ARTISTS’ BOOKS AND ART WORLDS
One
In many writings about artists’ books, there is a tendency towards history, identifying art histories and practices that converge on the artist’s book and signify it as art. It is as if that history, or that interpretation of history, calls this practice into being, shapes it. In The Century of Artists’ Books, an extensive survey of the subject to the mid 1990s, Johanna Drucker identifies artists’ books in every modern period of art.1 If historical narratives and the alternatives they pose can shape these practices, so too can collecting or ‘the collection’. Collections of artists’ books trace a complexity of visual connections. Two publicly owned and accessible collections of artists’ books are housed in Queensland: in the State Library of Queensland (SLQ)2 and at Artspace Mackay,3 the Tate Adams collection having been gifted and artist books being resituated from Mackay’s public library.4 Libraries and private collectors are the most active collectors of artists’ books, with most state libraries and many university libraries holding collections of them.
More recently, as an advocate and critic of this practice, Drucker has been calling for a ‘canon’ of artists’ books that provides a point of reference for collections and for criticism.5 Drucker is too well read and too critical to approach such an idea without having considered discursive formation. Even so, her approach manifests as a kind of historicised and critical typology. Initially, she proposes an extended cataloguing system, one that should be assimilated readily into the library catalogue. For Drucker, this kind of structure or construction—a system of differentiation, another way of knowing—is almost a matter of critical responsibility that brings modality into sharp register.
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