35th Modern Language Association Prize for Contingent Faculty and Independent Scholars, Honorable Mention
The Collaborative Artist鈥檚 Book offers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from 1945 to the present, and highlights how the artist鈥檚 book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alexandra Gold provides a broad overview of the artist鈥檚 book form and the many ongoing debates and challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose.
Gold presents five case studies and details not only how each individual collaboration came to be but how all five together engage and challenge conventional ideals about art, subjectivity, poetry, and interpersonal relations, as well as complex social questions related to gender and race. Taking several of these books out of special collections libraries and museum archives and making them available to a broad readership, Gold brings to light a whole genre that has been largely forgotten or neglected.
鈥淭roubling the boundaries of their own artforms, the poets and artists who created the artists鈥 books brought to life in this study used the form of the book itself to create new modes of relationality and expression. Written with intelligence and an artistry of its own, The Collaborative Artist鈥檚 Book tells an exciting story about collaboration and experiment across media, and is sure to be of interest to students of experimental poetry and the avant-garde.鈥濃擝rian Glavey, author, The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis
鈥The Collaborative Artist鈥檚 Book reveals the ways in which collaborative artists鈥 books鈥攑eripheral but enduringly engaging experimental forms鈥攕hape late twentieth and early twenty-first century American lyric subjectivities. This is a book about friendship, collaboration, multidimensionality, and creative unruliness, as delightful in style as it is in subject matter.鈥濃擱ona Cran, author, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O鈥橦ara, and Bob Dylan
鈥淕old demonstrates the relevance of artists鈥 books in the present time, as complement, substitute, or remedy for virtual realities. Scrupulous in her scholarship and careful in her arguments, Gold advocates boldly for the pleasure of artists鈥 books, especially those containing poetry.鈥濃擲tephen Fredman, author, American Poetry as Transactional Art
鈥淎n attentive, detailed work, The Collaborative Artist鈥檚 Book is an outstanding example of the capacities of an interdisciplinary creative study. Alexandra J. Gold generates a theory of the genre of contemporary artists鈥 collaborative books that deftly analyzes both visual art and literature, attending to the issues of material form, tactile and curatorial challenges, and social networks. Gold鈥檚 chapters also double as a history of avant-garde art in the mid-twentieth century and the relationships that sustained it. This book is a deeply informed, passionately and beautifully written achievement. It teaches us a great deal about an understudied field, models the importance of understanding collaboration in art, and serves as a model for studies of hybrid media.鈥濃擬LA Prize for Contingent Faculty and Independent Scholars committee
