Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

Memo: This is not an Artist’s Book: a New Zealand
Collection
Elizabeth Eastmond
A five hour drive south from Auckland in 1998,
towards Taranaki’s snow-tipped triangle, took
me to a gallery with six hundred and fifty
artists’ books. 1 This extraordinary exhibition
came from Germany, with just some of the ‘B’s
including Beuys, Boltanski and Buren. Two
hundred and fifty were ‘hands-on’. With ‘never
any time’ in Auckland, it was necessary to steal
some. To steal some in order to lose myself in
some, some artist’s book-time: a time which is
also a place, structured by artists, with the book
in mind. In this exhibition as elsewhere narrow
definitions of ‘the artist’s book’ were redundant
and they also fail to apply to all the works in my
sampling here from New Zealand: hence the
‘memo’ in my essay’s title.
That such a specialised touring exhibition,
covering thirty years of European artists’ books
generated considerable interest demonstrated
the extent to which New Zealand audiences
were familiar with this phenomenon. Hardly a
year has passed since the mid nineteen -
seventies without a local show or an offshore
import, with 1997 (when the six hundred and
fifty started touring) also featuring Paging the
Book, a major exhibition with forty-seven New
Zealand artists, and Unbound, curated as a small
but telling aside to accompany the German
show, its focus local book-related installation
works. 2
But it was American-generated rather than
European contacts and exhibitions that helped
nourish earlier stages of this country’s
contribution. A Duchamp exhibition in 1967
which included Green Box and Box in a Valise
presented possibilities, while Franklin Furnace
books showed in 1978, a Rusha exhibition with
a full complement of his books the same year,
and a 1978-9 touring show of one hundred and
eleven artists’ works curated by Jacki Apple
included, of the ‘A’s this time, Acconci,
Anderson and Aycock. 3 By 1990 in a significant
shift in curatorial practice Judith Hoffberg of
Umbrella curated CrossCurrents: Bookworks
from the Edge of the Pacific, which profiled
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together works from both New Zealand and
America, as have a number of other recent
‘Pacific rim’ art exhibitions. 4 New Zealand may
now have radically shifted position from the
‘edge’ to the centre of the world (The World,
Pacific Centred, as my Bartholomew’s map of
2000 has it), and we may enjoy the benefits of
simultaneous co-existence in cyber-space with
other places, but transporting works of art from
them still involves negotiating the Pacific’s
‘encircling seas’. 5 In paradoxical fashion it may
be precisely these two factors of ‘instant’ time
radicalizing communication, along with the
enduring problems associated with distance
(physical space) which have contributed to the
relative prominence here of this generally
smaller-scale form of art practice.
As elsewhere, the agendas originally informing
what were later called artists’ books have shifted
over the years: like installation art they are now
often part of the mainstream, if not partially
institutionalised. Tertiary and other institutions
have run courses in book-making, in ‘artists’
books’, (some in disk form only), and in history
of the book arts, from the 1980s, while paged
material accompanying exhibitions – sometimes
functioning as exhibits themselves - slither back
and forth confusing pedantic distinctions
between catalogue and artist’s book by both
replicating and resisting the catalogue’s
conventional codes. Memo: these in particular
are the slippery customers that lie behind my
essay title ‘this is not an artist’s book’.
Another shaping factor in the earlier years of
the New Zealand artists’ book movement was
the women’s movement of the 1970s and ‘80s.
In 1977 Joanna Paul organized the touring A
Season’s Diaries, the works exploring cultural
feminism’s concern for issues associated with
the ‘personal as political’. 6 In fact, in New
Zealand, the convergence of an emergent type
of art practice (artists’ books) with a newly
politicised art community (feminist women
artists) resulted in a cluster of exhibitions of, or
related to, artists’ books, by women artists, as
well as exhibitions curated by women, from the
late 70s through the ‘80s. The Auckland
Association of Women Artists’ 1990 Cover to
Cover was the last of these gender-specific group
exhibitions. 7