Course collaboration with SoVA: Speed dating artists’ books

ART 411 Seminar in Contemporary Art, co-taught by Simone Osthoff, professor of art, and Henry Pisciotta, arts and architecture librarian, is structured in the form of an artists’ book club. The course explores the book form as a medium, a metaphor, and also conceptually—as a site which simultaneously holds and produces content through original visual and verbal narrative structures and materials—and thus forges alternative forms of writing, of seeing, and of thinking.

As part of the class, Osthoff and Pisciotta organized the event “Speed Dating Artists’ Books” in the Pattee Library. During the event, students and guests browsed through more than 200 artists’ books from the Penn State Libraries’ circulating collection, with participants checking out a number of them for later projects. This book party was followed up a week later by a visit to the artists’ books in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library.

Oral histories told by artists, curators, collectors and experts working in specialized bookstores, collectives, and art world institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are a central part of this course which took advantage of the almost 500 artists’ books in the University Libraries. Not only did students have hands-on experience with contemporary artworks—many of them printed in small editions—but they also helped to broaden Penn State’s collection by making recommendations for the library’s purchase of new artists’ books.

The book as an intermedia art form exists in an experimental terrain that challenges traditional disciplinary boundaries. It further speaks to our multimedia digital environment, by referencing systems and codes as well as themes such as mapping, delay, travel, utopia, obsolescence, emptiness and socially engaged art. The precedents, politics and formal explorations of artists’ books are largely rooted in 20th-century avant-garde art and poetry movements, from Dada and Russian constructivism to concrete, Fluxus, minimalism, and conceptual art.

The seminar also hosted a guest speaker series, which began with Andy Schulz, associate dean of research for the College of Arts and Architecture, who shared stories and experiences with the students. The class was surprised to learn that, as a graduate student at Columbia University, Schulz worked in the legendary Printed Matter bookstore in New York City, which specializes in artists’ books. While sharing anecdotes and showing samples from his personal collection of artists’ books, Schulz told students how he got that job and became involved with the New York art scene of the 1980s. Part of his duties during that time were to write brief descriptions of artists’ books for the Printed Matter catalogue, some of which he read in the seminar.

With the artists’ book speed dating and book party, Penn State’s School of Visual Arts and the Libraries collaborated to give students direct experiences with processes, methods and archives of contemporary art.

The video above was created by Alvaro Jordán with photos by Holley Veenis. Music by Astor Piazzola.

– written by Professor of Art Simone Osthoff and submitted by Arts and Architecture Librarian Henry Pisciotta