The more I explore the opus, the more I realize how much it is not just a conceptual and visual encyclopedia, but also an encyclopedic experiment in all sorts of different image-making techniques.  Printing on everything from creamy handmade paper to phone book pages, using everything from offset printing to wood-type letterpress, the books use overprinting, negative image printing, collage, digital image manipulation, text-as-image, and more to create the wide-ranging stylistic interpretations that makes up the Encyclopedia.

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Second Encyclopedia of Tlön

Robin Price, 43

Robin Price's 43

Clever, visually enticing, introspective, humorous, Robin Price’s 43 is a delightful response to a 43rd birthday.  Price has concocted a book structured around the number 43 in every way you can imagine.  Having compiled a personal bibliography of 86 (twice 43, see?) books which have played a significant role in her life, Price began counting in them, forwards and backward – pages, sentences, words – to find the gems that might lie at the 43rd position.  She then took these texts and laid them out on translucent pages which float above sections of maps (all from the 43rd parallel)  to spell out the themes in her life. Undulating shapes beneath starkly gridded text combine into a visual harmony. A river, running through the whole book and printed on the translucent paper seems to merge with the maps below confounding one’s perception of the different layers.  It is a wonderful book, especially when you start to read all the excerpts from her autobibliogaphy  (to coin a term; this book makes me want to invent new vocabulary…).

Emily Larned, Stock Project

Emily Larned's Stock Project

A set of  3 socio-economic broadsides, available individually or as a set, Emily Larned’s Stock Project is appropriately printed on old defunct stock certificates. Bold black lettering, turned sideways and printed over the delicate engraving of the originals, proclaims the misguided impetus of putting too much stock in the name or price of an object. Taking her theme a step further, Larned changed the price of the broadsides throughout the day on Friday in response to the vagaries of the Dow Jones Average.  Calling in each hour to learn the current price of the DJA, she increased or decreased the price of the prints accordingly. True to the nature of our economic markets, once the closing bell hit on Friday, the price was set for the rest of the Fair.

I have to mention another project Larned was showcasing (but of which I don’t have pictures): ILSSA aka Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts, a collaborative venture with Bridget Elmer which you too can join and support the movement that “favors independent workshop production by antiquated means and in relatively limited quantities.” The joyous perversity with which they turn conventional economic wisdom on its head, declaring as their mission “as many hours as it takes,” is indicative of the new flavor of DIY in the 21st century.

Carolee Campbell/Ninja Press,  The Intimate Stranger

Ninja Press The Intimate Stranger

Carolee Campell of Ninja Press was showing a new book, still in proof form, called (I believe) The Persephones, which utilized a lovely wash of ink stippled by means of salt sprinkled onto the wet paper which sucked up all the ink surrounding it and left a gorgeous mottled pattern.  But, true to form, the book I took pictures of was fundamentally geometric and symbolic in nature. The Intimate Stranger is made up of sheets cut to reveal sections of subsequent pages and designed to create a visual harmony between spreads.  Geometrically geographic in design, each page spread combines printed shapes and lines that interact with the cuts in the sheets; as the pages are turned, lines that had formed one trajectory on a former spread, take on a new role on the next spread, creating an interconnected landscape in which the text is positioned.

Stay tuned for more from the Fair….

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More from the Hybrid Book Fair

Anatomy of Insanity by Maureen Cummins

Last November I had the honor of judging the JAB-sponsored Critic’s Award for the Pyramid Atlantic Book Fair. Artists’ books take such a wide variety of interesting forms, I ended up giving two awards, one to  Anatomy of Insanity by Maureen Cummins and one to Karaoke by Masumi Shibata. The former is a visual interpretation of diagnosis patterns found in 19th century records of a mental hospital, and the latter is an experiment in visually manifesting the author’s experience of the memory-laden sound of karaoke.

Masumi Shibata's Karaoke

You may be wondering why I am writing about this just now; well I’m happy to announce the release of JAB25, the Spring 2009 issue of JAB: The Journal of Artists’ Books which contains my full review of these two books and why I chose them, but I didn’t have room in that article to articulate the criteria I used when judging and, more generally, some of the things I think about when looking at (or making) an artist’s book. So I thought I would do that here as a companion to the printed article.

Judging requires a certain degree of focus, lest you get lost in the sea of possibilities, so I focused on 3 aspects of book art that I was looking for:

• Visually and tactilely compelling
• Content that takes me somewhere (but where the art, not the content, does the heavy lifting)
• Structural integrity

Criteria 1: Visually and Tactilely Compelling

It may seem odd to combine these two criteria into one since they involve two very different senses, but I find it can sometimes be difficult to extricate the one from the other when analyzing my reaction to a work.  The materials used in a piece can have such a significant impact on its visual experience.  [Of course both are also intertwined with, and affected by, the book's meaning as well, but I am speaking here just of the sensory experience of the work.]

I do not think that there are any visual forms, or production methods, or materials that are intrinsically better than others, but I do believe that materials have particular qualities and certain combinations can work at cross purposes—the character of the images straining against the texture of their paper for instance—which detracts from the overall effect of the piece. I found this in some of what I saw at the book fair—things that almost worked but left me feeling like something was lacking. Soft, dreamy images on hard shiny paper, for instance. I want a satsifying sensory experience as much as an intellectually compelling one.

Taking on the role of an award judge made me painfully aware of the somewhat accidental, personal nature of sensory taste. [I mean accidental in the philosophic sense in which it stands opposite essential]. What I find visually and tactilely appealing may say as much about me as about the piece itself. I sometimes feel helpless in the face of my senses, having  aesthetic longings for sensory enjoyments that I cannot achieve. I have always wanted, for instance, to like brussels sprouts (for reasons ranging from my delight in the odd way in which they grow like ping pong balls on stalks to a recognition of the great delicacy they are considered to be when smothered in browned butter), but no amount of intellectual understanding of these attractions can cajole the small bumps on my tongue to find the taste of a brussels sprout anything but awful. Almost more disconcerting is the way in which taste can suddenly change without warning or explanation (asparagus used to be in my brussels sprout camp, but now I adore it). Interestingly, I’ve always found my visual sense to be more ‘trainable’ and open to learning to enjoy new things than are some of my other senses.

Nonetheless, I do believe that there are aesthetic principles that can make a piece of visual art more universally compelling and effective.  Part of the process of judging is focusing more on these aspects and less on the quirks of one’s own personal taste. The burden of judging lies in the recognition that the latter inevitably plays a role even when the former is well satisfied.

Criteria 2: Content That Takes Me Somewhere

The importance of content in artists’ books has lately become something of a rallying cry in the field, though there still remains a need to explore what, exactly, that means.  I would maintain that content does not equal text—visual imagery can speak as eloquently as the best turned phrase—but it does imply a certain level of specificity.  The kind of specificity that gives shape and substance to an idea. I want a work to take me somewhere, whether that be to contemplation, or insight, or  laughter, I want to find when I reach the end of a book that I have arrived at somewhere more than a cliche. I want to feel that the artist has let me share in their unique vision of the world. I don’t require that the content be of a serious nature in order to be substantial. Humor, beauty, whimsical delight—all are as significant components of a full life as the political outrage, pain, and suffering that too often masquerades as the only scope for ‘important’ art.

Questions I ask myself when looking at a piece include: what specifically does this work say about its subject? and is that interesting or does it remain in the realm of the obvious? is the content contained within the work or is it merely a pointer after which I have to use my own knowledge of the subject to fill in the gaps? is half the content in a lengthy explanation in the colophon or is it fully played out within the pages of the book itself?

These questions underly my comment that I want the art, not the content, to do the heavy lifting in a work of art. The depth of meaning in a piece should come from the artistic interpretation of the subject, not from the external importance or inherent interest of the topic. This seems to be especially problematic with the hot issues of the day. How many book have you seen on X (fill in the blank with the topic du jour: war, child abuse, depression, global warming, political repression, etc) that really don’t say much except maybe that X happens (i know that) or that X is bad (i know that too). Do something more than point at a topic and let it do all the heaving lifting.  Don’t use the topic’s own emotional impact as a crutch to move me. Tell me something uniquely your own about it. Show me the details of what it looks like, or how it plays out in the human experience. Examine the contradictions. Make the art speak.

Criteria 3: Structural Integrity

Book artists have the luxury of control. Control over their layouts, control over their materials, control over their constructions. I like to see books where that control is used to create a structurally-integrated whole in which the formal elements complements, enhances, and/or completes the meaning of the book.

Structure is the architectural, spatial elements of a book and it can be played out both in the 3-dimensional elements like the binding and shape of the book, as well as the 2-dimensional relationships of elements such as the layout of the page or page spread. Structural integrity can take many forms, sometimes subtle—quietly complementing the piece, and sometimes central—shaping the primary mode of the experience. My desire for structural integrity does not require that a book’s structure take the lead role, just that there be a consonance between the book’s meaning and its structure; that they not fight each other. Shibata uses a plain codex binding and simple materials for Karaoke, but it suits the book perfectly.

On the other hand, in some books, the layering of different structural elements can be effectively utilized to create a rich experience.  Cummin’s Anatomy of Insanity, for instance, does not stop at a structure merely imitative of its subject (the book is bound as though it were medical record), but further employs that structure to convey elements of the book’s meaning: the male and female sections are juxataposed so they can be viewed simultaneously; the pages have a translucence that compounds the visual impact of the differences between the male and female diagnoses.

I have been speaking of all these elements as though they can be treated separately, but in truth I find them far more intertwined than that. Beautiful materials do little if they don’t mesh with the content of the book; structural elements can rely on the types of materials used, intriguing structure don’t save banal content. The point is not to think of them as a checklist of elements, which might all too easily lead to their mindless exploitation (“use handmade paper—special collections librarians love it” I once heard it advised, as though the element existed independent from the context of its book), but rather to ask something of the books we look at and make; to inquire into how their constituent components interact to form our experience. Always ask. Ever question.

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On Judging the Pyramid Atlantic Critic’s Award

Ten Years of Uzbekistan by Ken Campbell and David King

I’d like to turn now to a very different kind of absence. Ken Campbell and David King’s Ten Years of Uzbekistan takes up the disturbing issues of the absence of those who have been subject to political repression, and perhaps worse, the complicity required to effect such obliteration. Taking as a starting point, the book’s namesake – a work produced by the well-known Russian constructivist artist, Alexander Rodchenko, Campbell and King investigate and react to the history of Rodchenko’s book which saw the turning of the tides during Stalinist rule. The original Ten Years of Uzbekistan was Rodchenko’s celebration of the glory of the first ten years of soviet rule in the region. Published in 1934, it was a piece of propaganda, describing the advancements brought to the Uzbeki state, complete with portraits of politicians and other dignitaries of the area.  Not long passed, however, before Stalin’s purges began and many of these party dignitaries were declared enemies of the state to be reviled and sent to their deaths along with some million plus others during the 2-years of the purges.  But the Stalinist agenda was more thorough than just imprisonment and death. The purge had to happen at every level—books that pictured the newly-declared enemies were themselves banned and to be purged or destroyed.

The Commisar Vanishes: Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia by David King

David King in his research found Rodchenko’s own copy of his book with the names and faces unceremoniously blotted out with large swaths of black ink—obliteration by the designer of his own work at the direction of a leader who ten years earlier had called for the creation of the book in the first place.  Through careful research and as part of his much larger project, The Commisar Vanishes: Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia,  to record the doctoring of pictures under Stalin’s reign, King recovered the identities of each obliterated figure.  Campbell then transformed these images into a commentary not just on political repression but also a bitter judgment on the complicity of an artist in the act of censorship.  Campbell and King’s artists’ book version of Ten Years of Uzbekistan re-presents 10 of these obliterated images, accompanied by information identifying who each is and telling his or her story.

Ten Years of Uzbekistan

The first thing you notice about Campbell and King’s book, (besides its rather monumental size—it is 20 inches tall), is the heaviness of the ink.  Layer after layer is built up until you cannot even sense the texture of the paper underneath. The ink and its polychromatic glory becomes a subject itself , as though Campbell is saying to Rodchenko, “I see your ink and I raise you 10 layers.”  The focus of this artists’ book is not simply the tragic and untimely deaths of these political functionaries branded enemies of the state by Stalin’s dysfunctional reign of terror, but rather it is the fact of death and gulag not being sufficient—the need for total annihilation of all traces of the person—that is Campbell and King’s main concern. This is absence in the extreme.  Absent in body. Absent in image. Absent in Text. Absent in Memory.

From the first page, the book emphasizes inkish obliteration and censorship.  The black bars of the censor are repeated page after colorful page before the images even start. If you stare for long enough you realize that in the chaos of color, the title is being repeated and then occluded in layer upon layer of ink.

Ten Years of Uzbekistan - detail

Then the images begin. Each person stamped bureaucratically with their number  in large graphic roman numerals.  The thick layers of ink are visually palpable.  Whatever ink he used is extremely shiny  (note the light reflection in many of my photographs) and it sits on the surface in such a way that each layer can be literally felt under those that come after it. [click the image to see a larger version which shows these layers more clearly.]

Each image appears multiple times. Once as it appeared in Rodchenko’s self-censored copy, and then again in many variations as part of Campbell’s on-the-press manipulations and experiments.  Plates are turned upside down and printed over each other, then overprinted again with the text of their stories.  Interestingly, what isn’t here are the unadulterated original images that David King had found through his research.  Again, I maintain this is because in some ways the people themselves are not the primary subject here, but rather the act of what was done to them.  It is hard for us to imagine the thoroughness of the Stalinist agenda—the ability to manipulate history to the point that people who were there were made absent, not to mention people who were absent being put there.  [A major part of the propaganda machine was not just airbrushing people out of photos, but also inserting Stalin into important historical communist scenes where he had not actually been present.]

Pages on Yan Rudzutak

So it is somewhat hard to pinpoint one single message in this book.  On the one hand, it could be said that Stalin’s obliteration agenda was a success.  For generations of soviets, these people did not exist.  Their absence was complete.  The difficulty we have with reading some of their stories because of Campbell’s inking techniques reflects, perhaps, a certain subdued acknowledgment of failure by the artist.  Is it too late to resurrect these men? Is this primarily an expression of the success of Stalin’s campaign and the horror at a fellow artist’s complicity in effecting it.

On the other hand, the obliteration didn’t succeed.  After all, King has rediscovered the identity of these people so long absent from history.  In the end, the propaganda machine failed to achieve its final goal, and perhaps this is what is symbolized by the defiantly lush, colorful abandon with which Campbell plays on the press achieving inky obliteration upon obliterations but, in the process, breathing a kind of life back into these men and their stories. It is as if through sufficient layers of ink laid down with this different purpose, that initial act of inked obliteration can be undone and the figures restored to history if not to life.

More information and images of the book are available on Ken Campbell’s website. [once there, click the image of the book to view the page images.]  In our next post we’ll look at the kind of historical absence that slowly occurs from innovation and change, as opposed to the directed and intentional absence enforced by political regimes.

I’d like to thank the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago for access to their copy of Campbell’s book.

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Figuring Absence, pt 3: Ken Campbell’s Ten Years in Uzbekistan

Exquisite Pain by Sophie Calle

So let us now turn to Sophie Calle’s book Exquisite Pain which takes up both of this idea of absence as it relates to belonging and also examines that process in which the emotional presence of the absence becomes less over time (but in this case, quite intentionally and to good effect).

Exquisite Pain turns a failed love affair into a timeline of before and after the point at which her lover leaves her. “Before unhappiness” and “after unhappiness,” as she puts it. The underlying story is of the time when she received a three-month travel grant that she used to go to Japan at the end of which she and her lover planned a reunion in New Dehli. During her absence he begins an affair with someone else but in an act of pure cowardice not only doesn’t tell her but calls her several hours before their rendezvous saying he is getting on the plane for New Dehli.  She then arrives, in her outfit bought specially for the occasion, to be greeted with a cryptic note full of lies about how he’d been in an accident and couldn’t come. After hours on the phone trying to get through to him she finally does and instantly knows it is over and that he’d never intended to be there.

Before Unhappiness

The book is visually divided between the before and after.  The “before” section chronicles her trip, which she made by taking a train from France, through Russia, then China, finally to end up in Japan. Each day is counted down with a large bordercrossing-like stamp declaring the number of days left till unhappiness. Each page spread in the “before” section is framed in red – Red for Russia, Red for China, Red for Japan. Red for love. Red for anger. The layout of “before” is somewhat haphazard – sometimes there is text on the left and an image on the right,  sometimes an image spreads across both pages. It is often hard to tell where the images were taken or how they piece together into any kind of story. (You’ll see later how this contrasts with the “after” section.)

Day 0

The interesting thing about this section is of course the countdown.  The simple presence of that stamp, changes how you experience the images and stories being presented. Things take on a certain foreboding. History is rewritten to contain a prescience it didn’t have at the time, though she does admit to a fair amount of trepidation throughout the trip because her lover had told her he does not take well to being left alone. The pain of that moment when she realized he would no longer be there by her side is ever-present in the book: before, during, and after it actually occurred. The book is telling her story not by telling the actual story, but by rewriting it to visually and conceptually express the overwhelming centrality of the pain that she felt in that one moment of realization he was no longer a part of her life, and for several months afterwards. It is shown here by the only full-page spread without any frame. The picture of a red telephone on an empty bed in a hotel room in New Dehli. It is the zero point on the timeline and everything radiates out from it. The arc of the book’s narrative thus shows, what we talked about before – the idea of belonging and intentionality that is so integral to the idea of absence. This unnamed lover is, after all, not present throughout the entire book. But it is the absence on the intended day. The day of the reunion. The day he was supposed to be there, that matters. That is the absence. The rest is separation.

After Unhappiness

The second half of the book, “After unhappiness,” takes on a very different visual form. The layout is extremely rigid.  The left page is black, the right is white. On the top left is the picture of the phone – repeated on each page, and below it a narrative of the story of her affair and how he left her. On the right side are stories told by Calle’s friends in response to her question “When did you suffer most?” accompanied by a picture illustrating the story. Some are far more wrenching that what she is experiencing, and serve as a kind of foil to her pain.  What we are seeing, though this is not obvious at first, is the cure for her pain. The telling and retelling of her story is a process to reach the point in which she can see him for the jerk he truly is and rid herself of her pain.

Day 95

One page after another the story gets shorter and the ink gets lighter as her pain fades.  What we are seeing is the opposite of what we saw in Meejin Yoon’s book. There the banality of sameness served to remind us of the inner conflict we may feel over our own forgetting of tragic events, not to mention the fleeting nature of the meaning in a memorial. Here, in Calle’s book, banality is used as a cure to the too little forgetting and as a memorial not to the object that was absent, but simply to the author’s past experience of that absence.

In the next installment we’ll take up political absence as explored in Ken Campbell’s lush letterpressed opus, Ten Years of Uzbekistan.

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Figuring Absence, pt 2: Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain

Studying Artists’ Books

One of the exciting things about CBAA was seeing the number of students in Masters and PhD programs who are working on theses and dissertations about artists’ books. I wrote in my last post about University of Pennsylvania student Michelle Strizever’s analysis and comparison of the digital and physical encounter with an artists’ book.

Another such talk was Sarah Hulsey’s Linguistic Theory and Book Art. I first met Sarah when we were both learning how to take care of our printing presses in one of Paul Moxon’s Vandercook Maintenance classes, but in addition to being a printer, Sarah is studying linguistics at MIT. Her exploration of the applicability to linguistic concepts to analysis of artists’ books was a refreshing and promising approach. She took patterns such as recursion and using examples of several artists’ books, walked through how such terms could describe some of the factors at play in the narrative and structures of the books.

Slavicist Melissa Tedone, who is currently in the Conservation program at UT Austin, looked at three aspects of the book—architecture, art, and literature—as they played out in the various artistic movements of revolutionary Russia.

Three students from Columbia College Chicago, Brandon Graham, Karol Shewmaker, and Matthew Aron, led a discussion on the importance of high-quality writing in artist’s books. Arguing for the advantages  of going outside the field for critical theories, they explored John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, Phillipe LeJeune’s On Autobiography, and Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium which included what he considered to be the values of literature: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity, and Consistency.

I was sorry that I only caught the tail end of Jennifer Chisnell’s discussion of the artists’ book as metafiction as that topic seemed to be one that re-occurred throughout the conference in panels and individual discussions.

Favorite Books to Teach With

A group of artist/teachers from the Bay Area have been meeting together reguarly and they created a presentation in which each discussed a book that they find particularly useful for introducing students to artists’ books. In particular they talked about sequence, flow, and word & image. This is a great topic and I’d love to hear others share their favorite teaching books.  I’ve tried to track down where there is an online version (full or in part) of the books that they discussed.

• Macy Chadwick presented Warja Lavater’s Cendrillon, a retelling of the story of Cinderella in which each character is represented by a graphic shape.
• Julie Chen presented Barbara Tetenbaum’s Gymnopedia no. 4 which acts like visual musical score in four parts
• Betsy David’s presented Warren Lehrer and Dennis Bernstein’s French Fries, a typographic panoply in which each color/typeface represents a different character in a story about a day in the life of diner.
• Alisa Golden presented Coleman Polhemus’ Crocodile Blues, a children’s book which Alisa argued shares many of the features of artists’ books
• Michael Henninger presented David Stair’s Asperity, a book whose pages are made of sandpaper
• Charles Hobson presented Michael Hannon and William Wiley’s Fables, a collaboration between an artist and poet which was printed by Harry Reese at his Turkey Press
• Nance O’Banion presented Lisa Kokin’s Supreme Court: A Dream
• Chris Rolik presented Johanna Roger’s Secrets which appears to be simply an all-white book until it comes alive under UV light.

Point of View

Susan Viguers did an interesting presentation on point of view in artists books using a variety of books to show how point of view can be played out in different ways.  She examined Valerie Carigan’s Messenger, Katie Baldwin’s Storm Prediction,  Clarissa Sligh’s Wrongly Bodied Two, Clifton Meador’s Memory Lapse, Michell Wilson’s El Proceso, and the point-of-view tour de force, Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover.

Just recently I was re-watching Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent movie classic Man with a Movie Camera and was struck by its similarities to Cover to Cover. Both works play with the viewer’s sense of narrative continuity by disrupting the point of view and confounding who is watching and who is being watched. Vertov and Snow are both exposing the ability of their respective mediums to lull the viewer/reader into a belief in the truth of the medium.  They each exploit this strength by creating a rich, compelling visual narrative, only to then break it apart by exposing the artifice required to construct it.

Snow’s book is an completely visual journey, following a character as he walks through a door, into a room, interacting with what he finds, and then continues to follow him through the mundane journeys of a day. This seemingly seamless visual narrative is punctuated, however, by photographs which reveal the 2 photographers required to capture the various perspectives of the man’s movements. As the man enters a room, the photographer behind him capturing his back as it walks through the door, also captures the photographer on the other side who is capturing his front entering the room. As the book continues, photographs that appear to be a part of the seamless visual narrative of the man’s day turn out to be photographs being held by the man, thus revealing the artifice of this visual narrative which must, in fact, have been photographed not in one continuous stream as it appears, but in multiple ‘scenes’ shot and reshot, perhaps even over several days.

I highly recommend finding a copy of Cover to Cover at a library (a search of worldcat.org will tell you the nearest location) and studying it closely.  And in the meantime, you could get your hands on a copy of Man with a Movie Camera for a similar study in point-of-view and truth in image. [This all harkens back to my comments on Munari's Photo-Reportage which approached the same theme from a different angle]

Odds and Ends

I also find myself left with cryptic notes from the conference about things to look at that I can’t remember the context in which they were discussed, but I list them here as being of possible general interest.

• ocac.edu/fresh a lovely online exhbition from the Oregon College of Art and Craft
• Fully Booked: Cover Art and Design for Books
• A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (the Russian Futurist manifesto)
• How to Make Your Own Cheap Artist’s Book by Michael Goodman
• Scratch by Christian Boltasnki
• The Rational of Hypertext by Jerome McGann
• The Lure of the Object by Emily Apter
• The Art of Written Forms by Donald M. Anderson
• Pliny’s Tale of the Corinthian Maiden

and a wonderful little quote:

Metaphor is something the brain does when complexity renders it unable to think straight. ~Brian Greenberg

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CBAA Notes, pt. 2

Not a ground-shattering word, but one the book art field might benefit from employing more liberally.  I’ve recently returned from a stimulating four days at the New York Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference/New York Art Book Fair, where I had my eyes opened to a lot of interesting works and ideas, many of which differed significantly from the manner in which I work and think about books.  It was delightfully refreshing.

I wonder, however, at the persistent desire (in evidence at the conference) to define the totality of book art by a mere slice of the field. This happens both explicitly as well as implicitly.  It is easy to spot the explicit definitional statements that some people seem compelled to employ (and there is at least something to be said for the candor of such explicitness), but even more pervasive are the implicit assumptions that underlie much of the field’s discourse—discourse framed by an obliviousness to the very idea that not everyone shares one’s selfsame perspective. Take, for instance, the impetus to create inexpensive, easily distributed books—the democratic multiple.  Why is it that so many artists and publishers talk about that motivation as a given that is universally shared among book artists, rather than as a particular approach that they themselves happen to have embraced?

To put it another way, why, as a field, are we so resistant to the idea of eras and/or movements within our medium? If I were a painter I could go to the Met and look at medieval paintings and I could go to MoMA and see conceptual paintings, but would I then try to assert that this one is not painting because the painter’s approach and interests differ from mine?  So why is it so common to display a need to define away much of the activity in the book art field?  To not be satisfied with saying “this is my slice within a greater whole.” Even our conferences tend to divide along these lines with relatively homogenous programs and points of view.  Having been to the Wellesley conference and this New York conference, each were so good in their own way, but you’d think I was on two different planets.

Context is a such a useful thing, and there is a certain degree of honesty that comes with framing one’s remarks with phrases like “I believe” and “from my perspective” instead of implying one’s ideas are universal with “artists’ books are” or “we all want to…”  At some level this is a rhetorical issue, but rhetoric is powerful.  And not only that, it can be quite revealing of ones prejudices.

I have to admit to something that will likely be heresy to some. Ed Ruscha’s books do not rock my world.  I understand how and why they were significant, but they are of an era and of a type and I am of a different era and a different type. As such, I feel no need to reject them but neither do I embrace them as fundamentally definitional. They may have defined a movement but they do not define a field.   I find them interesting for what they are (and were) and I learn from that, but I also learn a lot (probably even more) from books that are quite different, such as the William Kentridge I just bought at the NY Art Book Fair (I’ll have to write later on the books I bought and saw…). And then look at something like Oliver Byrne’s Euclid from which there is so much to be gained but which makes irrelevant the importance of declaring whether it falls in or out of those carefully drawn definitional boundaries.

In my talk at this NY Contemporary Artist’s Book conference I characterized the field as an archipelago full of islands that don’t interact.  I’ve had more people come up to me and try to convince me of the virtues and exclusivity of their island.  I’d rather fashion myself as a traveler – set out in some ships and establish some trade routes.  Exploration seems to me to be such an excellent means to innovation and devleopment.  I know this sounds a little too much like a  “can’t we all just get along” speech. I’m not sure I’m asking for everyone to get along.  I just think we should acknowledge each other and forgo the partisan rhetoric.

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Undefining the Book Art Field