Yasmeen Siddiqui Publishing as an Art Practice

Publishing as an Art Practice is a twelve-week seminar that traces more than a century of artists’ books and manifestos to explore how artists have used publishing to communicate across geographies—efficiently, beautifully, and with intention.

Beginning with the Futurist manifestos that appeared in Italy, France, the Americas, Egypt, and Ethiopia,we will focus on the power of graphic design in an authoritarian context marked by Italy’s renewed nationalism and imperial interests. We will study Amauta (1926-30), the Peruvian journal devoted to the resurgence of Indigeneity in art and culture, attending to its woodcut illustrations and transnational reach.
The 2020 exhibition The Avant-garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s is our main source of insight into this magazine. From there, we move through the publications of the Bauhaus and Fluxus movements, engaging exhibition records to understand how artists used print to shape new visual and political vocabularies.

Referring to two books by Gwen Allen: Documents of Contemporary Art: The Magazine (2016) and Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (2011) we will examine ways artists reinvented the magazine and magazine page as portable exhibition spaces. Allen’s scholarship focuses on the 1960s through 1980s looking at the radical origins of Art Forum; Aspen (1965-71), found ed by Phyllis Johnson; 0 to 9 (1967-69), founded by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer; Avalanche (1970-76), founded by Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp; FILE (1972-79), founded by the collective General Idea.

Central to this course is student participation. They will locate and present physical artists’ books and magazines they have found and that they find particularly interesting. This work and effort will support an expansion of what has become in scholarship and the dominant narrative, a New York centric story of the
legacies of publishing as an art practice post-World War II.
The course culminates in the creation of a zine—a contemporary inheritor of the artist book tradition.Students will produce a small publication that integrates critical inquiry with aesthetic practice.

Readings and podcasts will be selected from:
Gwen Allen. Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (2011).
Gwen Allen. Documents of Contemporary Art: The Magazine (2016).
Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (1995).
Alice Evans & Jo Maddocks, BOOKNESS Podcast. Oxford University, Bodlien Library’s Centre for the
Study of the Book.
Annette Golbert, Ed. Publishing as Artistic Practice (2016).
Joan Lyons, ed. Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (1985)
Alistair Rye. The Photographic Artist’s Book (2015).