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

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

by Brad Freeman and Elisabeth Long

This leads me to our last book which is about different kind of historical absence, one not imposed by a political agenda and layers of ink, but rather the result of obsolescence and layer upon layer of time passing.   The Chicago Stock Yards Book was a collaboration between Brad Freeman and I on the subject of the Chicago Stockyards, an infamous area on the south side of Chicago that was finally closed down and razed back in the 1970s.  One of the themes of the book is this way in which things manage to persist even in their apparent absence – how hard it is to eradicate a vibrant past. We started by comparing two maps – one from the 19th century, an old birds-eye view engraving of the stockyards in its heyday, and one from the present day – a satellite view of the area as it looks now. What the maps showed us was that you could see the footprint of the old yards still evident in the modern statellite view. That as a place changes over time, the things that are apparently absent have actually left all sorts of patterns and traces.

Chicago Stock Yards Book: Opening spread

And as we explored, map in hand, the area that had once been the stockyards and was now an industrial park, we found that if we looked closely enough we could see these traces of the past.  But the looking required the right distance—different distances render different truths.  Our usual kind of looking, the one that simply shows us the present laid out before us, is a view of the middle distance. But if you pull back far enough (like the satellite)  or examine the details closely, that is where you find the flickerings of the absent still evident all around us.

Page spread. Left page: Brad taking pictures near an old packing plant; Right page: News photo of Bubbly Creek, 1913 overlaid on picture of the cattle pens

This artists’ book was an attempt to reintroduce the absent to the present.  Taking inspiration from rephotography projects, we searched for places that were on our maps—the hair drying fields, the manure pile, the packing factories, replaced now by overgrown rail tracks, a Chinese food packaging plant, a Tyson’s Foods warehouse. The book itself then reinterpreted the experience—printed on the back sides of our two maps it is filled with images both from our sojourn and from historical books on the stockyards, facts about the stockyard’s production and textual reflections on all the relationships therein.  The act of folding this map/pagelayout sheet into codex signatures resulted in an interspersing of old map, new map, text, modern photograph, historical image all mixed up together as they were in our minds and in the space around us.

Text and image expresses the vibrancy of the stockyards—a gruesome business that nonetheless was teaming with life—and contrasts it with the nondescript quiet of the current-day industrial park.  The layering of new on old (or old on new) was explored further through the collage of modern day and historical images and the repetition of image such that as you turn the pages and each spread appears to be a new set of subjects, ghosts of previous images still remain—a visual resonance used to express how our past is never quite absent from our present.  [No matter what Stalin may have thought he could do.]

These four very different books that were each about absence in one way or another show us just how complex and multi-faceted a theme can be.  What makes an artist’s book work well is that many facets of the book form are actively brought to play in the foreground of the work. (text, image, format, texture, the 3dimensional aspects, etc). None of these plays the crystal goblet in an artist’s book.  It is this complexity of foregrounded components that makes an artist’s book such a good vessel for expressing the complexity of our experience.  I hope this [talk] essay has give you a small taste of that.

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Figuring Absence, pt 4: Long & Freeman’s Chicago Stock Yards Book

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

Figuring Absence, Part One

I want to talk with you today about the theme of absence as played out in several different artists’ books. We will be looking at works by Sophie Calle, Ken Campbell, J. Meejin Yoon, and a work of my own that was done in collaboration with Brad Freeman. Absence takes many forms—physical absence, emotional absence, political absence, historical absence—and each of the works looks at a different type of absence and they each express it in radically different way. In comparing these works I hope we can discover something about how artists’ books work by examining how a variety of artists, working in different book mediums, have approached a somewhat perplexing challenge—that of figuring absence. How, after all, does one visually represent absence—The non-being-thereness of something? It is a visual paradox, but each of these books draws strength from their visual components and utilize the form of the artists’ book to speak with more than just words.

Absence by J. Meejin Yoon

Let us begin with a book that takes as its name our very theme, Absence by the architect J. Meejin Yoon. This book is extremely simple. There is no text. Its pages are made of the thick white cardboard of an architect’s model and when closed it forms a rather solid cube. The front cover is die cut with the word absence, and as you open it up, all you see is the small black dot of a small hole missing from the first page. That continues, page after page, for awhile and then the hole transforms into two squares, which again continue on and on until the last page which is a die cut angled grid of streets familiar to any who followed the news at the time. Upon turning to that last page you suddenly realize that what you’ve been seeing (or not seeing to be more accurate) are the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the 110 pages you’ve just gone through represented each of the 110 floors of the now absent buildings.

Opening spread of Absence

Middle spread of Absence

The obvious thing to point out about this book is that it is about negative space. The architect’s traditional model has been inverted, and the usual negative space of air around an architectural model has been turned into the model itself so that now the negative space of this model represents the absent buildings.

Last page of Absence

But what makes this book interesting is more than just the simple use of negative space to represent loss. The book form brings something more to the equation. This is not, after all, just an architectural model of inverted space. When you stop to think of about it, you realize that you cannot actually see the negative space of the twin towers that the book has created. The absence of the buildings is locked up inside the white cube. From the end of the book, I can try to look up into the void, but I can only see so far, certainly not up to the antenna that those initial pages of small holes represented, and anyway, this is not the perspective from which we ever looked at the towers. Were this a solid model I would not be able to see its subject at all, but because it uses a book format, I know what is going on. I can see each slice of the negative space as I page through the book. So negative space, yes, but the real effect comes from the use of the book structure to both give us the understanding of the book’s subject, while at the same time preventing us from visually experiencing that content. Now that is a truth of absence—the thing is present in my mind, but I can never see it.

There are other things that are going on in this book as well, for instance the lack of any text to introduce the subject.  You don’t know anything about what the book is about until you reach the end. The impact of that is that the book is, in fact, quite boring when you first encounter it. Page after page of small diecut spaces. After awhile you think, “I get it—absence—missing squares. Clever. Are we done yet?” You get impatient. You flip through the pages quickly. You pay them no special regard. They all seem the same. And then when you’re done, and you finally realize what the book is about, and that each of those pages represented a floor, a unique floor with unique people,  you feel like you’ve violated something. You feel guilty for your disregard, your impatience. Like the guilt that is felt as tragedies slip into the past and survivors begin to go on with their lives and no longer feel the presence of the absence quite so strongly. Absence is not always painful, as painful as that may be to admit. The experience of this book reminds us of that.

Which leads to another interesting aspect of the lack of text. Not everyone will get the book, even at the end. That grid. Those shapes. They aren’t recognizable or meaningful to everyone. And if they aren’t meaningful to you, all the textual descriptions in the world won’t change that, or help you experience the book as it was meant to be experienced. 100 years form now, no one will experience this book in the way that some do now, because it is not the mere absence of the towers that is the point, but rather the feeling that they should be there. That they belong there. A feeling that comes from having known them when they were there.

To give a simple example, you could look to your left, and look to your right and say that I am absent from your side—except that you would never say that. Because I don’t belong there in the first place. Absence is not the random non-presence of something, but rather the non-presence of something that once was there, or should be there, or is desired to be there. There is intentionality in the idea of absence. The absent one or absent thing belongs. This leads to our next book, Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain which will be taken up in the next post.

I’d like to thank Laurie Whitehill Chong at the RISD library for access to their copy of Absence.

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Figuring Absence (CBAA Notes, pt.3)

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

 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…

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Notes on the CBAA Conference 2009

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

“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.

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Bruno Munari and Photo-Reportage

cover of Everyone Their Own Projector

But back to Kentridge’s recently published artist’s book. Though best known for his charcoal animations, Kentridge was a printmaker before venturing into film and he has continued his practice of etching and lithographic printing even while working on his animations.  I don’t know if this is his first foray into the codex book format but if so, his films have taught him well how to use the rhythms of the pages to draw out his story.

The book explores the human proclivity to shape the world through the lens of our perceptions, using collages of torn books to literally draw the ground for the images on the page.  The images alternate between a meta-dialog on the artistic agenda itself—reproducing  quick ink sketches of famous works of art (primarily depictions of females), a visual representation of written language with its characteristic patterns of words and sentences, and finally a riff on Gogol’s story of The Nose. These themes intertwine, visually crossing in and out of each other’s borders. The staccato lines of a text become lines on a face, become the spaces between a nude that has been cut apart in a venetian-blind-like collage. The historical procession of well-known paintings of women become the setting for the Nose as he makes his foray into the world independent from his face and owner.  Images appear and reappear transformed, creating visual echos as the book progresses.  This is book-making as it ought to be done.  Dense. Beautiful. Evocative. Intelligent. And all with an acute awareness of the construction – the book as a construction of a story, the story as a construction of life, life as a construction of our minds.  Everyone their own projector.

As one of the pages declares, “what lies in store/what lies in wait/what lies asleep,” the book explores themes of potency and foreshadowing. Kentridge uncovers unexpected meanings hidden within the torn up texts that ground the collages through juxtaposition and defamiliarization. Images appear without context, foreshadowing the fuller role they will eventually develop within the narrative as we come to understand their part. These are just a sampling of the ways in which literary devices are reinterpreted through a visual vocabulary.

The placement of images and their repetition, take advantage of the book’s codex structure.  Page spreads sometimes act as mirrors, each side reflecting a slightly different version of the reality of an image.  Or similar images reappear, situated on the same side of a page, using the same visual placement, triggering the brain to experience an instant recognition of the familiar, but always with some difference.  Sometimes these are done sequentially, one after another, providing a sense of progression, or variations on a theme.  Other times the reoccurence is spread out over time, appearing many pages later, calling on memory to draw the correspondence.

If you have never seen Kentridge’s work, try a little exploring on youtube which seems to have some low-quality versions of several of his films.  Better yet, get your hands on Drawing the Passing which is a documentary of his film-making practices and includes clips from his work. Or one of the new CDs/DVDs that David Krut Publishing makes available.  David Krut  is also the distributor for Everyone Their Own Projector as well as many books about Kentridge.  (p.s. don’t be surprised at the prices – they are in South African Rands!)

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William Kentridge – Everyone Their Own Projector

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

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