Posts Tagged ‘invisible’
The Invisible Book at the National Library plus postcard set news
The Invisible Book has been gathering attention lately, and my postcard set Highlights in the history of The Invisible Book was sold out. I can now announce a new print run has become available, on a new cardstock. The set of six cards in a bellyband is priced at €10 plus shipping and available in my webshop. Or order by email.
The National Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) of The Netherlands is currently presenting The Invisible Book as one of the five most remarkable books in their collection. You can find more information (in Dutch) here. On September 26 there will be an evening at the library where all five books are discussed by the curators, find info here.
As a source of discovering many conceptual artists’ books that I hadn’t yet heard of, plus rediscovering works I did know, Moritz Küng’s Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements (1960-2022) (published by Walther Koenig on the occasion of the show I wrote about in my previous post) has been enjoyable. The Invisible Book is also presented in this, and gives one of the chapters its name. For those who read Dutch, there is a good review by Christophe Van Gerrewey in De Witte Raaf.
Blank. Raw. Illegible…
From May 14 to September 3, the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren shows Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements (1960-2022). Expect a whopping total of 259 books in the show, most of which will be visible to the eye.
Curated by Moritz Küng, the exhibition explores how contemporary artists and artist collectives exploit and activate the conceptual potential of a blank sheet of paper or a book with empty pages for their artistic practice. Starting with an authoritative exploration by artist Herman de Vries of the designation of the color white, the exhibition opens up the diversity of artistic concepts in reflecting on emptiness, purity, and raw material in relation to the formal and functional criteria of books in 15 chapters, the headings of each of which are taken from one of their book titles.
The Invisible Book will be on view in the show, and gives one of the chapters its name. For more information, visit the museum’s website. A catalogue will be published by Walther König (ISBN: 978-3-7533-0463-2).
For those wishing to read up on The Invisible Book, there were recently some new discussions of it: by Gill Partington in the London Review of Books (Vol. 45 No. 4, February 2023), by Annette Gilbert in the quite essential Literature’s Elsewheres (MIT Press, 2022), and by Felipe Cussen in La oficina de la nada (Ediciones Siruela, 2022).
Also
The postcardset of The Invisible Book will be part of Inexistent Books VI, curated by Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson and Jan Steinbach at Salong in Oslo, May 19 – June 4.
Visible, but also involving blank spaces, the book version of The Man of the Crowd is on view in a small exhibit on Edgar Allan Poe at Centre Céramique in Maastricht right now.
Inexistent Books at I Never Read
Inexistent Books is currently taking place at I Never Read, Art Book Fair Basel. Curated by Jan Steinbach, it questions the invisible in times of contemporary hypervisibility and explores the utopian potential of the art book. To this end artists have submitted publications for the ephemeral Book Shop that deal with non-existence or the outright refusal to exist at all. Among them are works by: Bia Bittencourt, Cassie Thornton, Christiane Blattmann, Claudia De La Torre, Elisabeth Tonnard, Fiona Banner, Florence Jung, H.P. Blavatsky & Sun Ra and others.
See the full list of exhibitors and detailed program of the fair on ineverread.com.
Opening hours
Thursday and Friday 3pm — 9pm
Saturday and Sunday 11am — 5pm
Address
Schaulager, Laurenz-Stiftung
Ruchfeldstrasse 19
4142 Basel/Münchenstein
Discussion of The Invisible Book
Instead of showing itself, it shows “that which allows it to exist”…
Annette Gilbert, quoted above, provides a two-page analysis of The Invisible Book as an institutional object in Publishing as Artistic Practice. The volume, also edited by Gilbert, was recently released by Sternberg Press and contains contributions by Hannes Bajohr, Paul Benzon, K. Antranik Cassem, Bernhard Cella, Annette Gilbert, Hanna Kuusela, Antoine Lefebvre, Matt Longabucco, Alessandro Ludovico, Lucas W. Melkane, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Aurélie Noury, Valentina Parisi, Michalis Pichler, Anna-Sophie Springer, Alexander Starre, Nick Thurston, Rachel Valinsky, Eva Weinmayr, Vadim Zakharov.
On a related note, the second edition of The Invisible Book recently sold out. Copies of the first edition are occasionally available through the Ebay auctions that Joachim Schmid puts up (he bought all copies).
Exhibition at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek
The Invisible Book is currently on view in the exhibition ‘Topstukken’ at the National Library of The Netherlands in The Hague. Read curator Paul van Capelleveen’s blog post about the book here (in Dutch).
The Invisible Book and the Cheshire Cat
“Like the Cheshire Cat, the book’s vanishing acts and reappearances are unpredictable and partial.” Gill Partington writes a stimulating piece for the London Review of Books blog about the implications of The Invisible Book.
Exhibition Living Space
The Invisible Book will be on view in Surface habitable/Living Space at Chaumont Design Graphique, as part of the International Poster and Graphic Design Festival. The work was selected by Loraine Furter. The exhibition runs from May 17 to June 9 in Chaumont, France.
Shortlist Artists’ Book of the Moment Award
Two of my books were shortlisted for the Artists’ Book of the Moment Award 2013, organized by The Art Gallery of York University in Toronto. One is The Invisible Book, the other We are small. For the 2011 and 2012 editions of this award my books were also shortlisted.
Artist’s Book Yearbook 2014-2015
I just received the Artist’s Book Yearbook 2014-2015 (they are quite ahead of their time). It’s a fantastic resource plus it contains interesting content besides the listings. I’ve contributed an artist page focusing on The Invisible Book. Below is more info about the yearbook.
Essays: A history of Café Royal by Craig Atkinson; Against Orthodoxy: A ramble in the woods of art by John Bently; Field Study International: Celebrating 20 years in the Field by Sue Hartigan; Women’s Studio Workshop: feminist history and birth of an era by Anna Giordano; Bob Brown’s Reading Machine & the Imagined Escape from the Page by Abigail Thomas; Making it happen with Angie Butler by Linda Newington; Stimulus/response – scratching away at some intrinsic and extrinsic problems in theorising the artist’s book from the far end of a ‘not-so-dark continent’ by David Paton; Book Art Object 2: making a book about books by David Jury; The fourth Codex International Book Fair and Symposium by David Jury; Art as collaboration: 50 years of Edition Hansjörg Mayer – An interview with Eleanor Vonne Brown and Gustavo Grandal Montero; Student report: When is a new ‘BookArtObject’ not an Artist’s Book? by Pete Kennedy; A New World: Johannes Häfner’s Digital Picture Books by Reinhard Grüner; Reading the Literary Text as ‘Art in Space’ Barbara Tetenbaum’s “My Ántonia” by Nathalia King; The Typographic Dante by Barrie Tullett; Les Coleman tribute page, Tanya Peixoto.
Artists’ pages: Sara Elgerot, Paul Laidler, Stevie Ronnie, Stephen Spurrier, Elisabeth Tonnard, Sylvia Waltering, Michael Weller, Elizabeth Willow, Philippa Wood.
Cover design: Tom Sowden
Information listings: Artist’s Book Publishers & Presses; Bookshops for artists’ books; Artist’s Book Dealers; Artist’s Book Galleries & Centres; Collections, Libraries & Archives; Artist’s Book Fairs and Events; Book Arts Courses and Workshops; Design, Print & Bind; Print Studios; Journals and Magazines; New Reference Publications; Organisations, People, Projects and Societies.
Artists’ books listings: Over 190 national and international artists have also listed their recent book works.
Price including postage: £15 (UK) or £16 (International), 21 x 29.7 cm, 296 pages, black and white offset print. The ABYB can be ordered online at: www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/bookpub.htm
Postcard set of The Invisible Book
In order to shed some light on the nebulous history of The Invisible Book, a set of visible postcards was published. From an early discussion about the book in 1654, to Robert Walser’s sterling 1925 review and Diane Simpson’s legendary marathon reading in 1980, discover some of the highlights in the book’s history through this set of six cards. The set is priced at € 5 plus € 1 shipping anywhere and available in my webshop. Or order by email.
Elisabeth Tonnard 