The Political Nature of the Boundless Book
On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access
Janneke Adema & Gary Hall
Coventry University
Transmediale 2013
Paperbound - Cultural Imaginaries and Practices in the Epoch of Paper
The Waste Land App
Guy Laramee - Grand Larousse (2010)
The book can be re-enacted and
re-imagined:
 to critique capitalism’s commodification of
knowledge;
 to construct an alternative future for both
art and academia;
 and to open up a space for thinking about
politics.
Artists’ books
Edward Ruscha
Artists who do books (1976)
Circumventing Established
Institutions




Critique of commercial capitalist art system
Space for experimental/ephemeral works
Control all aspects of one’s work
The ‘page as an alternative space’
Printed Matter (1976)
The Xerox Book
Mimeograph
The Politics of the Democratic
Multiple
 Cheaper technology and distribution
mechanisms
 Reach a wider audience
 Break down barrier between high and low
culture
 Greater role to the reader or viewer
Ed Ruscha
Conceptual experimentation
 The dematerialisation of art
 The self-reflexive nature of the book
 Experiments with the book as material,
form, metaphor and concept
 Critique of authorship and the role of the
reader
Ulises Carrión
‘ The convention of the book is both its
constrained meanings (as literacy, the
law, text and so forth) and the space of
new work (the blank page, the void, the
empty place). ’
Johanna Drucker (1995)
David Stairs – Boundless (1983)
Raymond Queneau - Cent mille
milliards de poèmes
Processes of incorporation and
commercialisation
 Clash democratic ideals and avantgarde
content
 Incorporation or transformation into
established institutions
 Unable to avoid market-mechanism
 Artist books were not robust enough to
keep on reinventing themselves.
‘A position of resistance can never be
established once and for all, but must be
perpetually refashioned and renewed to
address adequately those shifting
conditions and circumstances that are its
ground.’
Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1989)
Open Access Books
open access…
making peer-reviewed
academic research available
for free online, without the
need to pay to publish or to
read it
OA research is also free to
print, reproduce and
distribute, and free of the
majority of restrictions
associated with publishers’
licensing and copyright
agreements
There are currently nearly 7,000 Open Access
journals – more than 25% of the 20,000 peerreviewed academic journals in existence. 20%
of peer-reviewed articles across all disciplines
are now freely available (DOAJ)
There has been a call for a boycott of both Taylor & Francis and
Routledge if their parent company, Informa plc, does not lower its
journal subscription charges and pay the UK Exchequer the £13
million lost as a result of its 2009 decision to become a company
domiciled in Zug, the Swiss canton with the lowest rate of taxation.
Informa can be placed alongside Amazon, Apple, Facebook, eBay,
Google and Starbucks on the roll call of companies that aggressively
avoid paying the UK standard rate of 26% corporation tax.
Over ‘half of Informa’s total annual operating profit [is] derived from
academic publishing: £85.8 million’ in 2010. Its journals alone
provide ‘gross profit margins of over 70 per cent’.
There are only two other industries offering these sorts of return:
‘illegal drugs and the delivery of university-level business
education.’
See Harvie et al,
‘What Are We To Do With Feral Publishers?’
Academic experiments might adopt
a role:
 in terms of questioning the concept and
material form of the book;
 promoting alternative ways of reading
and communicating via books;
 and interrogating modern, romantic
notions of authorship.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick – Planned Obsolescence
Living Books About Life
Karen Barad
‘ open access publishing, without
a concurrent interrogation of the
economic underpinnings of the
scholarly communication system, will
only reform the situation rather than
provide a radical alternative.’
Nicholas Knouf (2010)
Guerrilla Open Access