Seminars

Abstract

The expression “artist’s book” indicates an object other than an illustrated book insofar as the materials and techniques in the construction of the book are made to intervene in the writing and reading process. In other words, it engages and invents, even as it cross-examines or otherwise tests the physical matter of the book by constructing a work other than yet contributing to its written content.

What happens when authorship includes more than one person? For the solitary vocations of artists or writers or composers, the made object is an interlocutor which tests creativity, and gives articulate definition to imagination. And yet the artists’ collaboration induces an object where negotiation complicates the creative enterprise. On the way to realizing the object is a process issuing from more than one person, with the realm of possibilities calling for more choices to be arrived at intellectually and technically, and an invitation for unforeseen consequences all along the way: the way of possibility rather than necessity.

Even so, the constraints of design induce limits.