Wonderful website with animated documentation of artists’ books in Reed College’s Special Collections

“The spectrum of modern and contemporary Artists’ Books in Reed College’s Special Collections and collected on this website include traditional letterpress printed books of poetry, conceptual book works, sculptural and visual works, concrete poetry, and magazine works. This unique collection, which holds significant 20th century and contemporary artists’ books, gives students and the broader population insight into the significant role artist’s books have played among the avant-garde of Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and the United States, from the turn of the last century to the present.”

The works are divided into four categories: 1) livres d’artiste; 2) avant-garde; 3) conceptualist; 4) contemporary.

newest hangout…

Super-cheesy po-mo title aside, they have assembled a great group of people. Hope to make it there myself.

This paper originally appeared in March/April 1999 edition of the The American Poetry Review

“Combining his quest for total objectivity with passionate bibliophilia, Walter Benjamin once dreamed of authoring an essay that would consist entirely of quotations from his sources. I’m not sure what my motivations were, but last year I wrote a poem largely composed of direct quotes from a 1979 guide to artists’ videos. For the texts of other recent poems I’ve lifted from such sources as the table of contents of a 1950s literary journal, a review of an obscure 1960s film, an article on the Swiss pop music scene, and the intermittently legible legend on an old Mexican retablo. In some cases I simply transcribed the passage I wanted, while in others I also had to translate it. What amazes me about these acts of literary larceny is how satisfying I find the process. Even though the words are not mine, I derive from them the same kind of pleasure and pride I get from lines I have written in a more conventional manner. Why, I wonder, should it be creatively satisfying to simply transpose lines someone else has written into a text I intend to sign with my own name?

It is to answer that question that I decided to delve a little into the history of what could be called “appropriative literature.” I wasn’t interested so much in the 20th-century tradition of collage poetry—exemplified by “The Wasteland” and The Cantos—as in a more extreme approach in which, rather than weave obvious quotations into his or her words, the writer becomes a kind of scribe, transferring small or large passages, usually without attribution or other signals that these words were written by someone else.” Read more…

Podcast of “Flarf vs. Conceptual,” a reading organized by Kenneth Goldsmith at the Whitney Museum of American Art in conjunction with the recent Jenny Holzer exhibition “PROTECT PROTECT”

Especially memorable is the reading by Christian Bök