The artist’s book as a space for discourse

Abstract

This article, the result of a Ph.D. thesis that proposed an artist’s book as an object of study., investigates the artist, or designer, in the position of author and examines their power in the creation of rules for discourse. The thesis, authored by Cristiane Alcântara, under the supervision of Monica Tavares, was defended in the Postgraduate Program in Visual Arts at the University of São Paulo and was entitled “The author between the subject: modes of subjectivation in the making of the artist’s book”. Based on the text “O livro como forma de arte” (“The Book as a Form of Art”), by Julio Plaza, this article considers that artists’ books are objects of language and matrices of sensitivity, comprising a sequence of spaces in which a process of “doing-building-processing-transforming-creating” is carried out. This article demonstrates how Cristiane Alcântara’s production of O livro por vir (The Book to Come) is the result of practices and reflections made through a series of similar regularized procedures, typical of a single know-how. It will show how this artist Alcântara’s book stands as a space of authorial positioning and discursiveness and is a place from which separate modes of subjectivation are produced. Finally, it will demonstrate how this artist’s book is established as a support that simultaneously stems from the traditional means of creation and the new digital technologies, involving a relationship between art and design.