Laure Prouvost | The Artist Book

Laure Prouvost
The Artist Book
London, UK: Booworks, 2013
296 pp., 23 x 15.5 cm., softcover
Edition of 1000

"What is it to make an artist book about oneself? To construct a biography in which the formal structures and chapter divisions develop a narrative, into which the self dissolves?

Laure Prouvost explores the processes of narrative, translation and reflection, and the substantial mis-communications, cultural slippages, inventive opportunities and transformations inherent to these processes. Each mis-translation allows a new episode or incident to form that can disorder and reassemble its origin. In this project she uses the material format and expectations of the artist book as a means to make new work. In translating video, painting and sound onto the printed pages Prouvost instills the object with emotion and a sensorial self-awareness, and invites the reader to share ‘the artist’s’ psychological experience. Annotations and drawings that make reference to the protocols of the book, ‘This page does not need you to exist, this page is so heavy to turn, this text like the sound of your voice when reading these words’ provoke a physical and affective relationship with the texts and images presented.

The Artist Book includes multi-voiced biographies by anonymous contributors, that combine illustrated fantasies, anecdotes and vignettes of the artist, alongside collages of the artist’s studio, personal communications and a film on paper. These and other sections demonstrate Prouvost’s peculiar and complex navigation of influence, humour, art history and methodologies that informs her idiosyncratic language. Insistent gesticulations and perceptual cues guide the reader’s attention and transmit information, as the subject, or narrator, merges with the book itself."

- publishers blurb

Available from the publisher, for £20.00, here. A special limited edition of 12 copies, plus three artists' proofs accompanied the edition. These signed copies were bound in cloth and housed in a slipcase, and sold for  £850.

Yesterday it was announced that Prouvost was awarded the 2013 Turner Prize, beating out favorites David Shrigley and Tino Sehgal.