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The artists' book has enabled a range of artists to find a means that is rich with ideas, available, affordable and malleable in configuration both spatial and material. This "plasticity" has made it possible for the artists' book to adapt to a variety of times and circumstances without being associated in particular with the major art movements or technologies. This has contributed to an inventiveness and reflexiveness that comments on the specific conditions of its own production. In two dimensional images, the subject's background is conventionally called the negative part of the field or picture plane. When allegory was the figurative means in art, the subject or figure was the prime consequence of an image, and the background was the field on which served the main subject in its significance. In twentieth century visual art, the negative space was given an equal place. This coincided with the shift of visual reading away from the positively defined allegory into a more ethnographic world view in which no subject is considered without an inevitable relation to its context. This created an environment of critical interdisciplinarity into which the hybrid art-form of the contemporary artists' book was born. Rabelais in his proto-post-modern way strove to show his world in a new light — to destroy the medieval hierarchy by using traditional folklore to mix social levels, to turn it all upside down and inside out in order to reveal the central truths. Bakhtin calls it a "positive negation". Rabelais' real was outside the status quo of the establishment. He looked at the "other face" of the ordinary person. The twentieth century artist draws on ethnography to create a fresh and more total image that is predicated on the "negative" yet flows from inside to out and back in an inclusive and socially engaged way.

Stream: Other or Stream Unspecified

Paper: Artists' Book and Negative Space, The

Nola Farman is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art, Toronto and a PhD candidate at the University of Western Sydney. Her work had been exhibited in private and state galleries including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. She has won awards including Australia Council Fellowships and residencies in Australian Universities as well as the Cite Nationale des arts in Paris. Her large sculptural works have been commissioned by universities and private corporations across Australia. Smaller works including bookworks are in the collections of the National Gallery Canada, the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the Baltic Centre, UK, the west Australian Art Gallery, the Royal Society, London, Centre des livres d'artistes, France, the National Gallery of New Zealand and numerous other corporate and private collections. She has produced a number of her own limited edition artists' books under the imprint of The Garden Path Press.