Artists' books

After a research committee meeting I rush over to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) for the London Artists Book Fair, organised by Marcus Campbell. I'm on the panel to award the Birgit Skiold  Memorial prizes. I'm late and the other three have had a good look already: I mark the plan with their choices. I'd have rather started without this. I look at the three spaces which are incredibly busy and I'm hijacked from my task with conversations with Marcus, Bill Allen, Helen Douglas, and lots of ex students.

Astrid Kogler's book comparing the medical dissection of a pig with the butchering process is strangely beautiful (Pig Trilogy). I'm also impressed with Tracey Bush's work which marries conceptualism with an almost crafts process: her butterflies, made from maps of their locations, reference the books used for their identification, atlases as well as having 'pages'. There's a powerful valency here. Another book that interests me is the point and place collaborative artists' book, a double binding that interleaves and allows the reader control of its appearance. It also folds out to a triptych that is endlessly (almost) variable. It's soon six thirty and we have to decide on the five winners and the amounts, sign the certificates and get ready for the prize ceremony. Time for a glass of champagne and I have a chat with Matthew Higgs. He promises to put me on the mailing list for his New York newsletter. Then I bump into Fiona Banner: her website has one of my reviews of one of her books - we talk about what the space of the artist's book offers the artist. I have a conversation with Heather Hunter who is experimenting with a gelatin process which some of the Russian futurists used.

Saturday: another 100 lengths in the Chelsea Pool, and then I have to meet my sister to hand over Xmas presents, as I will be going off to Blackburn while she remains in Essex.

Beforehand I call in at the Keith Tyson exhibition at the Haunch of Venison (the gallery is where Nelson was nursed after losing a bit of his anatomy - which?). There's something addictive about his work - sometimes the differential between an artist and everyone else is their preparedness to go through the repetitive and tiring processes of executing a work/project - one of Tyson's panels is a pencil drawing with the comment that the sharpening of the pencils was the real work of art.