The art of books

As the market for e-readers continues to expand with the arrival of the Amazon Kindle Fire, the demand for printed matter nevertheless keeps growing in the niche area of artists’ books.

The London Art Book Fair

The last weekend of September, for example, saw London buzzing to the power of the written and spoken word, with series of events devoted to art and books. Headlining was The London Art Book Fair, at the Whitechapel Gallery, a gathering of hundreds of publishing houses selling art books, magazines, artists’ books and more. Big names like Phaidon and Taschen exhibited stalls alongside smaller, more independent publishers like ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative and Book Works, showcasing the diversity of books being produced both about and by artists.
 

Representing the more alternative currents in the art book scene was artist-run Published and Be Damned, an ‘ongoing project for discussing and promoting alternative publishing directions outside the mainstream’ which has run an artists-book fair in past years. Unable to secure adequate funding for a fair, this year they ran a pop up stall at the Whitechapel, to launch their new magazine and The London Bookshop Map.

Talks and events

As well as browsing amongst the many stalls, visitors could sample from an extensive series of talks and lectures addressing the fruitful intersection of art and writing. One talk featured Kenny Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin, leading conceptual poets and the brains behind UBUweb (which hosts a huge online collection of poetry, videos and sound), who launched their book ‘Against Expression’ with an entertaining talk and poetry reading. Meanwhile artist Jon Thomson held a panel discussion dedicated to the ‘Artist as Writer’, a topic increasingly relevant as art-making becomes ever more academicised, with many artists educated to Masters and PhD levels.

The Artists Book Weekend
 

For those who found the Whitechapel a little too mainstream, there was also, as always with cultural events in the UK, a kind of ‘fringe’ programme in the shape of the Artists Book Weekend- a grouping of independent publishers, artists-run spaces and projects who describe themselves as ‘in response to’ (although not, apparently, opposed to) the main book fair. It included events at bookshops like X Marks the Bokship, a ‘project space for independent publishers’ in Hackney, which sells a wide selection of artists books while hosting regular talks, screenings and poetry / book readings.

Small-run magazines, often edited and published by artists, are also thriving, as evidenced by magazine launches at fellow Hackney galleries IMT and Banner Repeater over the weekend. Complementing their exhibition programmes, these spaces stock publications that are hard to find elsewhere: artists’ books and magazines which illustrate artists’ engagement with the qualities of printed material as a unique medium in itself.
 

Unlike the market which Amazon and Apple are competing to dominate, the motive driving all this activity is clearly not profit, as the niche content rarely appeals to a mass audience. But despite this, and the constant improvements in digital book-reading technology threatening the survival of the book in printed form, it seems the enduring appeal of a ‘real’ book to artists and readers alike is in no danger of waning just yet.