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avant-garde, including one of Butler holding one of her eyelids
open with a large screwdriver. The eccentrically-shaped pages of
the book are held together with a metal ring; they are laminated in
stiff plastic and trimmed on all sides with pinking shears; the
edges pierce the hands when the reader tries to hold and turn
them. The images and text are not separable, and the form is en-tirely
linked to the content.
" Jeff Kelley’s Artforum review of California Bookworks (summer,
1984) took on Butler’s idea of craft literacy:
In the information age, “craft literacy” is a hollow art-political slogan
that recalls the privileged medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, not the
rough-hewn street vernacular of, say the Russian Constructivists. Be-sides,
a craft esthetic too easily settles into fetish: for this show, little
white gloves were provided for book-handling. It felt like a petting zoo.25
" So much for Nodal’s free access. While Kelley does praise
some of the works, including several by Los Angeles and environs
artists and publishers (Rachel Rosenthal; Harry Reese and Kirk
Robertson; Harvey Mudd and Ken Price; and the Santa Barbara-based
mail art periodical Eye, a particular standout for Kelley), his
final statement about the genre is both dispiriting and prescient:
At this rate the artist’s book of the future will end up under glass in large
halls, where even petting will be forbidden. Will the stare of the curious
then constitute a new kind of reading?26
Enter the Woman’s Building
One Los Angeles institution that was directly fostering new kinds
of reading, not so much of form as of voice, was the Woman’s
Building. Founded in Los Angeles in 1973 by the artist Judy Chi-cago,
the graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and the art
historian Arlene Raven, the Woman’s Building and two of its nu-merous
offshoot programs, Feminist Studio Workshop and
Women’s Graphic Center, quickly became hubs for artists’ book-
15
Object Description
Description
| Title | Page 16 |
| Full Text of PDF | avant-garde, including one of Butler holding one of her eyelids open with a large screwdriver. The eccentrically-shaped pages of the book are held together with a metal ring; they are laminated in stiff plastic and trimmed on all sides with pinking shears; the edges pierce the hands when the reader tries to hold and turn them. The images and text are not separable, and the form is en-tirely linked to the content. " Jeff Kelley’s Artforum review of California Bookworks (summer, 1984) took on Butler’s idea of craft literacy: In the information age, “craft literacy” is a hollow art-political slogan that recalls the privileged medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, not the rough-hewn street vernacular of, say the Russian Constructivists. Be-sides, a craft esthetic too easily settles into fetish: for this show, little white gloves were provided for book-handling. It felt like a petting zoo.25 " So much for Nodal’s free access. While Kelley does praise some of the works, including several by Los Angeles and environs artists and publishers (Rachel Rosenthal; Harry Reese and Kirk Robertson; Harvey Mudd and Ken Price; and the Santa Barbara-based mail art periodical Eye, a particular standout for Kelley), his final statement about the genre is both dispiriting and prescient: At this rate the artist’s book of the future will end up under glass in large halls, where even petting will be forbidden. Will the stare of the curious then constitute a new kind of reading?26 Enter the Woman’s Building One Los Angeles institution that was directly fostering new kinds of reading, not so much of form as of voice, was the Woman’s Building. Founded in Los Angeles in 1973 by the artist Judy Chi-cago, the graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and the art historian Arlene Raven, the Woman’s Building and two of its nu-merous offshoot programs, Feminist Studio Workshop and Women’s Graphic Center, quickly became hubs for artists’ book- 15 |
