A Glance at Artists' Books from the Liliana Dematteis Collection at Watson Library

This post was initially meant to accompany an exhibition, curated by Melania Gazzotti, of artists' books from Watson Library at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York City. Though the exhibition is postponed, I hope this post will be informative in highlighting a few of the works that had been selected for display.

In addition to gifts from the Friends of the Thomas J. Watson Library, most of the materials selected for this exhibition come from the gift of artists' books that the Torinese collector and curator, Liliana Dematteis, donated to Watson Library. The Dematteis gift consists of books, mainly from Italian artists, published from the 1960s through the mid-2000s, and represents various twentieth-century art movements, including Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, and Visual Poetry. The artists I will focus on in this post include Alighiero Boetti, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Bruno Munari, Mirella Bentivoglio, La Monte Young, Joseph Byrd, and Yōko Ono.

In 1977, Alighiero Boetti and his wife, Anne-Marie Sauzeau Boetti, self-published Classifying the Thousand Longest Rivers in the World. This book was the product of seven years spent researching and tabulating data, resulting in the ranking of the thousand longest rivers on Earth, from the longest (the Nile at 6,671km) to the shortest (the Agusan in the Philippines at 384km).

In the book's poetic preface, Anne-Marie Sauzeau Boetti discusses the problems inherent in attempting to accurately measure and classify something that by its very nature is elusive—flowing water. She refers to the book's classification system, and indeed to all other classification methods, as provisional and illusory. In so doing, she voluntarily exposes the very legitimacy of this publication.

In 1969, from January 5–31st, an exhibition was held in a temporary space at 44 East Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan. Organized by curator and art dealer Seth Siegelaub, the exhibition space consisted of two rooms. While one room displayed works of art, the other room was empty except for a phone, a desk, and the following publication: January 5-31, 1969: Barry, Huebler, Kosuth, Weiner. Hence, rather than serving as a traditional exhibition catalogue, this publication was in fact one of the exhibition's physical objects. The artists participating in this exhibition—also called the January Show—were Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner. January 5–31, 1969 includes images of their works as well as brief statements by the artists on their craft.

The January Show included several installations of sound and carrier waves by Robert Barry. One such installation—88mc Carrier Wave (FM) (1968)—consisted of radio waves generated by a radio transmitter installed in the gallery at 44 East Fifty-Second Street but hidden from view. The photograph above, seemingly of an empty space, shows the place where one could experience the different sounds and tones of the radio waves.

Among the artists' statements published in January 5–31, 1969, I found the one by Douglas Huebler to be the most evocative (see above image).

One of my favorite books that was to have been displayed in the exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute is Bruno Munari's Supplemento al Dizionario Italiano (1958). Intended as a supplement to Italian-language dictionaries for tourists, the Supplemento is a dictionary of gestures and signs used by Italians to express things, actions, and sentiments. The book includes a photograph for each gesture and an explanation of its meaning in Italian, English, French, and German. The photograph below shows the gesture used to ask someone "what do you expect?"

Another gesture from the Supplemento, which can be seen in this post's first image, is one used to request an order of Punt e Mes, a famous bitter vermouth by the distillery Carpano. (Carpano is also the publisher of the Supplemento.) Punt e Mes translates to "point and a half" and refers to the vermouth's ratio of one point of sweetness and half a point of bitterness. Hence, the gesture consists of a raised thumb to signal "one" and a hand slicing the air horizontally to indicate "half."

Munari's famous An Unreadable Book (1953)—its formal title is An Unreadable Quadrat-Print—was also selected for this exhibition. This artist's book is composed of red and white cardboard pages die cut in different ways and is completely devoid of the conventional elements that define a book. There is no title page showing the author's and publisher's name, no copyright page, and no text. The idea behind An Unreadable Book is to present the book as an object of tactile and visual expression, where the paper itself communicates a story through its weight, texture, and shape.

In 1973, the sculptor and performance artist Mirella Bentivoglio published Punto Ambiguo. This artist's book consists of two folded card stock sheets, one pasted into the other, which allows the book to stand on its own in a square shape when tipped upright and for the following text to be visible: "being on the point of." Bentivoglio allows the book to be transformed into an object and in so doing highlights the relationship between words and the printed page. For further research, Watson Library has several books on Bentivoglio, including the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., in 1999.

Another artist's book I would like to highlight is An Anthology of Chance Operations …(1970). Edited by the minimalist composer La Monte Young, An Anthology contains submissions from over a dozen artists, including John Cage, Henry Flynt, Yōko Ono, Robert Morris, Nam June Paik, Dieter Roth, and others. Many of these artists were members of the Fluxus movement, which originated in the early 1960s and espoused the creation of art in a range of media based on everyday experiences. In fact, one of the founding members of Fluxus was performance artist and composer George Maciunas, who designed An Anthology.

An Anthology comprises a diverse mix of contributions, including essays, musical notation, visual and concrete poetry, instruction–based works, and graphics. The above image is of Joseph Byrd's experimental composition Fish: A Ballet for Woodwinds (1961). The right side of the page displays the musical notation, whilst the left side provides instructions for how the music should be played, which involves using groups of cards (made from cutting up the notation) to determine the work's duration.

The last artist's book I will feature is Yōko Ono's Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions (c1970).In addition to being an independent artist throughout her career, Ono was one of the original participants in Fluxus. Grapefruit is a compilation of conceptual art instruction pieces divided into seven sections: music, painting, event, poetry, object, film, and dance. The original 1964 edition of Grapefruit was highlighted in the Museum of Modern Art's 2015 exhibition Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971. The 1970 edition that Watson Library owns includes an introduction by John Lennon (see below image).

Some of the more compelling instruction pieces from Grapefruit include A Piece for Orchestra (1962), which directs the orchestra members to count all the night stars, and Voice Piece for Soprano (1961), which instructs the singer to scream against the wind, wall, and sky.

While this post is no replacement for viewing these wonderful artists' books in person, I hope it has given you a taste of what you can expect to find in our collection once Watson Library reopens.