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.]

Post from: The Sign of the Owl

History of Color

 CBAA BIENNIAL CONFERENCE STOP
 MERRIMENT LIVELINESS DISCOURSE STOP
 ARCTIC MIDWINTER ENVELOPED IOWA CITY STOP
 —OWLET

Now if you attended John McVey’s CBAA talk,  Codex/Code : Book and Procedure at the Center of Telegraphic Reading and Writing, you might immediately wonder about the true meaning of my telegraph above.  Indeed, you would be right to do so for if you were to pull out your trusty Adam’s Cable Codex you would quickly discover that what I really said was “Please name and reserve berths for four gentlemen everywhere we can think of.  Will write soon. No prospect of higher prices at present.  Sell at once, even at a loss.  Keep me well informed. There is an uneasy feeling in commercial circles. What do you intend to do–Reply by wire. –12Midnight”

McVey’s talk explored the world of the codes and code books used during the heyday of the telegraph to convert common phrases and sentences into less expensive single  words that would then, in turn, be decoded by the receiver. His talk was a fascinating overview of a topic I knew nothing about and as soon as I got home from the conference I investigated the code book holdings of my library. The books themselves are typographic delights (especially for those of us who have a thing for columnar typography), but they are even more fascinating for the sociological evidence they provide of that society’s concerns and communication needs. Some of these code books are 4-5 inches thick, many of the them devoted to a specific commercial sphere – mining, cotton, finance – codes to buy and sell and promise any amount of any thing at any price. Other of the code books were for common inter-personal communication.  The codes for birth telegrams speak volumes about the harsh realities of the time—a code word for every possible variation: “Confined to-day. Baby and Mother well” “Confined to-day, Baby dead, Mother fairly well” “Confined to-day, Baby dead, Mother weak” “Confined to-day, Baby dead, Mother very weak” and so on.  A glimpse into the common occurrences of the era and the need for fine-grained distinctions in the vocabulary of communication from a distance.

Zebra Code. From McVey's specimen pages

Mastering the codes must have been quite a feat since the organizational structure of these books was often  opaque.  I could not help but wonder at the economy in which it was cheaper to pay to employ coders to encode, decode, and correct messages than it was to send a couple extra words.  Many codices seem to have grouped codes/phrases together by topic, but headwords were not always used to identify the beginning of each new topic. Others seemed simply to arrange the phrases alphabetically (e.g. all phrases using the word uneasy or uneasiness falling under U). Typographically and design-wise, these are a instructive specimens of information organization (or non-organization, as the case may be). McVey showed an example of the decoding of a telegram whose translation had been heavily corrected and re-decoded.  Looking at my Adam’s Cable Codex I imagine mistaking ‘keynote’  for ‘keyhole (the code word one line up) and the major miscommunication that could ensue. The former means “Buy what you think best without loss” while the latter means “Buy what you think best without limit.” Image the havoc that could be wrecked with one wrong word.  [Hmm, perhaps this is what's gone wrong in our current economy!]

It is hard not to imagine that at least some people took a certain delight in trying to compose coded telegrams that were meaningful both in code and in translation  (as I attempted above). It makes me want to track down telegraphs between artists and writers.  Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that McVey maintains a web site which includes scans of specimen pages from various code books that can give you a more concrete glimpse into this topic.

SciFi Fanzines

New Worlds Fanzines

Another genre-specific talk was Gregory Prickman’s Social Networking and the Books Arts: A Futuristic Pre-History, which discussed the history of the sci-fi fanzine and their role as a precursor not just to the social networking of today, but also as examples of interesting printing endeavors. Prickman traced the development of fanzines and showed their relationship to book art movements, such as DIY and amateur printing associations.

One of the features of these fanzines was that while production was extremely low-tech (mimeograph and hectograph pages stapled together), there was often a fair amount of interest in the design of the zine and Prickman showed a lot of examples of the influence of contemporary artistic movements on the layout of the issues. Neither were they amateurish in their content—some of the luminaries of science fiction writing were regular contributers (Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, etc.).  Prickman also discussed the way in which the zines branched out beyond their obstensible topic to become mediums for simply connecting people together.  As a nascent blogger, I was fascinated to hear more about the history of one of its predecessor mediums. Prickman’s talk was significant because it of the way he looked beyond the specifics of the medium to the significance of the endeavor and so began to draw a theoretical map of the social networking space that is much broader than that commonly discussed today.

Reading the Digital Artist’s Book

There were several talks that delved into the role and use of online reproductions of artists books.  Michelle Strizever, walked through her experience reading Johanna Drucker’s From A to Z in both digital and physical form. Her conclusion was that each experience had its advantages and that the two really complemented each other.  For her, the physical copy was only available within special collections and this raised some lively discussion afterwards about the barriers that readers can experience in a special collections reading room, both psychological as well as physical.  The ubiquitous presence of the digital version – a great boon when doing extended research on a book as Strizever had been doing- was only one of the features she mentioned.  Also important was the ability to zoom in to see aspects of the text that were not so easy to read in real space.  The question was raised of whether this is problematic to be able to ‘see’ more than what can easily be seen with the naked eye – which presumably is what the artist was designing for – but I for one, as an artist, love the idea of people being able to uncover hidden treasures in my work. I think often artists pay attention to all sorts of minute details that get lost in the totality of the work.  Perhaps it is not just he mechanical aid to our sight that a digital version can offer, but more the focus that it forces upon us that changes our reading.

Manuel Portela in his Codex Codes: The Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics of Bookscapes, began to outline a methodology for understanding the experience of reading in a digital archive.  Given the audience, he focused on Artists’ Books Online, but I spoke with him afterwards about some of the major literary digital archives as well (e.g. the Blake archive and Rosetti Archive).  Portela talked not just about the particulars of how a book is translated into a digital display(e.g. images presented as single pages or as page spreads), but also about the entire framing mechanism that the archive provides and how it affects your reading of a book.  An approach very much in line with the work of scholars like Jerome McGann who studies the material conditions of textuality. As a digital librarian myself, the discussion afterwards was especially interesting in raising some of the frustrations that users of such archives can feel.  While I know full well how easy it is to criticize and how hard it is to actually pull together the staff and money and time to build anything – let alone something that works the way we want it to – in the end it is the user’s experience that matters and that keep us striving – not our explanations for why something got built the way it did or what compromises we had to make.  But to create some methodological structure for talking about this experience, as Portela is doing, takes this discussion to a whole new level.

Ok, this is enough for now.  I’ll write up some more conference notes in my next post…

Post from: The Sign of the Owl

Notes on the CBAA Conference 2009

“Photo-reportage,” Munari declares, “is a means of expressing oneself more through images than words. The images can be sculpted, drawn, or photographed, the medium isn’t important. The urgent needs of modern publication have turned the cameraman’s chisel into a camera. In the past, to see the story narrated on the Trajan Column, everyone had to go to  Rome. Nowadays that column has become a roll of negative of which the most distant reader can receive a copy at home.”

What are the important words in the above paragraph?

I maintain they are “more” in the first sentence, and “cameraman’s” in the third.

Let us begin with the latter. What can Munari possibly mean about turning the cameraman’s chisel into a camera?   When was the chisel ever the tool of the cameraman?  Why, when the cameraman was a Roman sculptor, of course!  With this simple description, Munari has positioned the photographer in a long lineage of art-makers, the term cameraman inter-changeable with the term artist.  It is 1944 and Munari has subtly and cleverly bypassed the strained, defensive whining of the underdog photographers vying for a place in art world, and simply written as though it is so (something the book art world could learn from). This is not a book defending photography as art, it is a book on how photographic images work their artist magic.

But that, in fact, is a misleading statement, which brings us back to the first important word in Munari’s paragraph: “more.”  I haven’t really yet explained what this book is about.  To read Munari’s preface, one would believe it to be all about images, but he then proceeds to create a book where the words are integrally intertwined with the image experience and critically important to their meaning.  Which is what makes this books so interesting for book artists.  “More.”  More about images, but not just about images.  The force of the “more” comes in large part from the way in which images come first in Munari’s story-telling. First in time, though not necessarily in importance.  Photo-reportage is all about telling stories based on pictures – stories which, despite the implications of the term “reportage,” are completely made up (Munari sprinkles the book with parenthetical comments that “its not true”).  These are fanciful imaginings, written as though they were factual descriptions. The truth lies not in fact but in the meaning that can be drawn out of the images. Munari appropriates pictures and finds in them not the obvious story but surprising non sequiturs; stories that come more from the artist’s internal thoughts than the pedantic world of everyday occurrences.

Photo-Reportage acts partly as a treatise on art, partly as an exposition of a way to think about images, as well as an interesting example of how to weave together multiple narratives though textual hooks.  Each story begins where the last left off, though never as simple sequential follower. There is much more to be said about it, but you can see for yourself since it has been reprinted again. Photo-Reportage: From the Island of Truffles to the Kingdom of Misunderstandings.

Post from: The Sign of the Owl

Bruno Munari and Photo-Reportage