Artists’ books are a strange genre in contemporary art, hovering between several different disciplines and having multiple histories. One of the persistent arguments in the field concerns the definition of an artist’s book. A reductive form of this argument might be: is it a craft practice or is it some kind of conceptual art form? Arguing definitions in the abstract is a fruitless and pointless activity, but examining the work of specific artists is rewarding and informative. The publication of a catalogue of work produced at the Visual Studies Workshop Press presents an opportunity to consider a diverse range of materials produced over the past thirty-seven years, to see the results of a program that has insisted on the importance of the artistic process, and to celebrate a discipline-forming body of work that is largely the vision of Joan and Nathan Lyons. The catalogue includes color images of many of the books along with statements by their authors. Through these vignettes of particular works, accompanied by a timeline, it offers a narrative history of the press and describes an important part of the development of artists’ books in North America.

Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) was and continues to be a unique institution, a place that is simultaneously an artist-run space, an exhibition venue, a production facility for photography, a printmaking atelier, a publishing house, an archive of media works, and a graduate program, all housed in one institution. VSW was founded in the late 1960s as a graduate program that quickly metamorphosed into an institution that promoted the study and production of media arts. Its great strength lies in the way it serves as a nexus of activity that includes professional and educational practice.

The press was just one of the many programs that VSW sponsored, but it was always central. When this publishing venture was founded, the idea of an artist’s book was relatively inchoate: artists were making books, just as they have since before William Blake, but the idea that a book was an artistic medium was still somewhat strange. Printed Matter in New York City helped promote the idea that artists’ publishing was a legitimate activity, and the work of many artists in the 1950s and 1960s proved the idea that books could be art in a way that had nothing to do with the idea of a catalogue. However, there were no institutions that supported artists making books the way that VSW began to do. Very early on in its history, VSW acquired a press: the first letterpress was acquired in 1970, and an offset press in 1971. As described in Artists’ Books, the early years of VSW were a period of creative ferment, a real investigation of how various media worked, an investigation into what was possible, of what was rewarding to make, and of the expressive possibilities of print media. What was unique about this situation was the emphasis on the artist participating directly in the means of production. This was not a traditional print atelier, where technical staff did all the production and the artist was a distant authority figure responsible for creative direction, but rather a place where the work of the artist was integral to the process. Joan Lyons quickly emerged as the person responsible for directing the press’s activity; in the artists’ narratives included in the catalogue, it is easy to see her engagement with the idea of the hands-on involvement in making things. She, along with VSW staff (Tom Sullivan, Brad Freeman, Stewart Cauley, Paul Muhly, among many others over the years), were teachers and collaborators as much as producers.

The VSW Press residency program, which sponsored many of the books listed in the catalogue, invited an artist to live at the workshop and produce a book. This involved teaching these artists in residence the techniques and processes they needed to make their work, helping them understand the possibilities of print media, and advising and working on the actual production. The experience that artists had in this process was frequently transformative for their artistic practice. Jenni Lukac, a 1995 resident artist, writes: “Joan Lyons is a master book designer and a very talented narrator and editor. To work with her was an immense pleasure. Our spirited conversations in Rochester concerning photography, memory, American culture, the arts and education are still a reference and an inspiration for me” (73).

A diverse array of approaches to making books is on display, ranging from conceptual works like Ulises Carrión’s For Fans and Scholars Alike (1987), a well-known bookwork where the text blocks and placeholder “illustrations” follow a conventional text/image pattern but are emptied of everything except an endlessly repeated letter “I,” to expressive works like Erica Van Horn’s Black Dog White Bark (1987), a materially rich, printmakerly work with no words inside the book. In the same year, two other major works were produced: Telfer Stokes and Helen Douglas’s Real Fictions and Paul Zelevansky’s The Shadow Architecture at the Crossroads Annual 19X. Stokes and Douglas’s work is an important, self-reflexive investigation of how a book functions as a time-based medium in art, while Zelevansky’s book is a part of a larger, multi-volume work of creative mythology, inventive and engaging. The fact that all of these books were produced in the same year demonstrates the press’s commitment to facilitating the work of artists and refusing to impose a particular aesthetic agenda.

This activity created an institutional home for the production of artists’ books that had not previously existed. The only comparable institution in the 1970s, the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles (which was an important institutional home for artists’ education and the production of artists’ books), started printing operations in 1974, a few years after the founding of VSW Press. There were other places and other publishers who were printing artists’ books, but none with the scope or longevity of VSW Press. The role of institutions in forming identities is well known; by focusing on artist participation, the press helped define the meaning of the term “artists’ book” by consistently producing work that foregrounded the vision of the artist as its defining element. Starting in the 1970s, Franklin Furnace, Clive Philpot at the MoMA library, Tony Zwicker, Printed Matter, Nexus Press, the Woman’s Building, Women’s Studio Workshop, and many other people and institutions recognized the activity of artists making books and started collecting, curating, exhibiting, publishing, and promoting these works. Ideas relating to what constitutes an artist’s book and the activities that the term contains were formed during this time, and the books published by the VSW Press were central to shaping that understanding.

VSW Press continues to this day with an active publishing program. The offset equipment was sold in 2002, but that merely signaled the adoption of different production methodologies. “A Press,” as Tate Shaw (current director of VSW) says in his afterword, “is not a press.” It stands for a much more complex entity, one that includes attitudes, abilities, and aspirations. The works that are currently being produced are marked by a broad range of approaches, but—in keeping with the traditions of VSW press—always with an awareness of the book as a form and a sense that the process of making is present in the work.

There are as yet no other artists’ book publishing enterprises that have produced more than four hundred titles. Artists’ Books: Visual Studies Workshop Press 1971–2008 provides a rich picture of a zone of activity at VSW, a history of the press through its activity; and it reflects, by extension, the evolving history of artists making books. As a result, it offers a useful addition to the growing literature about artists’ books.