In my previous post, I explained how developing an art history course, The Book as Art: A Hands-On History from 1750 to Today, allowed me to address the friction between the history of artist books and mainstream art history. I argued that sometimes artist books played only a minor role in a movement because they had already worked through the problems confronting artists working in other media. The previous post focused on Pop Art; in this post, I discuss Minimalism.
As I would tell my students, Pop and Minimalism occurred during the same period and shared certain concerns (despite very different appearances). Fundamentally, Pop and Minimalism both challenged the boundary between art and life. Whereas Pop appropriates everyday life into art, Minimalism deflects attention from the art object and onto its surroundings. Instead of being transported by, or immersed in, the work, the viewer remains aware of their embodied viewing experience. Minimalism could also challenge the boundary between media; artists argued that they created “specific objects” rather than exemplars of existing traditions like painting or sculpture. Lastly, Minimalism responded to the increasing automation and abstraction of labor, and artists adopted the role of manager rather than fabricator. Repetition and seriality often accompanied this industrial approach to artmaking.
A number of artists created minimal books with little or no printed content. Free of text and image, the books deflect attention to the embodied experience of reading.
Bruno Munari created a series of libri illeggibili (illegible books) to push the limits of communication through simple shapes, solid colors, rhythm, and touch.
Bruno Munari, An unreadable quadrat-print (Steendrukkerij de Jong & Co. 1953) © 1953 Bruno Munari. All rights reserved to Maurizio Corraini s.r.l. Photo credit: Robert Bolick, Books on Books.
Sol Lewitt made even simpler books by creasing sheets of white paper. Examples include A Book of Folds (c. 1978) and A Book Without Six Geometric Figures (c. 1978).
George Maciunas’s Flux Paper Events (1976) is a blank book in which every page is somehow altered — but never printed. Pages are folded, torn, hole-punched, stapled, perforated, and so on. Maciunas’s original proposal even called for pages to be scented with culinary spices and gasoline.
George Maciunas, Flux Paper Events, Edition Hundertmark, 1976. Photo credit: Rosemary Furtak Collection, Walker Art Center Library.
Despite the intensive alterations, Flux Paper Events was produced in an edition of 500. Munari’s books were also published in relatively large editions (he was, after all, an industrial designer). Even as LeWitt’s folded and ripped “drawings without drawing” were conspicuously hand-made, they were meant to be affordable multiples, “not to be sold for more than $100.” The difference is worth exploring: LeWitt’s serial production challenges the conventions of drawing, but the multiples by Munari and Maciunas simply fulfill the expectations of books production. Furthermore, it is hardly surprising that Flux Paper Events was published by Edition Hundertmark instead of Maciunas’s own imprint. Minimalist sculptors may have raised eyebrows when they began to outsource their fabrication, but the opposite was true in books, where only a fine line separates a studio from a vanity press.
So, serial production and outsourced production are less radical in artist books than in painting or sculpture. However, these books’ renunciation of text and image is as provocative as a monochrome painting. They succeed in focusing attention on the experience of reading rather than the work’s content. Yet, even in this regard, artist books moved more quickly toward other concerns, namely Conceptual art and institutional critique.
At first, Minimalist artists deflected attention from their objects into what they thought were neutral spaces, the so-called white cube. It was against this ostensibly empty backdrop that subtle nuances in light, shadow, and perspective would make the viewer aware of their own perception. It took a while for these (mostly white, male) artists to recognize that the white cube was not neutral, that beneath the empty walls were economic, information, and ideological systems. Michael Asher and Lawrence Weiner made physical interventions in the gallery spaces that opened the way for other modes of institutional critique.
Like an empty gallery, a blank book is never neutral. Indeed, I argue it is because books are more overtly ideological that artist books moved more quickly from Minimalism toward explicitly critical strategies. Books are too involved in law, education, religion — explicit instruction of any sort — to be mistaken for neutral. (Notably, Munari’s illegible books are related to his longstanding interest in early childhood learning.) Even when artist books cross boundaries like print and sculpture, they are never “specific objects”; they are always books.
Whether artists leverage the familiarity of books or aim to defamiliarize them, it is well understood that artist books straddle the boundary of art and life. It might be surprising, then, had they played no role in Pop art and Minimalism, two movements that challenged that same boundary from both directions. That artist books played only a marginal role in Pop and Minimalism does not demonstrate, in my view, any weakness in the book as a medium but rather the extent to which Pop and Minimalism maintained the modernist paradigm of medium specificity; artists were more concerned with the boundaries between painting and life or sculpture and life than the boundary between art and life. Thus, including artist books in the history of art contributes to the debate over whether Pop and Minimalism are the end of modernism or the beginning of postmodernism. What other contributions might be made when artist books are included in art history?
Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.
