by Jon Lackman | 17 August 2010 | Books, Contemporary, Journals
Caa.reviews has started reviewing artists’ books recently. (If this started earlier, I must have missed it.) Clifton Meador (who in February reviewed a book about artists’ books) writes on The Square by Emily McVarish:
Emily McVarish is one of a handful of artists whose primary artistic output takes the form of books, books that she writes, designs, and prints—artists’ books. The publication of The Square offers the opportunity to experience a new work by this artist, a product of her long-running and deep engagement with the book as an artistic vehicle. The Square is typographically sophisticated and superbly well-produced, but its objective is not a celebration of craft, nor is it intended to be a luxury product for high-end consumption. It is an original, inventive, and transformative work of art that offers a nuanced performance of texts, an exploration of ideas about public space, rhythm, and the everyday, explored through McVarish’s poetic use of language and the typographic manipulation possible within a book.
Jennifer Tobias reviews a book by William E. Jones titled Selections from “The Anatomy of Melancholy” by Robert Burton, “an intelligent, well-executed triple appropriation synthesized into a multi-layered, transhistorical meditation on 1970s-era leather culture.” The book reflects “a dominant theme in the artist’s considerable body of work: interrogating the socially constructed nature of homosexuality through appropriation of its representations in historical and contemporary media.”
NYU’s Lucy Oakley is the current editor of caa.reviews. Tony White, of Indiana University, is the field editor for caa.reviews specializing in “Artists’ Books and Books for Artists.”
