Project Details
Projekt
The Artist's Book as Aesthetic Experiment: History and Poetics of a Hybrid Genre
Subject Area
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Term
from 2010 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 176970773
Object of the research project is the artist's book in its multiple shapes and forms (such as livre d'artiste, sculptural book, book object) seen from diachronic as well as synchronic perspectives. The basic hypothesis is that the artist's book - a hybrid form of art that interweaves texts, pictures, and the material form of the book - has developed and flourished in a close and interdependent relationship to literature. Hence, the history of the genre and its innate aesthetics are to be made accessible and comprehensible by means of comparison with tendencies and trends, styles, and other phenomena within the history of literature. The project aims at compiling a handbook or compendium that (a) approaches the artist's book as a genre from multiple systematic perspectives in a number of comprehensive treatises, and that will (b) also circumstantiate a larger number of forms and examples of the artist's book that are specific to and representative to the genre. Special emphasis lies on the self-reflective, book-, media-, language- and picture-aware character of the works in question. A corpus for the selection of paradigmatic artist's books is found in extensive collections, especially of the HAB Wolfenbüttel.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
