In the spring of 2019, I was asked to give a talk to students on the Master’s program in Typography at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, discussing a selection of publications that illustrated “different ways of presenting works of art in books.” The idea was to explore the possibilities of the book as a medium for presenting art, going beyond the mere reproduction of works (through photography, drawing, etc.) to employ other tactics that are not only formally innovative, but also productive in terms of the levels of meaning they can bring to reading.
This invitation, for once, allowed me to sidestep the question of the definition of the artist’s book, since, as I was told, my selection could include artist’s books but did not necessarily have to consist only of them… Taking this presentation as a starting point, shortly afterwards I wrote a text that was published, in Spanish and Catalan, by the Polytechnic University of Valencia.