Books have always been related to knowledge and the transmission of knowledge. The loss and destruction of books (the disappearance of the Library of Alexandria, the burning of books by the Nazis or as a plot point in Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, among others) has been identified with the end of a civilization or a dystopian future. Fetishism and freedom have always been close to books, from the instructions of the French resistance, which were transmitted hidden in books or the connoisseur fetishism of the disturbing character of Josep María Pou in the TV3 series Nit i Dia.
Since 1994, when graphic designer David Carson prophesied The End of Print, the debate on the disappearance of books has only reinforced their presence, their aura and freer ways of self-managing them. Publications are once again a space for the recovery of control for younger artists, just as it was in the 60s and 70s, in parallel with the emphasis placed on ideas, on the process and on the dematerialisation of the artistic object. Like Ed Ruscha, Muntadas, Matta-Clark or Baldessari, to name just a few, publication is for artists of these early 21st century one more means of artistic expression that allows them to express heterodox research methodologies, work processes that follow their own logic, apparently disordered in a trial-error process in which the artist is creator, editor, curator and manager at the same time.
Publications made by artists and various editions, which include inserts in books or magazines, posters, stickers, vinyls and a thousand defined and yet to be defined formats, thus acquire the category of work and can function as printed exhibitions that move through distribution channels that are not only institutional or commercial. We are talking about self-publishing and independent publishers, about book lovers who create their own publishing line, like the designer Alex Gifreu with Cru, for whom, rather than an artist’s book, we must talk about publications conceived as a piece, in the sense that the work does not exist in any other physical format than a publication. There are specialized bookstores like Múltiplos, with Anna Pahissa, a structure for the distribution and dissemination of artist publications that, as she herself has defined on occasion, “works with a material – publications and people – that has a great potential to generate other things and that goes far beyond the object and its commercial circulation.”
It is no coincidence that now that large corporations are literally eating up the world, there is a proliferation of initiatives for self-management and empowerment, for regaining control and giving value to idiosyncrasy from the publication format, as broad and versatile as each one wants it to be.
[Article published in Bonart, 2017]
