University bookshelf: The Authority of the Book

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

The not-exactly-a-book recommendation this month is the “The Authority of the Book” exhibit at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts through Saturday, Jan. 7, 2017. Are we at the end of the era of the printed book? Perhaps, but the explosion in self-publishing argues that the printed/made book is more potent than ever. The works in this show have a variety of approaches and relationships to the idea of production, but they all share a commitment to the book as an authentic primary experience in art.

The Authority of the Book
The Authority of the Book

Are we at the end of the era of the printed book? Perhaps, but the explosion in self-publishing argues that the printed/made book is more potent than ever.

Increasingly, many find the screen a lifeless visual monoculture, a visual experience that homogenizes all visual content into the same bland RGB grid of pixels. The hunger for richer, more tactile experiences in reading can be demonstrated by the attendances at recent Artist Book Fairs in New York and Los Angeles, which were measured in the tens of thousands. The feverish interest in printed books of photography and the large audience for graphic novels all suggest that the audience for printed books is growing, not collapsing.

The potential of publication as a creative act is inexhaustible: this exhibition celebrates books and ephemera as distributable works of art created in multiple. We make a distinction between publication as simple replication and publication as creation—publication as replication uses the technologies of printing in a lifeless manner, inattentive to the rich material articulations inherent in all production processes. The works in this show have a variety of approaches and relationships to the idea of production, but they all share a commitment to the book as an authentic primary experience in art. The book is resolutely a material artifact, imbued with the aesthetic values and assumptions of the maker.

Clifton Meador
Philip Zimmermann

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