Book art piece for Insight

Since early 2008, including the amazing Blood On Paper at the V&A, there's been a really pleasing growth in that whole book art thing. In June 2008 we decided to cover its impact in Brighton.

A new generation of book artists have been quietly redefining everything you know about the tied and bound for over a decade – and judging many a book by its cover. With an international event on our doorstep in July, Charlie Jones has a pressing engagement.
A new global generation of artists are basing work on the printed and bound – remaking novels, rescuing pulped fiction, printing on potato and fur and creating fine art from £5 paperbacks. For these artists, the printed page is a way of creating art itself, rather than a means of reproducing existing work. It’s a broad church, ranging from Dieter Roths early experiments stuffing crap lit into sausage skins, to David Shrigely’s horror-drawings to Denise Hawrysio’s bound Union Jacks to Sam Winston’s word remodeling. It’s subversive, quaint and literate art in the midst of a renaissance that recalls the installationist’s rise in the early seventies. Most exciting of all, many leading lights are coming to Brighton this month for a one-day symposium.
“Eight years ago, no-one had heard of book art, but now almost every art school will offer a course in it. It’s a very exciting time,” says Sarah Bodman, editor of Artists Books Yearbook, the definitive international journal on the form. Sarah, who was introduced to book art when she happened across a handwritten stream of consciousness inside a novel in her university library nearly twenty years ago, is speaking at the Books That Fly event this month at the University of Brighton, a conference and two-week summer school bringing together typographers, artists, academics and writers from around the world. This exhibition comes hot on the tails of last months Phoenix gallery collection, Press and Release, a show of independent and small scale publishing, including many Book Artists, and one of the country’s leading Book Art shop is on Bedford place – Permanent, a group who specialize in small run art books. Lee Shearman of the shop: “It’s been huge recently! It’s exploded, just in the last year. Every month we hear of more event, more artists, more places. I really don’t know what has created this, but that’s the way with inspiration, isn’t it? Someone does something amazing, that makes people go ‘wow, I could do that’ and so these scenes happen.”
Brighton is one of countless hubs worldwide. Sarah Bodman:“Is it a global movement? Very much so! There are practitioners based on every continent, with incredible regional variation. With the new possibilities of internet publishing, it’s easier than ever to get works made – twenty years ago it would cost £100 to make a book, but today you can make one for a fiver, meaning that the person on the street can take home an piece of art.”
permanentbookshop.com
bookarts.uwe.ac.uk

Brighton bound – our list of local bookies

John Dilnot
Through his beautiful re-renderings of milk packaging designs, bad-apple guides and the like, John Dilnot’s work is both weightily political and playfully subtle, and that's all for the better.

Illustrator's Elbow
A newly formed group of 20-odd artists currently studying at the University of Brighton, working in drawing, printing, painting, photography and book-making.

Borbonesa Publishing
A collective of writers and artists who design and make conceptual occasional papers, currently working with filmmaker Jeff Keen to republish RAYDAY, a private broadsheet from the 1960s.