Artists’ Pages: the Accessibility of Art Through the Printed Page 1966 – 1973

Contemporary interest in artists’ printed ephemera and the restaging of historic exhibitions from the early conceptual era 1966-1973 has drawn attention to the materiality of work that was originally defined as being idea or process-based. This research investigates how artists used pages in group exhibition catalogues, to support, extend, or replace exhibited objects, thus making artists’ works accessible beyond the physical and temporal parameters of the exhibition. As a modest and intentionally democratic medium, artists’ pages disseminated information, ideas and artworks amongst wider, international audiences without infrastructure or economics thus enabling a new generation of artists to emerge at the same time throughout Europe and the United States. Artists and organisers advocated that in print, ideas became widely and immediately accessible, reproduction both significantly expanded the audience for conceptual art and positioned individual readers closer to the thinking and making processes of artists. Accordingly, the current research analyses a selection of artists’ pages contributed to exhibition catalogues and draws upon statements, interviews and essays published concurrently, supporting the view that it is preferable to go directly to the work and for readers to draw their own conclusions from it. This research explores how via the reproduction of plans, drawings, photographs, texts and documentation on the page, readers were invited to play an active role in tracing and extending an artist's thought process to arrive at their own interpretations of the work. The fixity of print ensures that, through reproduction, artists’ ideas continue to be accessible to contemporary audiences and engenders numerous reconfigurations of these as artists’ pages are taken into new printed and digital formats and contexts