Legible – Visible

"Legible – Visible" explores the relationship between print publications and audio-visual documents, two of the most important media in the social and cultural landscape of our time – and two forms that also define the evolution of contemporary art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mela Davila and Maite Munoz here show how the arrival of inexpensive home video technologies in the 1970s and then of digital media at the turn of the millennium sparked revolutions in the creation and diffusion of both video artworks and artists' publications. Davila proposes a theoretical and historical framework for works long dismissed by the market because of their serial nature, while Munoz shows how artists have taken advantage of the permeability between publications and audovisual elements. The first book-length work to study artists' publications and video in relation to each other, "Legible – Visible" will enable new ways of thinking about a number of contemporary artists and their work.