Liberature and the artist's book

Fajfer's claim that liberature ought to be understood as a distinct literary genre is perhaps more understandable when one realises that that was intended to counteract an identification of his material poetics with the kind of material rhetoric that features prominently in artists’ books. This fuzzy, highly heterogeneous, and inclusive field of creative practice can, like liberature, trace its roots to innovative modernist publications, William Blake's artistic individualism embodied in the book, and a long tradition of visual and figurative poetry. Present in many languages, the term has culturally-specific, and often mutually exclusive, referents and connotations. In Poland, the artist's book is strongly associated with the visual arts (Rypson 2000; Dawidek Gryglicka 2012). Simply put, the term refers to a self-contained, autonomous artistic work expressed through or inspired by the form of the book, which is historically grounded in the rich tradition of the Polish literary avant-garde, and the strict control of printing technologies in communist Poland. Importantly, the artist's book may include text (in the conservative sense of a verbal message), but this needn't be so. This qualification is more relevant to the American or Polish traditions of book art, and contestable in the context of the French livre d'artiste, which refers to a joint composition by a poet and a painter, often inspired and coordinated by an editor and typographer. So in it text is an important component, the feature livre d'artiste shares with liberature. In the artist's book, moreover, there is no need for the text to be authored by the person who designs, illustrates, and makes the work. The work can be a typographically innovative presentation or artistic adaptation of someone else's text, a found text, or a textual collage. Furthermore, the semantic and literary dimensions of the text may be of little or no importance to the meaning of the work, as in Zbigniew Sałaj's Miękka książka (Soft Book), which is in fact closer to a book-based sculpture or installation.

But generally speaking, regardless of local differences, artists’ books are considered to be hybrid forms that are situated between literature, the visual arts, sculpture, installation, and even the happening.