Art Metropole

#15906

CODE(x)+1 #18: Craft as Catalyst

Writer

Ken Botnick

Date

2024

Publisher

The CODEX Foundation

Format

Anthologies

Size

14 × 20 cm

Length

16 pp

Genre

Craft, Typography

While conceptual complexities differentiate the artist book from the world of handmade objects, there is a similarity in reconciling one’s vision for a project with its functionality. One of the truest lessons of craft practice is that it is not only difficult to foster innovation and creativity in the absence of constraints, the constraints give birth to them. Italo Calvino described this as “escaping the pull of gravity that so stimulates the imagination.” The book, a seemingly constrained form, should surely be exhausted by now. Yet it continues. And we continue making them. The book’s ineffable nature—its sustainable, renewable, inexhaustible resource—is found in the potential of the imaginative mind informed by the work of the hand.