Artists’ books are seldom in the spotlight of the art and culture business. You can’t nail them to the wall like paintings, you can’t make them heard in concert halls, you can’t give them a big stage in the theatre. Exhibited at fairs and in galleries, they offer the viewer only a small section of themselves – everything else can only be experienced by taking them out of their showcases and exploring them, sheet by sheet. The presentation on the internet as a sequence of photos and/or videos does show each individual page and thus what could be called “content” – but the most important thing is missing: the haptic exploration of their three-dimensionality.
Despite all this: Fraktalwerk Projektraum opens a new long-term project and presents artist’s books in loose succession by the Berlin artist Marlen Wagner, who says with Guy Schraenen that artist’s books are works of art in the form of a book.