The Book as Document
These artists' books look like archives or official records
What are Documentary Artists' Books?
In Chapter 11, artists' books are described as participating in this larger public conversation.
What is Political or Social discourse?
In these works, the reader becomes this active role rather than a passive observer
What is a Participant or Performer?
Cross the chapters, Drucker argues that authority in books comes from cultural expectations about this form.
What is the Codex?
Drucker repeatedly argues that in artists' books, this element carries meaning as strongly as content.
What is Form?
Artists often use grids, captions, dates, and inventories to imitate this institutional structure
What is the archive?
Books that resemble official reports but expose injustice demonstrate how format can create this effect...
What is Authority?
In performative books, the reader must physically do this to activate the work.
What is Manipulate or Interact with it?
Archives appear complete, but artists show they are shaped by this process of inclusion and exclusion.
What is Selection?
Page order and pacing function as this type of rhetorical device.
What is Sequence?
According to Drucker, documentation does not simply record reality but helps create ______
What is Meaning or Narrative?
Many politically engaged books mimic this mass-media format to critique consumer or propaganda systems
What is the Newspaper or Magazine format?
In performative books, meaning is created through action rather than only through this.
What is text?
This book by Brad Freeman features his personal experiences in a military hospital juxtaposed with images like war video games, Flash Gordon films, and wounded soldiers. It reveals a disparity between war in pop culture and in reality.
What is SimWar?
In Chapter 12, books are described not only as objects but as this kind of environment.
What is a Conceptual Space?
This book by Sol Lewitt "consists of page after page of small photographs of all of the items in Lewitt's possession at the time." It documents his personal identity and, in other ways, is completely impersonal.
What is Autobiography?
This book by artist Steven Willats focuses on the gay British punk scene and named after a club.
What is Cha Cha Cha?
Accordion folds and sculptural bindings transform the book into this kind of spatial experience.
What is an Installation or Exhibition Space?
Artists reveal that documentation is shaped by this process of choosing and arranging material.
What is Editing or Framing?
The idea that the book's physical structure shapes meaning?
What is Materiality?
Drucker suggests that even the size and price of a book reflect this political consideration.
What is Distribution / Audience / Accessibility?
This book published in 1986 was produced from a photographic exhibition highlighting "a cross section of working women in Australia."
What is Industrial Women?
When the act of reading becomes visible and self-aware, the book is described as this.
What is Self-Reflexive?
Across these chapters, Drucker shows that institutions use format to control ______
What is Knowledge?
What is Time?