The Political Nature of the Boundless Book On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access Janneke Adema & Gary Hall Coventry University Transmediale 2013 Paperbound - Cultural Imaginaries and Practices in the Epoch of Paper

The Waste Land App

Guy Laramee - Grand Larousse (2010)

The book can be re-enacted and re-imagined:  to critique capitalism’s commodification of knowledge;  to construct an alternative future for both art and academia;  and to open up a space for thinking about politics.

Artists’ books Edward Ruscha Artists who do books (1976)

Circumventing Established Institutions  Critique of commercial capitalist art system  Space for experimental/ephemeral works  Control all aspects of one’s work  The ‘page as an alternative space’

Printed Matter (1976)

The Xerox Book

Mimeograph

The Politics of the Democratic Multiple  Cheaper technology and distribution mechanisms  Reach a wider audience  Break down barrier between high and low culture  Greater role to the reader or viewer

Ed Ruscha

Conceptual experimentation  The dematerialisation of art  The self-reflexive nature of the book  Experiments with the book as material, form, metaphor and concept  Critique of authorship and the role of the reader

Ulises Carrión

‘ The convention of the book is both its constrained meanings (as literacy, the law, text and so forth) and the space of new work (the blank page, the void, the empty place). ’ Johanna Drucker (1995)

David Stairs – Boundless (1983)

Raymond Queneau - Cent mille milliards de poèmes

Processes of incorporation and commercialisation  Clash democratic ideals and avantgarde content  Incorporation or transformation into established institutions  Unable to avoid market-mechanism  Artist books were not robust enough to keep on reinventing themselves.

‘ A position of resistance can never be established once and for all, but must be perpetually refashioned and renewed to address adequately those shifting conditions and circumstances that are its ground.’ Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1989)

Open Access Books

open access… making peer-reviewed academic research available for free online, without the need to pay to publish or to read it OA research is also free to print, reproduce and distribute, and free of the majority of restrictions associated with publishers’ licensing and copyright agreements There are currently nearly 7,000 Open Access journals – more than 25% of the 20,000 peer- reviewed academic journals in existence. 20% of peer-reviewed articles across all disciplines are now freely available (DOAJ)

There has been a call for a boycott of both Taylor & Francis and Routledge if their parent company, Informa plc, does not lower its journal subscription charges and pay the UK Exchequer the £13 million lost as a result of its 2009 decision to become a company domiciled in Zug, the Swiss canton with the lowest rate of taxation. Informa can be placed alongside Amazon, Apple, Facebook, eBay, Google and Starbucks on the roll call of companies that aggressively avoid paying the UK standard rate of 26% corporation tax. Over ‘half of Informa’s total annual operating profit [is] derived from academic publishing: £85.8 million’ in Its journals alone provide ‘gross profit margins of over 70 per cent’. There are only two other industries offering these sorts of return: ‘illegal drugs and the delivery of university-level business education.’ See Harvie et al, ‘What Are We To Do With Feral Publishers?’

Academic experiments might adopt a role:  in terms of questioning the concept and material form of the book;  promoting alternative ways of reading and communicating via books;  and interrogating modern, romantic notions of authorship.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick – Planned Obsolescence

Living Books About Life

Karen Barad

‘ open access publishing, without a concurrent interrogation of the economic underpinnings of the scholarly communication system, will only reform the situation rather than provide a radical alternative.’ Nicholas Knouf (2010)

Guerrilla Open Access