Is it a library or is it a gallery?
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The University of Virginia hosts a library -- or gallery -- called Artists’ Books Online. It’s a highly academic resource that includes ‘facsimiles, metadata, and criticism.’ It’s also got a lot of pretty pictures.
Artists’ books are, generally, books made by people in the world of visual arts who have taken the book/book-like object on as an art form. They gained enough traction so that ‘The Journal of Art Books,’ which undertook the ‘creative exploration of the intersections of book arts, artists’ books, poetry, photography, experimental literature, and other book-related creative endeavors,’ was launched in 1994. The journal, published twice a year until 2003, and all its issues have found a home on the Artists’ Books Online website. All these issues, along with a wide range of the works themselves, appear on the website.
It is not surprising that the crossed threads of visual arts and storytelling eventually got wrapped up on the Internet. What is surprising, perhaps, is the thoroughness with which the works are presented here. Cataloged and categorized, explained and explored, most of the works have been photographed from cover to cover, and can be perused through a flash interface. Visiting the site is like standing in a library, being able to pull any book off the shelf and flip through at will.
The project was headed up by Johanna Drucker, who was recently appointed the inaugural Bernard and Martin Breslauer Professor of Bibliography at UCLA’s Department of Information Studies. She is the author of several books, including ‘SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing’ (2009), ‘Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity’ (2005), both by the University of Chicago Press, and ‘The Surprise Party Or: on not going not ongoing,’ (1977) pictured above.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
