Anca Cristofovici & Barbara Montefalcone : The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books

Always a space for experimentation, the book has been a platform for innovative collaboration since its invention, and never more than in the modern era—when painters, poets, editors, typographers, and binders have each contributed to the production of works whose whole becomes something far more than its parts. The essays in this volume address some of the main threads of collaboration in American and French poetry and printing, where the livre d’artiste flirts with the artist’s book in imagining the page, the text, the codex as a vital scene of exchange. Each of these authors has been involved in this field in a professional and/or creative manner, and each speaks from experience with substantive authority.

— Johanna Drucker,
Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA

The Art of Collaboration brings together the perspective and insight of a distinguished international community of poets, artists, publishers, scholars and curators, drawing from their rich diversity of experience to identify a useful framework for documenting and understanding the recent history and practice of the age-old tradition of collaborating with text and image. This collection is an invaluable tool whose very presence is a brilliant example of its subject.

— Steve Clay
Granary Books

The essays collected in this volume originate from a symposium that took place at the University of Caen, France, in March and April 2011, entitled ‘Collaboration and the Artist’s Book: a Transatlantic Perspective,’ one of the first in Europe to be organized for literary and cultural studies. The participants included American poets and artists who have produced significant work in the field (some since the sixties), together with American and French scholars, independent publishers of artists’ books, and library and museum curators.

Contributors include: Anca Cristofovici, Barbara Montefalcone, Antoine Cazé, Olivier Brossard, Michael Siebenbrodt, Vincent Katz, Bill Berkson, Susan Bee, Raphael Rubinstein, Gervais Jassaud, Pascal Poyet & Françoise Goria, Kyle Schlesinger, Antoine Coron, Constance Lewallen, Charles Bernstein & Richard Tuttle.

Edited by Anca Cristofovici & Barbara Montefalcone.

Hardcover. 198 pages. Full color throughout.
ISBN: 978-0-9860040-5-6