Over the last decade, I’ve had many conversations with peers about why artists’ publishing seems to remain so niche, especially in the landscape of Canadian contemporary art. It’s rare to see artists’ books in gallery settings and rarer still to get access to museum libraries. It’s almost unthinkable that an institution might offer a free book as part of its programming. These are by no means impossibilities, but they remain isolated experiences amid the overwhelming majority of exhibitions which tend toward more traditional art objects, performance, and video. Throughout my practice, questions of ontology in art-making have emerged and receded, but the question of where books belong in an arts ecosystem continues to spark contemplation and confusion for me.

Part of this confusion stems from the fuzzy task of definition—one that feels more like assembling a raft of exceptions rather than a list of declarations. In my experience, the artist’s book can be clumsily analogized thusly: any type of book in the visual arts can be an artist’s book but not all books in the visual arts are artist’s books. They can be published in conversation with other works but they are usually not documents of exhibitions; they are works in and of themselves (as much as an artwork can ever be considered a discrete unit). There is no prescribed way of producing an artist’s book. They can be singular, handmade objects or mass produced in ways that make them almost indistinguishable from other commercially produced books. They can be made in traditional printmaking studios or at a municipal library with laser printers, scissors, and tape. 

In an interview by Stephanie LaCava, when asked “What is an artist’s novel?” Paul Chan illustrates the uselessness of attempting to give a clear and succinct answer with the arch reply: “5” X 8”, softcover with color [sic] endpaper art, and retails for $12.95, with an e-book edition for $4.99.” Though this comes from a very particular segment of artist’s publishing, to me it also reflects back on the sector as a whole, and the obsession with clear, concise definition that runs through Western culture in general.

As an antidote to this obsession, the most diffuse example I can think of is a book of loose pages given to me by Rebecca Martin called Untitled (Calcium).  It is an experimental biography of her aunt. The book had to be displayed with a weight to keep the delicate pages (practically the density of tissue paper) from flying away. To read the book, a viewer has to move the paper weight and shift the pages by hand. The pages remain bound by care. It is the responsibility of a viewer to keep the pages in order and to restore them after flipping through.

In his book, Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature, Stefan Klima, a visual arts librarian, identifies three major avenues that have been explored in the critical discourse surrounding artists’ books. First and foremost, he cites definition—what counts as an artists’ book and who determines the validity of that definition—as the question that has dominated 20th century discourses around artists’ books. Second, he notes the way artists’ books challenge notions of reading through their attention to the book as an object. Finally, he highlights the challenges they present to art institutions. In my years of contemplating artists’ books, I have yet to find a concern for the field that cannot fit, at least loosely, into these three buckets. Still, I will go on looking.

This raises the sticky question of who can claim—or have applied to them—the label of ‘artist,’ and what that does for the perception of their work. One of the challenges of creating an introduction to artists’ books/publications is the tenuous meaning created by sticking “artists’” in front of anything.

The 20th Century has seen the rise of innumerable (seemingly) new and novel forms for the visual arts. From radio broadcasts and billboards to spontaneous street cleaning and truckloads of asphalt being dumped down a hill, artists continue to stretch the physicality of art into bizarre and unpredictable directions. But some modes have become more commonplace than others. To me, the rising ubiquity of video in contemporary art spaces over the last 30 years signals a dramatic shift in the infrastructure of galleries and the expectation of audiences. The same cannot be said of artist’s books and art publishing, which have been far less successful in carving out space in the white cube. While many galleries are ready and able to turn themselves into temporary movie theatres, they seem less ready or able to perform a similar transformation to accommodate the reading and dissemination of publications.

Some histories of the contemporary artist’s books cite Ed Ruscha and works such as “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” and “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” as possible points of origin for the book/publication’s entry into contemporary art. This history oversimplifies a long trajectory of drift and experimentation in favour of a lone figure of white, male, American genius who can offer a clean starting point rather than a fractured landscape of half answers. Even though this history has buried a more complex web of becoming, it can also point the way toward a more heterogeneous understanding of what we might call an artist’s book/publication. Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” is a long accordion fold book published in 1966 which holds a photomontage of almost two miles of storefronts along Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. In relation to Ruscha’s work, a two volume book by Yoshikazu Suzuki & Shohachi Kimura called “Ginza Kaiwai/Ginza Haccho,” published in 1954, has sparked intense contemplation. The first volume is a history of Tokyo’s Ginza shopping district which includes views of the area from historic woodblock prints. The second volume is an accordion fold book containing a photomontage of a street which bears an almost absurd resemblance to Ruscha’s publication. David Campany has written about these two publications in  light of panoramic street photography he describes as an “industrially standard technique.” A contemporary viewer might be tempted to accuse Ruscha of ripping off this earlier publication. But Campany draws attention to the possibility that Ruscha’s method of image making may have emerged from the same impulse as those of Suzuki & Kimura.  I wasn’t able to find any comment by Ruscha on the similarity of the publications. 

This raises the sticky question of who can claim—or have applied to them—the label of ‘artist,’ and what that does for the perception of their work. One of the challenges of creating an introduction to artists’ books/publications is the tenuous meaning created by sticking “artists’” in front of anything. First, one has to ask: what does it mean for someone to claim to be an artist? What does it mean for them to make a secondary claim based on that initial one? What does it mean for someone calling themselves an artist to locate their work within  the expansive and heterogeneous category of ‘artist’s books,’ which encompasses large-scale commercial publications as well as one-of-a-kind handmade books and small run zines? From there, one might ask what constitutes a book or publication? At some point, we find ourselves in open waters, adrift. These questions, about how language gathers, sorts, and separates remain open and bring with them waves of potential frustration, liberation, and indifference. In many ways, putting “artist’s” in front of “books” stirs up long-standing questions about how one understands relations between people, and the objects that they make and interact with. 

In the case of Ruscha, the designation of “artist” has led to the heights of international success in which his once cheaply produced bookworks now routinely sell for $1700-$2500 in antiquarian book forums. Many strategies have been employed to resist this and other forms of exclusivity by artists. Performance and ephemerality have sought to undercut the commodity fetishism of global art markets and to place relationships between people at the centre of art practice, but this strategy often feels like it narrows audiences rather than expanding them.

For me, seeing books in a vitrine often results in feeling like I have only seen the trailer and never the movie, and upholds the notion that preservation takes precedence over the viewer’s ability to fully experience a work. 

Though many artists, critics, and librarians have focused on questions of definition as the primary axis of understanding artists’ books, more and more over the last three decades, questions of distribution and audience have come to the fore. Instead of being assimilated into mainstream cultures of art presentation, books and publications have spawned a parallel sector; a network of specialty bookshops, mail art groups, publishers, and art book fairs have been gathering momentum over the last half century and have been fuelled by institutions such as Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair. In this sector, artist’s books have come to represent a kind of commodity which is much more attainable to most people (the majority of artist’s books in these contexts range in price from $10.00 to $100.00) but their status as a commodity often goes unquestioned. With no CARFAC schedule for artist’s books and so few institutional precedents for how to distribute them, they exist as a kind of pseudo-commodity; often traded or distributed by consignment to audiences who are mostly familiar with the sector. This trend toward commodity in a Canadian context is understandable, as the (often cited) first bookstore for artist’s publications, Art Metropole, was founded in Toronto and remains in operation. Though I don’t want to downplay the importance of organizations like AM or Printed Matter (one of Art Metropole’s American counterparts) in the landscape of artist’s books, their existence is often taken as the de-facto answer to the question of where artists’ books belong and how they are to be distributed.

For large institutions in North America, a similar question seems to be answered by library collections. Most collections of artists’ books and publications are held in libraries and research rooms with either implicit or explicit barriers to entry. Often, these spaces require institutional affiliation to interact with their collection and are cared for by librarians rather than being animated by curators. When books and printed matter make it into the gallery to be seen by a general audience, their fragility often takes precedence over their legibility.

For many institutions, the experience of art remains immaterial and intellectual rather than tactile. In “Marginalized by Design,” David Garneau writes:

Touch is the taboo of Western-style museums. They are sites of discipline. They demand that individuals control themselves, particularly that we repress touch, taste and smell in order to sharpen vision and imagination.

While this issue can be thought through with creativity and ingenuity, it is often resolved with glass vitrines which offer only a speculative experience of a book. In the case of rare or one-of-a-kind books, I often wonder why there is not more of an effort to make reproductions for display or distribution. For me, seeing books in a vitrine often results in feeling like I have only seen the trailer and never the movie, and upholds the notion that preservation takes precedence over the viewer’s ability to fully experience a work. 

In 2022, for the Singapore national pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, curator Ute Meta Bauer invited artist and writer Shubigi Rao to present Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V. The project is an exploration of the library and the book as a container, dissemination tool, and point of community congregation and resistance. As part of the installation, a pallet of books was offered to any audience member in exchange for their contact information as a way of tracking the dissemination of this particular project. Meta Bauer writes: “Similar to the presentation in Venice, the book is offered as a complimentary artwork, a form of sharing and generosity that is integral to Rao’s method …” Whenever a visitor enters an art space, whether or not they are required to pay a fee for admission, they are offered an experience of art. I wonder why books and publications by artists are so often not integrated as part of that experience. More often than not, they are considered commodities rather than programming. 

While the profile of artist’s books and publications seems to be on the rise—thanks, in part, to the proliferation of the art book fair model—these infrequent and itinerant gatherings (which are mostly restricted to large urban centres) also create a ceiling for artists working with books and publications. In a text written in the lead up to a panel at the Bergen Art Book Fair, Heather Jones writes:

While the artist book community is a thriving one, there is decidedly less visibility, writing, funding, and collecting of artists’ books on the same scale as other forms of artwork. Therefore publishers of artists’ books are forced into the role of educator/lobbyist in addition to their existing work as creators, publishers, marketers, and distributors.

With little institutional support or exposure from university art programs, galleries, mainstream critical outlets, or libraries, it is understandable that a parallel sector has emerged to respond to the needs of artists making books and publications. While I remain grateful for the resources available to me as one of these artists, I worry that the resiliency and resourcefulness of these mostly grassroots efforts will be taken as a sign that more and different types of institutional support are unnecessary. Over the next year, I will be conducting conversations with other artists to tease out some of these questions about the current landscape of artists’ publishing. I hope that the recent groundswell of production and distribution is taken on as an institutional imperative to offer more resources to artists and bring books and publications by artists to a much broader audience.