Bookworks for the '90S

As everybody knows by now, books have been adopted by modern artists, as newspapers and spoken language have also been adopted We can congratulate ourselves on this development, but let us beware of an unlimited optimism that with a deeper analysis might vanish. Most artists greeted the new art form with great hope. Here you had a medium that was cheap, that allowed for greater contact with the public, that gave artists greater autonomy from critics, that would promote social responsibility among creators, that would enlarge infinitely the number of possible consumers, and so much more. . . . Time has passed and our situation is totally different We are no longer innocent Now it isn't enough to be an artist in order to produce bookworks. Now it isn't enough to produce books in order to affirm that they are bookworks. - Ulises Carrion, Bookworks Revisited(1) Ten years have passed since Ulises Carrion, the Mexican artist and critic most noted for his often reproduced essay New Art of Making Books,(2) pointed out that this new art was getting old fast. It was clear to Carrion by 1979 that bookmaking activities were taking on many of the negative attributes of the gallery system that bookmaking initially hoped to supersede. Carrion foresaw the appearance of market mechanisms and a celebrity syndrome similar to those that typically oppress the art world.(3) During the last decade these predictions largely have come true. As Clive Phillpot, Library Director of the Museum of Modern Art, pointed out in his opening remarks as moderator at the Books and Publications symposium organized and sponsored by Dia Art Foundation and Printed Matter at Dia's 155 Mercer Street location, November 18, 1989, much of the initial excitement surrounding artists' publications is wearing off as the field becomes more like the galleries and museums to which artists' publishing was once seen as a viable alternative. Much in the same way that the institutionalized modernist photography community initially rejected postmodern critical photography by questioning its relationship to the accepted canon, the artists' book community has ignored bookworks by artists who use the form more for political and critical statements than for commenting on book structures. While the National Endowment for the Arts and various regional or regrant agencies do provide some funding for artists' books, it is usually under the categories of photography, printmaking, or works on paper. Artists' projects designed as production works receive significantly less support than bookworks intended for galleries or publishing that supports gallery work, such as catalogs and promotional items. Since LINE II, a New York City organization that dispensed New York State Council on the Arts funds for artists' publishing, dissolved in 1986, no direct grants are given specifically for artists' book production. Despite this discouraging climate, over the last decade artists' publishing activities outside the admittedly slim official institutions devoted to artists' books have been more challenging, heterogeneous and in tune with current theoretical debates. Private or semiprivate ventures like RAW Books, Hanuman Books, Tanam Press, Wedge and a number of self-published projects have operated with a heightened critical awareness and a disregard for arbitrary boundaries. The most notable institution dependent on public monies to support artists' publications has been Printed Matter. Founded in 1976 as a bookstore and publishing house, Printed Matter discontinued publishing in 1979 to focus on book sales and distribution. Through a succession of directors and staff, notably Ingrid Sischy, Nan Becker, Nancy Linn, Mike Glier, Alice Weiner, Susan Wheeler, Amy Hauft and most recently John Goodwin, Printed Matter has pursued the seemingly paradoxical goals of evenhanded support of artists' publications regardless of the artists' creed of stature and moving this mass of books out to an audience beyond the New York art scene. …