Monoskop Exhibition Library (2018) [English/Korean]

The Exhibition Library reimagines the medium of art exhibition as well as that of art catalogue. Catalogues carry exhibitions through time and space, figuring as tropes for imagining arrangements and the course of works and settings they describe. However, they rarely give us a clue about what really happened, since they are often made before the show opens. Rather than documenting it, they often stand on their own, almost as if another work on display, truly as an artistic medium on its own. For this work, artists, designers, curators, poets and collectives created thirty catalogues of imaginary exhibitions. Exploring both the potential and impossible in art, the resulting exhibition library also serves as a “library of exhibitions.”

With works by the Archive of the Museum of American Art-Berlin, Joana Chicau, Vuk Ćosić, Annet Dekker, Leslie Drost-Robbins, Espen Sommer Eide, Kenneth Goldsmith, Sarah Hamerman and Sam Hart, Seewon Hyun, Václav Janoščík and Eva Skopalová, Geraldine Juárez, Josefina Björk and Bhavisha Panchia, Mara Karagianni and John Colenbrander, Richard Kitta and Michal Murin, Jungmin Lee, Signe Lidén, Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg, Ilan Manouach, Darija Medić, Multimedia Institute Zagreb (Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, et al.), Michal Murin, Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha), Purple Noise, Jürgen Rendl, Danny Snelson, Supermuch, Technopolitics Working Group (John Barker, Sylvia Eckermann, Doron Goldfarb, Armin Medosch, Gerald Nestler, Felix Stalder, Axel Stockburger, Matthias Tarasiewicz, Thomas Thaler, Ina Zwerger, et al.), Charles Turner, Takuma Uematsu, Yuki Hayashi, Tadashi Kobayashi and Tetsuya Goto, Marina Valle Noronha, and Amy Suo Wu.

Presented as part of Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, 5 September – 18 November 2018.

Edited by Dušan Barok
Publisher Monoskop, Amsterdam, with The Book Society, Seoul, 2018
47 pages

Exhibition

HTML (includes PDFs of several contributed works)
PDF
Internet Archive
Humanities Commons
ARG
Issuu
Scribd

Johanna Drucker: The Century of Artists’ Books (1995)

“The seminal study of the development of artists’ books as a twentieth-century art form. By situating artists’ books within the context of developments in the visual arts, Drucker raises critical and theoretical issues as well as providing a historical overview of the medium. Within its pages, she explores more than two hundred individual books in relation to their structure, form, and conceptualization.”

Publisher Granary Books, New York, 1995
ISBN 1887123016, 9781887123013
xii+377 pages

Reviews: Kristine Markovich (Art Documentation, 1996), Paula Frosch (Library Journal, 1996), Buzz Spector (Art Journal, 1997), Tom Trusky (Afterimage, 1997), Eric T. Haskell (SubStance, 1997), Kranz (Bloomsbury Review, 2002).
Interview with author (Tate Shaw, The Journal of Artists’ Books, 2006).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (74 MB)
Introduction to 2nd edition by Holland Cotter (2004, added on 2018-12-18)

Joan Lyons (ed.): Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (1985)

“This anthology is the first in-depth look at artists’ bookworks. A series of essays, written by longtime participants in and observers of the field, address the following questions: what are the origins, attributes, and what is the potential of artsists’ books; what are their historical precedents; what issues are they addressing; who is making and publishing them? The essays are supplemented by extensive bibliographies and a list of collections.”

With texts by Richard Kostelanetz, Ulises Carrión, Lucy R. Lippard (2), Shelley Rice, Barbara Moore and Jon Hendricks, Clive Phillpot, Susi R. Bloch, Betsy Davids and Jim Petrillo, Felipe Ehrenberg, Magali Lara and Javier Cadena, Alex Sweetman, and Robert C. Morgan.

With a preface by Dick Higgins
Publisher Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, 1985
ISBN 0898220416, 9780898220414
269 pages

Digested version
Publisher Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, 1985
68 pages
via kaackattack

Review: M. Kasper (Papers of Bibliogr Soc of Am, 1986).

WorldCat
WorldCat (Digested version)

PDF (13 MB, added on 2019-10-26)
Digested version: PDF (28 MB)