Publishing as Artistic Practice - Annette Gilbert

Critical analysis of the aesthetics has moved on to the circumstances, practices and processes of production that foster a book.

Artist book has progressed to a new domain - 'As opposed to the artist book that refers directly to the book as a work of art, 'publishing' transfers the socio-economical, technical and legal aspects of dissemination of the artist work - the activity of making it public to a specific audience.' - Delphine Bedel

Publishing still 'remains untheorised'

p.9 - Nick Thurston
'I think we need to recognise publishing as a specific field of practice and theory, akin to a 'discipline' in academia.'

p.9/10 - Robert Darntons 'communications circuit'
'runs from author to the publisher, printer, the shipper, the book-seller and the reader' and attempts to capture 'each phase of this process and the process as a whole, in all its variations over space and time and in all its relations with other systems..'

Jerome McGann
Sociology of texts
The act of becoming public (publishing the work), of "socialisation", is necessary for it to transition from manuscript to 'work'.

Lothar Muller
Someone becomes "an author not by composing manuascripts, but rather when the work is circulated in print. Indeed, the concept of authorship has been explicitly bound to being printed at least since the lexicons of the seventeenth century." This suggests that an author and work only emerge in a public "institutional" framework; or, even further, that authorship is always accompanied or indeed created by publication.'

As such works are "institutional objects' whose existence is dependent upon the existence of practice.

Michael Bhaskar
Denounces the popular, but misleading conception of a book as a mere container of its contents: "publishing is active; it is not a passive matrix through which content passes but a force partially shaping and inflecting content."
p.11
Filtering as the traditional gatekeeper function
Amplification means acting such "that more copies of a work or product are distributed or consumed"
Basically distributing it out
Publishers are "not just producers of books but filters for content and constructors of amplificatory frames"


Publishing as Artistic Practice

Complex interrelationships - publishing and art

Alexander Starre believes graphic design is "the missing link between visual art and literature."
A 'united polemic' against the practice of industrially mass-producing printed matter, the graphic design scene has recently made an assertive claim for the artistic ambitions of their practice and their products.  - Go into the motives for designers desire for artistic expression

Increasing attempts to incorporate the newly emerging design concepts of the (post-) digital age into a comprehensive analysis of the whole practice and process of publishing.

Craig Mod - 'We need to start thinking differently about what books are and how they are produced. We need to reconsider the whole approach to the process of making a book into the thing it is: the creation, the consumption, and everything that happens around and in between.'

Somehow Different 
p.13

In what sense can publishing be said to be an artistic practice?

'publishing as an alternative artistic practice'
Antoine Lefebvre -
'This practice is alternative, or other, insofar as it represents an alternative to the usual mode of operation dominating the art world: it is both an alternative space for art; a new place for it to develop differently; but also an alternative to the art market as it develops in the book market.

'Artists favoured the book as a medium because, for them, the art industry and market was inadequate' - This is relevant to Dieter Roth



Artistic Autonomy, or: Publishing as Maker Culture

p.17
'Artistic freedom and autonomy is of prime importance to the contemporary artistic publishing scene.'

p.18
'publishing is and always has been a 'maker culture' that looks back on a 'long craft tradition of printers and publishers'. As such, it answers the 'longing for the humanisation of digital technologies' and the 'increasing ennoblement of the thing in art, theory and everyday life' that, according to Hannes Bajohr, are characteristics of the post-digital age and its discourse.'

Authorship:
Experimental authors - Take control of content and form to achieve authorship
Liberatic approach
'the material book, which can be of any shape and structure, ceases to be a neutral container for a text, but becomes an integral component of the literary work.'

Reproduction as Production

Ulises Carrion defined 'the new art of making books' in 1975:

'In the old art the writer judges himself as being not responsible for the real book. He writes the text. The rest is done by the servants, the artisans, the workers, the others. In the new art the writer assumes the responsibility for the whole process.'

'authors do not write books; they write texts that become material objects'







Portrait of the Artist as a Publisher: Publishing as an Alternative Artistic Practice
Antoine Lefebvre
p.53

'Why, and more importantly, how is this publishing work artwork?'

Barthes - 'Death of the Author'

LBF challenges authorship due to the fact that the cover artwork and title can be chosen by the artist even though the text wasn't originally written by them. - The biggest victim is the author

Author is not dead! - 'His presence continues to haunt us like a ghost as he rises from the dead as a meta-author'.
Immanuel Kant - defines the author as 'he who speaks to the public in his own name'
Describes the publisher as author - 'he who addresses the writing to the public in the name of the author is the publisher' suggesting that the publisher is therefore an author who expresses himself through authors

p.59
Artists books and the DIY ethos
artzines - DIY spirit
'strong connection to contemporary art'

Artist publishers are artists who refused to comply with the demands of the traditional design world
Reflective of Alexander Starre

A very democratic form of art - affordable
But they are expensive to produce

ArtFlux

Concretism - 'a type of art that presents objects instead of representing them'
'prefer the world of concrete reality rather than the artificial abstraction of illusionism'
Perhaps LBF is reacting against concretism as the books/text available online are not physical, just online potential - This could be the 'artificial abstraction of illusionism'

LBF is 'the future of publishing: the unrestricted distribution of information and printing on demand, which is cheap and sustainable'

p.101 - Print on Demand (POD) used since 1990
It is attractive for independent publishers because of its cheapness in small rotations