Information, Medium & Society Poster Session
Time After Time (2016-17): Using Artists' Books/Scrolls as Methods to Document and Disseminate Social and Political Narratives View Digital Media
Poster Session Rachael Brown
Time after Time is a series of three hand-crafted artist’s books/scrolls, each measuring 42cm x 182cm; they set out to investigate ways in which visual autoethnography and social justice approaches to art can capture social narratives, and engage and activate audiences. The books/scrolls illustrate selected elements of the extraordinary social, political and environmental global events that occurred between 2016 and 2021, events that are bookended by the presidential elections in the United States of America. The books also include more personal narratives and corresponding macro, micro, and nano discoveries that situate our human concerns with a broader context of existence and offer a sense of scale, perspective and connection. As visual autoethnography, the artworks present subjective perspectives whilst simultaneously inviting audiences to reflect on collective experiences and add their own memories to the narratives; as social justice, the artworks encourage reflection and offer a space to think about the past, present and future in a manner that offers hope and encourages action. The artworks follow in the tradition of documentary scrolls and offer an alternative method of collecting and disseminating social and political stories. The first of the three books, 2016-17, is complete, with two more – 2018-19 and 2020-21 - underway. The books will be displayed in concertina format but will also be reproduced as scrolls (larger and smaller than the original), to allow the audience to interact in more or less intimate manner.
Contemporary Artists’ Books: A Cultural Strategy for Art’s Re-Materialisation and Value Translation View Digital Media
Poster Session Hyunjoo Cho
A dominant expectation that consumable artworks should be permanent objects and alienable from their artists puts dematerialised practices at a disadvantage in claiming their socio-economic values. Addressing this tension, my research analyses the role of contemporary artist publishing as an alternative cultural strategy for representing dematerialised art practices via circulatable and valorised forms of books. Through interviews with artists, publishers, retailers, and collectors around the globe who take part in the valuation ecology of artists’ books, this research charts today’s topography of the medium’s production, distribution, and consumption. In parallel to the qualitative analysis, a practice-based experiment of self-publishing verifies the findings from the interviews and solidifies the idea of artist publishing as a cultural strategy. The preliminary findings of this research are: 1) Artists’ books are a medium that could be chosen by any artist as a cultural strategy, transcending medium specificities; 2) Artists’ books, especially those that are self-published, allow self-representation and self-institutionalisation of artists by giving them aggressive credit in both stages of production and circulation; 3) Artists’ books question the traditional hierarchy of curatorial practices, which often considers publication as subsidiary to the primary mode of exhibition; 4) Artists’ books, as ‘artefacts’ of social and communal practices, propose a particular form of artistic output that evidences the immaterial process and production. These findings point to an impactful direction of shift in the paradigm of art consumption, which translates the values of art practices into constructed socio-economic agents–artist publications–to replace the traditional sense of commodifying art.
