Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art

by Garrett Stewart

“There they rest, inert, impertinent, in gallery space—those book forms either imitated or mutilated, replicas of reading matter or its vestiges. Strange, after its long and robust career, for the book to take early retirement in a museum, not as rare manuscript but as functionless sculpture. Readymade or constructed, such book shapes are canceled as text when deposited as gallery objects, shut off from their normal reading when not, in some yet more drastic way, dismembered or reassembled.” So begins Bookwork , which follows our passion for books to its logical extreme in artists who employ found or simulated books as a sculptural medium. Investigating the conceptual labor behind this proliferating international art practice, Garrett Stewart looks at hundreds of book-like objects, alone or as part of gallery installations, in this original account of works that force attention upon a book’s material identity and cultural resonance. Less an inquiry into the artist’s book than an exploration of the book form’s contemporary objecthood, Stewart’s interdisciplinary approach traces the lineage of these aggressive artifacts from the 1919 Unhappy Readymade of Marcel Duchamp down to the current crisis of paper-based media in the digital era. Bookwork surveys and illustrates a stunning variety of appropriated and fabricated books alike, ranging from hacksawed discards to the giant lead folios of Anselm Kiefer. The unreadable books Stewart engages with in this timely study are found, again and again, to generate graphic metaphors for the textual experience they preclude, becoming in this sense legible after all.

Genres: Architecture, Adult

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Lady Knight · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, how I wanted to like this so much more than I did! The cover is gorgeous, and the concept is wonderful... so what's my problem? For an "art" book, there is shockingly few pictures and of those 90% are in black and white. Where is the colour? I relize text is typically black and white, but the surrounding colours of the covers, backgound, other objects, etc. give so much life! I want to see the "bookworks" not just read descriptions of them!

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bookwork as a genre forces us to face the materiality of the book by emptying the content of a book. In a world where book is taken for granted as a medium, once we strip the meidiative role out of it, we are left with the bare materiality of the book. Only then, the book as an object become an object of art. In other words, bookwork as a genre collectively as a what-if-not question that compels us rethink our thinking about and of books.
I only read the intro, chp1, and the conclusion as assigned by my professor. But if I have extra extra extra time at hand, I'll finish reading this book for fun.