One thing that really stuck out to me and surprised me about the interview with each artist was how many of them used technology and other digital forms of media in their work. Whenever I think of an artists’ book I imagine them being entirely crafted by hand using scrapbook-like techniques, but this is likely because that has been my only experience with creating artist books thus far. However, quite a few of the artists that were interviewed said that they had shifted toward creating digitized forms of artwork as technology has advanced over time. Another thing that stood out to me was that one of the artists, Sarah, mentioned how she always visualized her books as one whole piece from the beginning to the end of her process. I appreciated that she mentioned this because I related to it, as this is something I do when creating my books as well.
Something that many of the artists touched upon in their interview was how the artists’ book can serve as a basis for contemporary art by having a place within it, while also including multiple genres, forms, and mediums within itself. The last man interviewed said that “artists’ books are like the palette of contemporary art along with other forms such as performance, prints, videos, etc.”. I thought that this quote was a great way to illustrate how different forms of art and different genres of art can, (and often do) work together to form the basis for a much more generalized understanding of the concept of ‘art’ as a whole. This was illustrated further throughout the rest of the interviews in which every artist mentioned their inclusion of different forms of media and other aspects of art, and how they each play a different, critical role in the creation of the final book.
I’m not sure what type of artists’ book I would like to create just yet or what I envision that it will look like in the end. However, I definitely would like to try and include a wider variety of different mediums in my book as this is something that I didn’t do in my last one.
