Artist Book response

I found this reading very similar to that of a Judith Butler piece that I had read earlier this year in my Writing 205 class. Throughout the reading, I struggled to find a solid definition of what an artist book was, or what the point of this reading was, for that matter. My doubts, however, were addressed in the very last paragraph of the reading. The Judith Butler piece I read earlier this year spoke about the different aspects of gender and how gender was something that couldn’t and hasn’t been fully defined. In this piece about the history of artist books, author Johanna Drucker discusses the variety of different ways that the artist book has been interpreted throughout it’s brief history while mixing in her own personal opinion. The readings starts off by calling the artist book the “quintessential 20^th century art form”, which can only be stated as such because of how vague the term “artist book” really is. From what I’ve gathered, the term “artist book” is a placeholder for art that doesn’t have a home anywhere else. Saying that artist books have erupted in the 20^th century is misleading because artist books include so many various things—journals, any independent publication, experimental printing, actual books, or other advanced technical productions of different scale and physical complexity—so the term “quintessential” is a misrepresentation. However, at the very end of the article, Drucker herself explains that the attempts to define artist books have been “hopelessly flawed”; they’re either too vague or too specific (however Drucker failed to give examples of definitions that are too specific). Although I am still not entirely sure what an artist book represents, I agree with Drucker’s final, personal interpretation of the term:

Artist books take every possible form. There are no specific criteria for defining what it is; it distinguishes itself.