"The publication of archival facsimiles as mass-media art books raises issues of privacy and audience, in terms not just of making private sketches and notes public but also of wide access to materials that would otherwise remain behind closed doors, available only to researchers and institutions. When a sketchbook is more preparatory and less private, access to it is still often limited to visiting an exhibition or an archive, a very different experience from reading a facsimile. Even archives that offer online access still remain somewhat exclusive, resources only for those in the know, or even only those with institutional affiliations. In a 2008 interview, Whitney admitted to not formally exhibiting his sketchbooks: “I have a sketchbook that I draw in all the time. But I don’t really show them.”3 In 2017, though, to accompany an exhibition of his drawings at Lisson Gallery, New York, Whitney published a facsimile sketchbook, a slim, 120-page paperback.4 According to the gallery, a priority of this publication was affordability: it was priced at $30 so that students could buy it. Making the unique available and affordable, this sketchbook circumvents issues of access, functioning instead in the spirit and ethos of artists’ books as a democratic multiple for the masses."
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"Lee Lozano was an artist well-known for playing with notions of public and private. Published as a facsimile by Primary Information in 2010, her “Laboratory Notebooks” span 1967–70. Early on in the book, Lozano writes, “I have started to document everything because I cannot give up my love of ideas.”15 To read through its pages is to engage with both work in progress, diary entries, and finished works. According to James Hoff, a cofounder of Primary Information, while Lozano was still living she and her assistant unbound this notebook (as Haring did his), xeroxed its pages for her records, and then began selling them off individually. She treated these pages, then, as finished works, and this was certainly the case in her series of “language pieces,” which she made directly in her notebooks before removing them for sale. Yet each book is labeled “private” on the cover."
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