RafaelFajardo

Within the specific context of 1960s and 1970s counterculture, the artist’s book was arguably able to fill a certain political void, providing a means of democratising and subverting existing institutions by distributing an increasingly cheap and accessible medium (the book), and in the process using this medium in order to re-imagine what art is and how it can be accessed and viewed. While artists grasped and worked through that relation between the political, conceptual and material aspects of the book several decades ago, thanks to the emergence of open access online journals, archives, blogs, wikis and free text-sharing networks one of the main places in which this relation is being explored today is indeed in the realm of academic publishing.