One of these statements, incidentally, is the posthumous work Before And After by Ulises Carrión, published by Raúl Marroquín. This book, which appeared in 2012 in Boekie Woekie’s publications list Het Andre Behr Pamflet, is interesting above all because Marroquín, fellow artist and friend of Carrión, has written a very forthright and highly personal afterword. Zeitgeist The intellectual climate has changed radically in recent years. It is true that artists’ books continue to have a subversive, resistant air, situated as they are on the “peripheries of mainstream distribution networks.”21 But this is exactly what has earned them their status of cool zeitgeist phenomenon—even if Ulises Carrión already saw in 1979 the “market mechanisms and a celebrity syndrome” within the artists’ book community when he pointed out: “Time has passed and our situation is totally different. We are no longer innocent. Now it isn’t enough to be an artist in order to produce bookworks.”22 Since some years, his predictions definitively have come true and independence from artistic institutions, from definitions, and from the market are rarely the conceptual foundation of today’s artists’ books, with a few exceptions.23 In their creation, responsibilities are again conventionally divided between designers, publishers, and marketing channels, rather than, as formulated by Ulises Carrión, “the writer assumes the responsibility for the whole process.”24 Collaboration with sponsors is also willingly sought. Due to the associated and accepted—even if invisible—influence of the demands of concept and finance, self-publication is by no means any longer a priori an independent practice but is part of the repertoire of the established cultural industry. So although Carrión’s “non books, anti books, pseudo books, quasi books, concrete books, visual books, conceptual books, structural books, project books, statements books, instruction books”25 thus no longer exist, publishers, distributors and collectors of artists’ books refer more than ever to Other Books and So. This they do by declaring their services and entrepreneurship to be artistic practices, by choosing names like “& SO,” or by printing “Other Books” and other such allusions to it on their merchandise. Ulises Carrión is clearly in keeping with the zeitgeist. After Other Books and So, “The New Art of Making Books” is probably the most often cited in all these revivals. It is not only in writing that this manifesto is experiencing a resurrection but also in works of art, for example in a video installation by the artist Kyrillos Sarris (2001).26 Without exaggerating, it can be asserted that it has become a central reference in the definition of the concept of the artist’s book. What is happening is what happens in the course of many such cases of posthumous admiration: long-existing references sink into oblivion, making the renewed efforts look like pioneering achievements.27 To analyze the totality of the daily-growing deluge of references to Ulises Carrión would definitively burst the boundaries of this text. But the instances chosen as examples here, without meeting the demand for comprehensiveness, absolutely permit us to formulate a typology of Ulises Carrión referentialism. Latin America In Latin America, Ulises Carrión has been received for some time as an important compatriot. In this respect, he is one of several artists and groups of artists, some of them living in exile, who from the mid-1960s developed characteristic strategies beyond the official power structures and have today been rediscovered as counter-narratives to the dominant Latin American political rule and value systems, along with those of Western hegemony.28 In this context, it is also a question of identity and whether “after the totalitarian de21. “What we do,” Printed Matter, Inc. (website), https://printedmatter.org/what_we_do/overview (accessed February 10, 2016). 22. Ulises Carrión, “Bookworks Revisited,” in Second Thoughts (Amsterdam: VOID, 1980), 65. 23. To mention but one example, Bernard Villers is artist and author, manufacturer, publisher, and distributor all rolled into one. 24. Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books,” Kontexts (Amsterdam), nos. 6–7 (1975). 25. Other Books and So, advertising flyer, 1975. 26. Although their mention, whether positively or negatively connoted, might affect their market value (super!!!!!), the contemporary artists who refer posthumously to Ulises Carrión are named here for the sake of traceability. 27. A new translation of “The New Art of Making Books” into German was recently mentioned in a lecture debate with the author as being the first, even though a translation had already existed for a long time. 28. See Annabela Tournon, author of the thesis “Les Grupos. Une contre-histoire des années 1970 au Mexique (1968–1983),” at the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL), Paris, in conversation with Guy Schraenen and the author, January 2015.
63