LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Welcome to the first issue of Book Art Review magazine—published by Center for Book Arts. This new print and online magazine is part of BAR’s larger initiative, developed over the last two years, to create a platform for critical writing about artists’ books. The magazine follows on past CBA publications including… Continue reading In this Issue
Book Art Review
How Does the Artist Book?
A book in the poetry section caught my eye because I recognized its design. The white spine of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) stood out from the shelf. I knew the book well, but I picked up this copy anyway. The cover’s smoothness felt familiar, as did the book’s heft, an effect of its pages being printed on thick, matte-coated paper. After David Hammons’s iconic sculpture In the Hood (1993) greeted me on the front, my hands flipped to pages 134 and 135. I took in a short breath. Under a stanza of verse that reads, “because white men can’t / police their imagination / black people are dying,” there is a column of victims’ names: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks.[1] I was doubly shocked. First, to see the names of recent victims appear in this book at all. Brooks had been killed by an Atlanta police officer on June 12, 2020, and the others had perished in the months before, all during what became a year of traumatic loss. But I was also shocked to see the names on this side (the right) of the facing-page layout. Their appearance here marked a terrible turn.
Artists Books
Looking back at the history of writings about artists books is an opportunity to review the literature and the issues that have defined the genre.[1] From my perch as an art librarian and now as an independent researcher, I have watched the evolution of the field from the early 1970s to today. The writings surveyed… Continue reading Artists Books
Soumya Sankar Bose’s Where the Birds Never Sing
Fact is an unstable category, subject to distortion, fragmentation, and incompleteness. These conditions inform the practice of the photographer Soumya Sankar Bose who, since 2017, has been building a body of work around the 1979 massacre of Bengali refugees on the island of Marichjhapi on the eastern coast of India. Situating his project within the… Continue reading Soumya Sankar Bose’s Where the Birds Never Sing
Leandro Katz’s Self Hipnosis
Leandro Katz’s Self Hipnosis takes its title from a sign advertising self-hypnotism that the artist encountered on the Caribbean Island of Curaçao in 1975. Although the proper translation for “self-hypnosis” in the local language of Papiamento—a Portuguese-based creole—is “autohipnosis,” the sign opts instead to use the Anglo-Germanic “self,” suggesting the island’s history as a Dutch… Continue reading Leandro Katz’s Self Hipnosis
Milada Součková’s Mluvící pásmo
In Milada Součková’s epic poem, Mluvící pásmo (roughly translated from Czech as Talking Zone), an unnamed male narrator, who uses language related to printing, details pervasive anxiety over the collapse of European civilization. The poem was first printed in the fall of 1939 in Czechoslovakia, and responds in real time to the onset of the… Continue reading Milada Součková’s Mluvící pásmo
Awoiska van der Molen’s The Living Mountain
The Living Mountain by Awoiska van der Molen, made in collaboration with composer Thomas Larcher, is a work that hangs in the air, a work whose final purpose has been suspended. The work sees Van der Molen apply her now signature photographic approach to the countryside and mountains of Larcher’s native Tyrol, Austria, as part… Continue reading Awoiska van der Molen’s The Living Mountain
A New Manifesto for Book Art Criticism
The idea for Book Art Review, a criticism initiative and a magazine, came together over a set of conversations, discussions, and a few glasses starting in the fall of 2019. In 2020, BAR’s Manifesto was published in the Brooklyn Rail’s September issue and online on the CBA website. In June of 2021, Megan N. Liberty,… Continue reading A New Manifesto for Book Art Criticism
Books, Community, and Collaboration
To know the work of Devin N. Morris is to know the work of a world-builder, someone untethered by notions of dimension, temporality, gravity, and materiality. Devin is an illustrator, collage artist, sculptor, bookmaker, collector, and dreamer of spaces where we can be at home. Home is always a tenuous concept for Black people in… Continue reading Books, Community, and Collaboration