Book destruction/reconstruction

ARTISTS’ BOOKS, WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? Here is a link to an exhibition catalogue with numerous examples of the art.  The exhibition is running until 19 January 2016 at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Some are closely linked to the form of the ‘foundation’ book and others are a great leap from the novel or biography from which they sprang.

Actually that’s a point of interest, do the subjects of the books ever connect to the art form? We found the answer in an article in Hyperallergic.

Some artists, like Peter Ruttledge Koch, directly reference the content of a book’s text in their art. Koch’s “The Lost Journals of Sacajawea” is based on a poem by American Indian poet Debra Magpie Earling, specially commissioned for the project. Earling wrote a poem from the point of view of Sacajawea about the last days of the buffalo. Koch printed the text with photos from that era, bound it in a leather cover and a spine of empty bullet shells and beads. “The whole feeling of it captures the point of view of an American Indian woman,” Seager says.

Other artists, like Arian Dillon, from Oaxaca, Mexico, ignore the meaning of the words inside a book and focus purely on its visual and textural qualities to make pieces like “Order and Chaos,” a chess set cut from book pages.

Make up your own mind, but we recommend the catalogue for artist book exhibition at Brooklyn Public Library at least – its a fine thing to browse at home.