Artist''s Books by Peter H. Barnett

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Can you tell me how what you are doing now is to do something philosophical? (1980)

The Artist's Book genre has provided this philosopher with a means of extending his formal vocabulary beyond the article, the monograph, and the dialogue.

The integration of structure and text in these bookworks, merging the actions of reading and physical manipulation, invites a reorientation akin to that induced by Socratic questioning.

This reorientation takes us beyond both discourse and dialogue: to expose and thus to disarm the temporal dispositions implicit in objective discourse and in ordinary reading.

The prevailing theme is to articulate without-object: to think without surfaces. I was first set on this course by reading Malevitch and Kandinsky on the "non-objective." In the context of philosophy, as distinct from painting, to articulate without object would be a meaningless construction undertaken to learn how to make it better.

Each of the Artist's books presented on this Web Site has--unlike the conventional bound book -- a unique structure which reflects its text. The creative challenge presented by each has been to attain its inner necessity such that the text dictates the structure and the structure dictates the text.

Each of the seven physical Artist's books--"Time Trap", "Can You Tell Me...", "Reciprocal Encoding-Decoding...", "Picking Up Stones...", "Fragments of NameemaN", "Undoing" and "Backwards Backwards" has a handmade component, including folding, cutting, binding, glueing and stringing. I use readily available art supplies, inexpensive printing and digital photography.

"Fitting" is a non-site in the spirit of Robert Smithson. It represents a virtual collaboration between my father, the painter and draftsman Herbert Barnett (1910-1972), a favorite site--a ruined mill in East Princeton, Massachusetts, and myself. Site photographs, drawings and paintings are arranged according the the artist's vantage points and are integrated with my 1976 monograph "Concentration in the Present" which reflects our shared creative philosophy. "Fitting" comprises three parallel dialogues: between artist and site, between painting and philosophy, and between father and son. The estate of Herbert Barnett is represented by Childs Gallery, Ltd., Boston: www.childsgallery.com.

My Artist's Books are most readily available through Anartist, New York: http://www.anartistbooks.com and through Printed Matter, New York: http://printedmatter.org/catalogue/search.cfm?email=&cookie1=8708668.6&return=/index.cfm

Special thanks to Richard Kostelanetz for his support of my first Artist's Books.
For encouragement and support over the years, thanks to Michael Andre, Matt Hogan, Judith Hoffberg, Clive Philpott and the folks at Printed Matter, especially Max Schumann.

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