00A presented @ Artists’ books from Flanders and the Netherlands at Frankfurter Buchmesse

The selection was done by designer, publisher and curator Luc Derycke (Flemish selection) and art historian and art editor Roos van der Lint (Dutch selection) and showcased at the stand of Flanders Arts Institute and Mondriaan Fonds. 

The medium book is opening up, in the sense that it’s getting less and less functional. We replace it by the internet, apps and programmes. Purely functionally, we hardly need books anymore. Strangely enough, when a medium becomes obsolete, it creates a sort of symbolic space into which artists can enter. Jacques André’s I Want More and Do It! contain a single picture from cover to cover, no, eighty pictures of a picture, no, eighty pictures of eighty objects with the same picture, no, in fact eighty pictures of eighty objects with a different picture. Baptiste Caccia’s Croix Sur Panneau, eighty pictures through a single picture. Dominique Somers’ 00A contains pictures that were never intended as pictures. Mathieu Gargam’s Maroc aout 1971 THE WALDORF ASTORIA ONE WAY ONE WAY The Waldorf Astoria contains pictures that were never meant to be printed. The volume by Remi Verstraete is clearly driven by a MacGuffin, which is called X, the title of the book. Tris Vonna-Michell’s Scores (Japan) is not a book, but a book. The drawings in the Off Work series by Parcifal Neyt are not drawings, some are. Or maybe not.- Luc Derycke