Getting a shelf life.

In some respects this is a flush time for the artist book world. Despite continuing shortages of artist book distributors, bookstores and outlets for serious criticism, there are more titles in print than ever before and more colleges and universities offering courses and degrees in the production, history and criticism of the form. Two major museum exhibitions devoted to the genre are now touring the country. "Die Bucher der Kunstler: Artists' Books from 1920-1990," an historical survey (weighted toward work produced since the 1950s) of artists' books published in Germany, has been traveling extensively in Europe since 1994 and has begun the North American portion of its itinerary. "Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists' Books," a traveling exhibition curated by Cornelia Lauf and Clive Phillpot for the American Federation of the Arts (AFA), opened in February 1998 and focuses on an international array of publications issued since 1980.

"Die Bucher der Kunstler," curated by Michael Glasmeier for the Institut for Auslandsbeziehungen, is the larger exhibit, both in terms of artists (more than 150), titles (651) and in the scope of its treatment of the subject. Glasmeier describes his project as "an exhibition in ten chapters," and indeed, the installation is visually correlated to the chapter structure of its catalog, with 10 clusters of densely packed display cases: five thematic groupings - Fluxus and Happenings; Researchers and Collectors; Authors and Theorists; Painters and Drawers; and Documentors and Xerox artists - and five from the most influential publishing houses of artists' books in Germany - Edition Hansjorg Mayer, Edition Hundertmark, Rainer Verlag, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig and Wiens Verlag.

All of the most important German book artists appear in the exhibition. The extraordinarily prolific Dieter Roth is represented by all 25 volumes of his Gesammelte Werke (1971-85), along with more than 50 of his other publications. There are 19 books by Martin Kippenberger, 11 by Jan Voss, nine by Hans-Peter Feldmann and eight by Hanne Darboven, among others. Since the exhibit is concerned with artists' publication activity in Germany rather than citizenship, there is an ample selection of works by artists from elsewhere, including such luminaries as Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and many of the Fluxus artists. A Humument (1982), by English artist Tom Phillips, perhaps the best-selling artist book of all time, is included because London-based Thames & Hudson issued the book with the permission of Phillips's German publisher, Edition Hansjorg Mayer.

The catalog, with a cover by Voss, includes Glasmeier's eloquent topical essay "The Impossible Library." Glasmeier casts the genre in the shadow of Gustave Flaubert's desire for "a book about nothing, a book with no external connection that is carried by the internal force of its own style, just like the world is held aloft without supports . . ." The curator offers an unadorned description of the artist book as "the result of what artists do with, about, on, for, or against books," acknowledging the tautological aspect of this characterization while insisting upon its open-endedness. The range of publications in "Die Bucher der Kunstler" extends from high-budget offset editions to works such as Voss's Doc-u-ment (1993), a bound, collated book comprised of 25 lids from various forms of cartons and boxes (including laundry detergent, pizza and women's shoes).

Although the catalog dutifully reproduces every item in the exhibit, without any multiple page spreads readers do not get any sense of the narrative or sequence among the multitudes of volumes nor do viewers of the exhibition as the books are shown in display cases. Fortunately some 300 items included in the exhibition are available for browsing in an accompanying reading room, an extraordinary feature of "Die Bucher der Kunstler." At the Krannert the readers' copies were supplemented by dozens of books donated to the museum by American artists' book publishers and distribution agencies participating in a museum-sponsored artists' book fair in November.

"Artist/Author," on the other hand, devotes a great deal of catalog space to an expansive definition of the form while exhibiting a mere 130 objects and slide projections of book-related installations, including 22 historical books presented under the heading: "Pre-1980 artists' books from the Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, New York."

The exhibit itself and the accompanying catalog are handsome enough. Richard Merkle's A-frame traveling exhibition furniture allows for easy access to all the books on display except the Franklin Furnace Collection. The catalog, designed by artist Renee Green, possesses many fine graphic details including, at intervals, Green's own image/text work. In the acknowledgments, AFA Director Serena Rattazzi notes that "Artist/Author" is the organization's first exhibit concerned with "books as an art form" and describes both the furnishings and publication as "curatorial devices [that] follow from the central concept put forward by the guest curators that a book conceived by an artist is not only an artwork, but one of equal significance to works executed in more conventional mediums." It is how this egalitarian ideal figures in the selection of works that results in a strangely skewed view of the field.

Lauf, an independent curator, editor at Imschoot, uitgevers in Ghent, Belgium and the wife of influential Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth; and Phillpot, former director of the library at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, are both clearly art world insiders and the different, but equally self-righteous tone of their essays is a function of that status. Lauf begins, "If you are reading this essay, you most probably have an artist's book on your bookshelf. You certainly have one in your hands." She inveighs against a "narrow field of artists' books," since doing so would "limit the field and . . . circumscribe the wide range of approaches that artists actually take toward books." Lauf concludes that "where [artists' books] are shelved determines what they say." Phillpot offers up an exhaustive categorization of the form, beginning with his distinction between artists' books, "meaning books and booklets authored by artists," and bookworks, "meaning artworks in book form." Such taxonomic preoccupations - what is and is not an artist's book - are of great use in constructing histories of the genre, but they are also a form of art world politicking in which classification and definition are employed to dictate the ideological and practical terms of membership in the field. Witness the scolding Phillpot offers to those artists he sees as "overlooking the incredible potential of the codex form. The results are highly conspicuous. Exhibitions are cluttered with weird, dysfunctional book constructions, pages splay in all directions; and gaudy, mute bookobjects that only serve to fetishize bookishness preen themselves under glass. To the ill-informed these are bookworks."

The flip side of Lauf and Phillpot's shared disdain for the book object, however, is an almost obsessive concern with identifying the artist bookishness in more than 25 exhibition catalogs, anthologies of critical writings, experimental fictions and, most surprisingly, retail product catalogs, including a Romeo Gigli fashion catalog and a Donna Karan Company promotional piece entitled DKNY/NYC: Donna Karan and Friends Celebrate New York City. Not that many of the items are not visually and critically engaging, but there was an overriding interest in crossover publications to the exclusion of more seminal "artists' books." More to the point is how Lauf and Phillpot's selection of hybrid volumes reiterates their shared preference for high-budget printing and binding methods. There are few inexpensively produced works among the publications chosen for "Artist/Author." "Die Bucher der Kunstler," conversely, contains a substantial number of the book objects, such as one-of-a-kind books, that Phillpot condemns.

There are three other essays in the "Artist/Author" catalog - by Glenn O'Brien, Jane Rolo and Brian Wallis - plus Thomas Padon's interview with Franklin Furnace founder Martha Wilson. Among them, Wallis's discussion of the relationship between artists' books and postmodernism stands out, particularly for its fine analysis of the critical significance of LeWitt's 1980 photo bookwork Autobiography. The interview is notable, too, if only for Wilson's remarkably good-natured defense of the substantial 1992 sale, arranged by her with Phillpot, of the Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection to MoMA.

One of the ironies of the contemporary art world is the perception, from its margins, that the creative/critical/curatorial/collecting "center" has as its central concern a debate over the idea of art and its limitations. Whatever truth there may actually be to this perception, it should also be understood that the center also has a vested interest in remaining where it is, while making centrality a circuitously contested field where various manifestations of the artwork are judged in terms of affiliation as well as technique. That these two exhibits confirm the expanded field of artists' book activity is clear enough. That they reveal the ideological stakes at work in controlling the definition of the form should also be apparent.

Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists' Books Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois November 6, 1998-January 3, 1999

Lowe Art Museum Coral Gables, Florida February 18-April 4, 1999

Western Gallery Western Washington University Bellingham, Washington April 23-June 27, 1999

University Art Gallery University of Massachusetts Amherst, Massachusetts October 29-December 18, 1999

Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists' Books by Cornelia Lauf and Clive Phillpot New York: D.A.P. and American Federation of the Arts, 1998 183 pp./$45.00 (sb)

Die Bucher der Kunstler: Artists' Books from 1920-1990 Krannert Art Museum University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois November 14, 1998-January 10, 1999

I-Space Gallery University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois January 29-February 27, 1999

Nexus Contemporary Arts Center Atlanta, Georgia March 12-April 24, 1999

Die Bucher der Kunstler: Artists' Books from 1920-1990 by Michael Glasmeier Stuttgart: Edition Hansjorg Mayer and Institute of Foreign Relations, 1994 271 pp./$16.50 (sb)

BUZZ SPECTOR is a professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His work with the book as subject and object has been exhibited internationally.