the existing critical framework is
composed of. This research can function as a supplement to the existing
critical work carried on in book art. Critical work on the subject is
growing gradually more complex as it moves from assessments of artists’
book history, towards an arguably more useful fusion of taxonomical
framework-finding and a greater focus on the judgement of the
‘interestingness’ of artists’ books in specific terms. I think this is
leading critical practice away from historicising artists books and
more towards an interest in how they function as documents of practice.
That is to say, away from identifying artists’ books with their history
and more with how they reflect the contemporary milieux of
interdisciplinarity, curatorial practice in artists’ lives, and so on.
It is hoped that the research offered here can function as a point of
departure for debate about how best to set out the scope of such an
interest, and how one might develop the theoretical framework and
critical reflexivity of the same.
My criticisms of the literature are based on my readings of the key
critical works. For example, I have written critically elsewhere on
works by Johanna Drucker, Cathy Courtney and Clive Phillpot. Although
in each case I have found writing that continues the active pursuit of
critical development, the overall impression gained was that book art
criticism tended to emphasise the biographical and historical milieux
of artists, rather than looking deeply into their practice and asking
‘why’ questions that opened up practice. One felt more that what these
critics got out of artists was a good deal of ‘how’ they made their
work in terms of setting up and doing things, but not how the book form
became central to their work. This is a big generalisation of course,
and there are exceptions, (I am also aware that much of what I have
read could be regarded as ‘foundation’ critical work: unfair,
therefore, to expect it to elaborate on the present. The Century of
Artists’ Books by Drucker has a whole century to deal with after all.
In Drucker’s case, to give one example, more current work is more
centred on the present) However, the direction of most of the published
critical work tends away from assessing the artist book’s impact on
practice (the ethnography of artists’ books), and more towards artists’
book history, whereby a critical canon is evolved and a taxonomy of
judgement applied. My research offers a critical direction that
concentrates on the artists as much as the books, a direction that I
increasingly see in more recent work by many writing in the field.
2.2.2Breadth of practice
Part of book art criticism’s fascination with the history of the
form has to do with its astonishing variety. It is little wonder that
books must be written setting livres d’artistes apart from artists’
books apart from book art apart from bookbinding apart from editions
deluxe apart from zines apart from fluxus (and so on). This breadth of
practice continues to amaze, and continues to make the work of defining
the form difficult. However, this difficulty itself served as the main
inspiration for developing the approach this research has taken. The
only things I think all book artists have in common are present not in
common material concerns but in common use of ideas rooted in the book
form’s significance as a socially-constructed cultural form, conferring
a legitimate place of practice to those working to produce it. Artists
work at varying removes of consciousness of this, and with varying
(reverential, ironic, destructive) attitudes towards it, but all art
made with books in mind gestures towards this idea of the book. In
devising a plan of research I wanted to capture as wide a spread as
practicable of this practice, in order to test my propositions about
what I suspected to be the areas where practice involving books was
affecting how artists conceived of themselves, their intentions and how
they negotiated legitimacy for their work with peers, audiences and
critics.
With this breadth of practice in mind, as well as the theoretical
guides I outlined above, my intended methodology is outlined below.
3Methodology
3.1Interview/Questionnaire
3.1.1Work into presuppositions informs list of statements to test,
tends towards elucidating a structure that is altered by contact with
data
In a document presenting the process of creating questions that
would lead towards a series of interviews and questionnaires, I wrote,
The questions I am now working on are an attempt to interrogate
[my] assumptions by working with other artists. The data, doubts and
further questions raised thereby I plan to take back into my artwork
and understanding for further interpretation. I expect to arrive not at
an answer to my questions, but to gain interpretive insight from the
exchange of understanding and the interpretation of empirical data in
the form of artworks, interviews and written questioning.
This outlines my broadly hermeneutic approach of continuous
reflexive interpretation. In the case of the questions I have written
to start my research proper off with, they form a document of my
preunderstanding of the subject, They were worked up from a series of
written propositions detailing my unproven assumptions about artists’
book practice. These propositions and questions in turn seemed to
belong to more basic areas of query:
1) propositions about the enabling character of books.
2) propositions about the roles offered by books
3) propositions about the narrative and discursive function of books.
4) the fourth ‘group’ is the criterion of selection across a
range of types of book production. I want to test my propositions with
[to give two examples]book artists making one-of-a-kind books, as well
as with printer-publishers collaborating with artists to produce
editioned works that come closer to the livre d’artiste. But the manner
of my questioning would be influenced by the nature of the work
produced. In the one case, any questions about editioning are
irrelevant, in the other, questions about collaboration and design
would be informative.
These areas of inquiry themselves suggested that I might challenge them
by trying to select case studies whose practices would present a wide
range of engagement with these areas.
Currently I am involved in improving my research into my case studies
and preparing more general questionnaire material with a view to
tailoring questions more exactly to the practice of those under study,
but retaining the challenges to my propositions that their practice
represents.
I will use a similar strategy for viewers of the books (whose views I
intend to gather through a specially-produced exhibition), through a
process of elucidating presuppositions and challenging them through
questions directed at the people I will be studying.
In both situations, the extent and quality of my reflection on the
answers I obtain will be crucial. I intend to relate the results to the
presuppositions I will have written about, and to the results I obtain
in producing and exhibiting my own artwork. In this way I will have not
objectivity, but a datum of my presuppositional framework, repeatedly
revised as my research turns through its different foci.
3.2Exhibition
3.2.1Reflexive and Comparative practice
As I mentioned above, I plan to produce an exhibition featuring work
by my case study artists, as well as work by myself exploring and
reflecting on the material gathered in my research to date. In curating
this exhibition, I will be basing my work on the structure that
informed the questions I have outlined above, that is to say, my
presuppositional framework. However, these presuppositions and
therefore the framework will be newly informed by my work in
interviewing and reflecting on these artists, and modifications will be
introduced to the framework informing the exhibition. What will remain
will be my intention to present artists’ books to the public as a way
to make work: by curating a show of varied material practices, I hope
to show what they (I suspect) have in common in the way their disparate
practices encounter books.
I will use this exhibition as a setting to ask viewers what they
understand about these books and what they think the artists are doing
with books. I cannot be too specific about my exact goals in doing so
yet, as the framework which will inform these questions awaits my
analysis of what my artist interviews reveal. However, I plainly wish
to examine what happens to artists’ goals in using books in art when
they put them before the public.
3.3Critical studies
The material I gather from the preceding two sections of my research
will form the basis for a critical study that will form the third part.
In producing material that will point towards artists’ intentions and
viewers’ receptions I will have gathered together material I can use to
examine how criticism of artists’ books relates to these two areas. If
artists’intentions and books’ effects can be characterised, how does
the literature address them? What would an appropriate framework be?
What sort of criticism would be helpful to artists? To viewers?
I cannot speculate further as to exactly what questions would be posed
in such a critical study, but I plan to allow the material I gather in
the first two stages to inform it, with a view to returning the
significance of artist’s practice in book art back to the critical
framework- or, rather, vice-versa.
3.4Reflexive practice
3.4.1Reflexive artworks
I have written a good deal above of my reflexive practice as regards
my research, both in its written and artistic forms. What does this
mean?
Largely, it will mean the production of written and artistic documents
that present cogitations and investigations of the argument as it
progresses. In the case of written material, I plan to review each
interview as I transcribe them, including insights and reflections that
occur to me along the way which will help form the basis of my analysis
of the interviews as a whole.
In the case of artistic reflection, it will take the form of cogitation
and study on the forms and practices I find other’s artwork: copies and
studies. It will also take the form of comparative reflection that
grounds my own practice against that of others- grounding that will
make its way into other reflection.
A crucial form of practice will be to use artwork as a testing ground
for my propositional structures, much as I use questions for the same
purpose. This will mean using artworks to ask questions through its
theme, through its content, and through using it as a test bed for
further reflection on practice eg, “If I try out X’s way of working,
what happens?”
Another form of artistic reflection, as touched upon above, would be as
a setting to offer differently-couched ways of examining questions that
occur in the research: not so much as tests, but as rumination and
reflection in and of themselves. For example, my forthcoming work The Amber Room,
about a famous cultural artifact that may or may not exist, touches on
questions of interpretive practice and ontology through its themes and
offers a further form of reflective practice informing my methodology.
3.4.2Studio journal
An important site in my reflexive practice, my studio journal will
serve as the focal point for the various cogitations and documentation
that I will be producing in the course of my research. It will document
the work that goes into artwork, including something of the reflection
that goes into their formation, and will also include ongoing material
produced specifically for the research and tangential material that
will continue to influence me from outside the research practice itself.
One of the most important aspects of the journal is the way it confers
the probability of multiple versions, multiple drafts on everything.
As, specifically, a journal, it presupposes development that grows and
changes through time.
3.4.3Modelling of the project
I have mentioned above how I conceive of the research as a series of
stages or turns. I have engineered this with the specific goal of
providing points at which it is appropriate to formally reflect on the
data gathered to date, and move on to the next stage in the hermeneutic
process with a set of materials that one will bring into contact with
the next experimental stage. I intend to produce reflective
documentation throughout the project at a less formal level, but I
wanted to build-in this reflexive part of the research as part of the
structure of the project. The argument I will develop will not be a
single unified polemic, but rather a narrative of test, investigation,
failure and confirmation, characterised throughout by the interpretive
character of my research. It is therefore appropriate, I think, to echo
the developing meaning of the books themselves as they go from the
studio into the world and back again, in the developing character of my
interpretation.
4Key Texts (Research Methods Assignment 3)
Presenting a limited number of texts has forced me to hinge my
arguments on just a few core ideas. This ‘stripping-down’ introduces a
certain amount of mental mobility into my understanding of and
presentation of my ideas, in the same way that speaking from basic
notes rather than from a prepared statement makes for more lively
presentation. Having a smaller range of tools to set up makes me think
about what to do with them a bit more clearly.
I have chosen five short quotations from three key texts. Two of
them are from theoretically useful sources, namely the essay On
Interpretation1 by Paul Ricoeur, and the essay The Field of Cultural
Production2 by Pierre Bourdieu. My third text is from a talk given by
the book artist Helen Douglas as part of the Arcadia id Est exhibition
and conference organised by the U.W.E., Bristol, on the subject of
‘Nature, Landscape and the Book’3 as it pertains to her work.
My first text, Ricoeur’s On Interpretation sets out in brief
form his thought on how the functioning of metaphor in narrative
produces the meaning of texts through interpretation. This
interpretation, Ricoeur says, is a hermeneutic relationship between the
text and its producer, the text and its audience, and the text and its
relation to its cultural milieu. I have selected a pair of quotations
from this essay to support my use of Ricoeur’s ideas in my development
of a project interpreting artists’ books. My reading of the existing
writing on artists’ books has shown a tendency for texts to describing
artists’ books to to concentrate on the characteristics of the object
and its effect on the viewer, with some attention to the
historical/cultural placement of the artwork. Despite the existence of
works devoted to interviewing living artists4, the first site of books’
meaning (the first area of the hermeneutic interpretation of texts),
that of artistic intention, remains obscure.
At this point I will cite the first of my quotations. Ricoeur here
presents three events or sites where text (here I interpret this as
being applicable to an artwork as a cultural text) exists as a
discourse that is amenable to interpretation and analysis.
Thanks to writing, discourse acquires a threefold
semantic autonomy: in relation to the speaker’s intention, to its
reception by its original audience, and to the economic, social and
cultural circumstances of its production. It is in this sense that
writing tears itself free of the limits of face-to-face dialogue and
becomes the condition for discourse itself becoming-text. It is to
hermeneutics that falls the task of exploring the implications of this
becoming-text for the work of interpretation.p151
In short, existing work on artists’ books tends to concentrate on what
an artists’ book is. This includes criticism of what it is as a work of
art as well as its physical characteristics. There is also, as I
stated, attention paid to the historical development (and hence the
cultural engagement) of artists’ books, but this tends to produce,
again, taxonomies of physical description and critique over time ,
rather than a set of really ‘inward’ artistic practices over time.5 The
question of ‘Why produce artists’ books?’, and thus one of the crucial
areas of artists’ books as meaning-producing texts has not yet been
adequately examined6.
My further quotations from Ricoeur and from Bourdieu, attempt to
provide a framework for questioning why artists make artists’ books.
The insight informing my choice of this framework come from my own
experiences of what seems to be going on in the production of artists’
books.
Ricoeur’s thought examines meaning as arising through a hermeneutic
relationship of the self with other things: other texts, other selves.
His thought ultimately presupposes an objectivity which answers
empirical enquiry, but an objectivity modified by the liveliness of
interpretation. The world and its meanings are alive in living
metaphor, which bears the weight of interpretation for every novel
experience, every work of imagination where two or more terms are
freshly combined. Ricoeur sees the fully-fledged metaphor at work in
narrative, which he sees as the site both of fiction and of historical
testimony. Ultimately our sense of self is limited and articulated by
the powers of narrative, but these limits and articulations are far
from restrictive: they are productive. The human is, before all, an
interpreter. Here is Ricoeur on narrative. Note particularly his
comment on how narrative destroys ordinary consistency and allows new
interpretation to arise.
…Metaphor constitutes a work on language consisting
in the attribution to logical subjects of predicates that are
incompossible with them. By this should be understood that, before
being a deviant naming, metaphor is a peculiar predication, an
attribution which destroys the consistency or, as has been said, the
semantic relevance of the sentence as it is established by the
ordinary, that is the lexical, meanings of the terms employed…
[comparing the theory of narrative and the theory of metaphor]
Both indeed have to do with the phenomenon of semantic
innovation…In both cases the novel, the not-yet-said, the unheard-of
– suddenly arises in language: here, living metaphor, that is to say a
new relevance in predication, there, wholly invented plot, that is to
say a new congruence in the emplotment.
p144
What might this mean in terms of artists’ book production? I take
Ricoeur’s explanation of metaphor in narrative as a cue to begin a
description of the metaphorisation of practice. Like Ricoeur, I see
metaphor as operating at several points: (1)in the artist’s intention,
(2)in the medium, (3)for the audience, (4)in the work’s cultural and
historical relation. The first and second of these sites are held
within the hermeneutic of artistic practice, I have elsewhere their
relation as what I termed the ‘cycle of intention’. there are undecided
qualities of ‘yet/also’, of Keatsian negative capability in the book
artist’s use of his or her medium. The identity of the medium itself is
undecided. It has intermedium characteristics. The character of the
intention within the artwork has narrative characteristics, but the
narrative’s autonomy as a text and as an artwork are similarly in a
state of constant interpretation, between the challenges of artistic
intentions and the social construct of the book. (Between what the
artist wants it to be and what the viewer expects to see). Artists’
books are full of narrative metaphor, but also engaged in an ongoing
ironic contest as metaphors-for-books. They are viewed, read, as-if
they were books, and at the same time as-if they were artworks. They
coin legitimacy from both their appeal to, and their critique of
tradtional book forms. The third and fourth sites, that of the
audience’s viewing of the narrative artistic object, and of its
historical disposition are often seen in other work on artists’ books.
They too, inform the cycle of intention, but from outside the artist’s
own creation. This is a two way street, however. Returning an analysis
of artists’ intentions and the factors by which the artists’ book
metaphorises (and thereby mobilises) practice, cannot but inform our
view of books’ meaning for audiences and in historical context.
I mentioned above how artists’ books’ inter-medium identity allowed
artists to ‘mint legitimacy’ from several sources. Bourdieu’s essay on
The Field of Cultural Production is useful as a framework for
theorising how book artists use their medium to exchange the
capabilities of various artistic ‘roles’ in their practice. (I might
also have mentioned Robert Darnton’s essay, What is Book History?7, in
which he outlines a ‘circuit of production’ for books, thus following
(ordinary) books through the various roles necessary to their
production). Artists making books have vastly differing relationships
to their medium. Some are responsible for the whole process, including
publishing and distribution, others arguably produce artists’ books in
something approaching the role of an illustrator hired by a publisher.
Others are, in addition to being artists, poets, writers, musicians and
publishers. My thesis expresses the view that all book artists seek
access to two things: first, the metaphorisation of practice amenable
through working on the loosely-defined but multi-faceted (if not
knife-edged) medium of artists’ books. Secondly, they seek access to
the modes of production (and thus roles) of book making. Thus they
garner the legitimacy of publishers, designers, writers, and so on,
retaining (to varying degrees) the flexibility and undefined status of
the fully autonomous artwork. his hybrid form wants to cross
boundaries, wants to keep its freedom whilst gaining the legitimacy of
stricter or less autonomous forms.
Here are two quotations from Bourdieu. In the first he sets out the
diversity and instability of roles available in the field of cultural
production. In the second, he notes the general areas from which
legitimacy is sourced.
In no field is the confrontation between positions and dispositions
more continuous or uncertain than in the literary or artistic field.
Offering positions that are relatively uninstitutionalized, never
legally guaranteed, therefore open to symbolic challenge, and
non-hereditary (although there are specific forms of transition), it is
the arena par excellence of struggles over job definition.p87
…we find three competing principles of legitimacy, i.e., the
recognition granted by the set of producers who produce for other
producers, their competitors, i.e. by the autonomous self-sufficient
world of ‘art for art’s sake’, meaning art for artists. Secondly, there
is the principle of legitimacy corresponding to ‘bourgeois’ taste and
to the consecration bestowed by the dominant fractions of the dominant
class and by private tribunals, such as salons, or public,
state-guaranteed ones, such as academies, which sanction the
inseperably ethical and aesthetic (and therefore political) taste of
the dominant. Finally, there is the principle of legitimacy which its
advocates call ‘popular’, i.e. the consecration bestowed by the choice
of ordinary consumers, the ‘mass audience’.p83
It seems to me that book artists gain a capability for movements
amongst artistic roles and forms of legitimacy, through their creative
use of the book medium.
I will close with a quotation from Helen Douglas, a book artist whose
own work, as well as that made with Telfer Stokes, has been widely
exhibited and written about over the past two decades.
"Rather than speaking in the abstract, I have
decided to speak from the book, the place of my making, the place where
my expression is made concrete, and where all three Nature Landscape
and Book come together."
…And yes also to Book
That is the place of my making
where I can gather all within the gatherings
and weave my visual narratives as text to the page
in and out
teased to the surface
inside to out
expressing this to my viewer in an intimate and contained way
published
Douglas’ identification of books as the ‘place of her making’ is, for
me, an example of one of books’ several features being used by an
artist in her practice. Books are a place where narratives can be
assembled and presented, a ‘gathering of gatherings’. They are a place
for these things to be thought about and assembled by the artist. They
are a place for ruminations on how the work will affect the viewer- how
the work brings ‘inside to out/ expressing this to my viewer in a
visual way’. Elsewhere I have written about my notion of artists’ books
as forms of ‘temporary construction’: something between a temporary
abeyance of deconstruction in order to produce something worth
deconstructing, and a petit récit, stepping away from the legitimation
offered by the orthodoxy of grand narratives. These polarities, or
nodes, seem both to answer to the temporary but powerfully liberating
character of metaphor. Artists’ books metaphorise practice.
1 Ricoeur, Paul, On Interpretation, in The
Continental Philosophy Reader, pp138-155, Eds, Kearney, R and
Rainwater, M, Routledge,London and New York, 1996.
2 Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production,
in The Book History Reader, pp77-99, Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair
McCleery, Routledge, London, 2002.
3 Douglas, Helen, Nature, Landscape and the Book, accessed online at
4 See Courtney, Cathy, Speaking of Book Art,
5 See Drucker, Johanna,The Century of Artists’ Books, Granary Books, New York City, 2005
6 This criticism is why I am not citing a text from
Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artist’s Books in the limited space
available. I need to concentrate on articulating my own argument,
whilst acknowledging its meaning in terms of its critique of existing
work. I would, had I space, include a more detailed critique that
showed how my ideas build on directions suggested by Drucker’s scope
and the attitude taken by her work; it points towards the gap I want to
explore.
7 Darnton, Robert, What is Book History?, in The Book
History Reader, Eds, Finkelstein, D and McCleery, A, Routledge, London
and New York, 2002