Artists' Books from Latin America
Martha Hellion
2006

This is a glimpse into the history of Artist’s Books from Latin America, a subject that has not yet been studied in depth. I try to give these books, in the broadest sense, "a place", a geographical location in the world, and try to avoid designating them as "Latin American Books", a specific category used by European cultural centralism, which in any case has never acknowledged this particular production.
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ARTISTS’ BOOKS IN (what was formerly known as) EASTERN EUROPE
What, How and from Whom/WHW
2006

Contrary to the common understanding of the social and artistic situation in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, which tends to ignore differences in favor of a homogeneous view that suitably supports the political agenda of the cold war, developments in art were rather heterogeneous. As in the West, the production of artists' books in the East during the 60s, 70s, and 80s was connected to differing neo-avant-garde, conceptual, performance-based and post-conceptual practices, announcing the opening not only towards innovative forms, but also towards innovative ways of presentation, circulation, distribution, and validation outside of the established art system. Practices of artists' books, magazines and so-called “pages as an alternative space” emerged as a form together with neo-avant-garde practices, in opposition to ideological instrumentalization of art as well as in opposition to a moderate bourgeois, apolitical and decorative modernism. Artists were attracted to printed matter thanks to its simplicity and functionality, its directness and effectiveness in the dissemination of their ideas.
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Interview with Lucy R. Lippard on Printed Matter
Julie Ault
December 2006

JA: Many art groups and organizations began with a couple friends, colleagues, or like-minded individuals deciding to start something up. I would love to know the origin story of Printed Matter: the who, what, when, where, how, and why of it, and what triggered its inception.
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They Look Good on Paper
Berin Golonu
2006

As young generations of artists continue to lend shape to a cultural landscape that is increasingly occupied by a metastasizing corporate America, zine-making remains a valid and authentic form of distribution for their work. The do-it-yourself ethos of the 70s and 80s—lwhich spawned all types of zines, from punk zines, to music zines, to skate zines, to queer zines, to fetish zines—gives artists and writers the freedom to engage in zine-making as an effective way of sharing their output with cherished networks of friends, colleagues and collaborators. With the help of the postal service, artists and writers overcome geographic breaches and disseminate their ideas, artworks and collaged graphics to expanding networks of attentive individuals and communities. It makes sense, therefore, that the zine format itself has become a platform upon which collaborations become manifest, and emanate an alluring magnetic force around which creative communities assemble.
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Twenty Years of Printed Matter
Clive Phillpot
from Printed Matter 1996 Catalog

It is possible that if Lucy Lippard and Sol LeWitt had not dreamed up the idea of Printed Matter, the landscape of cheap artist books would be very different today. When Art Metropole, Printed Matter, and Other Books and So were founded in the seventies, it seemed as if we were witnessing a real breakthrough in the production of cheap art in the book form and the exposure of books and magazines by artists...
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The Politics of Representation
Brian Wallis
from Printed Matter 1986/87 Catalog

Political literature is judged more on the basis of its function or effect than its accuracy or style. Political literature depends on pragmatism and expediency, so it focuses on the specific more than the general, it seeks timeliness rather than timelessness. Yet it is for just these reasons that today political literature is virtually extinct. Immediacy, distribution, and practical results are now served more effectively by television than by books and magazines, and political writing has disintegrated for the most part into passionless journalism and bland press release prose, the literary equivalent of "no comment."...
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Storm in a Teacup
Amy Hauft
from Printed Matter 1986/87 Catalog

I have been a first-hand witness to the legions of books to come through Printed Matter over the past three years, and it is from this vantage point that I approach my subject: the books that have come to us from Europe. While it seems perhaps a crass Americanism to lump these excessively disparate works together just because they are not made in America, I do believe they share certain affinities...
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Photo Books
Robert Nickas
from Printed Matter 1986/87 Catalog

Artists in the mid-to-late 1960s presented their work in the form of books with increasing frequency, either to document an event or an ephemeral work, or to make their art inexpensively available to a wider audience than it otherwise might find in a gallery. In both cases, much of this work was photographic, although the artists were not strictly photographers. Artists associated with the Conceptual movement, such as John Baldessari, Douglas Hueber, Sol LeWitt and Richard Long, all published books both as documentation of projects in other media and, more importantly, as independent works in themselves. They all continue to do so today...
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Neo-Natural : Scientific Issues In Artists' Books
Anne Kugler
from Printed Matter 1994 Catalog

One of the most notable features of American modernity is the development and implementation of a mass media machine, functioning in the service of the government. Much of the information which it imparts is based on statistics and scientific studies created by and for the aggressor state, whose sole directive is capital and whose "benefits" can be seen in dollars pre-appointed for its sponsors. Because there is an incompatibility between national scientific efforts and the public's needs and desires, the importance of forms of parallel culture to report on the latter is great...
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It's A Whole New World: Recent Trends in Artists' Publications
Cynthia Chris
from Printed Matter 1995 Catalog

Only a century ago, the communications systems we now take for granted were still in development: the telephone had not yet reached more than 1 in 50 American homes; the television was still a nascent idea that would not come into common use for several decades. Now, as we approach the end of the Twentieth Century, it's a whole new world, from the internet to new technologies just visible down the pike, such as virtual reality and high definition t.v. Now, an encyclopedia which once occupied multiple volumes and several feet of shelf space - not to mention weighing hundreds of pounds - can fit on a single CD-ROM (with not only text but also moving pictures and sound) that can be slipped into a pocket. These and any other technology that operates at a distance are now performing their tasks of storing or transmitting information at capacities and speeds which are nearly inconceivable - and changing more rapidly than most of us can keep up...
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Is the Personal Political?
Cynthia Chris
from Printed Matter 1986/87 Catalog

The representation of the collisions between individual lives and the world is one of the functions of politically engaged artwork. Such work functions at the intersection of the personal realm and the implicitly political surrounding world. In this spirit, each book in this series recognizes a political relation - a hierarchical distribution of power - and each speaks from the margins to the center of that power. Through the recognition and depiction of these relations, mechanisms of hegemony are made available for examination...
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Artists' Manifestos & Magazines
Germano Celant
from Printed Matter 1988 Catalog

The phrase "artists' books" has been criticized enough, but it is impossible to deny that among the possible alternatives it has the greatest currency. One objection to this designation has been that it defines books exclusively in relation to the profession of the visual artist. While this may annoy writers who experiment with the form of he book, alternatives like "writers'books"(?), or "musicians' books" can still be swept up into the all-embracing category of book art: art dependent upon the book form. In any case, it is clear that visual artists have contributed to most to the revitalization of the books as art over the last twenty -five years, and to the development of visual and verbi-visual languages articulated within the book form...
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Artists' Booklets
Clive Phillpot
from Printed Matter 1986/87 Catalog

At the beginning of the century, Europeans art saw the emergence of a series of communicative tools that came out of the tradition of painting and sculpture but were more closely aligned with the mass media. A proliferation of manifestos and magazines, books and postcards, posters, and alphabetical constructions invaded the territory of art, until then dominated by the silence of work in studios and exhibitions....
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"Almost Retarded": (Funny Books)
Lynda Barry
from Printed Matter 1986/87 Catalog

One of the things some of us imagined a lot about when we were in grade school (besides being able to turn invisible and play tricks on people) was what it would be like to change brains with someone for awhile. What would it be like to be in someone else's body, see what they saw, and think what they thought?...
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