Regrouping the avant-garde After
World War II, many artists in Europe attempted to rebuild links beyond nationalist boundaries, and used the artist's book as a way of experimenting with form, disseminating ideas and forging links with like-minded groups in other countries. After the war, a number of leading artists and poets started to explore the functions and forms of the book 'in a serious way'.
Concrete poets in Brazil such as Augusto and
Haroldo de Campos,
Cobra artists in the Netherlands and Denmark and the
French Lettrists all began to systematically deconstruct the book. A fine example of the latter is
Isidore Isou's
Le Grand Désordre, (1960), a work that challenges the viewer to reassemble the contents of an envelope back into a semblance of narrative. Two other examples of poet-artists whose work provided models for artists' books include
Marcel Broodthaers and
Ian Hamilton Finlay. Yves Klein in France was similarly challenging Modernist integrity with a series of works such as
Yves: Peintures (1954) and
Dimanche (1960) which turned on issues of identity and duplicity. Other examples from this era include
Guy Debord and
Asger Jorn's two collaborations,
Fin de Copenhague (1957) and
Mémoires' (1959), two works of
Psychogeography created from found magazines of Copenhagen and Paris respectively, collaged and then printed over in unrelated colours.
Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha Often credited with defining the modern artist's book,
Dieter Roth (1930–98) produced a series of works which systematically deconstructed the form of the book throughout the fifties and sixties. These disrupted the codex's authority by creating books with holes in (e.g.
Picture Book, 1957), allowing the viewer to see more than one page at the same time. Roth was also the first artist to re-use found books: comic books, printer's end papers and newspapers (such as
Daily Mirror, 1961 and
AC, 1964). Although originally produced in Iceland in extremely small editions, Roth's books would be produced in increasingly large runs, through numerous publishers in Europe and North America, and would ultimately be reprinted together by the German publisher Hansjörg Mayer in the 1970s, making them more widely available in the last half-century than the work of any other comparable artist. Almost contemporaneously in the United States,
Ed Ruscha (1937–present) printed his first book,
Twentysix Gasoline Stations, in 1963 in an edition of 400, but had printed almost 4000 copies by the end of the decade. The book is directly related to American photographic travelogues, such as
Robert Frank's
The Americans' (1965), but deals with a banal journey on route 66 between Ruscha's home in Los Angeles and his parents' in Oklahoma. Like Roth, Ruscha created a series of homogenous books throughout the sixties, including
Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, and
Royal Road Test, 1967. A Swiss artist worth mentioning is
Warja Honegger-Lavater, who created artists' books contemporaneously with Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha.
Fluxus and the Multiple Growing out of
John Cage's
Experimental Composition classes from 1957 to 1959 at the
New School for Social Research,
Fluxus was a loose collective of artists from North America and Europe that centered on
George Maciunas (1931–78), who was born in Lithuania. Maciunas set up the AG Gallery in New York, 1961, with the intention of putting on events and selling books and multiples by artists he liked. The gallery closed within a year, apparently having failed to sell a single item. The collective survived, and featured an ever-changing roster of like-minded artists including
George Brecht,
Joseph Beuys,
Davi Det Hompson,
Daniel Spoerri,
Yoko Ono,
Emmett Williams and
Nam June Paik. Artists' books (such as
An Anthology of Chance Operations) and multiples (as well as
happenings), were central to Fluxus' ethos disdaining galleries and institutions, replacing them with "art in the community", and the definition of what was and wasn't a book became increasingly elastic throughout the decade as the two forms collided. Many of the Fluxus editions share characteristics with both; George Brecht's
Water Yam (1963), for instance, involves a series of
scores collected in a box, whilst similar scores are collected together in a bound book in
Yoko Ono's
Grapefruit (1964). Another famous example is
Literature Sausage by Dieter Roth, one of many artists to be affiliated to Fluxus at one or other point in its history; each one was made from a pulped book mixed with onions and spices and stuffed into sausage skin. Literally a book, but utterly unreadable. Litsa Spathi and Ruud Jansen of the Fluxus Heidelberg Center in the Netherlands have an online archive of fluxus publications and fluxus webslinks. Additionally, critical to the Fluxus and The Multiple movements was
Drucker's term "democratic multiple" (46). 1971 (book in concrete) by
Wolf Vostell.
Louise Odes Neaderland, the founder and Director of the non-profit group
International Society of Copier Artists (I.S.C.A.) helped to establish electrostatic art as a legitimate art form, and to offer a means of distribution and exhibition to Xerox book Artists. Volume 1, #1 of The I.S.C.A. Quarterly was issued in April 1982 in a folio of 50 eight by eleven inch unbound prints in black and white or color
Xerography. Each contributing artist's work of
Xerox art was numbered in the Table of Contents and the corresponding number was stamped on the back of each artist's work. "The format changed over the years and eventually included an Annual Bookworks Edition, which contained a box of small handmade books from the
I.S.C.A. contributors." After the advent of home computers and printers made it easier for artists to do what the copy machine formerly did, Volume 21, #4 in June 2003 was the final issue. "The 21 years of The I.S.C.A. Quarterlies represented a visual record of artists’ responses to timely social and political issues," as well as to personal experiences. The complete I.S.C.A quarterly collection is housed and catalogued at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the
Florida Atlantic University library.
Proliferation and reintegration into the mainstream As the form has expanded, many of the original distinctive elements of artists' books have been lost, blurred or transgressed. Artists such as
Cy Twombly,
Anselm Kiefer and
PINK de Thierry, with her series Encyclopaedia Arcadia, routinely make unique, hand crafted books in a deliberate reaction to the small mass-produced editions of previous generations;
Albert Oehlen, for instance, whilst still keeping artists' books central to his practice, has created a series of works that have more in common with Victorian sketchbooks. A return to the cheap mass-produced aesthetic has been evidenced since the early 90s, with artists such as
Mark Pawson and Karen Reimer making cheap mass production central to their practice. Contemporary and post-conceptual artists also have made artist's books an important aspect of their practice, notably
William Wegman,
Bob Cobbing,
Martin Kippenberger,
Raymond Pettibon,
Freddy Flores Knistoff and
Suze Rotolo. Book artists in
pop-up books and other three-dimensional one-of-a-kind books include Bruce Schnabel,
Carol Barton,
Hedi Kyle,
Julie Chen,
Ed Hutchins and
Susan Joy Share. Many book artists working in traditional, as well as non-traditional, forms have taught and shared their art in workshops at centers such as the
Center for Book Arts in New York City, and the Visual Arts Studio (
VisArts), the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Studio School, the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Statewide Outreach Program, and the no longer extant Richmond Printmaking Workshop, all in
Richmond, Virginia. Other institutions devoted to the art form include
San Francisco Center for the Book,
Visual Studies Workshop in
Rochester, New York, and
Women's Studio Workshop in
Rosendale, New York. ==Art book fairs==