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

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…

Post from: The Sign of the Owl

Notes on the CBAA Conference 2009