Bookwork

"This fascinating work will change the way readers think about books and their purpose."

-- "Choice"

"Bookwork is a bold, imaginative, and passionate study of the works of sculpture and installation art that are either made out of books or that reference books as cultural icons. No one has taken the study of book objects into as detailed a discussion as Garrett Stewart, who uncovers these objects' important relation to conceptual art and the tradition of the readymade. Bookwork bridges art history and the sculptural tradition at the edge of the field of artists' book production--creating a vivid link between these two communities. It will find a ready audience among those who study and practice the art Stewart explores."

--Johanna Drucker, University of California, Los Angeles

"Garrett Stewart focuses on the kind of book art that renders the book a physical object rather than a medium for reading with a thoroughness and theoretical sophistication that are unmatched in the literature on the subject. In its scope, erudition, and felicitous blend of museum stroll and sophisticated analysis, this book will engage and delight a much wider range of readers than most scholarly monographs. Sustained, original, intellectually stimulating, and often brilliant, Bookwork will become the source to consult on this topic for years to come."

--Sabine Gross, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"When we read a book, it is always the physical volume in our hands--or in some substitute for hands--that is being read. That reading is a hands-on experience, we well understand, but what is to be said about artists taking hands to the book as object, transmogrifying it and separating it from readability? Garrett Stewart thinks deeply about the experience of reading, and how memories of reading hover over the altered book, or as Stewart calls it, bibliobjet, once it has been made into an object of art. Bookwork is an eloquent survey of the conceptual parameters of the bibliobjet and the multitudinous ways by which artists of the book object bring forth other orders of its reading."

--Buzz Spector, Washington University