Clive Phillpot, quoted from Anne Edgar, “A conversation with Printed Matter”: Afterimage 12, No.6 (Jan 1985):11

We have been so involved with drawing the artists’ book away from the ordinary book, saying that it is an art form itself, that we have preferred the seperateness of distinction to claiming the artists’ books rightful place as part of the wider world of art. To paraphrase Clive Phillpot’s complaint (Phillpot didn’t like using the phrase because he thought it implied that the books were made as a”just a sideline for artists whose principal activity was… painting or sculpture”, those books shouldn’t be “artists’ books” – they are art.

In our anxiety to preserve and define the artists’ book’s distinctiveness, we have built walls around it. This prevents us from having the conversations that would allow us to stop defining it and start to ask what we can do as artists who happen to work with books in 10000 or so different ways.

Maybe it’s something that needed to happen; the paradox is that we have to have a better language to talk about our work to enter into these conversations-in-the-wider-world, which implies further clarification, further definition. Surveys afoot are tring to widen the net: either through opening the idea of cataloguing to a more flexible, almost folksonomic process, and other studies are studying artists’ publishing, which, crucially, is an activity, not an object. I think that finding new ways to talk about what we are *doing*, as well as looking at all those ‘quintessential 20th century’ objects, is going to provide us with some interesting conversations.

One such is a consideration of ‘reading’ as a way to examine what we are making. Since I gave a talk on the subject at the Scottish National Poetry library last year, Ive seen it in several places, including an exchange between Judy Barrass and Charles Brownson over on the Artists Books 3.0 site: http://tinyurl.com/ahkze9 .

I had been up way too late when I saw Melissa’s post about your blog and wasn’t able to read it properly but now that I am back from a long weekend trip away, I am SO thankful that you have started this blog and are publishing your always brilliant brilliance.

“Ed Ruscha’s books do not rock my world” is likely one of the bravest things I’ve heard come out of the dialogue since I’ve been privy to it, but also one that I used to say privately to myself and others ALL the time. Thank you. This will be a nice blog to follow now that I’ve cut myself off from most other parts of the conversation since it was getting too oppressive. Thank you again for making your voice heard!

Joan said, “Many people deny them selves
intellectual and creative growth by such attitudes.”

This is true, but it is also a personal choice. However, I need to point out that when these attitudes enter the academic sphere in the form of ‘canons’ and/or curricular bias (as they so often do), open growth is denied to the very people who are actively seeking to achieve it. That, my friends, is detrimental to the ecology of the entire archipelago.

Melissa Jay Craig

Your article was profoundly well written and greatly needed. This would be a better world if more people were
less judgmental and more open minded. It is one thing to have the courage of ones own convictions without foisting them on everyone else. Many people deny them selves
intellectual and creative growth by such attitudes. This
is about life in general as well as the book arts. May I
quote you?

JMP
http://www.joanmichaels.paque.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmpatelier/