Discovering Artists Books

Discovering Artists Books
The art, the artist and the issues

The role of women
         How women are related to the growth of book arts is not a topic I had planned for in my thesis statement. However as I began to question various artists on their views about the growth of the medium, it became apparent this was an issue I should address. It has certainly stimulated some very interesting conversations and insights. These may have raised more questions than answers, but out of them I believe there is strong evidence that one of the reasons book arts have grown in the last decades is because of the number of women that have begun to work in the medium.
         In my interviews most of these conversations were prefaced with "these are generalizations, and I know many wonderful men that work in the book medium, but..." And the "buts," usually brought on the phrase "most of the students in my classes are women" or "a majority of the entrants in such and such an exhibit are women."
         Judith Hoffberg, a widely respected curator and critic, has been involved with book arts since 1965. Her perspective is that 35 years ago women made up at least 90% of book artists, but beginning in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, more men became involved perhaps raising their numbers to the 20% range.

"I found many more men - in factI curated a men's diary show in Wisconsin to counteract a women's journal show. I found enough men throughout North American who had been doing journals, travel diaries and even printed editions."

         She suggests this number 80:20 ratio is still fairly accurate, but that it is "NOT" a women only medium and the greats names of Timothy Ely, Keith Smith, Scott McCarney, Tom Phillips, Dieter Roth, Jan Voss and I could go on and on, continues to expand the definition of books. Yet the next echelon is basically women."
         Some of the reasons raised as to the profusion of women involved in book arts, are based on generalization and stereotyping for which there are many exceptions, but also which do have some validity. The most frequently mentioned of these are that women are drawn to create book works because it is a narrative art form the likes of which had not previously existed. Women are comfortable with this form because socialization has made them more familiar with language and story telling.
         Another common reply was that women tend to create in a smaller more intimate size, more typical in book art, whereas males are drawn to larger and more forceful objects.
         In Is There a Feminine Aesthetic? Silvia Bovenschen³ suggests the feminine aesthetic is "answered in terms of a preoccupation with the detail or with pattern or decoration."⁴ In this article she quotes Lucy Lippard in a paragraph that supports the validity of there being a stereotypical women's aesthetic.

And yet, there can be no doubt that the realm of female experience is sociologically and biologically different from that of the male...This differentiation exists, and yet for every case that I can specify there are innumerable others that defy such specifications.⁽⁵⁾

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

The growth of artists books