CURATED LIBRARIES

Artist's Books Library

While important precedents can be found for the artist’s book in numerous Futurist, Dada, Surrealist and Situationist publications, the book as a medium equivalent to painting or sculpture was consolidated in the early 1960s, its leading exponents being Ed Ruscha, Sol Lewitt and Dieter Roth. In her seminal history of the form, The Century of Artist’s Books, Johanna Drucker writes: “In the 1960s books as an artist’s medium took off in the United States and Europe. They fit the sensibility of the 1960s alternative scene, whether produced independently by artists or by galleries as an extension of an exhibition, also giving rise to the hybrid genre of the catalogue as artist’s book.” In the 70s, artist’s books gained further hybridity in the uses of print for feminist art and activism, punk (and zine culture generally) and the early mergings of comic books with “high art.” Today, though no reliable definition of the parameters of an artist’s book exists, the ubiquity of the term and such events as Printed Matter’s New York Artist’s Book Fair attests to its massive international expansion as a practice at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Featured images are from Ray Johnson's Book About Death, September 10, 1963 and May 8, 1964 issues, respectively. They are reproduced from In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955, edited by Andrew Roth and Philip Aarons.