{"id":810,"date":"2017-02-24T04:33:45","date_gmt":"2017-02-24T04:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=810"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:37:05","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:37:05","slug":"michael-hampton-unshelfmarked-reconceiving-the-artists-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2017\/02\/24\/michael-hampton-unshelfmarked-reconceiving-the-artists-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Hampton. Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists\u2019 book"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Hampton. Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists\u2019 book<\/a>. <\/em>Axminster, Devon: Uniformbooks, 2015. 174p., ill. ISBN 9781910010068. \u00a312.<\/p>\n

In Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists\u2019 book<\/em><\/a>, Michael Hampton\u2019s goal is to shift the grounds on which scholars seek to answer that perennially pesky question, \u201cWhat is an artist\u2019s book?\u201d In a gray-papered and un-illustrated 26-page (numbered A-Z) Expos\u00e9 <\/em>bound into the middle of Unshelfmarked<\/em>, Hampton files the artist\u2019s book in an \u201cecosystem\u201d that ranges from tramp art to pooh sticks via hopscotch, sewing bees, football fanzines and \u201crubbish of every kind\u201d (O).<\/p>\n

Hampton uses Germano Celant\u2019s Book as Artwork 1960\/1972<\/em><\/a> as his initial frame of reference. He has worked with this catalogue previously; in 2011 he published a manifesto, THEARTISTSBOOKANEWHISTORY, that also referenced Celant. Hampton\u2019s manifesto forms the basis of this current longer work. In both, Hampton takes fundamental exception to the notion that the first true artists\u2019 books were made by William Blake. Instead, he offers several examples of medieval manuscripts as truer harbingers. Leaving aside the obvious differences between Blake\u2019s completely self-generated work and that of the scribes who wrote other people\u2019s words in the psalters and Bibles they made beautiful, the idea that an enormous range of historical work feeds into the current notion of what constitutes artists\u2019 books is compelling, if not exactly new.<\/p>\n

Hampton contrasts his broader definition with that of the \u201cinformal guild\u201d (B) of authors who have written about artists\u2019 books. Hampton\u2019s list represents an accurate assessment of recent writing on the medium. It includes among others Lucy Lippard, Clive Phillpot, and Anne M\u0153glin-Delcroix. Not all of the writers on Hampton\u2019s list, however, embrace a unifying definition: Johanna Drucker, for instance, titled her 1995 book The Century of Artists\u2019 Books<\/em><\/a> as an intentional challenge to Riva Castelman\u2019s earlier catalogue of livres d\u2019artistes<\/em>, A Century of Artists\u2019 Books<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In 1978 Joan Hugo (who formed her ideas about the book\u2019s possibilities while working as a librarian at MOMA, the New York Public Library, and the Sorbonne before landing at a small art college in Los Angeles in 1957) curated the first of two of the most influential early exhibitions that envisioned what the artist\u2019s book could become. Hugo stated that before printing all books were made by artists, and later wrote, \u201c…one has only to recall the history of the book from painted stones and cylinder seals to Medieval jeweled covers and Russian Futurist books on wallpaper, to see how flexible these limits [of artists\u2019 books] actually are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hampton\u2019s 50 examples of artists\u2019 books fit within Hugo\u2019s parameters and would generally receive no argument from the authors in his \u201cguild.\u201d His canon includes Ed Ruscha, Dieter Roth, Marcel Broodthaers, Ronald King, and the Bechers. Also included are the Lindisfarne Gospels<\/em>, a Vesalius anatomy, an advertising volvelle from the 1940s, and a stack of Charles Babbage\u2019s punch cards. This broad inclusiveness underpins much contemporary understanding of the medium while helping to create barriers to a formal definition of the form and to an agreement about whether artists\u2019 books belong in the gallery or the library. Hampton might perhaps say neither.<\/p>\n

Kathleen Walkup
\nMills College<\/em><\/p>\n

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Michael Hampton. Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists\u2019 book. Axminster, Devon: Uniformbooks, 2015. 174p., ill. ISBN 9781910010068. \u00a312. In Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists\u2019 book, Michael Hampton\u2019s goal is to shift the grounds on which scholars seek to answer that perennially pesky question, \u201cWhat is an artist\u2019s book?\u201d In a gray-papered and un-illustrated 26-page (numbered A-Z) Expos\u00e9 bound […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1893,1902],"class_list":["post-810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-12th-14th-centuries","tag-artists-books"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2561,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions\/2561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}