University of Southern Maine

Exhibit Information

Claire Van Vliet’s Sun, Sky & Earth (Janus Press, 1964) is the first artists’ book I ever encountered. I was captivated by what she had achieved so simply in appropriating the book form, using only differently shaped and colored acetate sheets in random sequences to create her work.

 

Art in books is ancient. Book arts in the Occidental tradition–crafts such as fine printing and bookbinding, printmaking, papermaking and marbling–find antecedents in the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But books-as-art first finds its voice in the mid-twentieth century. Artists’ books, defined simply as art objects that reference bookreading or book structure, began as a nonconformist anti-establishment movement.

Incipient examples are often cheaply made small editions or one-of-a-kinds. As these works intersect art and reading, they often challenge established notions of binding structures, reading conventions, and production processes.

The lure of “reading” artists’ books, of exploring how the artist had interrogated book structure, of requiring the viewer to come to terms with the book’s meaning through the intimacy of handling and manipulating an object, was compelling. Such reading launched an artistic and literary discourse that held little regard for conventional vocabulary or syntax, and I was completely taken in.

Artists’ books often reflect collaboration among book designers, writers, printers, bookbinders, paper makers, or painters; sometimes, the book artist assumes many of those roles alone. Because making books can demand the mastery of an array of skills and crafts, such collaboration comes inevitably, and even work that is achieved exclusively by a solitary artist brings with it a legacy of learning from others.

Beginning in the 1970s, artists’ books informed by such avant-garde movements as Dada, Fluxus, and “Founds” have been overshadowed by works that promote less combative agendas and express instead matters of materiality, visual appeal, and a more traditional graphic and textual vernacular. Taken generally, artists’ books have become more sophisticated, more complex, more elegant, more proliferous, and more expensive.

Maine can boast a number of accomplished book artists, many of national stature. Their work and their approachability invite others to consider artists’ books as a new means of expression. Consequently, the state enjoys numerous communities (both formal and unstructured) of mentors and students who are singularly focused on developing their book-art. One such example is the Book Arts at Stone House Program, a University of Southern Maine summer course offering. The Book Arts Program promotes both teaching and learning in an intensive, congenial workshop setting, where students learn from book arts masters and from each other. There, artistic skills and perspectives are matched with less graphic concepts, such as visual literacy, understanding of book structure and narrative sequence, and reading habits, to broaden each participant’s repertoire. Through viewing their work, that teaching and learning ultimately enriches us all.

Marcel Duchamp argued two crucial “poles” or the creation of art: the artist, and the viewer. The extent to which the former can engage the other affords some measure of the work’s worth. In considering whether or not to acquire an artists’ book, I string four factors between those poles: the artist’s concept; the appropriateness of materials and design; the artist’s skill in executing the work; and how well the completed work engages the viewer in a “reading” of the piece. I find no dearth of items suitable for hanging on that line. In Maine as elsewhere, the art form is vibrant–serious artists are making thoughtful, creative, appealing books, and they are teaching others how to do so.
Richard H. F. Lindemann
Director, George J. Mitchell Department
of Special Collections & Archives
Bowdoin College Library
Brunswick, Maine

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