Pages in-between: Intermedia Art between Cookbooks and Artists’ Books

This dissertation identifies and investigates an intermedial space between cookbooks and artists’ books, focusing on works that blur the lines between instructional text and art object. Through the lens of intermedia, it examines how cookbooks can function beyond their traditional role as instructional guides, incorporating elements of storytelling, memory, multi-sensory perception, and performativity. Conversely, it investigates how artists' books adopt the cookbook form, utilizing those same industrial elements and drawing from the cookbook’s cultural history to address themes of gender, identity, and culture. Utilizing artifact analysis, informed by intermedia/intermediality, feminist theory, food-centered life history, autoethnography, and autotheory, it presents twelve case studies—six cookbooks that function as art, and six artists’ books that adopt cookbook forms—that demonstrate how books are existing in an intermedial space between cookbooks and artist’s books through their interplay of content, materiality, context, and reader engagement. Across these examples, this dissertation shows how the cookbook’s form can be transformed into a communicative, aesthetic, and at times subversive object. This dissertation contributes to a deeper understanding of intermedia art by proposing the cookbook as an understudied yet potent site of artistic inquiry. It also expands the conversation around domestic and feminist art practices by emphasizing how everyday, utilitarian forms can be recontextualized as art. In doing so, this research has implications for artists and scholars across disciplines interested in the intersections of art, food and gender, and book forms, providing new frameworks for analyzing how cookbooks and artworks that use cookbooks forms both document and contribute to the creation of culture, particularly that of women and marginalized communities.