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

Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön 

Atlas volume from the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön

Rouge volume from the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön

The ability to charm and amuse without descending into empty frivolity or clever cynicism is an enviable talent. It requires a unexpected turn of mind coupled with a serious intelligence. And it takes just such a mind to undertake a project like the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön. A collaboration of german artists Peter Malutzki and Ines von Ketelhodt, The Encyclopedia, 10 years in the making and comprising 50 volumes, is a response to the Jorge Luis Borges short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. In Borges’s philosophically sophisticated story, Tlön is a fictional land (with no nouns in its language) which slowly over the course of the story begins to manifests actual artifacts in the real world (the real world of Borges’s fictional story that is…). Presented first as a mysterious land that exists only as an entry that appears to come and go in the Anglo-American Cyclopedia, the narrator begins an obsession with the place and eventually come across a single volume from an Encyclopedia of Tlön.  Malutzki and von Ketelhodt take up the challenge and create an entire encyclopedia of the fictional land and do so with great creativity and style. Using a keyword for each volume, Air, Flora, Labyrinth, Nacht, Rouge, etc. they artistically investigate a series of themes  (there are the element books, the color books, etc.) over the course of their encyclopedia.

Quiz volume from the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön

One of the remarkable aspects of the endeavor is the strong differences in graphic style, content, and layout of each volume, a difference that is more than just a difference between those volumes done by Malutzki and those done by von Ketelhodt. Each keyword engenders a unique work, some humorous, some contemplative, some cryptic, each a world unto themselves. Both artists engage seriously the philosophical, epistemological, and literary themes of Borges’s story, weaving their own selection of well-known authors into the texts of their volumes, but not without a measure of humor—the Leibniz volume which explores the philosopher’s De Arte Combinatoria has as its cover a silver-grey image of a Leibniz cookie and the Atlas volume reconceives the topographical lines of maps as outlines of hungry creatures eyeing each other, ready to pounce (see the 1st image above).

The Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön  is a true tour de force not only capturing a wide variety of ideas, but also using just about every reproductive and artistic technique you can think of: collage, linocut, letterpress, offset, each volume uses its own combination of techniques to embody its topic. For those of us not able to afford the well-justified price of the Encyclopaedia, a catalog of the work provides a good substitute.  A beautiful work itself, this multi-lingual catalog reproduces Borges’s story and provides commentary from librarians and curators on each of the volumes followed by a generous sampling of images from each volume. Borgesian in its layout, the book employs a color-coded notational system to link and cross-reference the 3 sections.

Die Luft ist Kühl und es Dunkelt : ein Rheinbuch

Die Luft ist Kühl und es Dunkelt : Ein Rheinbuch

As impressive as it is, the Encyclopaedia was not the only thing that has occupied these artists. Peter Malutzki, for instance, was showing a wonderful book, Die Luft ist Kühl und es Dunkelt : ein Rheinbuch .  Divided into three parts, the book explores the history, ambiance, and appeal of the legendary Rhine river. In the first section, the river literally runs through the pages, as Malutzki interprets each section of the river, playfully at times (he has castles on either side throwing rocks at each other in a notoriously narrow part of the river).

Ein Rheinbuch section 2

The central section of the book transforms the river into a stream of words in two colors, set mirroring each other, one representing the French and the other the German perspective (the river was a contentious boundary point between the two countries throughout history).

In the last part, reconciliation finally occurs, signaled by a typographical change that sees the river running at angles up and down the page with text and images crossing over it, the two side intertwining. It is in this third section that Malutzki most reveals his personal love of the river, recreating a sense of its beauty in the darkling light.

Tree Portraits by Melanie Mowinski

Tree Portraits - Alaska Series

An entirely different approach to a personally significant natural phenomenon, Melanie Mowinski’s Tree Portraits express her interest in bringing the outdoors into interior spaces. She has done several series of tree portraits, each from different areas where she has spent time. The Alaska Series was the one that I looked at, and it records trees residing in Denali National Park.  Each series is made up of a boxed set of pamphlets, one for each tree, the pages of which are rubbings from the tree’s trunk. A simple idea representing a simple phenomena, but rich in its visual variety.  The pages take on a mesmerizing progression of pattern  as each part of the tree (including graffiti carved into one of the trunks) is revealed through the subtle shadings that translate the tree’s bark onto a flat page.

East West by Leilei Guo

East West

The last book I want to mention is Leilei Guo’s East/West. The artist came all the way from Beijing to the book fair and her work juxtaposes cultural artifacts from both the east and the west.  Iconic images make their way through the book, as silk-screened silhouettes,  as cutouts,, and finally as photographic images where they reveal themselves to be copies in a storage yard of cheap imitations.

East West

The images alternate between eastern and western cultural artifacts and they invade each others pages with aplomb, a pink Venus de Milo looking coy as two Buddhas peek through a cutout window.  An intriguing structure, the book consists of stiff panels that move on hinged flanges, allowing the book a fair amount of movement despite its stiffness.

East West verso pages

Bright colored pages, silk-screened with an abstracted background pattern, the pages reverse to more somber colors. Scattered between the silk-screened pages are the outdoor storehouses of statuettes.

East West photo page

It is these images that have been echoed throughout the book, but here what had appeared as singular images, are now shown in the context from which they had been drawn – not museums or cultural sites but fields of  cultural icons reproduced out of scale and thrown together in a hodgepodge of cultural kitsch.

Hybrid Book Fair Awards

And to wrap things up, a list of the prizes awarded at the Fair:

JAB: 800,000 by Bill Snyder and Baghdad Times by Antonio Serna

Free Library of Philadelphia: The works of Bea Nettles

Wellesley: The Way to Empty by Sun Young Kang

Swarthmore: Typography of Home by Macey Chadwick

Yale: Cunning Chapters by Susan Johanknecht

University of Pennsylvania: A Guide to Higher Learning by Julie Chen

Columbia University: A Pink Story by Maureen McCallum

Philadelphia Center for the Book: The Way to Empty by Sun Young Kang

Jaffe Center for Book Arts: Handmade Vegetable Papyrus by Robert Lewis

Temple University: Good/Best by Else Wiener

University of the Arts: Catalog forthe Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön by Peter Malutzki and Ines von Ketelhodt

Bright Hill Press: Mimpish Squinnies by Lone Oak Press

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Even More Books from the Hybrid Book Fair

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

Margot Lovejoy’s The Book of Plagues is not a new work, but she was featuring it because it was printed here at the Borowsky Center.  The book is a montage of imagery and information about plagues – from the 1300s to the present day.  Mixing microscopic images of the AIDS virus with woodcuts of plague doctors in their beaked masks, the book unfolds in a complicated two-way structure.  A second book, Paradoxic Mutations, long and skinny and with an equally complicated strucutre, was something she made at the same time using the parts of the sheet of paper that were unused for the plague book.

In Cahoots Press

Macy Chadwick’s In Cahoots Press had some interesting new works.  Despite the differences in topics in her books  – everything from geometry to string alphabets for the blind,  there is a visually cohesive vocabulary that runs through her work.   Chadwick’s book, The Topography of Home, was one of the award winners at the show (it is the one pictured in the bottom left of the picture).

Half Life/Full Life

Perhaps Chip Schilling’s Half Life/Full Life especially intrigued me, because I’ve actually seen the Doomsday clock (it being housed on the Univ of Chicago campus in the offices of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists), but it really is of interest to all of us who have lived through the political ups and downs that have caused its movement over the past six decades.  The book opens up into a freestanding circular structure, each opening of which includes an event that has precipitated the movement of the clock’s hands – from the fall of the Berlin Wall that set it 17 minutes away from midnight, to the thermonuclear device testing in the 50s that brought it as close as one minute to midnight.  To add some perspective, Schilling has paired these momentous events, with  popular culture going on at the time—top movies, songs, etc.—revealing the human ability to continue living in the face of near crisis, or the human inability to grapple with serious issues, depending on your perspective.

I also had an interesting conversation with Thomas Parker Williams who is mixing his own inks using transparent base and pigments from Kremer.   He was showing me the effects of differnt ratios of pigment to base and seeing as this is something I’ve been thinking about doing for some time, it was quite inspiring.

Time to head off to the conference again, so I will have more to report later.

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Report from the Hybrid Book Fair

Mail from last week

I love the mail. I don’t get nearly enough of it (at least not of the good kind), though whether that is because I live in Chicago where there’s a good chance that my mail is stuffed under some carrier’s porch, or because email has killed the letter (and with it that marvelously crisp, cockled onionskin paper that people used to type on and which I need for an artist’s book and am dismayed to have discovered is no longer manufactured…) it is sometimes hard to tell.

Let’s start again.  I love mail. Last week, at least, the mail brought all sorts of delights, so despite this week’s hike in the postal rate I want to write a paean to old-fashioned, paper-in-envelope mail.  Now I have to admit that it was primarily what was inside my mail that was so exciting: My friend Tate Shaw’s latest artist’s book, The Placeholders, which arrived out of the blue; a copy of The New Manifesto of the Newlights Press which I had ordered, several old books about color (see last post), and a couple of sheets of onionskin paper (see comment above).  I’ll write about the  two artists’ books in future posts but today I want to focus on how these items took part in an age-old art of exchange of physical objects through a vast, networked, mediated system and why this system has so inspired artists.

Visual Individuality

screen of email

Two of these items had the added treat of creative, DIY packaging.  Tate had taken an image from his artist’s book and enlarged it to perfectly fit the front half of one of those soft, brown mailers, transforming the ubiquitously dull kraft paper into a harbinger of its content (see picture above). When you receive something like that, you know it is going to be good.  Which brings me to my first observation: I can mentally sort my postal mail using visual clues in a way that is impossible with email. Compare this screenshot of my email inbox with stack of mail pictured above. Everything in my inbox has been rendered mute through the democratization of the interface. Each message takes up one line in the same sans serif font. I cannot easily distinguish the interesting message from the spam.  Or if I can, it is only through the crudest of distinctions (those spams that are  all in Cyrillic). But I have to actually read the subject and from lines to begin to sort out my email and find what is interesting or pressing. Compare that to the intricate visual clues we have and use to evaluate our postal mail. I don’t have to read any words to know I can throw away the ubiquitous Comcast flyer. Partly it is the size (always a slightly too big rectangle to fit my mailbox and so often torn around the edges); partly the paper (glossy, 70lb cardstock); partly the colors of the logo; all physical elements that conspire to make the piece instantly identifiable. Interesting mail is equally distinguishable—the shape of a holiday card; the bulge of a wedding invitation bursting with its hospitality; anything from my mother, even in a plain white envelope, made instantly identifiable by her handwriting on the address. There is a potential for individuation in mail that mirrors that in artist’s books (see, I’m not straying too far from my book art theme)—the ability to create a cohesive structure that declares itself from first glance and carries through to final read.

Stamps

Another one of the envelopes I got last week was a delightful Egyptian-themed #10-sized envelope (see picture at start of post). It was sent to me by Leslie Cefali, a stranger who had the generosity to respond to my Book-Arts_L call for onionskin paper by sending me some samples of what she had in order to check if they would suit my needs.  Not knowing her, the envelope threw me for a loop at first, even though we had corresponded via email. But despite my inability to immediately divine what was inside, I knew it was something interesting not only because of the vibrant mural that marched around the envelope but because the sender had taken care to match the theme of the stamps to the theme of the envelope.  Or so I thought. Once I opened it up, I realized that the entire thing was made out of an old calendar picture, cut and folded up to eek out a new purpose after it had outlived its usefulness to mark time. Even the stamps had been fabricated – complete with perforated edges to seal the look that had fooled me upon first glance.  A single real postage stamp among the several striking images of mummy’s heads and eyes guaranteed its arrival at my doorstep.

Frank Magnotta's page of stamps from The Book of Stamps

There is a fascination with stamps that has galvanized artists time and time again.  Miniature pictures attached to an envelope guaranteeing delivery of everything from a gracious thank you note to a mundane bill payment to any place around the globe—it is stunning when you think of it.  Serendipitously, in my week of good mail, I stopped by Powell’s Book Store on my way home from work and came upon a book by Cabinet, one of my favorite art and culture journals.  The Book of Stamps was a project that commissioned artists to create sets of stamps all of which are then cleverly reproduced twice – once as pages of perforated, glue-backed, tear-out stamps and once as a permanent page of the book itself. The artists’ responses ranged from an Arcimboldi-style stamp man whose face fills the sheet with each stamp only representing a part, to a set whose pictures all were of materials that cannot be shipped through the mail.

The Radio Post

The Radio Post

So now that I have my Book of Stamps, I have to decide if I am willing to tear  out these miniature pieces of art and use them on things, which is no easy prospect for someone who loves the integrity of things. Of course I realize the integrity of this publication is to be deconstructed by its reader, but I still hate to tear out the stamps. Conceptually I like the idea but viscerally, I resist. If I do decide to use them, I know the first thing I will do with them: decorate the envelope I will be sending to Denmark requesting a copy of The Radio Post #1.  The Radio Post is a publication which you can get for free, but only if you send your request via the post.  Write them a letter and they’ll send you a publication (it is all about analogue: radios, lighthouses, recording studios, etc.).  Now there is someone who understands the allure of the postal mail.

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The Allure of Postal Mail

Chevreul's Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors

I’ve been home sick with a cold and in my fevered state have come up with my dream class to teach to  book art students. The subject would be  the history of color—which may come as no surprise to anyone who knows me and my fascination with this topic, but I believe there really is more to this idea than just my own personal passions (and the fact that I would find this such a fun class to teach!).

Think what apt training this would be for book art students seeing how, like book arts itself, it sits at the crossroads between several different disciplines. For one thing, the history of color could serve as a focal point to combine issues in the history of the book with those in the history of art.  Developments in pigments, dyes, and inks have had profound effects on both book production (think, for instance, of Gutenberg’s development of oil-based ink) and painting (where would the Impressionists have been without their new synthetic paints in tubes?). Currently, book art programs still tend to be framed around traditional divisions. We teach the history of the book (I, in fact, teach the history of the book—I’m not exactly knocking that), but if we want to encourage students to think of the book in radically different ways, shouldn’t we also be teaching from a perspective that shows its history intersecting and intertwining with that of art instead? Or perhaps even more to the point, show how it overlaps with entirely different disciplines (so often set up in false dichotomies): the relationship between color-making and alchemy, medicine, chemistry, not to mention industrial manufacturing, has a rich history.

Raphael's Leo X with Cardinals

When you scrape your ink knife across the top of that can of ink and pull out a lovely red, are you thinking of aspirin? (Bayer began by making paints as well as pharmaceuticals, and mauve, of course, was discovered by accident in the search to cure malaria)  or perhaps you are imagining the little bugs gathered off of cactus plants in the new world and crushed to dye the cardinal’s robes crimson (and still used to color that Campari you’re fond of sipping on a hot summer day) and the subsequent development of the field of organic chemistry in the search to find a synthetic substitute for that brilliant red.

The yellow to blue oxidation process of indigo

Speaking of intersections, in this dream class I am teaching at a dream school that does not pigeon-hole courses as  either history/theory or studio but never both.  In my dream class the students would move back and forth equally between seminars and practical experiments. We live in a era that presumes color ubiquity and yet the entire history of color has been one of overcoming the physical, economic, geographical, etc. limitations of color. And to really understand this you need to get your hands into it. You have to work with malachite to see how the finer you grind the lighter the green gets – color and texture unremittingly tied in a frustratingly inverse relationship.  Once you’ve made a lake or experimented with dyes it becomes transparent how fortunes could be built on the control of alum mines (the Medicis held the papal monopoly). And of course the urge to incorporate color into books and the endless problems thereof is one of the more interesting parts of this story.  History comes alive in the studio, the studio is enriched by theory, why leave the connections to be made between the classes, not in them?

Goethe's Theory of Colours

And then, of course, there is color theory. Raised as so many of us were on the 64-box of Crayola crayons and an idealized, simplified theory of color (yellow+blue=green) we are often unduly ignorant of the complexities of color theory, let alone the art of color mixing. I wonder how many book art students could tell you the differences between Newton and Goethe, Rood and Munsell? And how many could speak at length about what they consider to be the primary colors and why? (they aren’t necessarily red, yellow, and blue—really).  Doesn’t the best learning come when we break open our assumptions. It is hard to fully understand what we know until we have seen it questioned and the more we know the more we can do interesting things with our printing. Spot color layering, CMYK printing, pantone mixing, color wheels—what do you gain, what do you lose with each?  Systems entail choices and choices entail compromises. It seems all the more pertinent, as many students increasingly use the computer for pre-press operations, to understand the difference between additive and subtractive color systems or to recognize that moving from RGB to CMYK involves more  than just choosing a menu option. Hmm, did I just hear the word gamut float across the breeze…?  And we haven’t even begun to talk about the physiology of color and how our brains interpret and respond to it. So many interesting angles.

And now, of course, we’ve come to the point at which all good readers may be asking the question—”isn’t this really just an excuse for you to buy more books about color? I note, for instance, a copy of Ridgway’s Color Standards and Color Nomenclature on ebay at the moment…”  Well yes, I don’t deny that is a legitimate point, the truth of which is only tempered by my inability to afford all those wonderful old books with their hand painted swatches or pasted-in color chips (didn’t I mention the historical challenges to actually reproducing color in books…).

From Brian Kennon's Black and White Reproductions of The Abstract Expressionists

So to divert your attention, perhaps I’ll end with an artist’s book from 2nd Cannons Publications that rather delights me. Brian Kennon’s Black and White Reproductions of the Abstract Expressionists abstracts the colors in 13 abstract expressionist painting into simple color swatches printed alongside black and white reproductions of the art, with lines pointing to where each color belongs.  It isn’t just the idea of abstracting an abstraction that makes this book so interesting. It is what it reveals about the role of color—the falseness that occurs when the colors are rendered equal through uniform-sized color squares, through reduction to an over-simplified color palette.  In separating form from color, Kennon points our attention to how subtle the action of color actually is in art. And this isn’t even to begin to discuss the fact the Kennon has made color swatches that are not always accurate in tonal value to the original paintings, thus creating a work with its own independent aesthetic tone and feel.

Now if only someone would let me teach my class….

[Many thanks the The Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago Library for the following images: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. [Zur Farbenlehre.] Erklärung Der Zu Goethe’s Farbenlehre Gehörigen Tafeln. Tübingen: Cotta, 1810 and M. E. Chevreul, Des Couleurs Et De Leurs Applications Aux Arts Industriels à l’Aide Des Cercles Chromatiques. Paris: J.B. Ballière, 1864.]

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History of Color

I’m not going to do that confusing blog thing in which I quote the entirety of the journal’s blog on my blog – hopefully this has whetted your appetite enough to simply go to the Mimeo Mimeo site where you can read all about the contents of the issue and more about the ideas behind the journal.  And most importantly – you can order a copy so you can spend your holiday pouring over it. Happy reading!

p.s.  I’m sorry to have to admit that I already have fallen down on my promise of regular columns (this has been a crazily busy couple of weeks) but I’m back now and am already half-way through my next full column (on my experience at the Pyramid Atlantic Book Fair).  Keep tuned and thanks for your patience as I get used to doing this…

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New issue of Mimeo Mimeo released

Why This Blog?
As you may have seen from my About page, I am an artist with a particular interest in books—making books, reading books, thinking about books, thinking about what I read, reading about how to make, making what I think about…  I am starting this blog in order to explore these areas on a regular basis and share my thoughts with others.

I believe what Andre Gide said, “the only real education comes from what goes counter to you.” This is easy enough to say but less simple to live by in practice. The tendency to gravitate towards that which accords with our own interests and ideas, to find confirmation from others of a like mind, to feel superior through criticism of those whose concerns differ from ours, has all too strong a pull.  This column is my attempt at an antidote for that – an exercise to keep myself venturing always into new territories, and to ensure those ventures are of a type more meaningful than tonight’s discovery that I am not particularly partial to Wensleydale cheese (useful to know, but hardly enough to supply sufficient velocity to prevent the gravitational thud of a static mind falling from orbit). I hope to explore and examine my reactions to the many different movements, and ideas, and artwork that exist in the book art field. We need more writing in he field and I hope this proves useful to more than just myself.

Scope and Goals
It seems only fair before asking of readers even a small part of their time, that I describe up front what kind of things I am planning for this column.  In many ways, my main goal is a personal one: I intend this as a commitment to regular writing – since writing transforms amorphous thoughts and reactions into something more meaningful.  I plan to write at least once each week about ideas: thoughts on things I have read, things I think about when I think about art-making, thoughts I have on dialogues current in the book art field, thoughts I have on what dialogue is absent from the book art field, etc.  Mini-essays that may be too short or informal for a printed publication and yet can take full advantage of the interactivity possible on the web.

At the same time, part of what makes me a book artist is my engagement with particular forms and formats—printing, book-making, etc.—and with how those forms can be used in engaging ways.  As such, I may occasionally write on the actual process of making things, on problems and solutions.  I don’t intend straightforward technical how-to articles (there are far better places to get such advice e.g., the Vanderblog and various listservs), but rather something more like a discussions of technical approaches to aesthetic issues, formal solutions that suit particular content demands, etc.

I hope that others find this column informative and I especially hope that you will respond and tell me your thoughts. Just click the comment button and join in the conversation.

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Welcome and a Word About This Blog