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from 1934 to 1971, including Richard Serra’s 1968 film, Hand Catch-ing
Lead.
The Dumb Ox artists’ books issue
Hugo’s fascination with conceptual art and its products continued
to develop. In 1977 The Dumb Ox, a quarterly art journal published
in Northridge, California, created a special issue on artists’ books.
Hugo’s piece, Artists’ Books: Primers of Visual Literacy, was the lead
essay. Hugo took her subtitle from a 1973 publication out of MIT,
Donis A. Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy. That book is a particu-larly
erudite textbook for graphic designers, one that examines the
basic principles of design in the context of visual art and communi-cation.
It is easy to see the appeal of Dondis’s approach given
Hugo’s own eclectic and wide-ranging investigations. Her essay,
which again traces a trajectory of historical circumstance leading to
the development of artists’ books in the 1960s, grounds itself in in-ternationalism,
considers the impact of photography in the nine-teenth
century, mentions the G.I. Bill (encouraging travel abroad)
and eventually gets around to a supposition that suggests the possi-ble
future standardization of iconography through the broad avail-ability
of image-systems. Hugo explicitly states her collection pol-icy
at Otis: “The library at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, has been
slowly building a collection of art publications, representing art-ists’
books, periodicals, etc., over a period of twenty years [the
amount of time Hugo had been librarian at Otis].” This is followed
by a sentence fragment whose abruptness and a rhythm out of
sync with the rest of her writing suggests a level of frustration
about the limits of her ability to truly collect these works: “Limited
only by our modest budget.”7
" Hugo ends the essay with an appeal for more effective distri-bution
of artists’ books. Her two-sentence bio contains an editing
mistake but the plea is sincere: “Joan Hugo has been the Librarian
9
Object Description
Description
| Title | Page 10 |
| Full Text of PDF | from 1934 to 1971, including Richard Serra’s 1968 film, Hand Catch-ing Lead. The Dumb Ox artists’ books issue Hugo’s fascination with conceptual art and its products continued to develop. In 1977 The Dumb Ox, a quarterly art journal published in Northridge, California, created a special issue on artists’ books. Hugo’s piece, Artists’ Books: Primers of Visual Literacy, was the lead essay. Hugo took her subtitle from a 1973 publication out of MIT, Donis A. Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy. That book is a particu-larly erudite textbook for graphic designers, one that examines the basic principles of design in the context of visual art and communi-cation. It is easy to see the appeal of Dondis’s approach given Hugo’s own eclectic and wide-ranging investigations. Her essay, which again traces a trajectory of historical circumstance leading to the development of artists’ books in the 1960s, grounds itself in in-ternationalism, considers the impact of photography in the nine-teenth century, mentions the G.I. Bill (encouraging travel abroad) and eventually gets around to a supposition that suggests the possi-ble future standardization of iconography through the broad avail-ability of image-systems. Hugo explicitly states her collection pol-icy at Otis: “The library at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, has been slowly building a collection of art publications, representing art-ists’ books, periodicals, etc., over a period of twenty years [the amount of time Hugo had been librarian at Otis].” This is followed by a sentence fragment whose abruptness and a rhythm out of sync with the rest of her writing suggests a level of frustration about the limits of her ability to truly collect these works: “Limited only by our modest budget.”7 " Hugo ends the essay with an appeal for more effective distri-bution of artists’ books. Her two-sentence bio contains an editing mistake but the plea is sincere: “Joan Hugo has been the Librarian 9 |
