The Artist’s Book: Presentation and Discussion at the Garage Museum’s Round Table, December 12-13, 2023

Abstract

The publication is based on a report related to artist’s book, read at a round table at the Garage Museum of Modern Art on December 13, 2023. The examples given in the presentation are based on the book art scheme proposed by C. Phillpot in 1982. The scheme allows one to determine different levels of book involvement in the visual art environment. The term book art, which in the early classification of C. Phillpot meant an artist’s book, was replaced by the term bookwork, and book art more often began to be understood as art objects created from books. The initial difficulties in defining the artist’s book and the instability of terminology (both English and Russian) formed the basis of the discussion that followed the report. In addition to the problems of terminology and classification, it addressed the issues of accounting and cataloging non-traditional publications, ways of displaying them, as well as the very specifics of publishing in this area. The author provides western examples of the institutionalization of non-traditional forms of book culture and suggests the optimal exhibition option for working with the artist’s book: maximum media documentation followed by the translation of individual fragments of the digitized object, an equivalent to reading the original.