A place in the total library: artists' books between art and literature

This dissertation is an analysis of artists’ books not only as works of art, but also as works of literature. Artists’ books have long been at the center of a debate about both their nature and their future. One of the goals of this dissertation is to explore how throughout their history artists’ books have expressed the interactions between narrative, language, and materiality. ❧ This dissertation is an exploration of the evolving and hybrid nature of the book as a cultural object in its engagement with the concepts of memory, power, and multi- mediality in the iteration of artists’ books. This research offers a reading of, among others, Deborah Davidson’s Voce (1995), Carol Rosen’s The Holocaust Series. Book X, To Ashes (2000), and Tatana Kellner’s Fifty Years of Silence-Eva and Eugene Kellner (1992) to address the representation of memory and witnessing. Luigi Serafini’s visionary Codex Seraphinianus (1981) and Isgrò Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani e cancellata da Isgrò (1970) engage instead with the concepts of power and hegemony and are read against the works of Michel Foucault and Jorge Luis Borges. The Palaver (1999) by Gad Hollander and Andrew Bick is instead both an example of interactivity and multimediality showcasing an iteration of the artist book as an object that is defined by a hybrid nature. ❧ One of the aims of this dissertation is to shed light on how artists’ books engender a disruption of the “habits” of reading and engaging physically with the book form, and how this disruption calls for a set of new interpretative instruments.