Turning over the pages : some books in contemporary art

Pavel Buchler

Turning over the pages : some books in contemporary art

Cambridge, UK : Kettle's Yard Gallery, 1986

[52] pp., 21 x 15 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 750

Published to accompany an exhibition held at Kettle's Yard Gallery, from the first of November to the seventh of December, 1986, this survey of artists’ books, including Christian Boltanski, Ulises Carrión, Hanne Darboven, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Richard Hamilton, On Kawara, Anselm Kiefer, J. H. Kocman, John Latham, Annette Messager, A. R. Penck, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Barbara Schmidt-Heins, Gabriele Schmidt-Heins, Dieter Roth, and Lawrence Weiner.

Organized by artist Pavel Büchler, who contributes a brief essay that traces the modern conception of the book to the Renaissance and examines various definitions and categorizations it has undergone since the 1960's. Büchler also provides the catalogues design and layout. 

"The exhibition has been selected in an intuitive and idiosyncratic manner from work which I have known for some time. It is not a survey or comprehensive overview of the ways various artists have been using books; this is an attempt to open to others the opportunity of encountering these works as I have done, as individual pieces and not as illustrative examples of a genre. Indeed, I hold too deep a mistrust for the programmic cross-referencing and categorising, which has become the standard formula for organising thematic exhibitions, to feel too urgent a need for yet another didactic tour through the labyrinth of movements, tendencies and styles. So, as there is no seamless and coherent curatorial statement, or even an explicit critical viewpoint, illustrated by the selection, the questions about stylistic relationships, mutual influences or connections among the artists represented will remain unanswered. This is not to say that I find such questions entirely irrelevant, but rather that there are other concerns contained in the works themselves, and I would like to encourage the viewer to make his own cross references, to find his own readings and to formulate his own questions. After all, it is still demanded of a work of art that it should be ‘individual’, i.e. different from other existing works of art, so it should be alright for somebody just to bring together different books .. . and leave it at that.

Any exhibition of books faces one enormous obstacle: books are not at home in a gallery. They have their place on a bookshelf, among other books, among everyday objects (‘artists’ books’ are no exception). They function in a direct and private interaction with the reader and they only come alive when they are used, touched, handled, manipulated. In an exhibition, this is not always possible. What is possible in a gallery however, is to try to create an ‘environment’ in which the books can stand alongside other works of art, that is, an environment of their generation, rather than of their ‘consumption’. And this is the intent of the exhibition: not to present a didactic argument, but simply to show SOME BOOKS IN CONTEMPORARY ART”

- Pavel Buchler, Preface