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The Centre des livres d’artistes, Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Didier Mathieu  and
Gillian Varley
Didier Mathieu*
Affiliation:
Centre des livres d’artistes, 1 place Attane, 87500 Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche, France
*
Email: d.mathieu@cdla.info
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Extract

The Centre des livres d’artistes (cdla), which has been based in S aint-Yrieix-la-Perche since 1994, is the culmination of a project initiated at the end of the 1980s by the association Pays-paysage. After many years during which it lacked anywhere to develop its activities fully, the cdla has at last been installed in a refurbished building and opened early in 2005 with a new exhibition of books and publications by herman de vries. The two principal activities of the cdla are the creation and management of a collection of artists’ books (currently nearly 3000 items), and the organisation of exhibitions in France and also abroad.

Type
Research Article
Information
Art Libraries Journal , Volume 32 , Special Issue 2: Artists’ books: Special issue , 2007 , pp. 21 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 2007

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References

1. These rail connections show up as a sort of parenthesis on the map of France. A section of the country is thus, very explicitly (because intentionally) ‘put in brackets’. With regard to the new ‘geography’ (regions, distances and means of communication) these outline - more European than French - it could be that this conspicuous ‘enclosing ‘of the centre of the country will no longer be a handicap: Limoges will remain three hours distant from Paris by train but it is already no more than one and a half hours from London by plane. Paradoxically, the distance allows us to welcome artists, publishers and researchers in highly privileged working and exchange conditions.Google Scholar
2. This is more or less the same for many projects in the visual plastic arts. The situation is radically different for the ‘living’ arts (theatre, music, dance): it has long been accepted that the provinces, as seen from Paris (in this case their foster mother, especially in summer) welcome and develop projects in these domains.Google Scholar
3. We did however benefit, during these years, from modest and rather uncomfortable accommodation made available to us by the town of Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche (two classrooms in a disused school which were at the same time office space and a place to take care of the collection).Google Scholar
4. In addition, the Centre houses an annexe of the Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche public library, whose stock is managed by staff from the library; this is at once generalist (modern and contemporary art) and also has special material dedicated to the genre of the artist’s book and to the artists in the cdla’s collection.Google Scholar
5. However the expenses connected with running the building remain the responsibility of the association Pays-Paysage.Google Scholar
6. A ‘centre’ for books whose cardinal quality has always been to be autonomous and ‘on the edge’ (even if ‘central’ in the work of a number of artists). Where and how have these books been able to find their place? Two recent exhibitions raised this question. In the exhibition Ed Ruscba photographe, held at the beginning of 2006 in the Jeu de Paume in Paris, Ruscha’s books, seen together with his photographic work hung on the walls, became in a way a documentation of the artist’s work. By contrast with this confusion, it was cheering to see in the exhibition Covering the real at the Kunstmuseum in Basle in June 2005, several artists’ books (Gerhard Richter, Ernst Caramelle ...) judiciously mounted as works in their own right, and equal to what was hung on the walls. But after all, is it sensible to go on worrying about problems such as these?Google Scholar
7. I have always thought, perhaps wrongly, that the conditions of production and diffusion under which artists’ books exist in France have suffered both from the non-productive tradition of bibliophily and from the sclerotic supremacy of the text (i.e. the literary) to the detriment of the image.Google Scholar
8. The extremely interesting collection of artists’ books in Brittany’s Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC) should be noted here.Google Scholar
9. Even though it is very different, the collection is comparable with the two major French collections: those of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky in the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou. (See Annalisa Rimmaudo’s article on the second of these elsewhere in this issue of the Art libraries journal.) Google Scholar
10. However I know that there are two other projects that are as exacting as ours. The modest but remarkable collection of artists’ books and publications created by Françoise Lonardoni at the Artothèque in the Bibliothèque de la Part-Dieu in Lyon, and the installation project of a ‘Cabinet de livres d’artistes’ that Leszek Brogowski tried to get underway, with much difficulty, at the Université Rennes 2 Haute-Bretagne. Besides these, it seems that the Centre national de l’estampe et de l’art imprimé (cneai) in Chatou, near Paris, has the ambition to build up - in total confusion - a gigantic collection which under the global and improbable title of ‘ephemera’ mixes together (and I quote), ‘photocopies, leaflets, disks, cassettes, wallpapers, reviews, tracts, postcards, stickers, DVDs, web pages, artists’ books, fascicules, posters, playing cards, badges, insert pages in newspapers, slides, albums, magazines ...’. One can appreciate the combination of ignorance (or candour) and pretension revealed by this amalgam.Google Scholar
11. The collection grows, by purchases and donations, by an average of 350 items per year. I must stress here the generosity of the artists who, anxious to see the largest possible number of their books preserved together in the same place, willingly complement our purchases with gifts. This is a great support on their part, and evidence of their confidence in our project. (Moreover, the cdla is the place of deposit for two groups of books by Paul-Armand Gette and by herman de vries which belong to the Fonds national d’art contemporain (FNAC).Google Scholar
12. This collection was begun by Françoise Woimant, before all those that exist today in Europe and across the Atlantic. She has described its beginnings in a lively and joyful text which appeared in the catalogue L•s éditeurs, la foire, published by the cdla on the occasion of the ‘Biennale du livre d’artiste’ in 1999: Thanks to a lucky chance, or rather thanks to a succession of opportunities which had to be seized, the collection was able to develop considerably [...] The first of these chances was the encouragement of Jean Adhémar, who was at that time curator of the department [of prints and photography]; the second, no less important, was that I had lived since 1967 in a small street at the crossroads of the rue du Вас and the boulevard Saint-Germain, not far from the Iolas, Bama, Yvon Lambert et Nancy Gillespie galleries, and certainly a little further from the galerie Liliane et Michel Durand-Dessert. All these young gallerists would champion the artists of their generation from France and abroad who worked with the book as a medium. Further on, Françoise Woimant states, The end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s was also the epoch of the first great art fairs, at Cologne, Berlin, Düsseldorf and especially Basle, the first and most important of all, to which Anne Lahumière introduced me. It was there that for the first time I met committed publishers of artists’ books, the Swiss Statili, the Germans Staeck, Hundertmark and König, the Americans Bob Feldman et Kathan Brown [...]. Bearing in mind these comments, one can only smile when reading in the last pages of the catalogue of the 2005 Basle fair: Art Basel, for the first time (my italics), dedicates a space in the fair (organised by Art-Unlimited) for the presentation of a particular type of object: the artist’s book. This ‘first’ exhibition, entrusted to Lionel Bovier, art historian and publisher of contemporary art, was followed by a second, also commissioned by him, and one can read in the catalogue of the 2006 fair: The ambition of the organiser in the first year was introductory; the intention was to offer a subjective panorama of the production of artists’ books of the 21st century and through them show the whole extent of this genre, both physically and commercially [...] This year, the exhibition puts the accent on the production of a number of European and American publishers in the ‘small press scene’ of the years 1960-1980 in the wake of Fluxus. In this way publications from Something Else Press (New York/Villefranche/Frankfort), écart (Geneva), Printed Matter (New York), Lapp Princess Press (New York) and Zona (Florence) were shown. The crowding of the books in their showcases left people perplexed and gave them no incentive to go and look more closely or to linger. Presenting these works in such an unworthy way was surprising, especially since the declared ambition of this exhibition was to capture an uninitiated public. Google Scholar
13. It was while working on the catalogue raisonné of the publications of herman de vries, and because of his very many contributions to journals, that our policy for acquiring periodicals was strengthened. Magazines connected with concrete poetry (rich in its multiple collaborations) very fortunately allowed us to complement the books already in the collection by artists such as Ulises Carrion, Henri Chopin, Ian Hamilton Finlay or Robert Lax.Google Scholar
14. http://www.cdla.info/.Google Scholar
15. In the same way, the cdla has long collaborated with the Artothèque du Limousin (a collection of some 3500 contemporary works: prints, drawings and photographs) in thematic exhibitions bringing together prints and artists’ books.Google Scholar
16. I am not an art critic and I have never studied at university. Each exhibition I put on is for me an attempt to define - in non-written form - the genre of ‘livre d’artiste’.Google Scholar
17. In order not to make this article too long, I have not listed here the many teaching and training activities we carry out for our public (whether they are professional or not).Google Scholar
18. Since 2005, the cdla, together with RG Consulting-Paris, has also been involved in the organisation of ArtistBook International (a salon created by Rik Gadella in 1994), which will next be held in Paris in the autumn of 2007.Google Scholar