This third seminar at Artspace Mackay: Focus on artists’ books 3, was its most ambitious to date. Funding was secured to deliver international speakers, not only to the forum but to most capital cities in Australia for workshops following the artists’ books talkfest. This was a valuable extension to the already significant work Artspace has done on the profile and conceptual development of artists’ books in Australia. Director Robert Heather regards this as a happy accident predicated on the existing collection of artists’ books held by the Mackay library and the lack of any other national initiative in this area, but it is clear that without his leadership this depth of commitment to artists’ books would not exist, certainly not at a regional level. From 2007 the artists’ books forum will run in Mackay every two years, with the Libris Awards Australian artists’ books prize and exhibition, held for the first time at Artspace this year, to be seen in alternate years.
While numbers have remained fairly static since the first forum in 2004 (in terms of marketing, artists’ books have to be seen as a niche within the visual arts niche, albeit one that generates passion and commitment), the event has clear momentum. This year it took on the canon proposed by United States academic Johanna Drucker, seeking to debate her bid for a definition for artists’ books and structures within which they are made, bought, sold and collected.
Marshall Weber, of Brooklyn Publishing in New York, kicked the ball directly into this debate in his keynote speech, when he suggested that artists’ books in 2006 were a bit like installation art in the 1980s, or conceptual art