Book as Idea

• Extracts

• “the notion of books as an artistic medium appealed to conceptual artists who believed in ideas over aesthetics”
• “Another attraction was that books could be democratic”
• “Ruscha described L.A. as “the ultimate cardboard cut-out town""
• “By moving from one pole to another, the robin participated in what the artist called his ‘Drawing in Space’. Dibbets’s book contains a series of photographs, topographical surveys, handwritten notes and printed text”
• “sculptor, artist and performer Liliane Lijn. Sky never stops is part of her series of ‘poem machines’ – cylindrical or conical structures printed with text which she began to make in 1962. The forms are fixed to motorised turntables which, when made to rotate, cause the words to accelerate and dissolve into a blur of movement. Lijn was inspired by Tibetan prayer wheels which traditionally contain printed prayers wrapped around a cylinder. Buddhists believe that when the cylinder is spun, the prayers are activated and fly out into the world. When spun, Lijn’s texts lose their legibility but are invested with a new energy”
• “the words of the poems are repeated in different combinations and with varying gaps between them so that they appear to be bobbing around on the surface of the page.”
• “New meanings and associations are created as the words rearrange and recombine with one another from one line to the next”
• “In this box all the white cards are blank except two. Of these two, each is printed with just one line of an evocative couplet: *the name of a wave in a sea of waves *the wave of a name in a sea of names”
• “The book is presented as a walking guide, containing photographs of the residents and their own words, taken from interviews the artist conducted with them on the path.”
• “the book’s purpose is as a tool for social engagement.”
• “Walsh sees the book not merely as a sequence of pages but as a sequence of spaces”