CBAA the Association for Book Art Education Blog Test

-ARTIST BOOKS AS A FORM OF AND FOR QUEERING // Beth Sheehan

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

In this article, I would like to present the beginnings of an argument that the format of the artist book is uniquely equipped to embody a double queering—the verb: to make strange or subvert, and the noun: regarding LGBTQIA+ experiences. While I am not asserting that all artist books are queer, I would like to highlight book arts as a particularly apt medium for queer work.

Beth Sheehan. “Revision,” 2025. Offset printed accordion book.

First, it may be wise to acknowledge what my working definition of an ‘artist book’ is. Within the scholarly research of book arts, the question “what is an artist book” is a tempestuous one. It is generally agreed upon that an artist book is an art object that takes the form of a book, but what makes something a book? Why are other books like novels not typically considered artist books? Where is the line and why is the category of “artist book” useful?

Here, I am intending to include book arts objects that were conceived as complete art objects, meant to be experienced by an audience as such (this includes the object’s haptic and temporal qualities), where there is an important relationship to the democratic multiple, and where all aspects of the work and its reason for being a book become necessary to the experience of the work.

For the sake of word count, I would like to focus on the last two points, beginning with the work’s relationship to the democratic multiple. Democratic multiples are defined as “inexpensive artists’ books sold cheaply or even given away to as many people as possible. Typically democratic multiples convey a social or political message. The artist wants to get the word out with low production costs and self-distribution, by-passing the art gallery.”[1] This aspect of accessibility allows the work to live on as it is disseminated to many people, unlike most other art forms which are often made as singular, expensive works to be purchased by one museum or collector. Producing a democratic multiple is a way to create and perpetuate a futurity for the ideas held within the works. Connecting directly to the populist audience (as well as having more control over every aspect of the artwork by divorcing the work from the typical system of the art world) is paramount to an artist’s decision to create a democratic multiple. It is a transgressive act that critiques the standards of the hegemonic art systems.

Beth Sheehan. Editioning “Beloved,” 2016.

Therein, it is unsurprising that the type of artist that decides to make this form of work is often someone who is looking to subvert the typical modes of making, experiencing, and collecting artworks. Naturally, the history of the democratic multiple is intertwined with subcultures inhabited by many marginalized groups. Democratic multiples are a way for marginalized communities to share their perspectives, stories, and ideas with each other without the suppression and oppression that comes with needing to participate in the dominant art culture. Artist books, but especially artist books that fall on the closer end of the spectrum of democratic multiples, effectively subvert (or queer) the expectations set by white-box, high-art, fine art galleries and museums. (It should be noted here that I would argue even “expensive” artist books could be considered democratic multiples compared to many fine art paintings and sculptures, which is why I invite the idea of a spectrum when labeling these works democratic multiples.

Beth Sheehan. “In the Meaning,” 2025. Risograph and screen printed flag book.

Finally, I would like to address the ways in which the form of the artist book enhances the double-queering that is especially possible within this medium. Artist books occupy a space within the art canon that is overlooked, underutilized, underappreciated, and marginalized. However, because artist books are not quite 2D, 3D, or duration-based in the same ways as more mainstream mediums (for example, painting, sculpture, and video work, respectively), artist books can bridge qualities of other mediums while becoming their own thing—greater than the sum of their parts. (I talk a little more about this idea in my earlier blog post titled “Time and Book.”) Artist books embody a queer (subversive or unconventional) experience of time because they are time-based but without a set duration like sound or video work. Furthermore, artist books subvert the separation between the audience and the object by including the viewer as a participant, creating an intimacy with the work that dismantles the potential for othering the viewer, instead inviting us to include ourselves in the work—including us in the queering of experiencing the artwork.

[1] “Democratic Multiples,” Smithsonian Libraries, Accessed Dec. 10, 2025, https://library.si.edu/exhibition/artists-books-and-africa/democratic-multiples

Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Chicago, IL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harland and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

THREE PRACTICAL WAYS BOOK ARTS CAN SUPPORT DEMOCRACY RIGHT NOW // Caitlin Adair Daglis

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 05:00:00 GMT

I was initially drawn to print for three reasons. First, I was a bartender working my way through art school, and the affordability of handmade prints made far more sense to me than the price of an individual oil painting (no hate to oil painters). Printmaking seemed like one of the few ways that making art might be a sustainable livelihood without pricing out working people from purchasing meaningful handmade art. Second, the radical history of printmaking—making ideas accessible to the masses—was something I wanted to be a part of. Third, the smell of ink, obviously.

My studio practice shifted during school toward larger, immersive work. Recently, though, I’ve found myself drawn back to the accessibility of the poster, leaflet, and zine for the same qualities that first caught my attention years ago. “From the earliest times the leaders among us have known that a good picture, song, sculpture, or building can get our attention and maybe change our minds. Art has been used to educate us, to mould our opinions, to confirm us in our nationhood and to persuade us of the existence of many gods.” [1] The printed matter around us communicates powerfully, especially in our times of flickering screens and unreal imagery.

These threads of thought led me to consider the role book arts communities play in the unglamorous work of sustaining democratic culture. The ideas below will not solve the structural challenges facing democracy or the arts, but they are practical ways our field can contribute to our communities during a challenging time.

Build Local Book Arts Communities

Local gatherings have long helped sustain both civic and print culture. For almost a year I’ve been sitting with the best intentions of bringing together a group of local makers I know who share an interest in different aspects of book arts practice. Writing this post became the push I needed to finally gather random notebooks with contact information scrawled on the backs of pages and send that invitation.

Local meetups are vital. They allow people to build relationships while sharing technical knowledge, exchanging materials, or sharing a meal outside of work and home. In our case, we’ve talked about skill sharing, bring-your-own project nights, and making postcards to send to legislators. None of these activities are revolutionary on their own, but together they help build the kinds of networks that have always supported collective power.

Organizations like Studio Two Three in Richmond, VA offer the opportunity to connect with local and national print and book arts community regularly. Is there one in your town? Could you start something more informal?

Photo taken at “Everything is An Experiment: Poster Printing” workshop with Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. at Studio Two Three, 2024.

Empower Workers in Your Institution

If you have some institutional stability in higher education or nonprofit arts spaces, there is a good chance that highly skilled people around you are struggling to earn a living wage. Across many institutions, staff roles that sustain studios, archives, libraries, and workshops are often undervalued compared to faculty research or administrative leadership.

Yet facilities technicians, studio coordinators, archivists, and program staff are frequently the people who maintain equipment, train students, manage materials, and keep creative spaces functioning day to day. They are the infrastructure that allows the field of book arts to exist. Advocating for fair compensation, stable employment, and professional recognition for these workers is not separate from supporting the future of the field; it’s part of it.

Mentor and Support Your Network

Creative communities are also sustained by relationships. Many of us work in relatively small professional circles spread across institutions and geographic regions. Mentorship and informal support networks play an important role in helping emerging practitioners enter the field.

The book arts folks I’ve met have been generous with their time and expertise when I’ve asked, but many young makers and educators may not ask. When we share spaces, reach across age and experience groups. Welcome the next generation in, or ask your elders to share their experiences. Swap numbers and stay in touch. These small gestures help people grow professionally and remain engaged in vital creative work during draining periods.

The long traditions of book arts teach us that cultural change is rarely dramatic or immediate. It often happens through the accumulation of small acts of making, sharing, teaching, and caring. Progress is present and powerful in the protest posters on the streets, and also present in a crowded room that smells like ink.

Note

[1] Moore, Colin. Propaganda Prints: A History of Art in the Service of Social and Political Change. A&C Black Publishers Ltd., 2010, p. 7.

Caitlin Adair Daglis is a visual artist exploring layered histories embedded in Southern domestic spaces and culture. Working with paper, print, and fiber, she draws on craft and book arts traditions, using pattern and language to complicate cultural hierarchies. She serves as the Book Arts Studio Manager at the University of Richmond.

THE MAGICAL CAPABILITIES OF PAPER // Heather Peters of the Society of Hermits

Virginia Green — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Before I made paper, I wondered about paper. I was lucky to have an art teacher when I was young that taught me to use watercolors, and over the years and into my undergraduate degree in illustration, watercolor became my most comfortable art making tool. Even today, my most grounding exercise is sitting down with my pallets and spending a couple hours painting with watercolor. As a medium, watercolor shines best when it works closely with the substrate, and over time I wondered why the best papers were so expensive. I wanted to use the 300lb Arches paper, cold pressed and thick, an art piece in its own right. I struggled to find information about how it was made (this was before use of the internet was common!)–– something made it diﬀerent than the pads of aﬀordable paper—and my attempts with a blender did not work. Somehow, I did not cross paths with a papermaker until I started working at Magnolia Editions, and on my first day I was asked if I wanted to make paper.

Making paper is an incredibly physical act. It requires an intentionality and focus that I find so important in my practice. There is also risk––so much can go wrong––but when it is right it can feel magical.

I chase that feeling, the convergence of material and thought that borders on the mystical. I love the meditative repetition of pulling sheets, the revelation of opening a dry box to see how each unique sheet turned out. I find so much meaning in materiality as well, and the alchemical process of choosing all my materials, from the ground up, adds much to my work. I always think about Hemingway’s theory that if the writer knew something, even if he didn’t write it down, the reader would still feel it even if it wasn’t in the text. In a like manner, I believe that a viewer of an art piece gleans much from intentional material choice, even if it isn’t evident visually. Handmade paper is diﬀerent from what we are used to. Even a plain white sheet with the deckle cut oﬀ sits diﬀerently, catches the light in its own way, presents text diﬀerently that challenges the expectations of a viewer/reader. I am always looking for that catch, the hiccup in the continuum, when it comes to my own work.

Several years ago, I discovered the capillary action of unsized paper and the chromatographic process of black ink in a solution of water or other solvent. I love the process and surprise in working this way. It has again that feeling of magic and discovery. It rides the line of chaos and control. I have to let go and let the materials do what they will. And then the “real art” happens, I always say. There is discomfort in this, but also more satisfaction when it works. I make this inky wonderland paper often, playing around with all the many variations, trying to use the same materials over and over again to develop some kind of predictable technique.

This creates a huge surplus of this material in the studio. The new book We are Porous was born out a desire to both use and share this paper with a wider audience. I see it as an ongoing series. I am going to call each varied edition “an expression.” Each will be bound and placed in a box with a printed label. My hope is that it will be both beautiful to experience as a stand-alone artist book and interesting for other papermakers to see how the series develops over time. The pages of these books to me seem simultaneously like small glimpses of the known world and tiny forays into the unknown.

Heather Peters is a book artist and papermaker who runs a papermaking and fine art studio out of Los Angeles called Society of Hermits. Innovating with fibers and pigmenting techniques, she incorporates handmade papers into her artist books.

THREE CATALOGUES // Kathleen Walkup

Susan Viguers — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 15:52:29 GMT

A few days ago I received a surprise gift in the mail. The artist Kumi Korf had sent me her latest project, a catalogue titled In & Out of Sculptural Books. Korf, a longtime resident of Ithaca, New York, trained as an architect in her native Tokyo before completing an MFA at Cornell in the late 1970s. She currently lives in a house of her design in the Ithaca woods. For the past several years Korf has had medical challenges, which haven’t stopped her from making her way to her printmaking studio a short distance from her back door.

I first came across Korf’s artist books when I curated Possibilities: When Artists’ Books Were Young (San Francisco Center for the Book, 2022). I included Silk and Secrecy, a sculptural book created in 1985 by Korf and Emoretta Yang. Korf’s sympathy with materials (Japanese paper, silk thread, foam core) matched Yang’s complex storytelling ability in this haunting and beautiful book.

In & Out of Sculptural Books is a catalogue of a show that Korf organized at The Ink Shop, a community printmaking studio in Ithaca that Korf was instrumental in establishing and continues to be connected to. In & Out of Sculptural Books is not a recent show. In 2014 Korf invited artists who had taken her workshops to send work to the show; thirty-eight of them responded. Korf had photos taken of each of the works, but her health issues intervened in her intention to produce a catalogue. It is a testament to Korf’s determination and her resilience that, in 2026, she would complete the job.

The catalogue is presented in a printed wrapper held together by a band closed with a small netsuke-like toggle. Inside there is an accordion-fold introduction and 38 individual 5x7 inch cards, one for each artist in the show. The presentation of the artists (all but one of whom are women) on separate cards immediately reminded me of two artist book catalogues from the 1970s.

Women and the Printing Arts: A catalog was created in 1977 at the Women’s Graphic Center, an offshoot of the Woman’s Building founded in Los Angeles in 1973. One of the three founders, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, a graphic designer, created Women and the Printing Arts as a way to market artist books by women. In this case, each 5x7 inch card represented one work by one woman. The two-sided cards show the work on the front and the information about that work, along with the price and the artist’s address, on the back. The cards are held together by a metal ring.

The second catalogue, Women’s Bookworks, is a catalogue of a 1979 travelling exhibition organized by a coalition of sponsors primarily centered around Montreal, Canada. In this catalogue the 56 artists are each represented by a square (6.5x6.5 inch) two-sided card, the front side showing the work and the reverse giving the artist’s statement. The statements are either in English or French; the catalogue itself is bilingual. The two women who organized this exhibition, Doreen Lindsay and Sarah McCutcheon, decided to focus on women when they noticed that many of what they called “key artists” were involved with bookworks were women, including Martha Wilson, Joan Lyons, Judith Hoffberg and Art Metropole’s Peggy Gale.

Women and the Printing Arts reflected de Bretteville’s belief that, rather than needing to encourage women’s voices, women already had those voices; what they needed were ways to be heard. In other words, better marketing. De Bretteville and her co-workers didn’t curate the selection of women who could be included; the cards include an entry form along with a request for a check for $7.50 to help defray printing costs. Women’s Bookworks was a curated exhibition, but in order to encourage the broadest participation the two organizers travelled the country to contact artists in person, providing a definition of an artist book as “A work of art in book form which embodied an idea” to women for whom the medium was a new concept.

It is not necessarily surprising that the two catalogues of women’s work lacked traditional binding. In the case of Women and the Printing Arts, the use of cards was entirely practical: prospective book buyers could remove cards to use the information on them and prospective artists could remove the entry form. The reason for the single sheets in Women’s Bookworks is less transparent, but the cost of creating and binding the catalogue was almost certainly a factor. (Since the show was meant to travel, single sheets also meant that individual artists could be removed for different locations, although there is no indication of that taking place.) What the single sheets do indicate is a true democratization of the artists and their work. The lack of binding means that no single artist is privileged. Alphabetical filing is a convenience, but in both cases that can be easily breached. These single-sheet catalogues put every woman in them on an equal plane, resulting in a clear lack of hierarchy and an implicit statement about the nature of these books as democratized forms.

This democratic approach is separate from the notion of the democratic multiple espoused by Clive Phillpot and others also beginning in the 1970s. The democratic multiple is a book made in an open edition and generally published outside the gallery system with its norms of limitation and exclusivity. The individual books, however, aren’t grouped together in a non-hierarchical order; in fact, certain artists are privileged. In many of the critiques and histories, those artists are very often male (1).

That Korf chose to use this form in 2026 appears to be a reflection back to the genesis of artist books, particularly those made by women artists, as both individual celebrations and collective achievements. The cards from In & Out of Sculptural Books are one-sided, with minimal information and a corollary emphasis on the object. Most of the cards give the artist’s name and the book’s title, dimensions and materials. (One card, Emoretta Yang’s, lists only the artist’s name. While this could be seen as an oversight, my feeling is that Korf is honoring Yang’s memory—she died in 2023—by leaving blank the space that Emoretta herself would have completed.)

I don’t know if Korf had earlier models in mind when she created her catalogue, but it reflects the democratic intentions of these early catalogues and could be read as an homage to the democratizing nature of second-wave feminism nearly fifty years ago.

Note:

(1) For example, in Stefan Klima’s description of the 1973 exhibition Artists Books at Moore College of Art in Artists Books: A critical survey of the literature [Granary Books, 1998] Klima names eight artists, all male, as examples of the participating artists. The actual catalogue for the exhibition names almost three dozen women whose work was included in the show.

Kathleen Walkup is Lovelace Family Professor of Book Art Emerita, Mills College; she is currently based in the Hudson Valley. Her essay on Notes on Woman Printers in Colonial America and The United States will be published in the Grolier Club’s Gazette later this year. She will curate an exhibition of 1970s Bay Area presses at the Grolier Club in 2028.

AI AND THE CULTURE OF THE ARTIST BOOK // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Last September I wrote an entry for this blog that asked in its title and the body of its text “Is there a culture of the artist book?” I was hoping that there would be some comments and responses that might engage with and attempt to define the potential of artist book culture. Unfortunately, my post received no response at all.

Therefore, I took my query to AI (chatgpt) and asked it the same questions that were in my previous blog post. Its response began by stating the following regarding what makes up the culture of the artist book:

“The culture of the artist book is constituted by the intersection of practice, discourse, materiality, circulation, and community. Unlike conventional book culture or fine art culture alone, the artist book exists in a hybrid space where:

Authorship is often total (artist as writer, designer, printer, binder, publisher).
Material decisions (paper, binding, scale, durability) are inseparable from meaning.
Reading is redefined as a spatial, temporal, tactile, and performative act.
Distribution frequently bypasses mainstream publishing and gallery systems.
Value may resist market logics in favor of conceptual, experiential, or political aims.

“This culture is sustained not only by objects but by networks: artist-run presses, book fairs, zine libraries, special collections, teaching studios, online archives, and informal peer exchange.”

It then addressed, pursuant to my questions in the post, information regarding the scale, cultural levels and counterculture (I am not including these answers here, but try seeing what it says by searching yourself using my Sept. 15, 2025 posts questions).

Next, because I knew I had to write this blog post and that just after it is published that I would being co-chairing the Affiliate Society session at CAA on February 19 in Chicago I thought it might be interesting to see how AI would aggregate information to produce a response to the questions of our CFP for the conference. It began its response stating:

“AI’s relationship to the artist book can be understood as both a disruptive force and a critical mirror—one that reshapes authorship, materiality, and authenticity while simultaneously heightening the significance of the book as a tactile object.

“AI intervenes first at the level of authorship. By generating text, images, layouts, or conceptual structures, AI complicates the idea of the singular author traditionally associated with the artist book. Instead, authorship becomes distributed among human intention, algorithmic processes, training data, and cultural histories embedded in the machine. This destabilization aligns the artist book with long-standing conceptual and postmodern practices that already challenge originality, while updating them for a computational age.

“At the level of materiality, AI intensifies the contrast between the digital and the physical. While AI operates immaterially—through code, datasets, and probabilistic systems—the artist book insists on haptic engagement: weight, texture, sequencing, and bodily interaction. In this sense, AI does not negate materiality but reframes it as a site of resistance and reflection, where physical form asserts presence against digital abstraction. The artist book becomes a space where digital processes are translated, constrained, or made legible through material means.

“AI also reshapes production and process. Artists may use AI as a collaborator, tool, or subject, influencing design decisions, narrative structures, or visual languages. This hybrid workflow challenges traditional craft hierarchies while raising questions about labor, automation, and value—issues that echo broader cultural concerns in the digital age.

“From a theoretical perspective, AI brings frameworks such as posthumanism, media archaeology, critical algorithm studies, and feminist or decolonial critiques into dialogue with book art. These lenses foreground how power, bias, race, and gender are embedded in datasets and technological systems, positioning the artist book as a critical platform for exposing and contesting these structures.

“Finally, in terms of exhibition and access, AI complicates how artist books are displayed and experienced. Digital simulations, interactive components, or AI-driven interpretation can expand access while simultaneously raising concerns about mediation and loss of tactile intimacy. This tension underscores the artist book’s unique position as an object that resists full digitization.

“In sum, AI’s relationship to the artist book is not merely technological but conceptual: it redefines authorship, heightens the meaning of material presence, and positions the artist book as a critical site for negotiating authenticity, identity, and power in the digital age.”

What I find both fascinating and disturbing is how quickly this information was gleaned by AI from other ideas. However, there really is nothing here that is unique or that we did not know before, if only on an intrinsic instinctual level.

What I find that gives me hope is that it (AI) cannot yet understand the why of the aesthetic pursuit. When we insist on haptic engagement with the artist book, we resist the immaterial in favor of understanding not just the tactile but also the virtual. This opposition is a position from which, perhaps, a new synthesis of the haptic and the virtual will arise. I hope to see some more development of this possibility in our CAA session this February, just as we did last June at CBAA. However, as emphasis upon the virtual continues, will the physical, tactile, haptic artist book lose its relevance and importance? I think not, because I will not join the myriads of art critics that have predicted the demise of this or that art due to advancing technology. What I do believe is that the continued use of AI with book arts and book arts with AI will change our assessment of both. In what ways they will change, we can only guess.

Peter J. Tanner (He, Él, Ele) is Associate Instructor of Spanish at the University of Utah and Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art, the journal of the College Book Art Association. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

A VISUAL CATALOG: QUESTIONS ON COLLECTIONS AND INCLUSIVITY // Alexander Mouton

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 06:00:00 GMT

I recently moved my book collection into a new apartment and along the way, I packed boxes and boxes full of books and made stack after stack of book boxes – artist books, photobooks, illustrated books, but also, all kinds of other books. In looking at all of the precious artist and photo books enclosed in their boxes – many in small editions or out of print, some signed by the artist, others rare or of incredibly niche interests – I was caught wondering who other than me will ever see these books and how might this “problem” speak to larger issues related to collections, large and small?

Illustration #1, boxes of books

Twenty years ago, I was an Everett Helm Visiting Fellow at the Lilly Library Rare Book Collection in Bloomington, Indiana, where I documented as many innovative bindings as I could in the time I had. I set up a digital camera and tripod, so I would be free to handle the books while making videos of how the structure in front of me behaved in time & space. I then later used them in my teaching to inspire students in their own book works.

Illustration #2, Lilly Library miniature books (clockwise from upper-left) Maps of Stones (Bonnie Stahlecker, 2001), Along the Way (binding: Pat Baldwin, printing: Jaime Gonzalez, Pequeño Press, 1990), Them Poems (designed + printed by Pat Baldwin, Pequeño Press, 1991), Crossing Over (Bonnie Stahlecker, 2001).

A key aspect of my experience at the Lilly Library was Jim Canary, who was terrifically familiar with the books in the collection, being the head conservator for decades and a friend of mine. I went in every morning and talked with Jim about bindings I was curious about or other keywords like “text and image,” “photos” etc., and though informally through conversation, Jim would pull together a cart of books and bring them down for me to go through. At the time I didn’t stop to consider the privileges I had, knowing Jim, knowing about the Everett Helm Fellowship because I had worked there as a graduate student, and even my privilege in having parents who instilled in me a love for books and covered my tuition as an undergrad so I could study at IU. How do people walk off the street and into the Lilly Library to find artist books they do not already know about?

Later, I thought about how wonderful it would be to have a digital catalog so you could search for a binding type, and it would bring up a bunch of videos to help determine what to request. The Lilly’s catalogue system was nothing like this in 2004, and I thought this could potentially revolutionize access to artist books.

Around this time, Tony White, Associate Chief Librarian at The Met, NYC, invited me to present Iraqi artist books from an exhibition called Dafatir, curated by Nada M. Shabout, in the Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference at MoMA PS1. Following the exhibit, I traveled to Amman, Jordan to meet a handful of these Iraqi book artists, including Rafa Al-Nasari (see illustration #3). But in New York City at the conference, nobody knew these Iraqi artists and people were as amazed and swept away by their books as I was. Which begs the question, who can see these books and what role do collections and institutions play in making these books available to an audience that might not otherwise know about them?

illustration #3, Dafatir, Iraqi artist books (clockwise from upper-left) Poetry Book, Rafa al-Nasiri, 2003; Trace of Blood, Ammar Dawod, 2001; Baghdadi Diary 2, Mohammed al-Shammarey, 2003; Pilot Vision of Baghdad, Kareem Rissan, 2003.

Tony didn’t think it would be possible to have the artist books in a collection documented with video because each artist would want to control their book’s presentation. I argued gently how necessary I saw it now that everything is digital and that perhaps the artists would give their permission, or they could conceivably document the work themselves. As a librarian, Tony was dismissive that anything of the kind was in the realm of possible. I was stunned – could librarians require documentation as an extension of the colophon for an acquired book? Or could there be a standardized intake process that involves a thorough documentation for a digital database?

How can we create a system in which people can find books, in libraries and collections that they know nothing about, based on materials, binding, etc.? How inclusive is it that special collections are frequently cared for by a single person or maybe a few people who have been working with them for decades? I take many of my own books to teach with and my office is overflowing as a result. However, when I’m dead and gone, the books will be sold off and my knowledge of them will not transfer.Libraries are safer because the books will remain even after the people’s knowledge of them are gone, but my dream is of a video catalog with access for all, forever…

Skeleton Librarian

As a photobook artist, Alexander Mouton has been publishing limited-edition, hand-bound books for over 30 years. His Unseen Press photobooks are in the collections of the MoMA NYC, the Ghetty Research Institute, the German State Library in Berlin, and the Latvian National Library, among others. He teaches visual book classes at Seattle University. IG: theUnseenPress

ARTIST BOOK OR PRINTING ERROR? PRIVATE PHOTOGRAPHY IN EAST GERMANY 1980-2000 (SPECTER BOOKS, 2024) // Alexander Mouton

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 06:00:00 GMT

This past spring, I explored the idea of the “affordances and instructions“ of artist books with Jeff Nilan as we collaborated on a chapter for the book series Studies in Art & Materiality, edited by Dr. Veronica Peselman. We loosely defined the term “affordances” as the way the physical properties of an artist book allow for, grant, or facilitate a particular reading experience and we defined “instructions” as the way the materials of an artist book “communicate” to a reader how they should be engaged.

Subsequently, I ordered from PhotoEye the book,Private Photography in East Germany1980-2000 (editor: Friedrich Tietjen). My expectation was that this would not be an artist book, but rather a traditional codex, including a handful of essays together with photographs from selected East German photo albums (as per the publisher/distributer descriptions). To my surprise, upon receiving the book, I discovered that the foredges were not cut (illustration #1):

Illustration #1, Uncut, folded pages, Private Photography in East Germany1980-2000

Additionally, hidden inside the uncut pages were photos that could only be seen by peering in from the top (illustration #2):

Illustration #2, Images inside of uncut, folded pages, Private Photography in East Germany 1980-2000

The material properties of the book suddenly demanded it be read in a manner different from a traditional codex. Was this a printing mistake? Was it intentional? My curiosity piqued, I looked for other clues that might speak to the intentionality or otherwise of these hidden images. When I paged through to the back of the book in the hopes of finding a textual explanation, I was Instead surprised to find that the last pages, including 119-123 and the publisher’s information, to have been glued in upside-down (Illustration #3):

Illustration #3, upside down final section, Private Photography in East Germany 1980-2000

To be clear, the way the book was made was that the pages were printed front and back, folded in half, and then the edges that were not folded were “perfect bound” by glueing them all together. For the final section, however, the pages were glued in upside down.

This final section confused me as the upside-down pages indicated an error rather than the possible intentionality of the uncut pages. I decided to email Porter McLeod at PhotoEye to inquire about the book. In his initial response, he requested the images I included in the essay you are currently reading:

I never heard back from Porter after I sent him the images, though, so I emailed Specter Books and attached the same images:

Specter Books never responded either, which leaves me to interpret the book’s instructions solely on the materials themselves and to consider the affordances of the physical properties as I experience them.

Could it be that the images that are on the inside of the folded, uncut pages are not supposed to be looked at, but are there to speak to the myriad private images that have been made, like wallpaper? Or could it be that the images on the insides are private, as in the book’s title, and thus are present but not viewable? Or perhaps the folded, uncut pages are an invitation to pull out a letter opener, affording the reader the experience of discovery to reveal the images inside? I’m sure these interpretations do not exhaust the possibilities; however, the intentionality can be definitively established in the way that the page numbers are consistently visible and in sequence for the reader to clearly see, page by page, while the mysterious insides of the folded, uncut pages remain outside the numbering system.

As for the final upside-down pages, I would argue that this is clearly in error, not only because as in illustration #3, page number 119 is upside down, but because page numbers 120 & 121 are on the inside of the folded, uncut pages, so they are no longer part of the sequence that is visible to the reader. Furthermore, there is no purpose served by turning the book upside down when the pages that need to be read are hidden on the inside of the uncut pages in this section.

In conclusion, this book has had its innovative construction, which hides images in a beguiling manner, overwhelmed by the error of the last section having been mis-glued upside-down (and folded inside-out). Were it the case that the reader only faced the challenge of folded, uncut pages, it would pique curiosity rather than consternation. And as a final note, there is a note on the upside-down publisher’s page at the end of the book that I initially overlooked because it was upside down and which I later discovered that reads, “All images printed on the inner pages of this book are taken from the archives of Friedrich Tietjen, Martin Siebert and Karen and Andreas Koven” (illustration #4):

Illustration #4, final upside-down publisher’s page, Private Photography in East Germany 1980-2000

This exploration of the instructions and affordances of Specter Books, Private Photography in East Germany 1980-2000’s, gets at what distinguishes an artist book from a more traditional codex and how intentionality can be an important feature.

KINDER INQUIRIES: PLANNING, IMPROVISATION, AND INFLUENCES // Jennifer Miller

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 06:00:00 GMT

This is Part 2 of a two-part blog post. If you haven’t already, read Part 1 (December 1st), where I introduce the concept of ‘difficult landscapes.’

On Planning and Improvisation

When I started Kinder Inquiries in April of 2024, I told everyone I had a plan and showed them my little dummy book with penciled in words relating to the letters of the alphabet. Half of the pages were blank. None of the pages spelled out the detailed ideas floating around in my imagination. It is difficult to explain a book’s direction when only 10% of your plan is visible to others and 90% of your work is improvised while standing at the press. Thankfully, my MFA committee members at the University of Iowa trusted my proposal and let me do my own thing.

Kinder Inquiries, “Alphabet; Kinder inquiries”

At first, I embraced the fact that alphabet books are recognized as pedagogical tools with built-in structure that can be used to convey a moral tale. The sequence of letters from A to Z offered the pacing of the pages and rhythm of the text. I mostly followed alphabetical order, but there are specific instances where I blended or disrupted the sequence to make a point. For example, the book does not end with the letters and symbols W, X, Y, & Z. When I reached the letter Z, as I had planned, which contains the number 0 and the word “zero” repeated over three pages, I did not sense that the story had the proper sense of closure. Consequently, I added another page that jumped to the letter G to address the ongoing march of development in my hometown: How many gardens once grew under that 3-car garage?

Kinder Inquiries, “W”

Kinder Inquiries, “Z is for zero”

The guiding structural element of Kinder Inquiries was conveying a true story that took place in 1974, the year I started kindergarten. I also knew that I wanted to print most of the pages with a base layer using large wood type.

Press lock-up for “B is for before”

To begin printing the book, I started with formulaic language that had a distant voice. “Ages & Ages Ago...” [nonspecific period in the distant past] and “Before you were even born...” [a bygone era existing outside of the lived experiences of the imagined reader]. From there, I printed with metal rule and metal dotted lines to reference elementary school lined papers. Learning to write, we copied the shapes of the printed letters: “Aa Bb Cc” and so on. After that, I printed the words of a sentence to begin my moral tale, “A beautiful creature....” [romanticizing and obfuscating the narrative with vague language].

Kinder Inquiries, “ABC is for A beautiful creative”

By the fourth letter of the alphabet, I wanted readers to know the central tragedy of the moral tale: the mysterious death of a beautiful creature. Printed in large wooden type, like a headline in a newspaper: “In 1974, A Beautiful Creature Died!” The irony of alluding to headline newsprint is that this true story was never reported, and the death of the beautiful creature was never investigated. In fact, the death of the ornate box turtle in our kindergarten classroom was never discussed, other than the initial and factual report of the beautiful creature’s death over the winter break.

Kinder Inquiries, “D is for died”

Following the opening pages, with intentionally cloying shades of bubblegum pink and Milori blue, the mood shifts to a darker grey print that announces death in a somber tone. This headline news formatting “IN 1974, a beautiful creature DIED” is followed by a sudden and improvised explosion of color found on the center spread for letters Ee Ff Gg. The turtle has died, but we as readers don’t yet know why or how. We may never know why or how. But we know how this makes us feel.

Kinder Inquiries, “Ee Ff Gg”

The resulting print was a breakthrough moment for me as an artist using letterpress. I successfully used multiple layers of transparent and opaque inks (9 or 10 print runs) to create an emotional landscape expressing the sorrow of a child who has been told that her turtle died. These pages also include the critical insight of an adult who has recently discovered a crucial scientific fact: under normal circumstances, box turtles hibernate and burrow underground in November.

There is no way I could have planned the Ee Ff Gg page spread in advance. Rather, I printed and then responded intuitively to the ink that was on the page, deciding to add layers that could express emotions and key ideas.

Influential Voices from the Fields of Pedagogy and Critical Literacy

Because I have a professional background in the field of literacy, I wanted to blend theories of critical literacy pedagogy into the creative development of my book.

Now that Kinder Inquiries is complete, I can look back and identify three theoretical voices from the field of literacy education who influenced my creative process. The first voice is that of Dr. Daniel Okubit, former Education Sector Program Manager of Peace Corps Ethiopia (who was my supervisor from 2011–2014, when I served in the U.S. Peace Corps). The second voice comes from translated works by Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire (1921–1997). The third and final voice is that of Dr. Louise Rosenblatt (1904–2005), a literacy scholar and university professor who lived and worked in the United States.

Press lock-up for “U is for under normal circumstances”

As I was composing and printing this book, I regularly recalled the voice of Dr. Daniel Okubit who often said, “a lesson plan is not a straitjacket.” Dr. Okubit encouraged Peace Corps English language teachers who were working in Ethiopia’s rural government schools to leave room for education to become more expansive rather than more constricted. By doing so, Dr. Okubit was pushing against educational norms, empowering teachers in Ethiopian schools to respond to the creative energy, the intellectual capabilities, and the lived experiences of their students.

I refer to Paulo Freire’s notion that “reading the world” precedes “reading the word” using large wood type and transparent pink ink. Freire’s Word/World connection suggests that critical literacy and lived experiences are dynamically interconnected. Rather than quote Freire directly, I included his concepts to ask future readers a question: What does it mean, to read the world? And how does reading the world relate to reading words on the page?

Kinder Inquiries, “P is for place”

Finally, I was motivated to create this difficult alphabet book because of my interest in transactional reader response theories as described by Dr. Louise Rosenblatt. When I was a graduate student in the College of Education at the University of Iowa, I took a semester-long course on Reader Response Theory. I imagine that my alphabet book is an intentionally challenging text designed for imagined readers who will willingly engage in transactional relationships with my book, despite its difficult terrain. In other words, I was motivated to create a book [the text] that acted as one protagonist whose purpose was to engage with an unknown person [the reader] who is the second protagonist. These two elements work together as equal participants to create a new and unique response [the poem]. (If you are interested in these ideas, I recommend Rosenblatt’s book, The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of Literary Work.)

Like Rosenblatt, Freire, and Okubit, I conceptualize the act of reading as a transactional event that is unique and specific to any individual reader’s identity. I see our identities as continually unfolding/evolving as we are idiosyncratically molded by various social and cultural contexts.

When I decided to create Kinder Inquiries as an intentionally difficult alphabet book, I knew I was embracing future ‘poems’ that might be created by readers I will likely never meet. This gave me a sense of artistic freedom. Because I never considered my intentionally difficult text to be a separate and static entity, I felt liberated from the pressure of printed book as authoritative text. The moral tale of Kinder Inquiries will come to life in the future, thanks to the dynamic potential of intelligent and unique readers. As Rosenblatt suggests, these readers will engage in transactions with the text to create new and insightful poems.

Jennifer Miller (she/her) is an artist and an English language educator currently living in Iowa City, Iowa. Her creative projects are inspired by history, archives, mapping, linguistics, phenology, and ecology. She holds an MFA in Ceramics (2000) and an MFA in Book Arts (2025), both from the University of Iowa.

KINDER INQUIRiES: NAVIGATING THE DIFFICULT TERRAIN OF A LETTERPRESS PRINTED BOOK // Jennifer Miller

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 06:00:00 GMT

Kinder Inquiries: The 50th Anniversary of the Death of an Ornate Box Turtle (2024–1974). Variable Edition of 30. Letterpress printed on handmade and commercial papers.

I letterpress printed Kinder Inquiries at the University of Iowa while I was an MFA student at the Center for the Book. I aimed to create printed pages that offered readers a range of compelling visual and emotional experiences. Each page will strike a different emotional chord in the reader, and each reader will have a different experience as they traverse the pages of this book.

Kinder Inquiries, “50th Anniversary 1974-2024”

This project encompasses five decades of my lived experiences in Iowa City, Iowa. The two main goals of this book were to commemorate of the 50th anniversary of the year I started kindergarten (1974) and to reflect on early literacy pedagogy in schools. Conceptually, I wanted to complicate the familiar genre of an abecedarium. As readers turn the pages, the terrain becomes increasingly complex and difficult to navigate. Layers of text and images reveal narrative threads, present decontextualized facts, raise questions, and provoke sensory memories.

Kinder Inquiries, “R is for resident”

Most print runs in this book were composed while I was standing at the press, allowing me to simultaneously construct and deconstruct ideas related to literacy and environmental harms. Notions about literacy and ecology were dredged from my subconscious mind and translated into pages that I consider to be ‘difficult landscapes.’

Press lock-up for a “circle story” in Kinder Inquiries

What makes a landscape difficult? A familiar terrain would be linear text read from left to right. A more challenging terrain contains circular texts, which disorient and require a slower approach if a reader wants to glean meaning. The most jarring landscapes in my book are the pages with up to ten layers of ink. These were attempts to obliviate language with opaque inks, but some of the words are still legible. Taking a complicated approach to setting type and printing layers of text was essential to my artistic vision. I wanted to use printed language to convey my own feelings of solastalgia (a sense of homesickness a person feels while they are still living at home).

It took more than one year to print the pages of this book. The process was not efficient; it was a long, slow slog through the solastalgic bogs of my soul. I called upon cultural artifacts laden with memory, including ornaments, flourishes, roman letters, and cuts/images that have been long separated from their original institutional publications. All these items were found in the University of Iowa’s Type Kitchen, part of the Center of the Book studios in North Hall. Interestingly, North Hall was built in 1925 and served as the University Lab School until the 1970s. Entering this building, I often felt like I was stepping back in time and experiencing the history of education in the United States. Printing with institutional relics that were specific to printed history in Iowa City resonated with me as I attempted to express the idea of solistalgia.

Kinder Inquiries, “F is for facts”

Though I had a preconceived plan, I invited spontaneity into the creative process. I would estimate that 90% of the book was improvised. I followed my intuition and attempted to express a range of emotions on the pages, while gradually revealing a true story about the death of an ornate box turtle that took place in 1974 in my kindergarten classroom. When the narrative became too dark, I remembered to include a feeling of joy. The endangered species act was not enacted in Iowa until 1975, so people were just beginning to recognize our harmful impacts on the environment. At the same time, 1974 was a time of play, like jumping rope at recess.

Kinder Inquiries, “J is for jumping rope; K is for kindergarten”

This book was a labor of love. Love for literacy, love for the natural environment, love for letterpress printing, and love for my home here in Iowa City, Iowa. Every new page spread is an invitation to readers to experience the complex narrative as it unfolds and to discover their own unique textual connections. Read alone or read aloud as a dialogic performance, this epic alphabet book fully embraces heteroglossia and never allows the experience of reading to become flattened by a singular voice of authority.

This is Part 1 of a two-part blog post. In Part 2, I discuss the balance of planning and improvisation, personal experiences and intellectual influences.

TYPE MATTERS: SUGGESTIONS ON LEARNING THE MECHANICS OF TYPOGRAPHY // Ellen Knudson

Virginia Green — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 08:00:00 GMT

Cardinal/Ordinal RISO Print Project, Ellen Knudson, 2025.

The Cardinal/Ordinal project addresses our fraught relationship with maps through the artist’s exploration of visual and directional language. These RISOgraph prints experiment with the recognizable graphic elements and directional marks of maps combined with RISO-friendly gradients and halftones. The set of fifteen prints is an offshoot of the upcoming artist book Cardinal/Ordinal. The entire project contemplates the language of and the problem with maps. See more at: https://crookedletterpress.com/#/c-o-riso/

I've been a book artist for almost 30 years. My undergraduate degree is in graphic design from North Carolina State University (Go Wolfpack) and I worked at The Art Institute of Chicago and The Detroit Institute of Arts as a graphic designer. Typography has always been an important part of my life and it remains a constant part of what I do every day as a book artist. Whether I’m setting type in the bed of the press or on the computer, I’m always trying to do it well. I had to learn how to do that and I'm going to share some tips about how you can learn too. These are my personal suggestions and they might not appeal to everyone. In the end, to each his/her own, but if you're interested, here's what I think.

1. TYPE TELLS THE STORY:

My first suggestion is to understand that whether good or bad, typography tells the story. Literally, the typography guides the reader from word to word. Figuratively, it sets the tone or provides the "flavor" of a printed piece. That's the easy part. The more difficult part is the details. The typography of books is different from the typography of a logo or a poster. It's more complex because of the multiple pages, surfaces, and positions involved. A visual system is required to create a sense of cohesion and discernible flow.

A stack of my favorite books about typography and visual grammar.

2. USE GOOD TYPEFACES:

There are so MANY typefaces that it’s mind-numbing. Many of them are poorly designed. I recommend beginning with classic typefaces and using your design skills to tell the story. You can always veer into the wild with some funky typeface on a special occasion. That's fun and all, but to get a good start at typography, I recommend using foundational, traditional typefaces, which allows exploration with the architecture of typography. It's like building with plain wooden blocks versus building with highly decorated, colorful blocks. Neither is wrong, but if you think about it there is already a strong aesthetic to the decorated blocks and it ultimately restricts what you can do typographically. Nowadays it is somewhat difficult to find free versions of classic typefaces. Check out the books below to become familiar with the names and characteristics of these typefaces. That way you can explore similar options if the classic typeface is unattainable.

Books about Typefaces:

Typographic Specimens: The Great Typefaces. Phillip Meggs and Rob Carter.
This book is a classic and one of the first books of typography I ever purchased. It’s a great reference tool and has a lot of good information in it.

Sample page from Typographic Specimens: The Great Typefaces

The Elements of Typographic Style. Robert Bringhurst.
This book is a dense text and it appears intimidating, but it is so elegantly written and beautifully designed. Even the proportions of the book itself make it stand out amongst its peers! I like to open it wherever and start reading.

Sample page from The Elements of Typographic Style

3. PRACTICE TYPE MECHANICS:

Find examples of typography that appeal to you and try to recreate them. I am not saying to copy or steal another designer’s work. I'm suggesting this as an exercise: recreate a sample of text and try to make your type look like that type. This practice will force you to consider typeface, point size, alignment, letter spacing, kerning, leading, hyphenation, etc. It sounds very simple and it is. By getting microscopic with this exercise you will learn what's involved with typesetting. (See the sample exercise at the end of this post.)

Books about Typography Mechanics:

A Type Primer. John Kane.
This is an essential text about the mechanics and complexities of typography. This book covers many of the nitty-gritty details of typography and the book itself is beautifully designed.

Sample page from A Type Primer

Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students. Ellen Lupton.
This is one of my favorites. Lupton is a well-known designer and writer of graphic design texts. Her writing is approachable, understandable, and the book is well designed.

Sample page from Thinking with Type

Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type. Elam, Kimberly.
All of Elam’s books are fantastic. If you can find them, grab them! A special part of the books is the addition of tipped in translucent paper diagrams layered over the cited examples. Yummy!

Sample page from Grid Systems

4. PRACTICE GOOD COMPOSITION:

Learn how to arrange objects on a page (or in a space). Doing this well takes a conscious effort of exploration. The concepts of visual grammar apply to both type and image. These are timeless lessons that will teach you how to create visual relationships. When you experiment with composition it opens your eyes to where things go on a page and why some arrangements look and feel better than others. Every project will be and should be different!

Books about Composition/Design:

Visual Grammar: A Design Brief. Leborg, Christian.
This is another essential text. Its striking design is perfect for visual learners, which makes sense because the book is about the language and technique of visual design. It’s a fantastic reference book that I go back to repeatedly.

Sample Page from Visual Grammar

Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition and Typographic Systems. Kimberly Elam.
The other two books in Elam’s design series, these texts are elegantly designed and readable. She distills the information clearly and inspires through her own skills with design.

Sample page from Geometry of Design

Having said all of the above, I have also seen great typography that does not necessarily follow traditional rules. Personally, I’m not a fan of assigning a formula to something and following it every single time. BORING. Below I share some examples of cool typography that I have seen. (It's mostly posters and single page designs, but I think they are contemporary examples of quality typographic design.) In all of these tantalizing and inspiring works, the various concepts of visual grammar are being applied. My feeling is that if I am tantalized and inspired then you have gone most of the way to your goal of good design!

L to R: Designer: Studio Angello Torres: Fictional poster for the 1969 Frank Zappa album Hot Rats / Peaches en Regalia. (2020); Designer: Ting-An Ho: Name the Tree: Poster for lecture (2013); Designer: Lenka Clayton, Typewriter Drawing from her ongoing project "An Artist Residency in Motherhood" (2016)

In closing, I will share a handout I created inspired by A Type Primer. It is an exhibition label that I designed for a show, and my notes detail the finer points of typography. I hope all of my suggested texts and plans of approach will encourage people to practice good typography!

Exhibition label with typographic specifications.

Ellen Knudson produces artist books as Crooked Letter Press. A book artist for over 30 years, she is Sr. Associate in Book Arts at University of Florida. She holds an MFA in Book Arts from The University of Alabama, has taught book arts, letterpress, and design at UF, Alabama, Mississippi State, Wayne State, and workshops across the U.S. Her work is in over 120 national and international collections. https://crookedletterpress.com/

https://www.instagram.com/ellen.knudson/

CONCERNING THE LIFE CYCLE OF BOOKS: ANXIOUS OBSERVATIONS OF A BOOK ALTERER // Emily Tipps

Susan Viguers — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:00:00 GMT

Books are tossed out because they must be.

This is a space concern above all else. Despite the increasing variety of means for reading, physical books continue to be produced, sold, consumed, passed along, stored, and also thrown away. Where do we put all these books, eventually, if not in the trash? It’s a real conundrum. Libraries are magical, but Automated Retrieval Centers aside, they are not infinite bags of holding.

Why does it hurt to throw a book away?

Books are among few objects people are taught, as a matter of course, to “respect”: do not throw books; do not dog-ear the pages; do not write in the margins; do not break the spine; do not allow books to get wet or burn. [1]

When our teachers stop telling us this, we repeat it to ourselves and then to our children. I squirm when books molder in damp garages, are pulped for reuse in paper products, or are upcycled as home décor. Was my training too successful? What exactly are my hopes and dreams for that copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People?

Is the sacredness of books a romantic ideal?

Is altering books a kind of deprogramming?

For me the practice of creative alteration requires a mantra: There are thousands of these. They’ll end up in the trash otherwise. They’ll end up in the trash otherwise. They’ll end up in the trash otherwise.

But there are lines we don’t cross, right? Things we mustn’t destroy? Trinkets too silly to be made of butchered books? Books too decent to disassemble? Such rhetoric slides me into true confusion, Olfa frozen in indecision. [2]

Bookworm, altered book by the author, 2022

Is the sacredness of books an intellectual ideal?

The Academic Senate voted to save the books.

Those who tend the books are also the most practical.

Librarians and archivists know saving them all is not realistic. A healthy garden requires weeding.

The archive is key. [3]
Let’s keep what’s important, or try to keep a copy of each thing (because who determines importance?).

The orderliness of the archive is a fallacy.

The Archive is chaotic and rich. It exists in the most impressive collections and intentional efforts, but also in our homes, thrift shops, and dentist office waiting rooms. The archive is purposeful and accidental—a function of luck, coincidence, and dedicated labor. The archive is a mammal with a coat that sheds and regrows and changes its character and leaves hair all over the couch.

Creative reuse is a symbolic gesture.

Even if every household in the world had space to display their altered artist books and read their 19th century hardcover flops by the light of stacked-books table lamps, we’d have books coming out our ears. Does the existence of these objects signal that there are just too many of the damn things?

But don’t we have a problem if we treat books as disposable?

With their unique cultural status, books teeter on the edge of the expanding arena of single-use-products. The answer is not to equate books with plastic spoons. Maybe the answer is more artists books, and lots and lots of recycling. The demand for toilet paper shows no sign of dissipating.

worthtrashworthytrashworthy, altered book by the author, 2022

Notes:

1. These rules are exterior to questions of quality. To an extent, it doesn’t matter if this is a first edition of an important literary work or the 27th printing of a best-selling thriller. Collectively and conceptually, books are the embodiment of treasure, of human wisdom, knowledge, expression, desire, history, and culture.
2. My conclusion for now is that crumbling copy of The Firm has served its readers and its time. Now it is collateral damage. It is not alive (not exactly). Maybe it is okay to use it for a planter, a table lamp, or a sculpture.
3. Preservation is also key, but that gets us into that question of quality—stored on the same shelf, yes, but a separate can of literary sausages.

Emily Tipps is a Librarian and the Program Manager for the Book Arts Program and the lead binder for the Red Butte Press at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library. Emily is also the proprietor of High5 Press. Her work is exhibited and held in collections nationally.

MISSED CONNECTIONS: ARTIST BOOKS AND ART HISTORY, PART 2: MINIMALISM // Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 07:00:00 GMT

In my previous post, I explained how developing an art history course, The Book as Art: A Hands-On History from 1750 to Today, allowed me to address the friction between the history of artist books and mainstream art history. I argued that sometimes artist books played only a minor role in a movement because they had already worked through the problems confronting artists working in other media. The previous post focused on Pop Art; in this post, I discuss Minimalism.

As I would tell my students, Pop and Minimalism occurred during the same period and shared certain concerns (despite very different appearances). Fundamentally, Pop and Minimalism both challenged the boundary between art and life. Whereas Pop appropriates everyday life into art, Minimalism deflects attention from the art object and onto its surroundings. Instead of being transported by, or immersed in, the work, the viewer remains aware of their embodied viewing experience. Minimalism could also challenge the boundary between media; artists argued that they created “specific objects” rather than exemplars of existing traditions like painting or sculpture. Lastly, Minimalism responded to the increasing automation and abstraction of labor, and artists adopted the role of manager rather than fabricator. Repetition and seriality often accompanied this industrial approach to artmaking.

A number of artists created minimal books with little or no printed content. Free of text and image, the books deflect attention to the embodied experience of reading.

Bruno Munari created a series of libri illeggibili (illegible books) to push the limits of communication through simple shapes, solid colors, rhythm, and touch.

Sol Lewitt made even simpler books by creasing sheets of white paper. Examples include A Book of Folds (c. 1978) and A Book Without Six Geometric Figures (c. 1978).

George Maciunas’s Flux Paper Events (1976) is a blank book in which every page is somehow altered — but never printed. Pages are folded, torn, hole-punched, stapled, perforated, and so on. Maciunas’s original proposal even called for pages to be scented with culinary spices and gasoline.

George Maciunas, Flux Paper Events, Edition Hundertmark, 1976. Photo credit: Rosemary Furtak Collection, Walker Art Center Library.

Despite the intensive alterations, Flux Paper Events was produced in an edition of 500. Munari’s books were also published in relatively large editions (he was, after all, an industrial designer). Even as LeWitt’s folded and ripped “drawings without drawing” were conspicuously hand-made, they were meant to be affordable multiples, “not to be sold for more than $100.” The difference is worth exploring: LeWitt’s serial production challenges the conventions of drawing, but the multiples by Munari and Maciunas simply fulfill the expectations of books production. Furthermore, it is hardly surprising that Flux Paper Events was published by Edition Hundertmark instead of Maciunas’s own imprint. Minimalist sculptors may have raised eyebrows when they began to outsource their fabrication, but the opposite was true in books, where only a fine line separates a studio from a vanity press.

So, serial production and outsourced production are less radical in artist books than in painting or sculpture. However, these books’ renunciation of text and image is as provocative as a monochrome painting. They succeed in focusing attention on the experience of reading rather than the work’s content. Yet, even in this regard, artist books moved more quickly toward other concerns, namely Conceptual art and institutional critique.

At first, Minimalist artists deflected attention from their objects into what they thought were neutral spaces, the so-called white cube. It was against this ostensibly empty backdrop that subtle nuances in light, shadow, and perspective would make the viewer aware of their own perception. It took a while for these (mostly white, male) artists to recognize that the white cube was not neutral, that beneath the empty walls were economic, information, and ideological systems. Michael Asher and Lawrence Weiner made physical interventions in the gallery spaces that opened the way for other modes of institutional critique.

Like an empty gallery, a blank book is never neutral. Indeed, I argue it is because books are more overtly ideological that artist books moved more quickly from Minimalism toward explicitly critical strategies. Books are too involved in law, education, religion — explicit instruction of any sort — to be mistaken for neutral. (Notably, Munari’s illegible books are related to his longstanding interest in early childhood learning.) Even when artist books cross boundaries like print and sculpture, they are never “specific objects”; they are always books.

Whether artists leverage the familiarity of books or aim to defamiliarize them, it is well understood that artist books straddle the boundary of art and life. It might be surprising, then, had they played no role in Pop art and Minimalism, two movements that challenged that same boundary from both directions. That artist books played only a marginal role in Pop and Minimalism does not demonstrate, in my view, any weakness in the book as a medium but rather the extent to which Pop and Minimalism maintained the modernist paradigm of medium specificity; artists were more concerned with the boundaries between painting and life or sculpture and life than the boundary between art and life. Thus, including artist books in the history of art contributes to the debate over whether Pop and Minimalism are the end of modernism or the beginning of postmodernism. What other contributions might be made when artist books are included in art history?

Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.

MISSED CONNECTIONS: ARTIST BOOKS AND ART HISTORY, PART I: POP// Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 07:00:00 GMT

In the spring semester of 2025, I debuted an upper-level undergraduate art history course called The Book as Art: A Hands-On History from 1750 to Today. It was as much a survey of Western art told through artist books as it was a history of artist books. The tension between the two was part of what inspired the course. I had long wondered why artist books are so often excluded from mainstream art history courses, and why art history is often absent from book arts curricula. I aimed to insert artist books back into the flow of art historical movements and styles. And if they fit uneasily, so much the better — I would rather use artist books to trouble the canon of Western art than try to create a canon of artist books.

Even before I began my research, I knew that some periods would be easier to address through artist books than others. I had no trouble conveying the core tenets and technical innovations of Surrealism through books alone. Meanwhile, Abstract Expressionism was a glaring absence in my syllabus. Toward the end of the semester, which proceeded chronologically, I posited speculative new periods to address artist books from the 1990s–2020s (perhaps these can be the subject of a future blog post). However, some of the most interesting periods were those with some artist books but not many.

In the rest of this blog post and the following one, I will introduce two examples of this generative friction: Pop and Minimalism. In my view, each is a case where a discovery was made more quickly through books than other media and, as a result, artist books moved on to other questions.

Arguably, two of the most influential book artists could be considered Pop: Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha. Furthermore, the early Pop collages of Eduardo Paolozzi echo in books by Benjamin Patterson and Italian artists like Stelio Maria Martini, Michele Perfetti, and Gianni Bertini, which use similar cut-up strategies to explore the libidinal economy of advertising and mass media.[1] Why, then, did books fall by the wayside when Pop migrated to the United States? And why have the books that were produced been underappreciated? (For example, books were a major part of Andy Warhol’s oeuvre but hardly figure in his popular reception.)[2]

Gianni Bertini. Oppure. Torino: Galleria il punto, 1970. Photo credit: The Idea of the Book.

Pop art, as I would teach it in a survey course, is about the appropriation of everyday life into art. But Pop appropriation differs from Dada’s readymade strategy: artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol translated the mass media they appropriated back into traditional media like paint on canvas. The erosion of the art-life boundary also worked the other way: Pop reminded viewers that art existed in the everyday and not a separate realm.

For artist books, crossing the art-life boundary, in either direction is less radical, less subversive. Unlike Lichtenstein’s painted cartoons, when Dieter Roth appropriates comics and coloring books, the medium remains the same: ink on paper. Arguably, such works are more like assisted readymades than true appropriation. Roth sequences the books at random and removes content (by die cutting holes) rather than creating it. Like Dada, Roth challenged authorship through radical negation, whereas painters like Warhol or Lichtenstein retained a signature style even when appropriating content.

Dieter Roth. Gessamelte Werke Band 7: Bok 3a und 3b. Stuttgart: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1974. Photo credit: The Idea of the Book.

While Pop painting comments at once on fine art and mass media, Roth’s books mainly comment on the latter. (When Roth does challenge traditional media, it is by refusing to use them or abide by their standards. For example, a painting by the likes of Lichtenstein is meant to endure, no matter how ephemeral its pop culture subject matter, whereas Roth’s Literaturwurst — shredded printed matter mixed with lard and spices then stuffed into a sausage casing — were meant to be perishable.) Just as the continuity from printed source to printed artwork lessens the power of appropriation, the realization that artist books can immerse a reader within them yet simultaneously exist in real space is less subversive than, say, a Brillo box by Warhol. Unlike a painting, which remains a window into another reality, a book is eventually closed. Anyone who ever finished reading a book, fully engrossed until the very last word, then found a place for it on a shelf had already crossed the boundary from art into the everyday.

In summary, printed books had already demonstrated that the distinction between high art and low was not to be found in the medium. So too had books recognized their physical existence in the everyday. Artists who made books had to find other ways to pursue the problems that motivated Pop art, to investigate mass media and dissolve the boundary between art and life.

My next post will address similar concerns at play in Minimalism.

1. For works by these artists, see: Maffei, Giorgio and Maura Picciau. Il libro come opera d’arte / The Book as a Work of Art. Corraini Edizioni, 2006.

2. Fortunately, there is an excellent study by Lucy Mulroney, which nicely distinguishes between making books and publishing. While offering close readings of Warhol’s books, she emphasizes how important the collaborative and social aspects of publishing were to Warhol. Mulroney, Lucy. Andy Warhol, Publisher. The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.

IS THERE A CULTURE OF THE ARTIST BOOK? // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 07:00:00 GMT

This semester I have been parsing with my Spanish classes the definition of popular culture. We began with Google and ChatGPT definitions because that’s where students would usually start. They found that while culture is generally defined as being made up of both surface culture (including foods, traditions, and customs) and deep culture (values, world vision, and basic beliefs), these definitions are also constantly being reconstructed and reevaluated due to differences in actual practice. We discussed different scales of culture from the universal to the individual. As we went through this process, it became evident that there were not only different meanings to culture, but that there were also different levels of culture. These include culture with a capital “C,” Traditional culture, as well as Popular culture. This tripartite separation, while still a simplification, represented a beginning point for my students to understand and further explore the meaning, relevance, and creation of culture.

As I reflected upon this with my students, the question of the culture of the artist book has come to my mind as one that deserves consideration. I know there are multiple voices and opinions beyond my own that have already considered these questions, and so I am appealing to you with your capabilities to help develop this concept of the culture of the artist book:

What makes up the culture of the artist book?

Is there a range of different scales? Universal, national, subcultural?

Do these represent different levels of culture? High artist book culture, popular culture, traditional culture?

Is there an artist book counter culture that goes against all other cultures?

CULTIVATING ECOLITERACY WITH ARTIST BOOKS, PART 3 // Karen Viola

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 07:00:00 GMT

To round out this three-part blog series begun June 1st (Part 1) and Part 2 (June 15) I offer a brief presentation of a lengthy artist book project that was also the capstone of my Masters of Liberal Arts degree program at SUNY Empire University, completed earlier this year: A Generous Land: Gifts from Cranberry Lake Preserve, which took the form of an 88-page coptic bound book, illustrated map, and collection of found natural items wrapped in hand-dyed cloth, all contained in a wooden diorama box.

The project’s conception itself was a revelatory gift, as the creative freedom afforded me by this interdisciplinary program posed a challenge from the start: how do I choose a topic focus when everything around me is interesting? A day came when I was particularly exasperated by my lingering analysis paralysis, so I went for a walk around Cranberry Lake, a 5-minute drive from my home, to clear my head. I would go there often for a mindful reset, to sketch, write, or just walk. And it was while walking and breathing in the loamy smell of the moist earth that my epiphany struck: It’s all here. Everything I needed was right there at my feet, the diversity of details which could speak to the larger issues that mattered to me. One of my many favorite sentences from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass had come to pass: “The land knows you, even when you are lost.” [1]

My individualized course work helped me gather the material and experience I would need, including a practicum component of a land-based pedagogy course which involved designing an eco-art workshop for the summer camp at the preserve. I was glad to work with the simple liveliness of children in what was a complex time of loss, having recently witnessed my mother endure the ravages of cancer in her final weeks of life, shortly followed by seeing how Beech Leaf Disease was killing my favorite trees at the preserve. But as I write in the book: “memories are like microbes. They consume the blood, sweat, and tears shed during the exquisitely profound experience of accompanying a loved one on their last, corporeal journey. A rich, regenerative compost emerges, fertilizer for the soil of a growing soul.”

A few months after my mother passed away, my partner and I began a new life chapter in Ithaca, NY, after so many of them ‘downstate’ in White Plains. It turned out this book would also be a work of closure, a long farewell to the physical closeness of a beloved place and its creatures, trees, and gneiss rocks. Despite, or perhaps because of this, the meaning of the writing and research deepened. In the larger picture of ecological collapse, the work seemed to take on the feel of a eulogy infused with gratitude for the land as it lived and breathed—a microcosm of our imperiled biosphere as a whole. If work is not grounded in gratitude, it can too easily become a chore to ignore. We need the beauty of unvarnished eulogies for our still-living world.

In her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit elaborates on the idea that narrative writing is closely linked to walking, and that “to write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as guide” [2]. In the same spirit, I crafted an ecocentric lyric essay divided into ten segments, each centering on a different section of trail while exploring a particular topic such as sound pollution, disease and death, geology, clean water, graffiti, invasive species, land ownership, and the fragility or resilience of ecosystems including humans. Woven throughout the text are my photographs, sketches, poetry, and maps. Also featured are QR code links to audio clips of a singing Wood Thrush and roaring airplane, a mini slide show of one vista through all the seasons, and a video of a migrating salamander missing part of its tail. The book is an invitation to walk and reflect with me, to map stories onto the preserve’s pathways, and to consider multiple points of perception in a multi-species world. A serendipitous result is that it takes about the same time to read the book as it does to leisurely walk the actual looping path I write about.

The unique display edition of the book was printed using an Epson P700 printer, the pages trimmed and assembled by hand. The cover boards were wrapped with printed watercolor paper and protected with a coating of acrylic matte medium. The kozo end papers were embellished with a hand-carved rubber stamp of a beech leaf I made for the camp workshop. On the front, the title page peeks through a hexagon-shaped portal framed by a ghosted version of my illustrated map of the preserve.

The hexagon, an icon of interconnectedness and a shape which occurs frequently in nature, is further honored by my map design which is divided into ten pairs of hexagons, each corresponding to a chapter of the book, to either be explored in order while reading or pieced together like a puzzle to contemplate as a whole. With its liberties of perspective and scale, the drawing depicts fairly accurate positioning of trails, roads, and landmarks in the preserve. Real property lines are omitted intentionally to emphasize the interconnectivity and character of the land itself.

The wooden container box has double doors reminiscent of a devotional ‘nicho’ or diorama that when opened reveal a photographic panorama. There is also room in the box for a small assortment of pine cones and gneiss rock specimens from the Quarry area of the preserve, collected with permission and stored in the hand-dyed indigo cotton ‘ground cloth,’ its watery pattern an echo of the surface of the lake.

A paperback version of the book featuring sections of the illustrated map as chapter title spreads is forthcoming, which will make a larger edition and wider distribution possible. The ultimate aim of this project, after all, is to inspire readers to engage intimately with their own places, to deepen their curiosity about ecological entanglements and relationships, and to revere with humility the generosity of all living lands.

Notes:

1. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. First Edition. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

2. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Penguin Books, 2001.

Karen Viola is a book artist and writer in Ithaca, NY. Her work is grounded in research and a sense of kinship with the land. She has an MA in Liberal Studies focused on creative ecoliteracy, a BFA in illustration, and a professional background in designing innovative books for children.

TEXT AND MATERIALITY IN JEWISH WOMEN'S PRAYERS (PART 2: THE CREATIVE RESPONSE) // Nora Cornell

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 12:43:56 GMT

I began the second, letterpress-printed half of my senior thesis project with an open mind and without a set plan. Following my initial research into the materiality of tkhines (early modern Jewish women’s prayers, as described in the previous blog post), I sat down with a laser-printed version of a 1992 translation of Sarah Bas Tovim’s original text and quite literally cut pieces of it away until I was left with what I saw as the core of the prayer: one woman’s plea for a spiritual connection that fully acknowledged and celebrated the role of her gender in her religious life. Sarah’s text resonated strongly with me, and I made first-person additions to the prayer that highlighted similarities between her life and my own.

A reader holding Nora Cornell’s version of Shloshe She’arim

The design process was similarly exploratory and circuitous. With three distinct “voices” to represent (the original text in Yiddish, the original text in English, and my own English-language additions), I set out to design a typographic system that clearly differentiated each voice in the text and harkened back to the complex hierarchies of language and typography present in the historical documents. I printed the Yiddish in black from a narrow 24- and 30-point Hebrew-alphabet metal typeface, with occasional phrases in a warm brown color from a wider 8-pica wood type for emphasis and visual interest. Similarly, I used an 18-point condensed typeface for the English, in black for the original and red for my additions, with a corresponding 5-pica square wood type in the same warm brown. Throughout the pamphlet (which reads right to left, like a standard Yiddish book), the Yiddish text is on the right page and the corresponding English text is on the left. As a beginner Yiddish speaker myself, I knew that my audience would be instinctively drawn to the English text, and so I wanted to prioritize the Yiddish by giving it more visual weight.

The mix of typefaces and languages recalls the cobbled-together feel of earlier tkhines, as does the flimsy, handheld format, but my design choices and printing processes are much more connected to contemporary book arts traditions. For this reason, I took to calling the project an “artist’s pamphlet,” as it lives in the spaces between accessible and elite, between unique and mass-produced, and between old and new.

I printed the book over the course of three months in Wellesley College’s Book Arts Lab. The project quickly became one of meditative repetition: I was creating 100 copies of a three-color book, where each copy was made from three separate sheets of paper. This meant that (at a conservative estimate and with some fuzzy math) I completed 1800 cranks of the Vandercook SP-15 press throughout this project. This is, auspiciously, 100 times chai, the Jewish word for life, which is numerically represented by the lucky number 18. With each piece of type I set, with each crank of the letterpress, and with each fold and stitch I made in the final pages, I felt myself grow closer and closer to the women who first wrote, printed, and read from these documents more than 150 years ago.

Shloshe She’arim in Cornell’s thesis installation

To me, that is the power (or one of the powers) of book arts: the capacity to tap into — or even create — powerful connections across time and space through the use of the written word and the tangible page. Even after months of research on Sarah Bas Tovim and her tkhines, nothing made the text come to life more than watching it take physical shape in front of me, piece by tiny piece. And nothing could more effectively convey the significance of my project than inviting my community to take part in it themselves. To celebrate the completion of my thesis, I invited friends, professors, and the entire Wellesley community to a letterpress open house. I shared my research findings and invited each guest to print their own copy of a special letterpress keepsake, where they connected themselves (knowingly or not) to the same long line of people involved in the care and preservation of women’s prayer and materiality.

I am still engaged in the process of distributing my pamphlets. In addition to the copies acquired by friends, family, and mentors, my version of Shloshe She’arim is held by Wellesley College, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, as well as by artists, Yiddishists, and scholars across the country, with more still to be distributed. As this project takes on a life of its own, I hope that it brings these previously-marginalized people, prayers, and documents to the forefront of contemporary art and scholarship. Tkhines are a powerful example of how book arts and critical bibliography shouldn’t just include women as individuals but can be reshaped around them and their work.

Nora Cornell is a recent graduate of Wellesley College, where she created the Book Studies major. Her poems can be seen in The Blue Nib, Furrow Magazine, and Prairie Home Magazine, and her artist books are held by Wellesley College, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Yiddish Book Center, and elsewhere.

TEXT AND MATERIALITY IN JEWISH WOMEN'S PRAYERS (PART 1: THE ACADEMIC RESEARCH) // Nora Cornell

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 07:00:00 GMT

For my undergraduate senior thesis in Book Studies, I took a multidisciplinary deep dive into a well-known but under-researched genre of Yiddish-language women’s prayers known as tkhines. In a two-part project that involved scholarly work based on archival research and a creative letterpress project in response, I aimed to recenter materiality as the primary lens through which to view these important texts in Jewish women’s history. My work argues that the tangible, physical artifacts of the tkhine pamphlets offer just as much as the texts they contain.

Tkhines date to at least the sixteenth century and have been written almost continuously ever since. They represent an organic, even folksy realm of women’s spirituality, and have often faced derision from authors, publishers, and readers. Their language, subject matter, and format all contribute to their perception as distinctly feminine prayers and objects. Tkhines are primarily a Yiddish-language genre, which separates them from the Hebrew-language rituals of educated Jewish men and is part of what cements them as books specifically intended for women. Additionally, unlike the prayer books intended to be used by men in synagogue, tkhines were almost always printed cheaply and in small formats, to be easily used in the home and carried in daily life. Their texts are often meant to be recited on intimate occasions like childbirth, during pre-existing rituals meant specifically for women, or during ritual meals and cleanings.

My research rests at the intersection of book history, feminist bibliography, and studies of Jewish book culture — intertwined fields with their own unique histories and methodologies. The work of feminist bibliographer Sarah Werner was particularly important to structuring my research; rather than simply trying to fit women readers into preconceived notions of Jewish book history, I wanted to entirely reconceptualize what bibliographic work looks like and does. As Werner puts it, I wanted to “ask feminist questions about what we choose to study and the systems that get books from their origins to our hands today” (Werner, “Notes on Feminist Bibliography – Wynken de Worde,” n.p.).

This feminist approach to book history naturally centers long-term processes and instances of marginalization. Tkhines are a perfect example of the “less visible book[s] that gain meaning through social circulation,” which Werner invites us to focus on (Werner, “Working towards a Feminist Printing History,” 5). Low-cost, ephemeral, and often anonymously written, their value in Jewish life comes not from beautiful decoration, famous authors, or institutional support, but from repeated use, from the invocation of emotional prayer by women all over Europe and, indeed, the world. Studying tkhines is not feminist practice just because they were used by women or even because I, myself, am a woman but because studying tkhines means tracking common, everyday moves in the printed world and thus radically reenvisions what it has historically meant to be a bibliographer.

Using this approach, I conducted an in-depth examination of two particular copies of one text: Tkhine Shloshe She’arim or “Tkhine of the Three Gates,” written by a Ukrainian Jewish woman named Sarah Bas Tovim in the late eighteenth century. The two editions I examined were undated but likely from the early to mid-nineteenth century and are currently held in the Special Collections at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. In many ways, these pamphlets are representative of all tkhines published in this period and shortly thereafter: they engage specifically and exclusively with “women’s rituals,” their texts are highly varied even though they clearly come from the same source, and they are printed in a hand-sized octavo format on low-quality paper, with cramped and smudged type.

What I was able to learn through hands-on archival research would have been impossible with any other methodology. Feeling the paper between my fingers and letting the spine open in my hands brought me as close as I will ever be to the women who first prayed from these books and gave me an unparalleled insight into the text’s ability to impact the reader. Indeed, it was exactly that hands-on experience that became the driving force behind my responsive letterpress project, which aimed to bring Sarah’s tkhine into the 21^st century, focusing on the interactions between womanhood and Judaism within the context of contemporary artists’ books. That letterpress project is the subject of my next blog post.

Nora Cornell is a recent graduate of Wellesley College, where she created the Book Studies major. Her poems can be seen in The Blue Nib, Furrow Magazine, and Prairie Home Magazine, and her artist books are held by Wellesley College, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Yiddish Book Center, and elsewhere.

ARCHIVES AS SHOPPING // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 07:00:00 GMT

In my July 1 post I wrote about archives-based publishing practice as a form of study. At the time I was immersed in the archives at Women’s Studio Workshop (WSW) in anticipation of an exhibition I have there this fall. Today I wish to explore: what if publishing from archives is closer to shopping than to studying?

I owe this analogy to documentary filmmaker (or in his words, “television journalist”) Adam Curtis. He likens his own process of scouring the BBC footage archives as “shopping” for the best material, which he then organizes by theme/feeling/affect and rates by excellence. You can read more about his fascinating process here in a New Yorker profile: “Curtis watches most of what he finds on fast forward, whizzing through QuickTime files. He allows himself to be distracted. ‘It’s like shopping,’ he said. ‘You just go through it.’”

But I recall elsewhere, in another interview, and I regret I did not make note of where I encountered it (clearly I am a big Adam Curtis fan): Curtis elaborates on how his process is actually a very discerning form of shopping. He said, and I paraphrase here, that you only take the very best and put it in your cart. Only what truly grabs you. If something is just OK, put it back. Do not buy it.

A few thoughts on this:

1. Is the process of creating from found material, which comprises curatorial surveying and critical analysis but also a more primal and immediate “I want this, and this, and this” --- is this process of creation not also a form of consumption? Is this a contributing factor to the popularity of work from archives these days: we are so well trained as consumers we turn this way in our artistic practices as well? (Would all forms of artistic creation, indebted in some way to work that has been done before, also be forms of consumption? If not quite as blatantly?)

2. Popular culture often asserts that shopping releases dopamine, a rush of pleasure. But Psychology Today reports “dopamine is also critical in causing seeking behavior. Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels your searching for information.” So work in archives prompts further work in archives…

3. And does this suggest that some forms of studying—when it is research, search—is also a form of shopping? Is all seeking a type of shopping? Or is this a category mistake: is shopping only shopping when money is exchanged?

4. I’m currently in the process of moving house (of 15 years) and studio (of 19 years) and am all too aware that in my scouring of thrift stores and second-hand markets I buy way too much of not always the very best things. The excess of the mediocre is heavy and burdensome. Similarly, at WSW: I photographed 120 items from their archives. That is more than I need. In going through them now, there’s so much wonder, but also overwhelm at the magnitude. How to choose only the very best?

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut. For the past five years she has been working on a book with feminist activist and radical police educator K.D. Codish. Her exhibition The Work Around the Work opens this October at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY.

PUBLISHING AS STUDY // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Lately I’ve been thinking of my archives-based publishing practice as a form of study.

study(n.) c. 1300, studie, “pursuit of learning, application of the mind to the acquisition of knowledge, intensive reading and protracted contemplation of a book, writings, etc.,” from Old French estudie “care, attention, skill, thought; study, school” (Modern French étude), from Latin studium“ study, application.” https://www.etymonline.com/word/study

This way of working emerged for me in 2017 through the making of Our daily lives have to be a satisfaction in themselves, a book documenting Bloodroot, a feminist vegetarian work collective, restaurant, and bookstore in Bridgeport, CT. The research involved hours in Bloodroot’s archives at Yale as well as in the restaurant’s back storage room. One box at a time, one folder at a time, I sifted through each paper and asked myself: does the book need this? Or this? Or this? While I don’t think I was conscious of my criteria at the time, to name them now they included: did this answer a question? Seem significant? Exciting? Unexpected? Delightful? Illustrate a point? Connect the disconnected? Mostly I listened to my intuition, remembering what Ann Hamilton said: “Pay attention to what you pay attention to” (2011 CBAA conference keynote, Indiana University). In the moment, I photographed with my phone each document that passed this first round.

Later, back in the studio, [notably the root word of studio is study, studio(n.) 1819, ‘work-room of a sculptor or painter,’ usually one with windows to admit light from the sky, from Italian studio‘room for study,’ from Latin stadium” https://www.etymonline.com/word/studio)] I reexamined each document. Did I want to keep it? If yes, I used OCR software to convert the image to editable text (astonishingly quick compared to my old method of manual transcription). I reread for errors, compared it to the original. Then, the text was ready to be sculpted: I copied and pasted it into InDesign and applied saved design styles (themselves painstakingly developed over weeks, continuously revised). I reread it again. This time while rereading, I maddeningly operated the software as if hand-setting metal type. I inserted em space indents one at a time in front of each new paragraph, replaced double dashes with em dashes, changed roman text to italics, hung punctuation: a lavishing of attention and care. I came to graphic design via zines and printmaking, and knew letterpress printing before I knew software, and so I am largely self-taught in InDesign. This is how I know how to work. It is arguably ridiculous, but also non-automation offers many returns: namely, a dwelling in the text; a deep slowing down.

To design a text this way — meticulously, slowly, (re)reading for (re)publication — is to know intimately its rhythms and meanings, to visually interpret them.

Reading becomes shaping, of both the book and the self.

While I took several courses in Women’s Studies as an undergrad, I recognize that making this book was my true feminist education.

Perhaps bookmaking and typography could be more often incorporated into extradisciplinary academic coursework as an artistic method of studying the material.

The second entry in the etymology of the noun study offers this: study(n), also from c. 1300 as a state of deep thought or contemplation; a state of mental perplexity, doubt, anxiety; state of amazement or wonder.” It is attested from mid-14c. as “careful examination, scrutiny.” [Ibid.]

Years after completing the Bloodroot book, I am at work in my studio making another book from feminist archives, the same one I blogged about in 2023 here ( https://www.collegebookart.org/bookarttheory/13221744) and here https://www.collegebookart.org/bookarttheory/13227501 Comparatively, the Bloodroot book was easier to make. This time the book is not a collected anthology of discrete materials but rather a collaged medley of disparate and unwieldy parts: interview excerpts, clippings, screenshots from digitized VHS tapes, televised news coverage, and documents from various archives, which I am attempting to sculpt into a compelling and coherent narrative arc. “Mental perplexity, doubt, and anxiety” was certainly my dominant mood for the first five years of making this book.

But recently I’m entering a new phase. I think my “state of deep thought or contemplation” has been transformed by the sheer number of hours I have invested in the material through studying it, through devoting myself to understanding it. These days, making the book is sitting with it patiently, staying curious and open with the material, allowing the book to emerge and reveal itself. I have a strong sense that everything the finished book needs is there, just obscured. Recently to study is to closely observe a living thing grow, to supply what it needs, to cultivate: perhaps a bit more 16th century in meaning [“ ‘seek to learn particulars of observation’ is from c. 1600; that of ‘regard attentively’ is from 1660s,” ibid. study(v)]. Now studying is something closer to a “state of amazement or wonder." I’m immensely grateful for the transformation.

In my next post, July 15: what if publishing from archives is closer to shopping than to studying?

#EmilyLarned

#ArchiveBasedArtmaking

#ArtisticProcessContemplationObservation

CULTIVATING ECOLITERACY WITH ARTIST BOOKS, PART 2 // Karen Viola

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 18:05:36 GMT

Following Part 1 (June 1) of this blog series, I am sharing an analysis and reflection of my own place-based, ecocentric work. My artist book Nursery: The River that Flows Both Ways takes readers on a journey through time, beginning with a glimpse of how the glacial forces formed the Hudson Valley and how for millennia, the Lenape people survived and thrived based on a reciprocity with each other and their land.[1] As implied in its title, the book celebrates both the river’s own purpose as a nursery for migratory fish and the nature of its Lenape-given (translated) name, Muhheakanuck, which recognizes its observable estuarine attributes—a stark contrast to the names recognizing imperialism-fueled explorers. The book was created in 2023 when I was still living in Westchester County, NY, and like a slow-moving, meandering and interrupted river, I will at last be completing the hand-cut and assembled first edition this summer which was created digitally and ink-jet printed on watercolor paper.

Nursery: The River that Flows Both Ways by Karen Viola

I challenged myself to convey an poetic essence of this living river’s lifespan thus far in very few words without the distraction of dates or numbers—a loose brushstroke of sequencing which paints an accessible, more-than-human sketch of experience over time, where it seems, from the river’s point of view and “in the blink of a mountain’s eye,” that all the European colonists and Americans wanted was ‘more’ of everything they found. What has been widely and rightly celebrated, to which my text alludes, is the landmark case won in 1965 by the environmental organizations who banded together against General Electric who had proposed to build a power plant into the side of Storm King Mountain. Several organizations including Scenic Hudson, Riverkeeper, and Clearwater have been working tirelessly for the sake of the entire Hudson Valley watershed ever since.

With its modest proportions (5 x 7 inches closed), Nursery privileges a haptic experience which, as art historian and curator Betty Bright says about the artist’s book genre, offers readers “a means to begin, to literally take an issue in hand,” and one which I hope might inspire further reflection and conversation about the deeper ‘unseen’ stories beneath the surface of our waterways—and culture. “Once activated by touch,” as Bright explains, “a book’s intimate dynamic joins intellect with emotion and action, sending an artist’s story through the book to its reader.”[2] The graduated accordion structure allows for multiple viewing perspectives. The layered effect of the closed book depicts a receding, turbid water surface, and when opened and standing up for display, the folds and illustrations combine to depict the back and forth cascade of a river from source to sea, the flows of fish migrations, and the ebbs and flows of tides. Anchored to the bottom of the pages, the blocks of text rise as the narrative flows ‘upstream’ to its end, which is really a beginning, presenting a serious of questions which ponder the potential of indigenous knowledge here and now.

In his book, Rivers of Empire, published in 1985, Donald Worster asserts that all our rivers are “worthy of our respect and understanding.” He continues, “To use a river without violating its intrinsic qualities will require much of us. It will require our learning to think like a river, our trying to become a river-adaptive people.”[3] While much more needs to happen, things are beginning to look brighter for rivers rights across the globe, with legal personhood granted to a number of particular rivers. The Whanganui River in New Zealand set the precedent in 2017 with its Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act which includes in its preamble: The great river flows from the gathering of mountains to the sea. I am the river, the river is me. These beautiful words underline what ethnobotanist and educator Dr. Enrique Salmón, who is Rarámuri, calls ‘kincentric ecology.’ He explains: “Interactions are the commerce of ecosystem functioning. Without human recognition of their role in the complexities of life in a place, the life suffers and loses its sustainability.”[4] With a humble nod to these wise leaders, my piece asks all Hudson Valley residents and visitors, starting with the storied New York harbor with its trash-filled, flood-prone edges: “Can we turn to the rising, widening mouth of Muhheakantuck and understand what it is saying to us? Can we discover the source of its mountain spirit, Lake Tear of the Clouds, by paddle or foot or story or poem or dance or song, and understand how we and the water are kin?”

For author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, learning the “grammar of animacy” is a pursuit full of promise, and for me, a comfort under the weight of our times: “We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us.”[5] Indeed, I often ruminate on the loneliness of our age, the air of despair made more intense by current geopolitics and the threat of our biosphere’s demise thanks to humankind. Perhaps a call to the mountains is in order. Take a breath, those mountains might say, in and out slowly, like the tides. And they might remind us that we cannot let the well of our spirit run dry, that we would be wise to go find a body of water to follow, see where it leads, how it goes, and what joy we might find in this process. It might help, they would say, and they would know.

Notes/for further reading:

1. “History of the Hudson River.” Riverkeeper - Protecting the Hudson River & Safeguarding Drinking Water, https://www.riverkeeper.org/resources/history-of-the-hudson-river. Accessed 29 May 2025.

2. Bright, Betty. Reclamation: Artists’ Books on the Environment. Autumn Press, 2021.

3. Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. 1. issued as an Oxford Univ. Press paperback, 1992.

4. Salmón, Enrique. “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship.” Ecological Applications, vol. 10, no. 5, Oct. 2000, p. 1327. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2307/2641288.

5. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. First Edition. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

#CULTIVATINGECOLITERACY

#KarenViola

CULTIVATING ECOLITERACY WITH ARTIST BOOKS, PART I // Karen Viola

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Riding a Manhattan-bound train to spend a day with artists’ books, I pored over digital versions of zines which described a sacred, wounded land in New Mexico: “Fracking, fracking, burning bright/In the forests of the night:/What immortal hand or eye,/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” [1] These artists knew their book art history. William Blake is often considered to be the first book artist.

After William Blake, from The Magic of This Place Greater Chaco Art Zine

This essay is concerned with what such handmade creations can do in the face of environmental injustice. And how they do it. As the human species reckons with ongoing climate and biodiversity collapse, the book as an expressive, intimate, and accessible art form can be a totemic, much-needed tool for cultivating ecoliteracy and building resilient communities.

The Greater Chaco Art Zines: The Magic of This Place; In Balance/Imbalance; and Thank You, I Love You, I Am Sorry

The work of book artist Sarah Nichols exemplifies one such an ecocentric approach, and it is her meticulously crafted but modestly priced pamphlets under the quirky series name Brain Washing from Phone Towers which lured me to the Center for Book Arts for the intimate, visceral encounter all such objects offer. The ‘pamphlet wars’ peaked in the 17th century when those with the talent and access to a press could distribute their cultural critiques and competing religious or political ideologies to a hungry ‘reading public’ that was not unlike the insatiable consumers of social and news media today. Pamphlets were often printed on both sides of one sheet then zig-zag folded into a booklet. Nicholls honors this centuries-old tradition with her own pamphlets which as she states are “produced via obsolete technology,” but she is also interested in cultivating a “reading private” by distributing editions to a serendipitous network of artists, friends, or like-minded fellow citizens. [2] As book art scholar Levi Sherman elucidates in his review, "Plant out of Place," “Even the subscription model operates within the gift economy; the subscriber nominates a second person to receive free pamphlets. In place of metrics, feedback, likes and tags, the relationship between author and reader is mediated through the publication itself.” [3]

Sarah Nicholls, pamphleteer extraordinaire

I was able to engage with a number of Nicholls’ titles in the Center’s collection which addressed various ecological topics such as bees, rising seas, and the history of weeds. She sets the metal type by hand, letter by letter like seeding an urban garden, her pages propagated with luminous, hand-carved block prints. Her text has a matter-of-fact, friendly tone, like being in the company of a thoughtful tour guide which with one fell swoop guides her audience through the past, present and future of particular places explored by bike or on foot. I found her Homesteading for the Urban Coyote to be particularly striking, its cover featuring an intricately carved coyote face printed with a bronze-tone ink divided in half by the stitched fold of the blood-red cover stock. One eye stares at us, daring us to open. The narrative begins with a personal recollection of a photograph and the event it captured: the rare sight of a coyote on the roof of a Long Island City bar. The coyote, considered a menace, was apparently reported to the cops but slipped away easily, and that was that. Nicholls reflects on how coyotes have been gradually establishing residency in the city via the Bronx since 1990s, and how urbanization has fragmented wilderness, disrupting its complexity. She advises readers: “If you do encounter an urban coyote, stay very still and be grateful, not scared; your understanding of your home just became slightly larger than before.” As the narrative unfolds, so do the accordion pages of animal renderings and lushly patterned foliage, all bleeding off the edges of the paper as if nothing can, or should, contain them. Nicholls’ letterpressed words press on: “They’re all abstractions,” she says of the wilderness stories we tell ourselves, which “erase all the squatters, foragers, wanderers, and native peoples who lived in landscapes that explorers and writers pretended were empty.” [4]

Detail from Sarah Nicholls’ Homesteading for the Urban Coyote

While ‘obsolete’ technology is celebrated by many contemporary book artists, it is hard not to appreciate the innovations in photography and printing processes throughout modern history that have widened audiences and increased accessibility, culminating in a digital age where anyone can do it themselves. Zines, like the pamphlets of yore, have emerged as an iconic, subversive publishing platform and art form for marginalized group movements within an unsustainable economic system which demands unrestrained extraction of the land.

Artist and educator Jeanette Hart-Mann directs the Land Arts of the American West program at the University of New Mexico which is focused on engaging with local communities directly impacted by water and land justice issues. In 2018, she partnered with artist Asha Canalos and the Greater Chaco Coalition to lead a team of students in creating three collaborative art zines which feature evocative drawings, poetry, stories, diagrams, and appalling data about the extent of extraction on sacred lands and the damage to human health and ecosystems caused by fracking. [5] The group set up camp with all their needed art supplies at Angel Peak Campground in the center of the third largest natural gas field in the country, and within 48 hours they created the artwork for the zines—an unforgettable, completely embodied experience.

The idea to make the zines was based on knowing that many members of the impacted community had no cell or internet service, so they became, literally, a “touch point” of communication between elders and younger people. Over 5,000 copies were distributed to both local and nationwide communities and organizations. One of them was actually censored by the New Mexico Museum of Art and New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs and the artists were never told, which only fueled their fight. [6] In 2019, larger advocacy groups including the Sierra Club and WildEarth Guardians filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration ’s illegal approval of 370 drilling permits, which the Biden administration shockingly defended in September 2022. But on February 1st, 2023, for the first time, the 10th Circuit ruled in favor of the citizens and the land, halting the drilling. Later in June, Secretary Haaland announced that all public lands within a 10-mile radius of the park will be protected from new mining leases for 20 years, and in April of 2025, The Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act was signed into law. It seems to me from this chain of events that the Greater Chaco Zine project, in more ways that are possible to measure, made a difference.

Homeward bound, I stared out the train windows, pondering urban coyotes, fracking in sacred canyons, and the labors of love I had encountered that day which enlarged my understanding of community resilience and what part humble, artful books might play—small and devotional offerings that can be held in the palm of a hand that invite readers, urgently, to slow their pace and consider what matters the most. Our survival depends largely on our capacity to form intimate bonds with each other and with the living land which sustains us all, and all artists, including book artists, are called to act. They are the canaries in the coal mines and fracking wells of capitalism, yet they are resilient, flocking together, singing their chorus brightly to the forests of the night.

Notes for further reading:

1. The Magic of This Place – Greater Chaco Art Zines. https://greaterchacoartzines.org/the-magic-of-this-place/. Accessed 29 May 2025.

2. About - Brain Washing From Phone Towers. https://www.brainwashingfromphonetowers.com/about/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2023.

3. “Artists’ Book Reviews.” Artists' Book Reviews, 31 Dec. 2019, https://artistsbookreviews.com/.

4. Homesteading for the Urban Coyote - Sarah Nicholls. https://www.sarahnicholls.com/portfolio/homesteading-for-the-urban-coyote/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2023.

5. Greater Chaco Art Zines – Resisting Environmental Racism and Censorship. https://greaterchacoartzines.org/. Accessed 29 May 2025.

6. Hart-Mann, Jeanette, and Asha Canalos. “Creating Social Change Through Art: The Greater Chaco Art Zines.” Natural Resources Journal, vol. 60, no. 2, 2020, pp. 309–36.

FOR THE RECORD // Kathleen Walkup

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 May 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Sorting through my library recently, I came across a book I had forgotten about, The Printer’s Relict. Subtitled An Example to Her Sex, the book was written by Eleanor P. Spencer and published in Baltimore by the Amphora Press in 1937. The press was founded by Elizabeth Mann in 1933; further information is elusive.

The Printer’s Relict is a modest chapbook. It’s ten printed pages are classically formatted, with attention to typographic detail. It’s also surprisingly full of information about Anne Catherine Green and Mary Katherine Goddard, two of the three dozen or so women printers from the American colonial era. The book’s title (an archaic definition of relict is widow) suggests that Spencer was exploring the approach that most women in the printing trades took to becoming active, as does a note at the end of the short text: “No one except Mr. McKinstry (in The Press of Chautauqua) has tried to analyze the position and importance of the printer’s wife.” Still, it is interesting that of the two women she focuses on, one, Goddard, was never married.

Spencer doesn’t include her sources. How do we know the information is accurate? And why bother to find out? Because real history does matter. If Eleanor Spencer hadn’t done her work, or Elizabeth Anthony Dexter, or Lois Rather, or Janet Bogardus, or Leona M. Hudak, or scores of other women, we would be in even more ignorance about the real history of women’s literally countless roles in the history of printing.

This is also true of artists’ books. While it’s early in the life of the field to claim a canon, it is vital that, when we put Ed Ruscha at the top of any list, we can’t forget about Alison Knowles. Dieter Roth? Certainly, but don’t leave out Dorothy Iannone. Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books? A critical voice in the history. But so is Joan Lyons’ Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, published a decade before Drucker’s book. Lyons’ anthology is a self-proclaimed “first in-depth look at the territory.” Perhaps most surprisingly, the essays are still relevant today and are to some extent a movement toward canon formation, although Lyons never makes that claim. Again without making an explicit claim, Lyons’ anthology acknowledges the presence of women in the field through her choice of essayists (Shelley Rice, Lucy Lippard, Betsy Davids, Barbara Moore, etc.) and her visual examples at the front of the book (Madeline Gins, Janet Zweig, Joyce Weiland, Susan E. King) whose work appears among the usual male suspects. These voices and images help to offset Clive Phillpot’s inclusion of only one woman in his long essay, “Some Contemporary Artists and Their Books.” And even that woman, Helen Douglas, is listed only through her partnership with Telfer Stokes.

One of my earliest works is misattributed in two different print publications. Maybe this shouldn’t matter to me, but I would like to see those mistakes righted. As my late friend, poet Chana Bloch, once wrote, “The past keeps changing.” That is why we need to continue to seek out the history, correct the record, go over old ground and re-examine what has been written.

This work is just beginning when it comes to the inclusion of people of color and queer people into book and printing history. We have a long way to go with these histories, but the record is out there; we just need to seek it. And while document digitization, Google searches, peer-to-peer sites like Wikipedia and now AI make the job of research much easier, the necessity for in-person visits to archives, combing through bibliographies for hints of possible sources, de-coding nineteenth-century handwriting and the like is still with us. Mercifully, we are mostly spared the bilious perusal of microfilm.

In 2022 I curated an exhibition at San Francisco Center for the Book, Possibilities: When Artists’ Books Were Young. The show included the books of thirty-two artists whose primary work is or was books or whose work included them. A friend who came to the Center to help design the exhibition phoned me the day after she saw the work for the first time to point out that all of the artists in the show were women. Yes, I acknowledged, I know.

“But it doesn’t say that in the title.”

How sad and how infuriating that we are still having this discussion.

Kathleen Walkup is currently an independent curator and writer living in the Hudson Valley. She is Lovelace Family Professor Emerita of Book Art, Mills College.

NOT A ZINE, NOT AN ARTIST BOOK: A SECRET THIRD THING // India Johnson

Susan Viguers — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 15:19:32 GMT

At zine fests these days you’ll spot plenty of exciting publishing projects that are not exactly “classic” zines, but they aren’t exactly artist books either. Amelia Greenhall of Anemone has proposed the term “artist publishing” to describe this not-quite-a-zine but not-quite-a-book territory. For me, “artist publishing” is a capacious term that would include a wide spectrum of publishing activity by artists, but it seems useful to have a specific term for the category of print publications. For now, I’ll refer to it as third thing publishing. There are a handful of preoccupations that characterize this type of artist publishing: materiality, equipment access and maintenance, scope, audience building, and sustainability.

Materiality

Third thing publishing has a higher production value than many zines but isn’t as long or as formal as a book; usually a booklet. Experimentation with formats is balanced with a certain practicality. Like zines, third thing publications generally start their lives as a standard size piece of office paper and make use of consumer-grade binding equipment intended for office settings. You might spot the occasional pamphlet stitch, too. While classic zines might be printed on the cheapest copy paper and artist books might use mouldmade or handmade paper, third thing publishing embraces machine-made paper tailored for the project. Again, third thing publishing tends to seek a balance between what’s practical/affordable for the publisher and what looks/feels fun or unusual for the reader.

Third thing publishing involves a little extra time and effort. A publication might strategically deploy a cutout or a belly band or a round corner; material qualities that make you think “what a nice touch.” There are even some letterpress-printed projects that have a lot in common with the approach of third thing publishing. The corresponding price point for third thing publishing is usually higher than a classic zine, striking a balance between quality and affordability—enabling personal collecting without private wealth.

Equipment access and maintenance

The heyday of zines as we know them coincided with widespread adoption of photocopiers in schools and workplaces, making it feasible to self-publish by stealing copies after hours. The rise of hand-printed artist books (and academic book arts programs) coincided with the ability to salvage letterpress equipment in the 1970s and ‘80s. Third thing publishing is often Riso focused, and that usually involves a salvage operation too. When artists repurpose office equipment, we’re usually asking it to do things it wasn’t designed to do, so the Riso discord server is a wealth of peer-to-peer tips and advice, a lifeline for artists all over the globe who are fixing up duplicators for artmaking.

Equipment ownership and equipment maintenance, alongside equipment sharing and collaboration, are the default in third thing publishing — and not just for print. Most Riso printers need light bindery equipment, like stitchers, collators, and tabletop stack cutters. The entire setup can still fit in an apartment, enabling lower overhead costs.

Scope

Historically, zines have had defined genres (perzines, fanzines, cookzines) and often very specific audiences. Zinesters might use a zine/artist name or produce an ongoing/serialized project, only sometimes describing themselves as a press or distro. In third thing publishing, press names and clearly defined publishing scopes are common but paired with larger (and less elite) audiences. For instance, Anemone focuses on DIY culture and the climate, Midtones Photo Magazine spotlights photographers of color across mid-America, and our own press, Late Night Copies, publishes informal research-based writing on a handful of subjects.

Audiences

Scope goes hand-in-hand with audience. Third thing publishing is curious about specific topics. Audiences are interested in those topics or invested in independent publishing—or, ideally, both. (These are typically not the institutional or wealthier individual collectors of artist books.) Crucially, there is an entry point into these third thing projects even if you’re not an artist/zinester/publisher yourself. Third thing publishing deliberately cultivates a readership, and readers are often future contributors and collaborators. Publishers connect directly with readers at fests and fairs and through webshops, subscriptions, workshops, launch parties, social media, newsletters, fundraisers, and participatory projects. Third thing publishers speak about their work, teach, participate in exhibitions, contribute publications to reading rooms, etc. Third thing publishers consign and wholesale and, with print runs of 100–1,000, may push against the limits of what an individual can circulate without a distributor.

Sustainability

Third thing presses are interested in sustainable creative labor. They want to cover their costs, maybe pay their contributors, maybe pay themselves, and have money for the next project. With some notable exceptions, most publishers break even. Many share business strategies with one another and reject the idea they are competing with one another. The goal is to grow the audience for everyone. At the point of sale, readers may not understand how the costs of equipment and compensating contributors means a publisher might just break even on a $12 or $15 or $20 publication. Third thing publishers must balance labor, equipment, and materials costs with the reality that readers who buy indie publications have limited disposable income.

In Conclusion

I would appreciate having a word to describe a publishing practice that results in something that is not quite a book and not quite a zine. If you would too, leave a comment or write your own blog post to keep the conversation going.

Thanks to Melissa Murch-Rodriguez and Rachel Hays for their thoughts, which are integrated into this essay, and Aiden Bettine, who helped me write it on a long road trip to (what else?) a zine fest.

A longer version of this essay first appeared in the newsletter Papereaters.

India Johnson is a Minneapolis-based artist. Along with Aiden Bettine, Johnson runs Late Night Copies Press and a new community print shop, the Workshop for Independent Publishing.

GROUNDING THE IMAGINATION IN ARCHIVAL RESEARCH // AB Gorham

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Investigating book collections and archives for content and structural inspiration is integral to a research-based artistic practice. This semester at the University of Nebraska Omaha, I decided to frame my undergraduate Book Structures class around archives. In mid-January, Patricia Silva posted to the Book Art Listserv a request for a list of artist books that utilize archives in some way. I was nearly finished designing my class for the semester and this list filled in many gaps in my own list of archival-adjacent works. Working with existing collections and archives isn’t only for academically based work; it has been a source of inspiration for projects for a long time, including projects that are made specifically about reference libraries, such as REF, an artist book by Shift Lab. This type of Archival Based Research Methods for artistic inspiration were new to my undergraduate students and the first step towards more independently driven research.

For their first assignment, my students looked at ways to create their own archives as artist books and bound as single pamphlets of Mohawk paper folios that they had manipulated in some unique and intentional way. The students needed to create a visual sequence and could tear, fold, puncture, layer, fold, cut, pierce, lump, register, crumple, jumble, fray, roll, scratch, clump, burn, dampen the paper to get these results. This book became A Material Archive of Action and asked students to think about the paper substrate as the main conveyor of the book experience.

For their second assignment, my students worked directly with images from the Public Domain Archive and created a lenticular accordion book based on those images. The resulting artist books were excellent examples of the structural possibilities of a lenticular accordion (fragmenting imagery, one book that allows for two perspectives) and gave students the opportunity to work from existing archival and out-of-copywrite images as inspiration. They worked outside of their own aesthetic tendencies while giving those archival images new life.

For the third artist book assignment, I worked with Tammi Owens who is the head the Director of Research and Instruction Services, the Fine Arts Librarian, and an associate professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha's Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Library. Tammi had taken a book arts class a while back and so had a greater understanding of the possibilities of connections between materials and content. Together we came up with an assignment that asked students to Use The Archive To Ground Their Imaginations.

This means, Grounding Their Imaginations in the following ways: 1) in academic research to have a touchstone to reality; 2) in existing historical texts to provide historical context, timelines, stories; 3) in the materials and book structures from the past to provide structural precedence; 4) in scientific fact to enable larger, more imaginative leaps that are based in logic.

Here are the steps we asked students to follow: 1. Go into the stacks, grab up to five books and bring them back into the room. Try to have them be from different eras in history. 2. Find something that you love and use the Form and Content Analysis Worksheet to conduct a SLOW LOOK of the book. 3. Narrow down what aspects of the book you would like to emulate, be inspired by, modify and use—start sketching! 4. You can use any aspect of the book but consider that we will be displaying your book and the library book side-by-side. 5. Final output will be an artist book and a small piece of writing for the exhibit text.

The initial free-for-all supermarket-sweep-type of book gathering was frenzied and fun. We visited the folio section of the book collection and filled our arms with giant books about the circus, magic tricks, and early maps and comics. Students then settled on a book that they wanted to work with for the remainder of the assignment. The next few weeks back in the classroom were dedicated to learning either the drumleaf or flatback binding structures and paper marbling, as well as preparing the exhibition installation.

The resulting artist books are colorful, structurally formal, and deeply connected to the library books. Asking students to conduct this object-based research in a library kept them away from predictable search engines and pinterest boards and asked them to create their own path forward in this artistic pursuit.

Images show students installing the exhibition in two cases in the library, plus some examples of their third assignment:

AB Gorham is Assistant Professor of Book Arts and Papermaking at University of Nebraska Omaha and serves at Chair of the CBAA Publication Committee. Her poems have been published in Puerto Del Sol, The Call Center, American Letters and Commentary, DIAGRAM, and Gulf Coast, among others. Her artist books are collected nationally.

THE UNFORGETTABLE ART OF ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS // Caitlin Cass

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 07:00:00 GMT

As an artist who often considers how the unfurling of a gatefold can make a section of narrative more memorable, I was delighted to learn that many Medieval people saw books as mnemonic devices. In her classic text on the subject, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Mary Carruthers examined how books were used to foster memoria or trained memory. She wrote: “It is my contention that Medieval culture was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree that modern culture in the West is documentary” (1). Medieval Europeans recognized a properly trained memory as a crucial component of good character, citizenship and piety. Actual words on the page were seen as far removed from the truth itself. Words needed to be internalized to become meaningful, or as Carruthers put it: “A work is not truly read until one has made it a part of oneself…” (2). In this culture, stuck between the earth and salvation, meditating on illuminated manuscripts and carefully encoding mental images into a mental arca (storage chest) were integral parts of designing a memory that could survive into the afterlife, like Noah’s Ark.

Biblia. Pentateuchus [Pentateuque dit d’Ashburnham ou de Tours]

In an illuminated manuscript known as the Ashburnham Pentateuch, Noah’s ark was painted to look like a giant storage chest. Carruthers notes that such chests or arca were often used as a metaphor for memory. Using locational memory techniques, people would store concrete bits of information in different parts of their imaginary chest. In the twelfth century, theologian, Hugh of St. Victor wrote a treatise that mapped biblical teaching onto an imagined blueprint of Noah’s Ark (3). He associated the many rooms in the ark with locations on the route of the Exodus. Hugh endlessly complicates the design of this ark, even hiding concepts in the cubby holes he imagines on its exterior. There are no physical images in Hugh’s treatise, outside of those described in the text. Still, his work reflects the close relationship between words, images and memory evident in illuminated manuscripts.

Medieval manuscripts are full of visual mnemonic devices that help the reader encode their contents in memory. Scribes wrote sins in red ink and used marginalia to emphasize important passages. Sometimes the large letters at the beginning of blocks of text functioned as rebuses to help the reader remember key parts of the passage. In the Cuerden Psalter (ca. 1270) each psalm begins with an elaborately illuminated initial. These contain images that reference key words in the psalm. For example, in the initial for Psalm 72 a man on his knees uses low stools to support himself and another man walks hunched over with a walking stick (4). These men were painted to help emphasize the line: “but as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well-nigh slipped” (5). It’s worth noting how strange this image is. Unique imagery was considered a necessity in memory arts. As Carruthers puts it: “What is unusual is more memorable than what is routine” (6).

Manuscript painters made the margins as unforgettable as possible. In one striking example from the fourteenth centu ry Hours of Saint-Omer a couple appears to be having sex while a bird pokes the man from behind him (7). Even this is a mnemonic. Michael Camille’s explains that the man is diving back into the womb prodded by a bird. The image references Psalm 87:5 in the text below: “This man and that man were born in you. The habitation of all delights is within you” (8). Camille argues that this particular Book of Hours was created for a women named Marguerite and the illuminations were geared specifically at her as a female of childbearing age. This page certainly would have helped her remember Psalm 87:5.

Which leads me wonder: will I ever really known a text as well as Marguerite?

(1) Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 2008).
(2) Ibid., 11.
(3) Hugh of St. Victor, De Arca Noe Morali, 1125-1130.
(4) Book of Hours, France, Saint-Omer, between 1320 and 1329, MS M.754 fol. The Morgan Library.
(5) Carruthers, 287.
(6) Ibid., 168.
(7) Book of Hours, France, Saint-Omer, between 1320 and 1329, MS M.754 fol. The Morgan Library.
(8) Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. ( London: Reaktion Books, 1992, 2003), 50.

Caitlin Cass makes comics and art installations about failing systems and irrational hope. She is the creator of Suffrage Song (Fantagraphics, 2024) which was named a Best Art Book of 2024 by Hyperallergic. Caitlin teaches Illustration at the University of Nebraska Omaha and is currently working on a graphic history about the visual culture of disaster.

TOWARD A TAXONOMY OF USES OF HANDMADE PAPER IN ARTIST BOOKS // Emily Tipps

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 07:00:00 GMT

When I studied poetry in graduate school, I remember learning various ways a line break could function in verse. These ways were enumerated and described technically. A line break could create a pause within a phrase, establish a moment of tension, serve as punctuation, work as a lever tipping one idea into the next, produce a visual effect on the page, etc. While I understand such a breakdown cannot be exhaustive (or account for mystical occurrences in art), I appreciate the analysis for its utility. I could choose my line breaks for reasons beyond intuition or rhyme scheme!

Similarly, I am interested in considering and articulating the ways handmade paper functions in artist books—what it does and how it does it. The rest of this post examines one book held in the Rare Books Collection at the J. Willard Marriott Library for its particular employment of handmade paper—the beginning of a study I hope to continue through observation of examples in the collection.

Steph Rue’s Lectio Divina is comprised of three accordion books, letterpress printed on handmade abaca paper, treated with collage, embroidery, and sumi ink washes, and housed in a sturdy abaca wrapper. The text itself is a “sacred reading from the fourth chapter in the Gospel of Mark” (from the colophon), and concerns a tempestuous crossing in a boat and a questioning of faith. But the real focus of the work is the contemplative, meditative practice of Lectio Divina or “divine reading” itself.

Instead of mitigating or resisting its reactivity to water, Rue embraces handmade paper as a reactive surface. Throughout the book, the abaca waves and cockles in response to changes in moisture. Where collaged text elements are adhered, the substrate paper furls out from beneath them; this creates a relief effect that emphasizes the stability of the text portion on the wavy ground of paper—the prayer as the steadfast throughline of the meditation. The sumi ink too has certainly contributed to the paper’s lively surface. Commercial papermaking often seeks to suppress such effects, including sizing, additives, and finishing processes to ensure a consistent surface. These papers tend to react erratically to moisture, or to lack the strength to withstand it.

The evidence of water’s influence on the paper also points to handmade paper as a reflection of content. “A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that it was already filling.” The storm at sea is echoed in the captured motion of the water in the paper. The reader may trace her finger over the relatively flat text and the waves of the surrounding ground of sumi-washed paper and read the chop and swell of the storm, bringing her sense of touch into the contemplative process.

The apparent chaos of the waves in Lectio Divina works in part because it is ordered by a skillful hand. The careful creasing and alignment of folds in the accordion reveal an intentional maker. Rue has created the boundaries within which the paper is allowed to expand and contract to such interesting effect. The clean and precise folds also demonstrate handmade paper as durable material, which is on display elsewhere in the book too. The resilient abaca fibers support a running stitch making its way in a straight line across panels and folds of the accordion, the regular rhythm of the thread reiterating the text in a pulse: “be still. be still.”

Rue trusts in this durability for her enclosure as well—a four-flap with a button/string closure and an additional pair of flaps inside that convert the opening process into a content-relevant ritual. When opening the book, it become apparent that this simple paper wrapper will serve to protect the book as it passes through the hands of any number of contemplative reader.

In Lectio Divina, handmade paper has a distinct voice and multi-faceted purpose (conceptual, aesthetic, and practical)—none of which could be achieved so successfully with commercially produced paper. It is an excellent example of handmade paper as reactive surface, reflection of content, and durable material.

UNGOVERNABLE BOOKS: IS TANGIBILITY MORE RESISTIVE THAN DIGITALISM?// Sara Luz Jansen

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 08:00:00 GMT

In a moment when many of us in the States are feeling the pull towards political and social activism I’ve been thinking a bit about the role of printed matter. Physical print may be much more resistant to corporate scrutiny than online publishing.

I wonder if physical self-publication, in the form of zines, books, artist books, broadsides, etc., can escape some if not most of the scrutiny of surveillance, shadow banning, AI use, algorithmic assessment and erasure that much of online self-publishing through social media and other platforms must endure and combat. I’m thinking of the recent ban of TikTok, motivated by political aims and corporate pressure that effectively removed a huge number of people’s voices and their web of connections in an instant. The internet is a beautiful beast, a churning of information, reinterpreted information, misinformation and a fascinating forum, but more and more our interest and attention is being harnessed for its buying power. Social media, though in many ways an incredible tool for sharing information, is implicated in the corporate and political interests of the platform’s owners and content is available for their use and data mining.

Physical books are exempt from this particular use and scrutiny. Printed matter finds itself in a resistive position, able to work outside the layers of corporate censorship, tides of popular opinion and law. This of course is not new. Late to the game, the Western world made use of movable type to produce books with the production of the Gutenberg Bible around 1450, and hot on the heels of its publication the process was commercialized around 1470 as the first publishing houses in Europe began popping up. With the commercialization of publication, the ability to self-publish became defined in a new way, as in opposition or alternative to the considerations of business.

The longevity of printed and paper matter over digitally published matter is not certain, but it seems to be more resistant to the whims of a platform. Physical content must be laboriously and physically removed, burned or purged to be eliminated from the corporate or government structure (as is happening in public and school libraries). Though there are many alternatives to posting on major social media platforms with more ethical terms of use or even coding and publishing on your own website, the pamphlet, broadside and zine remain platforms for all voices with a definable impact within a community. There is a long history of self-publication as activism, to avoid editorial procedure, publication rejection or just for fun. The reach of printed matter may be small, but the power of localized voices to build community and efforts to organize offline and under the radar should not be underestimated.

Sara Luz Jensen is an Instructor for the Book Arts Program, University of Utah. Under the small-press imprint Fingertips Press, she produces books and printed matter, many of which are in collaboration with writers and artists. Sara Luz’s work is held in public and private collections and is exhibited nationally.

VISUALIZING THE CONSPIRACY: HOW COMICS AND ARTIST BOOKS MAKE (AND BREAK) THE TRUTH // Kelly Lindberg

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 08:00:00 GMT

Almost a month into Trump’s second term and almost five years after the pandemic started, I’d like to recommend a comic that I’ve paired with artists’ books that resonate with the current state of the country. We’ve been in a world overwhelmed with misinformation, disinformation, and deepfakes for quite some time now, and it often feels like the world is changing too fast for any of us to keep up. To cope with these current events, I’ve recently read every single issue of the comic The Department of Truth, which I first discovered by attending my local comic shop Bat City Comic Professional’s Fresh Start Book Club, all of which I cannot recommend enough.

Writer James Tynion IV, artist Martin Simmonds, letterer Aditya Bidikar, and designer Dylan Todd are the brilliant team behind the creation of the comic The Department of Truth, whose first issue was released on September 30, 2020. The series is based on the premise of an alternate America, one in which Lee Harvey Oswald is alive and spearheading the government’s “Department of Truth,” an organization designed to push the nation’s agenda by propelling mass belief of “Truths,” and where every conspiracy theory that exists is in fact real. Tynion says that the inspiration for The Department of Truth began with the 2016 presidential election (read what he says in an interview with Polygon).

Pg. 79 of The Department of Truth: The Complete Conspiracy Volume One, Martin Simmonds, Image Comics

Pg. 199 of The Department of Truth: The Complete Conspiracy Volume One, Martin Simmonds, Image Comics

I choose to recommend The Department of Truth to the book arts community because of how much depth and care was put into the creation of this series. In a fantastically enlightening interview with the creators, The Nation points out, “A reader experiencing The Department of Truth for the first time will likely make connections to the collage-heavy art movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, like surrealism or Pop art. The most direct influence seems to be Brought to Light, a ‘graphic docudrama’ anthology by Alan Moore, Bill Sinkiewicz, Joyce Brabner, Tom Yeates, and Paul Mavrides from 1988, whose style was partially influenced by the propaganda comics the CIA once issued in countries like Nicaragua to disrupt leftist movements.” Simmonds tells the interviewer: “My relationship with collage goes back to my love of comic artists Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave McKean, and Jon J Muth, mixed-media artist Robert Rauschenberg, and graphic designer David Carson, among others.”

Excerpt from pg. 195 of The Department of Truth: The Complete Conspiracy Volume One, Martin Simmonds, Image Comics

Pg. 309 of The Department of Truth: The Complete Conspiracy Volume One, Martin Simmonds, Image Comics

While I’m amazed by Simmonds’ artistry throughout the whole series, a favorite of mine is issue #7 of the comic, a flashback story actually illustrated by guest artist Tyler Boss, who tells the story of a young “Doc” Hynes who writes a publication, “Resist the Men in Black!”, which he purposely distributed to government organizations through the mail. This publication is heavily influenced by early science fiction fanzines (the Ringling library collection has an issue of Astounding Science, which is not a fanzine but is a sci-fi magazine from 1938).

Pgs. 172, 174, The Department of Truth: The Complete Conspiracy Volume One, Tyler Boss, Image Comics

I think that fans of the comic will appreciate many artists’ books that also were made in the response to the current political climate, and vice versa. The revolutionary Louise Odes Neaderland was one of the many artists who responded to the Trump era with her art, creating both “Trump Circus” and “Trump Wallpaper Borders” in 2017. Another favorite of mine that we have in the Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center by Neaderland is the Nuclear Fan.

Photograph of the opened box of Trump Wallpaper Borders

Photograph of the Nuclear Fan, Louise Odes Neaderland, provided by the author

Fred Hagstom’s The Blue and The Red “uses archival photographs from the January 6th attack on the capitol, coupled with comments by the Capitol Police, convicted rioters and politicians who spoke in support of the attack. Much of the text comes from congressional or court testimony, while the quotes from politicians come from media sources" according to the artist himself. As Jane Anne Carlin points out in Artists' books as catalysts for social change, “Approaching conversations about difficult issues using the artists’ book as a jumping off point causes us to slow down, reflect and to think deeply.” This deep thinking also allows for the capability of differentiating fact from fiction, a skill we all need to harness.

Photographs of pages from The Blue and The Red, Fred Hagstom, provided by the author

Photograph of materials in the Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center at Ringling College of Art + Design

My final selections are Living in Denial, U.S.A. by David Stairs, which gives the author's personal reactions to U.S. economic statistics against a background of Oregon maps. Capitalism’s Collapse by Dale Edwin Wittig, in which Wittig ruminates on a near-apocalyptic vision of a crumbling global capitalism with hand scrawled captions and graphic illustrations, and Whereas... we declare by Tatana Kellner and Ann Kalmbach, which compiles the text from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), proposed to the United Nations by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948, with drawn images and statistical information about immigration.

Photographs of pages from Living in Denial, U.S.A. by David Stairs, provided by the author

Photograph of pages from Whereas... we declare by Tatana Kellner and Ann Kalmbach, provided by the authors

You can read the first issue of The Department of Truth for free online through Image Comics. For combatting misinformation, I’d also recommend reading How to Win the War On Truth : an illustrated guide to how mistruths are sold, why they stick, and how to reclaim reality by Samuel C. Spitale, illustrated by Allan Whincup.

Works Cited

Carlin, Jane Anne. "Artists' Books as Catalysts for Social Change." Art Libraries Journal 44, no. 1 (01, 2019): 2-8, https://ringlingcollege.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/artists-books-as-catalysts-social-change/docview/2173848142/se-2.

Hagstrom, Fred, and publisher Strong Silent Type Press. The Blue and the Red / Fred Hagstrom. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Strong Silent Type Press, 2024.

Keljera, ML. “A Comic That Captures the Antic Energy of a Post-Truth World.” The Nation. March 2023. https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/qa-department-of-truth-comic/.

‌Kellner, Tana, Ann E Kalmbach, and publisher Women’s Studio Workshop. Whereas... We Declare / KaKeArt: Tatana Kellner & Ann Kalmbach. Rosendale, NY: Women’s Studio Workshop, 2018.

Neaderland, Louise Odes. The Nuclear Fan. 3rd ed. Brooklyn, NY: Bone Hollow Arts, 1999.

Neaderland, Louise Odes. Trump Circus. Brooklyn, NY: Louise Neaderland, 2017.

Neaderland, Louise Odes. Trump Wallpaper Borders. Brooklyn, New York: [Louise Odes Neaderland], 2017.

Stairs, David. Living in Denial USA. Mt. Pleasant, Mich., D. Stairs, 2005.

Tynion, James, Martin Simmonds, Aditya Bidikar. The Department of Truth. Portland, OR: Image Comics, 2020-ongoing.
Wittig, Dale. Capitalisms Collapse / Dale Edwin Wittig. San Francisco, California: Red Hammer Press, 2017

Kelly Lindberg is an Instructional Design Librarian at Ringling College of Art + Design, who has always had an interest in zines and comics. She often incorporates her passions into her job of teaching information literacy to students.

WORKING AT THE BRIZDLE-SCHOENBERG SPECIAL COLLECTIONS CENTER // Olga Nerciu

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 08:00:00 GMT

As I walked down the aisles, enclosed with shelves of meticulously placed books, each enveloped and assigned a long code of letters and numbers, I would scan through them, looking for the right one, the numbers would hint at where to look. “Bingo!” Take it, scan it, register in the system, display on the shelves, scan it again, put it back. This is how my shifts started as a Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center student worker. It did not take long to learn how wrong I was to reduce our collection’s items to their mere numbers.

I am Olga, motion design sophomore at Ringling College of Art and Design from Moldova. In fall 2024, I started working as a Special Collection student assistant, undertaking a wide range of skills and responsibilities, from organizing and registering books, to creating merchandise and even writing a blog! By my side, I always have Muling Tzai, another student worker from Taiwan, and Cheri Marks, Special Collections Librarian and Archivist (my boss). Our Special Collections Center specializes in rare artists’ books, publication projects, art prints, zines and many more items. We are driven to introduce the general public to both niche and recognized artistic creations via hands-on object based experience. I myself was amazed by the variety of items in our collection: broadsides, campus materials, democratic multiples, documentation of time-based and performance projects, engravings, exhibition publications, experimental writing, fine press books, flip books, handmade editions, historic facsimiles, parlor toys, photographs, pop-up books, prints, rare books, zines, and more.

My favorite part of Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center is the unique tactile experience we give access to. Anyone coming to our center can literally touch art and connect with the artist on the other side of the page. I believe that utilizing primary sources is a game changer in any scholarly research. Engaging with original physical materials rewards with more insights into a particular subject, compared to internet/digital research. Touching or closely observing an artifact allows researchers to feel a deeper connection to the material. For example, examining an ancient manuscript provides a sense of its age, authenticity, and craftsmanship.

Images by Olga Nerciu, spreads from Giving Fear a Proper Name, Detroit (c. 1984) by Susan Kae Grant, 2025.

My favorite artwork to interact physically with Giving Fear a Proper Name, Detroit by Susan Kae Grant. It follows the artist’s journey as she moved to Detroit, supported by images from her dreams, nightmares and daily experiences, interpreted in a symbolic manner. I was stunned to find strands of the artist’s hair, human teeth, accompanied by pictures of body parts, nails and particles of dirt and sand. The overwhelming experience of the book could never have been felt through digital research. Seeing the book and touching it, even smelling it, submerged me into the artist's world, where I was guided by mysterious pieces of her writing to undergo the same experiences and storylines.

Hence, experiences are made to be shared. Artworks such as Giving Fear a Proper Name, Detroit inspire us to hold exhibitions, led by conceptual themes that unite various art pieces and artists, bringing a holistic experience of an era or movement to our audience. Our visitors are welcome to interact with the items and witness the line blur between a book and a work of art. Our Special Collections Center is open to collaborations and exhibition ideas proposed by faculty and students! I am always curious to observe my colleague Muling creating branding identity for our exhibitions, setting the mood for it. Thanks to her, our visitors always leave with a cute sticker, postcard or brochure to remember the event.

I find myself again, walking down the aisles on my weekly shift, looking straight through envelopes, through long codes of letters and numbers, seeing each book now as a story, a person, an entire universe for me to dive into. This is how my shifts are, as a Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center student worker.

Olga Nerciu is a Motion Design student at Ringling College of Art + Design and is a Special Collections Assistant at the Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center in the Alfred R. Goldstein Library at Ringling College. She is from Moldova, and works under the supervision of Cheri Marks, CBAA member and Special Collections Librarian and Archivist.

PUBLISHING A MANIFESTO / PUBLISHING AS A MANIFESTO, PART 2 // E Tonatiuh, trans. Mónica Mejía

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 16:17:42 GMT

Today we, as publishers, seek to collectivize our findings, link them, knead our techniques and processes so that they overflow, expanding their radius of action through accompaniments, more or less personal and yet alive, real or at least latent. We have the will to dismantle our practices in favor of a strengthening of differences, in search of a thousand different forms of editing; of all possible worlds.

Image by Mónica Mejía, production of La Escuela del Dolor Humano de Sechuán, published by Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee, Cali-New Orleans 2024.

It is no longer about the word. We do not seek to convince through that firmness because the word fixes the ideas and the gesture leaves them open to interpretation. In any case, neither the author nor the editor ever knows if the reader or spectator read the book they published, so we bet on the infiltration of languages and theories from other disciplines to search for mail-readings or score-texts or the phenomenology of the book as an exhibition space, as a sculptural piece. We turn our face away from the preeminence of the text, the preeminence of the eye, the preeminence of the object, the preeminence of the fetish, the conservation of things, to make way for the free experience of the entire body in obsolescent time and space, because everything, ultimately, is obsolescent. We deeply love the ambiguity of our publishing identity, which rather than fleeing from the commercial-industrial circuit, flees from the processes that wish to fossilize it, from the habits installed in each of the actors in the productive chain of the book, which we now also consider an affective chain. We take the book down from its pedestal and take it to live alongside the map, alongside the instructions, alongside the pamphlet, the graffiti, the poster, the leaflet, the manifesto, the vindication of an attack.

The reality of our projects implies—as has always happened with fragmentary projects—self-management and administration, oftentimes of the precariousness that forces us to do the most we can with the little we have, a precariousness that can be understood as a format, as the structure that involuntarily promotes new editorial shifts, future divergences of our work. In general, we do not “live from” our work, we “live for” our work. And behind this there is a reflection on pleasure without guilt.

Image by Gina Spitiani, La Escuela del Dolor Humano de Sechuán workshop. Collaboration between Casa Omedeto and Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee. Armenia, Colombia 2023.

We question our ways and those of others in our intimacy because we understood that our editorial projects are also bodies; we share tools, machines, time, drink and food because we are not just concepts. We do not speak through a coherently constructed editorial catalogue, we speak through every corner of our practice because our practice is our weapon and no practice is more or better than another in any case. We do not want to accumulate publications, we throw ourselves into the discovery of other editorial and publishing practices because editing a process as hard, as linear and hierarchical as the industrial editorial process is an example that everything, in reality, is prone to editing. And this is a major policy.

We do not understand radicality as the sharp end of our practices, but as a mobile and permeable border that adjusts each time we advance in the decomposition of our models. In this way, we all have different thresholds of radicality, thresholds that at some point will have to negotiate with other ways of understanding editorial practice and the world in general. We resist, we resist to cease to resist.

Finally, and perhaps in a more indolent way, we no longer even think in terms of books and publications. The game is no longer, and perhaps never was, about publishers, authors, content or readings; alongside this classic model of publishing there is now a broken shell from which laboratories, collectives, editorial workshops have been born, interventions, actions and gestures that are molecularly editorial and publicational, but which are the children of the plasticity of each mind and each practice involved in the projection, development, production, circulation and conservation of publications. At all these points there is a possibility of political expression. Publishing a manifesto is not the same as publishing as a manifesto. Our weapon is our practice.

This essay was published in Spanish by Casa del Tiempo, number 5 October-November 2022. Cultural magazine of Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico.

E Tonatiuh Trejo. Graphic communicator from the Faculty of Art and Design at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is founder, editor and designer of the Editorial Laboratory Esto Es Un Libro. He has collaborated in magazines such as Perros del alba, RegistroMX, CinePremier and Revista404. He was editor of the magazine Sensacional de Cineastas and founding partner of the Refud bookstore. www.estoesunlibro.com

Mónica Mejía, from Cali – Colombia, has been collaborating with the artisanal publishing collective Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee since 2015. She works at Antenna, a literary and visual arts organization in New Orleans, coordinating Antenna Press, and Paper Machine, Antenna’s print shop, book bindery and community space.

PUBLISHING A MANIFESTO / PUBLISHING AS A MANIFESTO, PART I // E Tonatiuh Trejo, trans. M. Meija

Virginia Green — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 08:00:00 GMT

Political skirmishes between publishing and its environment do not only revolve around the discourse of thinkers, writers or editors; they do not arise from a political stance in the face of a shared reality or from its ideological representation; nor are they a response to the thousand publications distributed clandestinely or through the analog or digital reproduction of a thought.

The countries that make up the Latin American region have a long history of dissident, resistant publishing, as well as brilliant and very necessary representatives who—in tune with the game of ideological weights and counterweights that shaped the geopolitical and social chaos of our continental region—have debated in the open and in the dark against the media that legitimize the forms and privileges of power since the arrival of the printing press to the New Continent. (The very first publisher in America, Juan Pablos, settled in Mexico City in 1536; he brought with him a capital slogan: to print religious books and pamphlets destined for the Christianization of the Indians.) Since then, rebel publications have been among us, often affiliated (sharpened) with insurgent ideals and with a fierce opposition militancy.

Image by Mónica Mejía, excerpt from La Escuela del Dolor Humano de Sechuán, published by Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee, Cali-New Orleans 2024.

It is not my interest to review this publishing scene. I am interested in focusing on other editorial divergences, the policies of which distance them from confronting an institutional political system that has already surpassed the limits of cynicism to perpetuate its corrupt denaturalization. In these publishing facets —also dissident, also politicized—the discourse (content) is modulated and has the same importance as our practices situated in a specific context, moment, and space.

There are and will continue to be politicized book makers, conscious and consistent with a political militancy, but today we also understand and seek to extend our influence based on our work politics, collaboration politics, reproduction politics, exchange politics, circulation politics, and property politics, design politics, material politics, politics of the relationship between the body and the object born of the publishing interest.

Since institutional policies are gone, today we publishers are thinking of ourselves as a group of extended localities that recognize each other as remote but familiar in the region; we are moving from a homogenization sustained by uniform codes and practices towards practices and codes that we do not yet know, with the full intention of finding and assimilating them. We are leaving the analogy of the publishing house as a guerrilla towards the analogy of publishing as a rhizomatic organ.

Image by Mónica Mejía, spread from xpan.atlas number 1. Mexico, 2024.

We see it impossible that today's political editorial practices emerge only from a single sensitivity about the socioeconomic reality of the region. This is not the only fuel that feeds our agency now. Today we try to revert the influence flow by creating specific editorial imaginaries that are trying to model gestures whose transcendence manages to modify situations in situ. It is no longer about editing contents. It is also about the possibility of editing time, space, interpersonal and interspatial relations between bodies, emotions and intellectualities exposed to the contamination of our objects-publications; it is also about the repercussions that these relationships produce in their context. In this sense all action or omission has repercussions. We do not believe in political nihilism. In this scenario, language loses importance and, on the contrary, the value of gesture increases; the possibility of activating the reader between the lines is exacerbated, without explicitly calling for direct individual or collective action, but rather provoking their political action in the blind spot of the institutional board.

Fuerza Aérea Zapatista, a book from Esto Es un Libro. Image by E Tonatiuh Trejo.

These peripheral editorial practices of Latin America do not try to contribute to the international metrics that define and measure culture and development; we ignore national reading indexes and try to free this exercise by recognizing it as a simple, natural, deintellectualized, everyday activity. The reading experience is plausible anywhere, not only in the spaces that historical discourse has provided for it. Therefore, our editorial anxiety can be deployed in the same way, anywhere.

This essay was published in Spanish by Casa del Tiempo, number 5 October-November 2022. Cultural magazine of Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico.

E Tonatiuh Trejo is a Graphic communicator from the Faculty of Art and Design at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Founder, editor and designer of the Editorial Laboratory Esto Es Un Libro. He has collaborated in magazines such as Perros del alba, RegistroMX, CinePremier and Revista404. He was editor of the magazine Sensacional de Cineastas and founding partner of the Refud bookstore. www.estoesunlibro.com

PART TWO: EXCERPTS FROM HOW TO ART BOOK FAIR // Paul Shortt

Susan Viguers — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 20:02:44 GMT

When I started out at my first art book fair, I had 3 books on my table and made basically nothing while tabling for 4 days. But I spent a lot of money on amazing books, met a bunch of artists who would become great friends, and immersed myself in a space full of bookmakers. I learned a lot at my first few fairs: what worked (well-made books), what didn’t (anything too big), and the importance of community. At the fairs I asked a lot of questions of other vendors, talked with as many people as I could, and tried to have fun, even when it was slow and boring.

Community

I stress the community aspect of art book fairs because the connections you make with other vendors and fair attendees are often more meaningful than sales.

Being A Good Tablemate:

Talk to the people tabled next to you.
Know to shut up (and give them space) when someone is stopped and looking at books on their table.
Don’t play loud music, movies or games on your phone.
Don’t be obnoxious.
Be respectful of space.
Don’t block other vendors’ tables while talking with your friends.
Trade and buy their books.
Help out if they need to leave their table for a minute.
Share food and drink with them.

Community Is Important:

Talk with other vendors.
Ask them about their books and previous fair experience.
Follow them on social media.
Swap business cards.
Do trades and buy their books.
Sign up for email lists.
Send librarians and collectors who stopped by your table to neighbors’ and friends’ tables.
Go to the after party. Approach publishers you recognized from the fair and say hi.

Trading Or Bookswapping:

Trading your books with other bookmakers is a rite of passage at art book and zine fairs. While not everyone will trade books, most will. The best way to find out is to simply ask and have a copy of the book you are willing to trade with you.

I’ve found that this is one way to both connect to other publishers and not spend the money you’ve just made selling your own books. In How to Art Book Fair I include this quote from Michaelis Pichler about equal swaps, and not paying in books. I think it gets at the heart of what makes art book fairs unique: participating in a gift economy while also still participating in the broader market economy.

Please note: a friendly book swap is always one-on-one. That is, a swap between publishers, artists, or authors where one book is exchanged for another. Ideally, both parties have a choice, and are swapping their own books. Exchanging one big book for three small books is “paying in books” (not a friendly book swap).

— Michalis Pichler, “Book Swapping & Seriosity Dummies” in Publishing as Artistic Practice

Building Community After the Fair:

Do follow-up emails. Follow back people who followed you on social media.
Do studio visits with other bookmakers.
Include their books in exhibitions you curate.
Share their books with your friends.
Interview them for podcasts or your zines.
Stay in contact. Show them around your city when they visit.
Also, don’t forget to take a photo of all the cool stuff you got and tag the fair. This is a book fair staple. Photograph your haul, tagging the books you’ve traded and purchased.

Upcoming for the Fourth Edition of How to Art Book Fair

Bad Trends In Art Book Fairs:

Charging to apply: The Capital Art Book Fair and the New Jersey Art Book Fair have both started charging to apply which I think is a problem. Publishers pay to participate through their table costs; they shouldn’t also have to pay to apply. This is double charging people. I understand that reviewing applications takes time, but these costs should be a part of your table costs. Hopefully this won’t become a trend, because this could reduce the diversity of participants.

Door Entry Fees: Ticketing is necessary for queuing people for both health and safety reasons, but please keep the entry price low so that it doesn’t affect sales. Art book fairs are more democratic than other art fairs in that they sell to the general public as well as collectors, libraries and museums. When you buy a ticket for an art fair, you are usually going to view art, whereas with an art book fair, you are going to view, connect, and purchase.

Printed Matter’s model of a ticketed opening night for collectors of rare books generally works. That said, I’ve found that opening night events are usually the worst for sales, as the event becomes more of a party and place to be seen.

Good Trends In Art Book Fairs:

More diversity. Break areas for vendors. Free food and drink for vendors. Volunteers to watch your tables. Overall, a focus on the vendors’ wellbeing. This began, in my opinion, in 2019, when some fairs saw new leaders and actively addressed complaints from vendors. All (good) fair organizers care about health and safety, but the pandemic really made those concerns part of a great experience.

Successful art book fair organizers balance what makes a great event for bookmakers and attendees. Having a crowd is important, and organizers should make every effort to introduce and popularize artist books in their city and arts community.

Paul Shortt is an artist, curator, and educator based in Florida. He makes signs, books, videos and social practice with a bit of humor. As the creator of How to Art Book Fair, Shortt has participated in over 50 national and international art book and zine fairs.

PART ONE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOW TO ART BOOK FAIR // Paul Shortt

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 08:00:00 GMT

I had been participating in art book fairs for about 4 years, when I started to realize that no one was really writing about selling books. During my research, I discovered that while many books provided guidance on making books, none focused on selling them. Specifically when it came to artist books. At this point, I had participated in the Printed Matter Art Book Fair in both New York (NYABF) and Los Angeles (LAABF), sharing a table with a friend for a couple of years. My sales were very poor in the beginning, mainly because of a low price point. Over time, I began improving my sales and made more connections in the art book community. Inspired by this progress, I decided to create a how-to guide for participating in an art book or zine fair.

In 2018, I purchased my first Risograph printing machine. For years, I had sent my books to be commercially printed, but now I had immediate and direct access to produce them myself. In the past, I had made a few publications as handbooks or guides, but most were playful and didn’t really teach anything. I worked on the How to Art Book Fair text over the course of a couple months, then reached out to Christopher Kardambikis (Papercuts, George Mason University printmaking chair) for feedback. After incorporating his suggestions, I posted on Facebook about creating the guide and added some practical and playful advice from others. I designed the book in Illustrator and InDesign and printed the first 16-page version on whatever paper I had in my studio, producing a small edition of 100.At that year’s NYABF, I distributed copies to friends and other publishers—some of whom had contributed and others I thought might offer feedback for future editions. This first version had an immediacy to it, just getting the idea out there. As I often do with my publications, I continued refining it, paying more attention to quality and construction.

HTABF Second Edition (2019)

For the second edition, I concentrated on both my retail experience and the practicalities of sitting for six to ten hours selling books. What do you need? How should you engage with attendees? How do you make the event work for you as an artist or bookmaker?

Having worked in retail for more than a decade (Gadzooks, Sunglass Hut, Pacific Sunwear, and the Gap), I was used to selling products, so art book fairs felt natural to me. Instead of selling camisoles and jeans, I was promoting books, concepts, and ideas. I understood that every person walking by was both a potential customer and a chance for meaningful interaction. At any art book fair, the hope is your book will find its way into someone's home, a library or collection. Artists shouldn’t feel bad about selling and making money from their books. It’s incredibly difficult in most art fields to make money and have a middle class life. Books such as Be Oakley’s Publishing Now: GenderFail’s Working Class Guide to Making a Living Off Self Publishing attempt to start discussions about this.

These interactions often influence the work itself. Once, someone asked if I had any prints or books that weren’t negative. At the time, my table showcased a series of “No prints,” so the comment resonated. A year later, I began developing a more positive series, though still tinged with humor and irony. That newer direction remains central to my practice today.

Engaging directly with an audience is one of the great things about being at an art book fair. Oftentimes this audience will be artists and bookmakers themselves, but with the diverse audience that attend art book fairs you will also encounter people from all fields who will give you insight you won’t find in your studio. Sometimes that insight will be how they engage with your books, or how they don’t.

How to Art Book Fair video

During this time, I also created a video adaptation of How to Art Book Fair. Leah Mackin, who teaches print and bookmaking at the Rochester Institute of Technology, had a project called Internet Art Book Fair, a web-based platform that, in many ways, anticipated the shift to virtual events during the pandemic.

In the video, I sit at a table alone, pitching my book while growing frustrated as no one approaches or shows interest. The piece functions both as a promotion for my books and as a standalone work, capturing the loneliness that can accompany art book fairs. The video stands apart from the book, because it addresses in real time the boredom, tedium and frustrations a tabler can go through at a book fair, while with the book I try to remain practical and positive.

Marlene Obermayer, the founder of Das Kunst Buch and the Vienna Art Book Fair, became a strong advocate and secured a grant to bring me and a few other publishers to the first Vienna Art Book Fair. There, I performed a live version of my video, dramatically pitching to an empty table and eventually overturning its contents.

The second edition debuted at the 2019 Printed Matter NYABF and the inaugural Vienna Art Book Fair. Over the next four years, it was sold primarily through Printed Matter and my website. In 2020, I added a one-page sheet titled How to Virtually Art Book Fair on one side and How to Table Post-COVID-19 on the other, which I included with book orders. These additions, along with other notes I had jotted down over time, would later inform the third edition.

HTABF Third Edition (2023)

With each edition, my goal is to expand the content and incorporate more diverse perspectives.

Ingrid Schndall, who runs IS Projects (now the Miami Paper & Printing Museum) and organizes the SPF fair and Tropic Bound in Miami, contributed insights not only as a fair organizer but also on launching and running events with an international focus.

I’m especially grateful to Ingrid and Marlene, as their perspectives reflect the modern art book fair scene—deeply embedded in their local communities while actively engaging with the global landscape. They leverage extensive networks to create vibrant and inclusive events.

Like many art books, distribution poses challenges. I was fortunate to work alongside Cynthia Connolly, a curator and self-publisher of Banned in D.C. since the 1980s. I first met Cynthia as a young artist in Southwest Virginia (Floyd, Blacksburg, and Roanoke), so it was rewarding to collaborate and learn from her DIY/punk-inspired approach to publishing. One lasting lesson from her is the importance of self-distribution and keeping your work in print. Personally, this is important to me because in my early twenties I made comics but failed to get the work out. In the early 2000’s it wasn't as easy as it is now to create, share, distribute and share your works. It's much easier now, but no one is going to get your work out for you.

Through international distribution via Antenne Books in the United Kingdom, my books are now reaching a broader global audience. I make my books, not just for an insular art audience or institutions, but for the general public. I’m aware that in How to Art Book Fair, I’m presenting a perspective on art book fairs in the west. My hope is that as the book is available globally, more global perspectives will help shape it.

My primary aim with this guide is to support bookmakers and help them thrive. To that end, I offer educational discounts to teachers and class packs for students at a reduced price. I’ve also tried to maintain the book being priced low. The first version was $10 and the newest is $12, even as the book has more than doubled in size.

I’m currently working on the fourth edition of How to Art Book Fair, and I welcome any advice or suggestions!

Part Two of this post will share excerpts from How to Art Book Fair, including the forthcoming fourth edition.

ZINES AND HONG KONG – 11/15/2024 // Beth Sheehan

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 08:00:00 GMT

I had planned to write an article that would act like a love letter to artworks that are not technically books but feel bookish to me; instead, given the results of the election, I have been constantly reminded of the topic of my final paper for an art history class I took recently on Contemporary Chinese Art. The topic I chose was Zines and Collective Identity in Hong Kong.

In that paper, I argued that zines provided an exceptional platform to create community, share individual experiences, and build a collective identity worth fighting for during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong in 2019. By examining Save Hong Kong Ourselves, Self-Help First-Aid, 自己香港自己救, 自己受傷自己救 by Yan Yu and 咸濕 (Salty Wet) by T▇▇謝▇ (Tiffany Sia), I discussed the dissemination of counter-hegemonic perspectives and the way that zines are uniquely equipped to provide information while creating connections that embolden and unite individuals. These zines and others that were produced during the recent Hong Kong protests were uniquely positioned to fight for democracy and against censorship because of the role zines play as democratic multiples written by the people and for the people.

Image courtesy of the author.

Prior to 1997, Hong Kong did not have a notable history of large protests, other than the demonstration in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. From the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, announcing that Hong Kong would be returned to Chinese rule in 1997,(1) up until the transfer of power actually occurred, the threat of monumental change intensified for Hongkongers, exponentially. Although many people living in Hong Kong are ethnically Chinese, the history of Hong Kong followed a path that diverged greatly from the mainland, making the prospect of reunification a tense subject when considering the disparities in the collective identities of Hong Kong and mainland China. I argued that the impending countdown created a pressure cooker environment, leading Hong Kong to solidify a more definite identity for itself and its people in that interim. When the incident at Tiananmen Square happened in Beijing in 1989, the act of both protesting and specifically supporting pro-democracy movements naturally took root in the DNA of Hong Kong.

It is then no surprise that this foundational aspect of Hong Kong’s identity featured so prominently in the citizens’ reactions when faced with the Extradition Law Amendment Bill in 2019. By that time, the territory was no stranger to protesting, proving that the collective identity of Hong Kong was strong and thriving. The most prominent protest prior to 2019 was the Umbrella Movement in 2014. It was during this 79-day period that political zines started to play a considerable role in Hong Kong, further shaping the collective identity of the citizens. Many makers chose to create zines in tandem with this major movement as a way to draw on the rich global history of zines being used for activism and expressing dissent, particularly in fights for women’s rights and LGBTQIA+ rights.(2)

One of the most notable differences with the Anti-ELAB movement when compared to earlier protests was the immediate and continual dedication to decentralizing the movement. The phrases “no central stage” and “be water” became paramount, (3) encouraging participants to have autonomy and allowing for more flexibility to respond to the situations they were met with. By creating an environment where citizens felt like any form of involvement was helpful to the collective, the production of communications, publications and artworks took shape through posters, photographs, drawings, infographics, and zines that were distributed both tangibly and online. Tong Kin-long, a scholar of Hong Kong zine history, contextualized the importance of zines taking on topics of protest and identity when he stated, “zines are beyond a resistive text that challenges mainstream narratives. They are also an important tool for artists to communicate a version of the self to cope with the trauma of state violence.”(4)

Image courtesy of the author.

It is that idea of claiming stake in a collective identity and actively asserting aspects of that identity for the good of the collective that has been on my mind over the past few weeks. I have heard a lot of talk (primarily from privileged white people) of leaving the U.S. because of the upsetting election results and it is my opposition to that mentality that has most reminded me of the Anti-ELAB protests because if those protests show us anything, I hope that it is how important every person’s actions are. Wanting to separate your identity from your demographic and, instead, be seen as “one of the good ones” does not exempt you from being part of that collective, so instead of distancing yourself, (speaking to myself and other white people) I hope you find ways to shift the collective identity. I hope we can all find ways to fight for democracy, kindness, and community; in smaller ways like creating zines, and in larger ways like getting involved in community organizing.

Works Cited:

Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minnesota: the University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3.
Adela C. Licona, Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 2.
Nam Kiu Tsing, Hongkongers’ Fight for Freedom: Voices from the 2019 Anti-extradition Movement (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2023), 32.
Tong Kin-long, “Overcoming Fear: The Representation of State Violence in Hong Kong’s Protest Zines during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement,” in Violence in Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Philosophy, ed. Darren M. Slade, (Chicago: Inara Publishing, 2022), 3.

Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harlan and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

CBAA – ENCOUNTERING PRINT HISTORY // Beth Sheehan

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 07:00:00 GMT

The Miami-based community printshop and book arts studio IS Projects, established by Ingrid Schindall, just celebrated its 10-year anniversary. As part of that celebration, they officially announced a name change and several exciting new facets that are ushering in the next era. Now known as the Miami Paper & Printing Museum, the studio will continue to offer many of the fantastic opportunities and amenities it has been providing to the thriving South Florida art community for the last decade. These include workshops, print club meetings, studio rentals, artist residencies, events, and more. But now the Museum also includes dedicated galleries for the museum’s permanent collection and contemporary exhibitions, as well as a store to purchase supplies, tools, artist books, prints, and many other incredible goodies.

Contemporary wing of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Ingrid Schindall.

The store inside the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Ingrid Schindall.

In a state where the accessibility of information has seen more and more restrictions recently, IS Projects becoming the Miami Paper & Printing Museum feels like a deliberate assertion of the important role that history, information, and art all play in creating an open, inclusive, and kind world. As part of the transformation, I curated an exhibition in the newly christened Permanent Collection Gallery: the bathroom. My goal for this exhibition was to provide viewers with an engaging and informative overview of the history of papermaking and printing. In organizing and installing this exhibition, I continuously came back to thinking about how much information is edited, culled, manipulated, erased, rewritten, and re-presented in our contemporary lives. Information is purposefully erased or made harder to access with things like the book bans in Florida and the Anti-DEI Senate Bill 129 in Alabama, but in addition to these targeted acts of erasure, information can often be erased to make it more comprehensible, to create more streamlined narratives, or to fit into the spatial limitations of museum galleries.

Inside the Permanent Collection gallery of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Beth Sheehan.

The information that is included in exhibitions and publications by prestigious institutions routinely perpetuates biased and selective information about art, participating in echo chambers honoring the knowledge of the critic or scholar, rather than the knowledge and experience of the maker or non-academic. Work is being done to consciously and ethically undo some of the harm caused by that process as people fight to decolonize museums. But plenty of important information will still inevitably be left out of museums in favor of trying to make the information understandable to audiences that may not have specialized knowledge in the given topic, and in favor of fitting the “most important” information into the space the museum has available.In its new incarnation, the Miami Paper & Printing Museum is trying something different.

Inside the Permanent Collection gallery of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Beth Sheehan.

It might seem humorous to house a museum (at least partially) in a bathroom, and it is, but when Schindall approached me about curating the show in the bathroom, I was immediately overjoyed by the idea because it seemed to be such a wonderful way to make information accessible. Museums have been contentious places in regards to accessibility; ideally they are places that provide everyone equal access to knowledge and culture, but when collections do not include diverse artists, entrance fees bar people from entering, and people feel that contemporary art is too hard to understand without didactic information, art museums stop being places that people feel welcome. So, by placing the MPPM permanent collection exhibition (one that includes diverse artists) in the bathroom (no entrance fee), anyone can close the door (for a… “private viewing”) and spend any amount of time that they want (or need) looking at the exhibition. My hope for the space is that it will make going to museums less intimidating and that it will prompt people to think about alternative ways history, knowledge, culture, and art can be shared. If you were to make a museum that showed people how impactful and empowering your artistic medium can be, what would you include? How would you make that space more accessible? More engaging? More inclusive?

The Tactile Wall of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Beth Sheehan.

WHY WE LOVE BOOKS, PART II: THE OUTCOME // Rachel Simmons

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 18:21:27 GMT

Similar to the first edition of Why We Love Books, the second communicated a range of ideas about the preciousness of books as both conceptual and physical objects that readers, writers, librarians and artists connect with deeply. The projects tapped into the myriad reasons that people love books as objects of infinite possibility, expression and knowledge. For the second edition the participants shared memories of their first book ever read or made, offered confessions about disliking altered books, and considered whether or not writing in a library book is ever okay. The format of the workshop was instrumental in this exchange; as participants moved around the room in game of musical typewriters, each sheet loaded into a machine became a potential conversation. Writers could allow previous responses to shape their thoughts or they could start fresh with a new sheet. The prompts, which were written in collaboration with members of the guild and meeting volunteers, were more much specific for this project, and the materials were limited to sheets of paper and typewriters. This allowed participants to really focus during our hour-long session. To be more inclusive, prompts encouraged contributors to consider a range of experiences, from literary to creative. Many contributors were book artists, but many were also librarians, writers, curators and avid readers.

These were the prompts for the second volume paired with a favorite selection of responses:

Describe, in detail, the first book you ever made.
Before I could read, I stapled my drawings together and gave them to my mother. Book after book after book.
Which bookmaking activity do you like best, folding, gluing or sewing? (Follow up: which one do you hate most?)
GLUING IS HIGH STAKES. Folding calms me right down, sewing makes me feel productive and industrious.
What kind of book or art materials would spend a lot of money on?
I spend my money on the triangles. I love the triangles so very much. All the triangles.
This response was followed by:
I love that answer. I’m the same way about triangles, especially brass ones. I’m not allowed near a leather seller. :) Triangles and squares are lovely, but I have to add paper. PAPER!
Is there a book that you like to keep with you?
A sketchbook, a book for lists, a book of debris that is not always useful.
What is a book you’ve read over and over again?
I’m such a cliché because I read over and over is the Great Gatsby. Gaaaaaaaatsby, Old sport.
Would you ever draw or write in a library book?
I would NEVER write inside a library book! I also don’t like to make altered books. They are creepy and sort of horrifying, though I realize that many people don’t agree with me and have a lot of fun “recycling” old books that way. Which is why I keep quiet about this opinion and don’t sign up for any altered books workshops.
Do you keep journals or sketchbooks and would you ever share them in public?
I have shared my sketchbooks in public. It was kinda okay.
Which story do you remember most vividly from childhood?/ Which author or artists have influenced you?
Margaret Atwood and Audrey Niffenegger.
And,
i had a book called 100 dresses and i think it’s why i enjoy thrifting so much.
What would the most mysterious book in the world look like, smell like, feel like? Would it be heavy or light? Large or small?
70% imagery. 30% text. has a lot of funny jokes. Measures 6” in height. Some pages open out into 3D models of different things that represent cultures.
And,
Your face is on the cover. The plot is the opposite of every choice you’ve ever made. But it ends the same.
And,
The most mysterious book will change every time someone reads it. Sometimes it would be big, sometimes it would be tiny. Sometimes it would smell sweet.
The typewriter asks, “Do you have any questions for me?”
Do you like being attended by nimble fingertips? What does a typical day look like? Where are the exclamation marks? Do you feel obsolete?
As the curator of this collection, I can identify several common threads from the responses. First, it seems that books are highly valued objects, whether we make them, write them, collect them or read them. Secondly, it seems that many book artists fell in love with making books as young readers; there is a clear connection between being an avid reader and becoming a book artist. As most people are first exposed to literary books and only later learn about artists’ books, this trajectory sheds light on the unique ways in which our community of practitioners has developed, examined, and expanded this rather recent genre of contemporary art. It’s interesting to think about how book arts will continue to to evolve as society’s relationship with the book as an object changes over time.

Rachel Simmons is an artist and educator from Orlando, Florida who makes artist books, comics, zines, and prints. In her creative practice, she explores environmental and social activism, science, philosophy and memory. She teaches book arts and printmaking at Rollins College and serves on the board of CBAA. You can find her work at www.rachelsimmons.net and follow her on instagram @bearwithjetpack.

WHY WE LOVE BOOKS, PART I: THE PROCESS // Rachel Simmons

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

Why We Love Books, designed, edited, and bound by Rachel Simmons, June 2024. A collaborative one-of-a-kind artist ’s book created with typewritten participant responses, risographs, and stab bound with metal rivets. 5.125” tall x 10.75” wide x .5” deep. This book is 77 pages long and printed on French paper.

Why We Love Books is a collaborative community book arts project I organized for “Critical Reading,” the CBAA annual meeting I co-hosted with Ben Rinehart at Rollins College, June 7-9, 2024. Over 30 artists, librarians, and book enthusiasts contributed to the pages of this book by responding to a set of prompts developed in collaboration with participants. Each prompt was displayed on a different manual or electric typewriter (including a rare IBM Selectric with three fonts) and participants were invited to type their way around the studio, embracing the unique experience of working on typewriters and giving themselves permission to leave typos behind as a record of authentic, in-the-moment reflections. Everyone wrote together in the studio, creating a symphony of fingers hitting typewriter keys and accompanied by ringing return chimes and happy chatter. This environment shaped their energetic and thoughtful responses, which were often in dialogue with one another.

After the responses were submitted, I gathered the pages to trim and edit (without correcting typos) and collaged them over a variety of vivid risograph patterns. The vibrancy of the backgrounds echoes the dynamic qualities of the writing and bring focus to each writer ’s voice. After scanning all 77 pages, I bound them together with metal rivets in a stab bound book with a wide pattern. There are two digital copies available for download, one with the pages turned horizontally for better viewing, and one where the pages are set vertically for easier printing on a US letter sized sheet. Contributors are welcome to download, print and reproduce these files.

I created the first volume of this book in 2019 in collaboration with members of the Book Arts Guild of Central Florida. In that version, I asked contributors to respond only to the prompt, “Why We Love Books.” We each contributed a collage and typewritten folio to what ended up being a very long leporello. In the two hours we had to finish our folios, we worked primary with found collage elements which allowed us to explore visual representations of why we love books as well as through writing.

Rachel ’s folio from the first edition of Why We Love Books, 2019

Rachel Simmons is an artist and educator from Orlando, Florida who makes artist’s books, comics, zines, and prints. In her creative practice, she explores environmental and social activism, science, philosophy and memory. She teaches book arts and printmaking at Rollins College and serves on the board of CBAA. You can find her work at www.rachelsimmons.net and follow her on instagram @bearwithjetpack.

SOME "HOWS" OF CREATIVITY // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 07:00:00 GMT

Over the weeks since my last post, and as I continue to teach my undergraduate introduction to literature and film analysis in Spanish, I have been introducing my students to figuras retóricas or rhetorical devices. Rhetorical devices are technical vocabulary associated with the production of various forms of writing in order to give it greater depth, beauty, and expressivity. These devices include the basics that most of us are very familiar with such as: alliteration, analepsis, hyperbole, metaphor, simile, etc.

Rhetorical devices are more than technical embellishments used to demonstrate a writer’s skill. On the contrary, they are tools used to construct new structures to convey new meanings. Therefore, the utilization of these tools structures the form of content in such a way that it constructs and conveys new meaning. In this way, the employ of these techniques as exercises can lead artists—whether writers, painters, or book artists—to experiment with new formats of presentation, as well as lead them to explore new discoveries, and create new content.

As I have been reviewing and providing examples of each of these and other meaning-making devices to my students, I have reflected upon their potential significance if applied as theoretical frameworks or guidelines to create artist books.

What if hyperbole, a form of extravagant exaggeration, was the parameter for the creation of an artist book? Every aspect of the book would have to be pushed into some form of exaggeration. Paper with an extreme amount of tooth. The sewing on the binding would have to be so elaborate that it would have to be recognized as an essential part of the book. The printing exaggerated in such a way that the work is potentially unreadable or readable in multiple formats, printed in multiple directions, producing a shifting prism of potential readings.

Shifting gears to something a little more radical, how could the use of hyperbaton, the alteration of idiomatic word order—exemplified by the way that Yoda talks in Star Wars movies, where “Do your judge me because of my size?” becomes “Judge me by my size, do you?”—influence the creation of a work of book art? This transposition of word order as a framework for a book could inspire some really topsy-turvy work. For example, a book where the binding and cover are in the middle of the book with the pages all around the outside. Or a book with only pages and no cover at all. Perhaps even a book where the binding is along all the edges with each page opening up in another direction from the center out.

What of metonymy, or the use of a figure of speech in which the name of one thing is used to stand in for another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated? Recently Levi Sherman, in his August 15^th 2024 Book Art Theory blog post People as Books / Books as People, examined several ways in which discourse surrounding book art reflects this metonymic perception of the book as body, individuals as books, books as stand-ins for their creators, libraries standing in for their collectors, and libraries as multitudes. Another possible approach would be to create a book work where everything used in the book had to be a metonymic reference to another object, the book itself would then be assembled of parts that all referred or alluded to something else, and never to the ultimate question that could be perhaps posed as a riddle: I begin where the story ends, my life in your hands it depends. What am I?

What about the use of alliteration, or the repetition of similar sounds at the beginning of two or more words or within them—which also includes assonance: alliteration with vowel sounds, and consonance: alliteration with consonant sounds—as the premise for the production of an artist book. This could be a book where all the materials used to create it all share a similar consonant or vowel sound in their name. It could equally be a book where every page or part includes the deliberate repetition of some sound motif (in this way it could also be an example of synesthesia where the repeated sound motif is presented by means of a very tactile medium to bring both the sound and the haptic sensation together).

Finally let me propose the use of anaphora, the repetition of a word or expression at the beginning of a succession of phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses for not only rhetorical or poetic effect but also for the purpose of emphatically highlighting the particular reiterated element. Such a work that made use of this technique could begin on each page with the same phrase or visual element that grounds or iterates continued reflection upon the material presented upon that page as well as upon each succeeding page.

These ideas are just to suggest that while book artists are frequently aware of the book-ish nature or their creations, perhaps there is another book-ish aspect, one that has been there since hermeneutics began, that has been overlooked or underappreciated as a potential source of creative concepts, of inspiration, to construct their works. Just think about what could be done by employing:

Phantom structure: When the second line of the first stanza becomes first line of the second.

Cesura: A pause or break in a line of poetry that mimics the natural rhythm of speech.

Antiphrasis: The usually ironic or humorous use of words in senses opposite to the generally accepted meanings

Chiasmus: An inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases

Apophasis: The raising of an issue by claiming not to mention it

Dysphemism: The substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one

Dialogism: A disjunctive conclusion inferred from a single premise

Acrostics: poetic composition in which the initial letters, read vertically, form a name or a phrase.

Blank verse: Poetry with regular meter but no rhyme

Onomatopoeia: Naming a thing using a world that makes the sound like the thing.

Oxymoron: The combination of contradictory or incongruous words.

Kennings: A figurative phrase or compound word is used instead of a simple noun.

Antiphrasis: An ironic or humorous use of words in an opposite sense of their meaning.

Red herring: Misleading through irrelevant diversion.

Tautology: Unnecessary repetition of meaning using different words to say the same thing.

Peter Tanner teaches Spanish Language and Literature at Utah State University and is Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art. He has a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, an MA in Latin American Art History, and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

THE “WHY” OF CREATIVITY // Peter Tanner

Virginia Green — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 07:00:00 GMT

Over the last few weeks, I have been begun a new semester of teaching an undergraduate introduction to literature and film analysis. My students are learning how to talk about, in Spanish, the various cultural currents and trends in the last century in Latin America. Recently we discussed the following basic questions:

Why do we as human beings tell stories?

Why do human beings make art?

When we talk about art what are we talking about? What is your definition?

Here are some of my students’ responses for your consideration:

We tell stories because they teach basic lessons in a fun way.
Humans create art because it is fun, and it is a good way to express our emotions.
When we talk about art we are talking about other people's creations.

I think the reason why we tell stories is because people can read the stories and know more about the world and the lives of others.
A reason why I think humans create art is to express emotions. When a person cannot say things with words, a person can express it with art.
When we talk about art, we are talking about the perspectives that art reveals to us. Each person has a different idea and perspective on art.

I believe we tell stories because we need to know the history of human beings to know what can help our problems today, and what won't help.
I believe that human beings create art because it is a type of communicating with people on a more directly human level.
Art for me is an expression of ideas, emotions, and stories shared by other humans in a type of communication that is more personal than just directly telling someone the reason why something happened. This way you can discover what others have experiences by looking at their experience through their creative expression.

We tell stories to remember and show people's different experiences. They show and help you to learn lessons. We tell stories to know people's perspectives. It helps to have empathy.
I believe that human beings create art to express opinions and emotions on specific topics.
I think that to be an art form it must be a creation that expresses opinions or emotions. Art is a way to show your ideas. It is a way of perceiving the world.

We tell stories to pass information and experiences to other people. We tell stories so that we can connect with other people and so that others can understand more about us.
I think that human beings create art to express themselves. That means expressing feelings, opinions, and understandings about the world that they live in and the experiences they have as well. It is a way to link thoughts in physical form so that others can also understand something about the artist.
When we are talking about art, we are talking about an artist's way of expressing themselves artistically, that is, in a different and unique way that is their own way.

These seemingly simple questions have inspired the creation of many a tome of poetry and prose, as well as countless texts regarding the interpretation and meaning of artistic works within their discursive and historic milieu. These same questions are important for us, as makers of art and as interpreters and critics of art, to rehash from time to time.

I think for some of us it has been years since we have thought about these questions that have defined our lives.

I would love to hear your thoughts, based on your experiences, to see if in all of our collected experience with art creation, art history, art criticism, we have established a more nuanced understanding of the reasons we do what we do.

Perhaps when we ask questions such as “Why do we as human beings tell stories?” “Why do human beings make art?” and “When we talk about art what are we talking about?”, we might as well be asking why we breathe.

If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop making, discussing and writing about art, our individual worlds would die. Is it really that heroic or is there something else?

Let me know what you think.

PEOPLE AS BOOKS / BOOKS AS PEOPLE // Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 07:00:00 GMT

Many artists’ books explore the metaphor of the person-as-book or the book-as-person. There are the common clichés (to read someone like a book) and the shared anatomical vocabulary (spine, shoulder, head). At a deeper level, if we believe that a book enables communication between reader and creator, then it would seem to embody the creator in some way. And as the biblical reference in Johanna Drucker’s The Word Made Flesh (1996) suggests, the incarnated book is nothing new. Rather than offer a theory of the book-as-person, this blog post is exploratory: I survey works of contemporary art that deal with books, and especially with libraries, to see how the metaphor has been used.

Individuals as books

If we are told not to judge a book by its cover, it is because the analogy between books and people goes deeper than the spine or shoulder. After all, every person has a story. Perhaps the Human Library Organization has gone furthest in realizing this version of the person-as-book. While not framed as art, their events “where readers can borrow human beings serving as open books” to “have conversations they would not normally have” share obvious parallels with social practice art.[1] Tellingly, the organization’s slogan is “unjudge someone.” Artist duo Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead instead lean into first impressions in their take on the human library book: Borrow Me (2006). The human books are tagged with labels like “sleeper” or “gossiper,” and, as expected, they perform versions of these stereotypical behaviors that one might encounter among library patrons.

Books as their creators

Just as people can stand in for books, so too can books stand in for people. For his first sculpture, Pense-Bête (1964), Marcel Broodthaers entombed the remaining copies of his final poetry book in plaster to signal the death of his literary self and the beginning of his career as a visual artist. Publication and person are also equated by Thomas Hirschhorn in his monuments to philosophers: Spinoza Monument (1999), Deleuze Monument (2000), Bataille Monument (2002), and Gramsci Monument (2013). Each of the increasingly complex public works includes a library of works by the philosopher, which viewers can read.

Libraries as their collectors

Thus far, we have dealt with the analogy between books and their creators. But books can also represent their collectors. Anyone who has felt proud, or more likely self-conscious, as a guest examines their bookshelves will sympathize with Craig Dworkin’s The Perverse Library (2012). Having enumerated his entire collection, Dworkin can project an imagined book that would, in some way, represent himself: “a 48-page perfect-bound volume by Clark Coolidge [New York: Sun & Moon, 1982]. No such book actually exists; its details are merely the projection of a statistical mean.”[2] Buzz Spector’s exhibition and book, Unpacking My Library (1995) similarly investigates how the organization of one’s books represents them — with a nod to Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same title.

Dworkin and Spector bare their own libraries, but others are more interested in the voyeuristic (or scholarly) appeal of other people’s books. Abra Ancliffe’s Personal Libraries Library (2009–) recreates the libraries of influential thinkers and makers, and allows readers to check out the books. The idea that you can learn something valuable from someone’s library had led Anne H. Young to argue that artists’ personal libraries should be preserved as writers’ often are.[3] An example of one such project is Donald Judd’s library, perfectly preserved in Marfa. I would argue that its digital presence (you can virtually browse every foot of shelving) combined with its physical presence (where viewers are not allowed to browse) are as much a monument as anything by Hirschhorn. Robert Smithson’s library has also been saved, and furthermore, is the subject of artist Conrad Bakker’s Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library & Book Club, an impressive series of painted book surrogates.

Libraries as multitudes

For Dworkin, Spector, Ancliffe, and Bakker, the library stands in for an individual. But if a book can represent a person, then one can also see the library as a collective of many people. This is, indeed, the logic behind many memorials and monuments. Yinka Shonibare’s British Library (2014) is an installation of more than 6,000 books bound in the artist’s signature Dutch wax fabric. Many of the books’ spines are stamped with the name of immigrants or prominent opponents of immigration. The blank books are meant to represent future migrants. Shonibare’s follow-up American Library (2018) and African Library (2018) replicate the installation format but also include websites with archival documents and additional information about many of the people represented on the shelves.

Using a similar logic, Rachel Whiteread's Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (2000) is in many ways the opposite of Shonibare’s libraries. It is devoid of color, anonymous, and signifies loss. The memorial is one of the best-known libraries in contemporary art, but it is preceded by Micha Ullman’s The Empty Library (1995). Both are voids that resist would-be readers — Whiteread turns her library inside out, as if it is a negative space cast from an absent positive, and Ullman’s empty shelves are sunk beneath the street, extending meters underground. A plaque added later to Ullman’s memorial bears the most infamous analogy between people and books: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.” It is worth noting that Heinrich Heine wrote these words a century before the holocaust, and it is therefore no surprise that artists have used libraries to memorialize other conflicts.

Wafaa Bilal’s participatory installation 168:01 memorializes the University of Baghdad’s art library, which was burned during the 2003 US invasion. With rows of uniforms white books representing 70,000 lost volumes, it is through participation that the analogy between a person and a book is made. Donors can exchange one of the blank books for a new book requested by the university faculty. One book — one donor — at a time, the blank library gives way to culture. Another poignant work about a lost library derives its impact through the analogy of the book as person: Emily Jacir’s Ex Libris (2010–12). Jacir’s book presents books from the Jewish National Library in West Jerusalem that were looted during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Nakba. By photographing the handwritten inscriptions from the books’ frontispieces, often gifts from one person to another, Jacir reminds the reader of the individual behind the book.

Bilal and Jacir memorialize conflicts that destroyed people and books alike. However, the fact that both artists were drawn to the library shows how wrong it feels when books are assaulted. It may be unsurprising, then, that the analogy between the destruction of books and people can be reversed. Mohammad Sharaf’s installation The Cemetery of Banned Books (2018) envisions a mass grave of books to criticize the banning of 4,300 books in Kuwait. The rectangular tombstones echo the shape of a book, and each is inscribed with a title and stamped with “Banned in Kuwait.” The installation was, predictably, dismantled by the authorities.

The Human Library Organization. “Unjudge Someone,” May 1, 2024. https://humanlibrary.org/.
Dworkin, Craig. The Perverse Library. York: Information as material, 2010.
Young, Anne H. “Preserving Artists’ Personal Libraries: Providing Insights into the Creative Process.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 35, no. 2 (2016): 339–51.

Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.

FANDOM AND CREATION // Icarus Key

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 07:00:00 GMT

The fine arts world, to be quite frank, looks down on books and printmaking as a creative medium. They’re strongly and obviously tied to commercialism (though we can look to the beautifully decorated Sistine chapel and remind painters that Michelangelo too was paid to promote the church’s agenda), and for an artist who is used to spending hours on a one of a kind piece, the idea of an edition—with each copy an original work of art—is antithetical to how they operate. Still, as easy as it is to understand their logic, it doesn’t make the pill any less bitter to swallow. And it doesn’t solve the problem of printmaking and book making as skills going under-acknowledged and under appreciated. Fortunately for this, we live in a time where humanity is more connected than ever.

My first experience with the internet was through media fandom, a portmanteau of the words fan + kingdom. Think of fandom like sports fans; there are many levels of obsession but ultimately it’s a group of people excited about a mutually loved piece of media. Online, people will share (fan)art and (fan)fiction based on the original stories and characters, as well as musings, theories, and breakdowns of the source material, all for free.

What does this have to do with book arts?

I engaged with fandom using my graphic design skills to layout “fanzines.” The name is archaic as the modern fanzine is more artbook than zine, but the communal collection of art and stories has strong ties to historical zinemaking and printmaking history. And it’s through these spaces I learned that there is a real hunger for that history in younger artists who might not have access to a more traditional art education. Outside of fanzines, artists create casebound books out of fanfiction to show off online that captivate people, and digital artists share fledgling attempts at linocut with familiar pink Speedball Easy Carve and a cheap set of tools. People want to express their love of someone’s work through their own creation, and do so even with the most basic knowledge gleaned from youtube tutorials or elementary school art projects.

This is the space I want to share my work. To that end, I have created Threadhunters, a comic that utilizes traditional printmaking to create comics. Think Frans Masereel, only instead of wordless woodcuts I am utilizing multiple printmaking methods and digital typesetting before running it through offset lithography, in the tradition of classic American comic books. The book, for this project, does not matter so much as the tools I’m using to create the mark and tell the story. But the story and the art will draw attention and curiosity to the methods being used. It will generate discussion and interest in creation, and as someone who is interested in passing on the tools of the trade, I can help guide younger artists in how to safely use these tools and engage with the larger historical narrative they’re taking part in.

I also take part in these spaces because of their accessibility. Young people (and many other people, but my focus here is on those still growing up) cannot afford our expensive, handmade books. And as a storyteller, I focus on giving people the language they need in order to express themselves, especially in matters such as gender identity and mental health. Language that I myself did not have growing up. It would be almost hypocritical of me if I did not seek out a way to share my stories in as accessible a way as possible. And the internet in general creates a way for me to share this comic and similar stories widely and freely, both by hosting it online for free and offering print on demand copies for $10 versus the $40+ of the traditionally printed and bound copies.

Threadhunters (v.1, p. 13) offset lithography

The internet is not an easy place to translate a book, but neither are formal gallery spaces. For me, it’s more important to share the story, as well as the mechanical process of creation, than it is to show off a beautifully put together codex that can’t be touched because it’s under plexiglass. There is space for both, but I have learned that the internet and the people who desire to learn are far more accommodating and far more interested than traditional spaces.

Icarus Key is a recent MFA graduate of the University of Arts. He hopes to use printmaking and narrative storytelling to empower the next generation to tell their stories and engage meaningfully with the community around them. His work will be updated on instagram at @happysadyoyo.

NOTES TOWARD A TYPOGRAPHY OF CARE, PART 2 // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 07:00:00 GMT

At an exhibition opening just hours after writing my previous post, I ran into my former professor John Gambell. I told him about my interest in the Yale Typesetting Checklist as an act of care. He replied, “Oh! I got that from Geoffrey Dowding. He was a crafts teacher in London after WW2 and wrote several books about typesetting. I still have several designers who set type too tightly because of it.”

An AbeBooks search yielded a first edition of Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type by Geoffrey Dowding available from a bookseller in the UK. The slim volume has just arrived. Scanning the book quickly, I cannot find a checklist within it. Did John mean he had taken the main ideas from this book, and turned them into the Yale checklist? Or is a typesetting checklist in one of Dowding’s other books?

But before I get further into it: the possibility that somebody else had written theYale Typesetting Checklist had never occurred to me. It is true John didn't put his name on it. I was the one who did that before sharing the handout with my students. Yet, I hadn't assumed that my former professor had invented the checklist, either. Certainly the lineage of typographic convention (and education) traces back centuries to incunabula, and to the scribes even more centuries before. Yet, the way this knowledge had been passed down often failed to resonate with me as a student. Often typography manuals discuss “ideals,” and achieving “mastery” or “perfection.” As I suspect is true with most of us who enjoy making things, I like attending to the process of making, of caring-while-working, of the lived experience of sustaining (and being sustained by) a state of engagement and focus. Fixating on a perfect outcome makes me anxious and miserable. When I think of my own effective teachers: what had struck me about John was how much he cared about type. He had visceral reactions to our awkward work. I was awed by how sensitive he was to small details that were invisible to us students. He saw differently.

Years later, to enjoy and be effective in teaching typography myself, I realized I needed to identify a framework that aligned with my values.* Achieving perfection and mastery was not it. “Seeing differently” sounds wonderful, but isn’t that more of an endpoint than a process? How does one learn to see differently? By caring. And slowing down. Attending to details. The Yale Typesetting Checklist shows a way.

Reading Dowding's books, influential to my own mentor, is a way to dig into a genealogy of my education. So, for a preliminary reading of Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type, here is a concordance of care, including its corollaries, careful, and careless:

“But in the opposite direction there is, and always has been, abuse: the pernicious system of piece rates for the job, for example, does not conduce to careful text setting & the proper division of words, but only to a maximum number of ens per hours ‘standard’ and thus to disturbingly large amounts of white space in the wrong places, i.e., between the words—the antithesis of good composing & sound workmanship.” (xii)

“From the time of invention of printing from movable types in Europe, that is, circa 1440, up to the present day, one of the hall-marks of good printing, and of the good printer, has been the care and attention paid to the setting of text matter.” (1-2)

“A carefully composed text page appears as an orderly series of strips of black separated by horizontal channels of white space.” (4)

“If he has organized his job well, there will be a set of house rules in the hands of all who work for him, but, with the greatest care, such rules can never be exhaustive, and much will depend on his being lynx-eyed and uncompromising in enforcing the standards he has set himself.”- H.P. Schmoller” (7)

“Extra thin spacebands were used, and normal care was taken to see that word spacing was reasonably even and close, by the judicious breaking of words at the ends of lines.” (7)

“In arranging text setting care must be exercised to ensure that the type and the measure are so related that the eye has, firstly, no difficulty in swinging easily to and for without any suggestion of strain: and secondly, is not hindered in finding the beginning of the following line.” (9)

“Colons and semi-colons are often carelessly spaced also.” (20)

“The introduction of unnecessary punctuation marks and their frequently careless setting makes for fussy and ugly typography.” (22)

“Even a casual glance through a book or newspaper reveals initials used in this manner but in many instances it also discloses appallingly careless methods of setting.” (30)

“Only two of the many treatments of initial letters have been mentioned, but they indicate the care with which the setting of initials should be treated.” (32)

“This care in setting & printing, nullified when extra space is inserted between paragraphs (for there is some show-through even on reasonably good paper), adds to the beauty & clarity of the pages by heightening the contrast between the lines & their interlinear whiting.” (33)

“Care is necessary in adjusting the leading of the lines so as to give visually even spacing between them.” (43)

“Careful placing laterally, either to the left or the right of the mechanical centre, is necessary to make lines which begin with A, C, G, J, O, Q, T, V, W, Y, and c, e, j, o, q, v, w, and y or end with A, D, F, K, L, O, P, Q, R, T, V, W, Y and b, c, e, f, h, p, r, v, w & y, appear centered.” (43-44)

* If this notion strikes you as unfamiliar or unconvincing: “We know that the consequences of our motives for teaching and learning are significant: Keith Trigwell and Mike Prosser have shown that the instructor’s intentions in teaching (“why the person adopts a particular strategy”) have a greater impact on student learning than the instructor’s actual strategies for teaching (“what the person does”) (78). Their research has shown that approaches to teaching that are purposefully focused on the students and aimed at changing conceptual frameworks lead to deeper learning practices than teacher-centered, information-driven approaches (Trigwell 98). The implications are that the instructor’s fundamental beliefs and values about teaching, learning, and knowledge-making matter.” —A Guide to Feminist Pedagogy

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993. She is currently Associate Professor of Art in Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

NOTES TOWARD A TYPOGRAPHY OF CARE* // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 07:00:00 GMT

Recently I’ve been thinking about typography as a practice of care.

By typography, I mean both the communications function of type, as well as its crafted details. The “communications function” entails attending to the meaning of the text, coaxing it out, making it visible, giving it physical form. By “details” I mean everything from creating and managing spaces (whether between letters, words, lines, paragraphs, or margins), to the use of dashes, to considerations of when one might use old style vs. lining vs. tabular figures.

For a contemporary analysis of care, I turn to Matters of Care by María Puig de la Bellacasa, who draws upon the thinking of feminist theorists before her, including Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer. While this book makes no mention of typography, I find it rich with resonance.

De la Bellacasa offers Tronto’s definition of care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (3). ‘Our world’ contains design artifacts; individual design artifacts, such as books, also create their own world. De la Bellacasa emphasizes that “‘caring about’ and ‘taking care of’ need to be supported by material practices” (4), that caring necessitates acting; one cannot design without doing something. She notes that “feminist interest in care has brought to the forefront the specificity of care as a devalued doing, often taken for granted if not rendered invisible” (53). The labor of typographers and graphic designers is ubiquitous, yet largely anonymous. Evidence of their work surrounds us, and yet as workers they remain largely uncredited and invisible.

I came to the notion of “care” as a lens to think through how to teach typographic rules that feels personally authentic to me as a feminist practitioner. As my students will attest, I care a lot about typographic detail. And my eagerness to teach conventions gives me pause. Many contemporary students and instructors alike are skeptical of Eurocentric inheritances, weary of their weight, and seek alternatives. New texts in this area, such as matriarchal design futures: a collective work in progress, by Heather Snyder Quinn and Ayako Takase, advocate for “changing the rules, unlearning the systems and structures under which we have been trained” and advise students against “checking off boxes and working to ‘please the professor’” (n.p.). My zealous presentation of a handout called the Yale Typesetting Checklist (distributed by a beloved former professor, Yale University Printer and Senior Critic John Gambell, now retired) hardly seems in line with this pedagogical approach. I relish teaching this checklist, yet I identify as a feminist design educator who values creating an environment where students explore, experiment, identify their influences, follow their interests, and develop their own research and methods. How do I reconcile my love of this traditional checklist with my dedication to feminist pedagogy?

Learner-centered teaching is knowledge and skill sharing, something long considered a part of feminist practice and process. Certainly there is power in understanding how and why things work, and being able to shape material to get a desired outcome: to know how to polish something. When students take a raw paragraph into InDesign and iterate various ways to shape and detail it based upon a desired outcome, the text gains character, liveliness, identity; the text becomes more itself. De la Bellacasa offers that “collective reenactment of committed knowledge [is] a form of care” (16), which suggests to me that typographic shaping is a way of caring for a text. One cannot care without knowledge and without action. The point to remember is that there are many types of knowledge, many ways of knowing, many ways of caring, multiple ways of acting.

So in teaching the checklist, the question becomes “how to care in ways that challenge situations and open possibilities rather than close or police spaces of thought and practice”(67)?

How to teach skills and principles while creating space for invention? What could this mean for a typographic checklist?

In the original checklist, one item is “to render all underlined titles of literary or artistic work in italic type.” I offer to my students that this is a reminder to treat titles differently: italics is a quiet and effective approach. Other options could be to underline a title (creating custom underlines is one of my favorite InDesign tricks), or make a title bold, or a different typeface, or a different color.... the reminder is to attend to the difference of the title, and not flatten it to the rest of the surrounding text.

Another item in the checklist outlines the usage of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. Dashes are glyphs, symbols, meaning-givers, like the letter A: you use the sign you need to communicate what you need to communicate. While I may be satisfied with conventional dashes and have yet to seek alternatives, I think of Samuel R. Delany inventing his own punctuation mark “⋮” for simultaneity. So in dashes there could be room too for invention, if students have the desire and care to create them.

Instead of a rigid list of rules, the checklist becomes a jumping off point for (re)considering every design choice. Does caring for a particular text mean adhering to the conventional, or inventing the unconventional? In discussing the value of the checklist, my student Tomaso Scotti offered “When details are cared for, people notice.” He elaborated that even if a layperson may not be able to identify why or how a design artifact appears cared for, they still recognize the designer’s attention. This “caring for” is a world-building, and world-maintaining, an outlook of attention and responsibility, an ethics of praxis: a cycle of theory, action, and reflection. If you consider a book (or any design artifact) its own world, “to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” offers a feminist lens through which to think through what we do as typographers, one checklist point at a time.

* this post presupposes that typography is a book art relevant to all students and practitioners of the book.

Works referred to:

de la Bellacasa, María Puig. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Quinn, Heather Snyder and Ayako Takase, matriarchal design futures: a collective work in progress, Chicago and Providence: self-published, 2024.

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993, when as a teenager she began making zines. She is currently Associate Professor of Art in Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

THE ZINCS: CAPTURING A BYGONE WORLD – PART TWO // mahala kephart

Susan Viguers — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 07:00:00 GMT

Used in commercial printing from the 19th century through the mid-20th century, the 20,000 photoengraving blocks in the J. Willard Marriott Library collection would have been used in the production of a variety of printed materials, including books, pamphlets, newspapers, announcements, invitations, greeting cards, and advertisements. Under the direction of Book Arts Program faculty, book arts program volunteers and student assistants have been responsible for most of the cataloging efforts to date.

At first, the collection was organized by grouping, like subject matter (such as birds, images of people, or ships) together on galley trays. This organizational strategy, however, required moving and reorganizing all of the galley trays as blocks were put away. As the number of cataloged blocks grew, this practice was, pun intended, shelved. Now blocks are filed away and given a cabinet address based on their original galley tray. This means that carefully labeled “birds” will be scattered through the galley tray cabinets. Cabinet address and inventory numbers are noted on the original print proofs as a backup inventory control measure.

With the rare exceptions of zinc cuts that exceed an 8.5 x 11” footprint, scans appear in the physical catalog at true size. Large zinc cuts appear at a reduced size, with appropriate notation. Zinc cuts that are damaged are proofed and scanned, with damage notes added to the catalog. Moving to a digital catalog will require physically measuring each zinc cut with digital calipers since size will no longer be obvious to the potential end user; notations about damage or other issues will also transfer to the digital catalog.

Zinc cuts can be fiddly to print, requiring some amount of make-ready temporarily attached to sections of the wood block underneath the metal plate. Nails are sometimes visible in the printed image; usually this can be fixed using a nail set and light tapping with a small hammer, being careful not to strike any other part of the plate with the nail set or the hammer. In cases where the nails are not possible to hide, damage notations are made in the catalog. A galley tray usually contains between ten and fifteen blocks, carefully arranged to maximize use of the space (sometimes fitting them back presents a Tetris-like challenge). The blocks are square or rectangular but are occasionally irregularly so (like Utah’s state boundaries compared to those of Wyoming or Colorado). A proof printing session can proceed most efficiently if the blocks from one tray are printed from largest to smallest (and the next tray from smallest to largest, and so forth); this greatly reduces setup changes.

In addition to the multi-step, manual process of printing the photoengravings and preparing them for digitization and search engine optimization, one of the serious challenges of cataloging the images in the collection has been the sheer volume of subject matter present. Only about a fifth of the collection has been cataloged, so many more gems sit waiting to be found. Some images provide interesting insight into long-ago mechanical or logistical processes in factories, below deck on ships, or in the loading of ships from dockside. There are dramatic scenes that are quiet; dramatic scenes that are full of action; and other dramatic scenes that seriously beg the question of what was going on in the accompanying text.

As electronic platforms have advanced in functionality, some early versions of key wording in the studio were lost in computer and software upgrades, a long pandemic hiatus, and other incompatibilities. Moving the existing data as well as updating and standardizing descriptive material under the umbrella of the Marriott Library’s Digital Collections team should ensure data integrity, continuity, preservation, and backup going forward. Additionally, this move will create a road map for future staffing needs and standardize information about the project to ensure smooth knowledge transfer and strategic planning.

The accompanying illustrations offer the very briefest introduction to the wonderful variety and not-yet fully explored creative potential of the J. Willard Marriott Library Photoengraving and Zinc Cut Collection housed in the Book Arts Studio at the University of Utah. We look forward to being able to share this resource more broadly with book artists near and far in the coming years.

mahala kephart, flutist by training and retired university development administrator, is a long‑time volunteer and student in the University of Utah’s Book Arts Studio. Work on printing and cataloging the photoengraving and zinc cut collection has proven to be a surprising marriage of the analog and digital worlds.

THE ZINCS: CAPTURING A BYGONE WORLD – PART ONE // mahala kephart

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 07:00:00 GMT

The Book Arts Studio housed within the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library is home to a collection of approximately 20,000 photoengraving blocks that capture and preserve a surprisingly rich array of images from a world gone by.

The vast majority of the pieces in the collection were originally part of the collection of the Newcomen Society in North America. Established in 1923, its members were leaders from a variety of fields (industry, invention, transportation, communication, energy, mining, agriculture, economics, banking, insurance, education, and the law). Newcomen Society members addressed gatherings of their peers in talks focused on the history, triumphs, and challenges of their particular enterprise; these talks were held across the US and Canada.

Eventually the Newcomen Society in North America established a physical campus and headquarters in what is now the Philadelphia suburb of Exton, Pennsylvania. The campus, designed by architect Briton Martin, included offices, guest houses, a chapel, a bell tower with carillon, as well as many antique model steam engines. Also located on the campus was the Thomas Newcomen Memorial Library in Business History which housed some 2,700 volumes.

The business model of the Society also included Newcomen Publications, Inc. and an on-site print shop. The print shop produced a long-running series of pamphlets that served to document the presentations given at meetings. The booklets, which were generally paid for by the entity being recognized (the business or organization highlighted in the publication, whose leader had given one of the meeting addresses), were produced using a consistent design strategy for decades, and were illustrated first using both commissioned and antique engravings; later publications were illustrated primarily with photographs. With more than 2,500 institutions and organizations having been honored during the four decades the Newcomen Society was active, the number of commemorative booklets produced by Newcomen Publications, Inc., was significant.

At its height, the Newcomen Society of North America had a membership roll of 17,000. Membership, however, declined significantly in the last part of the 20th century. The campus was sold; the collection of photoengraving blocks came to the University of Utah; the collection of antique engines was auctioned; and the Society officially disbanded in 2007. The organization’s remaining archives are housed in the National Museum of Industrial History located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

The University of Utah’s collection contains other photoengravings and zinc cuts, as well. These likely came from newspaper printers in Salt Lake City (the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News), as well as the University of Utah print shop. The provenance of individual pieces in the collection, however, has not been fully documented.

The images on the physical objects are both photoengravings and line art that were etched onto thin zinc (sometimes magnesium or copper) sheets that were then trimmed and affixed to blocks of wood with small nails. The distance from the base of the block to the highest face of the engraving was calculated to 0.918 inches, the US industry “type high” printing standard.

Cataloging the University of Utah’s collection began in earnest when the Book Arts Studio moved to its current location in the J. Willard Marriott Library in 2009. The engravings are housed in designated galley tray cabinets in the studio. The cataloging process involves cleaning and polishing the metal part of the block (this operation is largely limited to engravings that are extremely dirty, dusty, or appear to be stained or damaged); taking a proof of the image by printing it onto paper on a flatbed press; scanning the resulting proofs; assigning keywords and galley tray addresses to the scanned images; and, finally, adding an inventory number to the physical object.

From 2010-2023, the resulting “Zinc Cut Catalog” information was made available through physical notebooks housed in the Book Arts Studio. Beginning in 2024, the physical catalog will be phased out and the photoengraving catalog eventually made available through the Marriott Library’s Digital Library Collections.

More about this exciting development our next post.

Sources:

Swearingen, John E. The Growth of Standard Oil Company (Indiana): 1889-1964. Princeton, NJ: Newcomen Society of North America, 1964.

“Public Relations: The Newcomers,” Time Magazine, July 21, 1952, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,859909,00.htm, accessed February, 2024

Wikipedia. “Newcomen Society of the United States.” Last modified March 2, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_Society_of_the_United_States

PART TWO: WARREN LEHRER'S LIFE IN BOOKS // Brian Davis

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 May 2024 07:00:00 GMT

Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books (2013) is one of my favorite contemporary novels. A Life in Books is Lehrer’s first novel, but as many of CBAA’s readers surely know, Lehrer has been composing artist books and experimenting with typography and multimedia since the late 1970s. Readers familiar with Lehrer’s earlier works as well as the history of artists books and book history more generally will find A Life in Books is not only an evocative love song to the book as object but a masterfully original and emotionally driven work of visual storytelling. A Life in Books also happens to be an exemplary multimodal book-archive.

Warren Lehrer, A Life in Books, 2013, Goff Books. Front cover.

The full title to Lehrer’s novel is A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, The Long Awaited Memoir and Retrospective Monograph Featuring All 101 of Bleu Mobley’s Books.As its long title suggests, Lehrer’s novel is both a fictional memoir and a retrospective monograph written by a fictitious author and bookmaker named Bleu Mobley. Narrated from the confines of a prison cell, A Life in Books is Bleu’s 102nd and last book, transcribed from audiotapes, compiled and edited by a writer named Warren Lehrer, the real Lehrer’s fictional doppelganger. While I do not have the space to elaborate on how the novel explores issues of fictionality or matters of textual authenticity, nor do I wish to spoil the ending for those unfamiliar with the novel, I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that Bleu publishes a work of Fiction that he markets as a work of Non-Fiction, a kind of satirical hoax, written with the intention of exposing war crimes committed by the U.S. government—and that it is this literary scandal that eventually leads to Bleu’s imprisonment.

As a literary compendium of sorts, A Life in Books documents Bleu’s creative universe. It includes excerpts from 33 of his 101 published books, photographs of each of his 101 personally designed book covers, as well as book reviews, catalog copy, and artifacts from his personal archive—all woven together with Bleu’s life story. Much like Lehrer himself, Bleu experiments with all kinds of bookish forms. He creates letterpress books, scrolls, dos-à-dos books, accordion books, works of biblio-circuitry, VR book-installations, poetry on toilet paper, a mini television built into a book, flying poster poems, bookish furniture and children’s toys that look like books, and of course, Bleu cuts across virtually every popular genre at some point along the way. In other words, this is not merely a novel about the life of a writer and bookmaker, it’s about the institution of literature and the history of modern publishing. Each of Bleu’s books also reflects a technological stage in the development of printing and, given that many of the events narrated in Bleu’s memoir pertain to actual historical events, both Bleu’s life and his books index real historical events, too. Even the title of the novel is metonymic: Bleu doesn’t merely spend his life making books, his books stand in for his life—his life in books. As such, A Life in Books is paradigmatic of the more maximalist or encyclopedic variant of multimodal book-archives.

Diagram in A Life in Books explaining the book’s format.

Around the time when the book was published, Lehrer adapted several of Bleu’s books into short films. Embracing the expansive nature of the project, Lehrer took the 101 book covers he designed for A Life in Books, as well as the textual artifacts he produced that became the foundation for the novel, and exhibited them across the U.S. as a retrospective survey of Bleu’s extraordinary publishing career. In the spirit of archiving, I like to view this travelling exhibit less as a component of Lehrer’s book tour for A Life in Books, which it obviously was, than as a traveling book-art installation that showcases the Bleu Mobley archive.

Photo from the exhibition A Life in Books: A Bleu Mobley Retrospective. Photo credit: Warren Lehrer.

Just as some of Lehrer’s book titles from the 1980s end up being a part of Bleu’s oeuvre in A Life in Books (e.g., French Fries and i mean you know), Lehrer has recently taken some of Bleu’s stories and remediated them into standalone books. For example, Jericho’s Daughter (2024), which Lehrer co-authored with Sharon Hovarth, is an anti-war retelling of the Biblical tale of Rahab and takes the form of a bifurcated, dos-à-dos binding. Riveted in the Word (2024) is an interactive digital book, soon to be available at the Apple Store, that incorporates kinetic typography and an original soundtrack to explore a writer’s attempt to regain their language faculty after a stroke. Both books first appear in A Life in Books, albeit in different forms. That Lehrer continues to find ways to further elaborate on Blue Mobley’s textual universe is not simply a matter of postmodern recycling, it’s a testament, I would argue, to just how generative archival practices can be within the domain of book art and literature.

I encourage readers unfamiliar with Lehrer’s work to check his stuff out and, for those already familiar with his work, I highly recommend looking into the two aforementioned titles which are set to be published in June of this year.

Brian Davis teaches English in the Upper School at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart as well as undergraduate courses in writing, literature, and film at the University of Maryland. His writing has appeared in Frontiers of Narrative Studies, electronic book review, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, among others.

PART ONE: THE RISE OF MULTIMODAL BOOK-ARCHIVES // Brian Davis

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 May 2024 07:00:00 GMT

Most of my writing during and after graduate school has argued that contemporary multimodal literature, for the most part, employs an archival poetics.[1] Books like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) — which is arguably the most influential example — as well as Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture (2006), Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts (2009), Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009), Anne Carson’s Nox (2010), Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams’s S. (2013), Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books (2013), Thalia Field’s Experimental Animals (2016), Matthew McIntosh’s theMystery.doc (2017), Rian Hughes’s XX (2020), and many, many others, not only exploit the material and expressive possibilities of the book as object, they function as physical sites for compiling and organizing heterogeneous collections of textual artifactsfor narrative and other expressive purposes. I call these aesthetic objects book-archives and examine them through the lens of archival poetics, a poetics of documentation and preservation, of curation and transmission.

In addition to employing a variety of literary modes and linguistic registers, book-archives often include reproduced photographs, paintings, drawings, handwriting, newspaper clippings, x-rays, maps, diagrams, charts, and other kinds of textual artifacts and ephemera. Makers of book-archives tend to also organize their books according to archival techniques and principles such as collation (the combining and comparison of objects), cataloging (the listing and inventorying of various things), annotation (commentary and diagrams of objects), cross-referencing and intertextuality (the citation of texts in other texts), indexicality (how textual objects point to specific places and contexts in the world), and conceptual metonymy (how textual objects stand in for larger psychosocial complexes, spatiotemporal continua, and other textual objects).

Given the physical dimensions, design potential, and portability of books, book-archives often take on the form of compendiums and dossiers. On the one hand, there are the more maximalist or encyclopedic book-archives like House of Leaves and A Life in Books, which recapitulate entire schools and traditions of literary history and printmaking. On the other hand, there are the more minimalist book-archives like Nox and Important Artifacts which are more modest in terms of their scope of documentation and narrative scale. At both ends of the spectrum, book-archives employ archival principles and techniques.

The emergence of book-archives as a contemporary mode of writing and bookmaking occurs at the intersection of literary-cultural history and material-technological development. In recent decades, a wide variety of literary modes and genres, including encyclopedic fiction, metafiction, artists books, electronic hypertext, visual literature, and graphic narratives, among others, have tended to coalesce in individual works, and this convergence has come at a time when the technological affordances of new media, including software like QuarkXPress and Adobe’s InDesign and Photoshop, become readily accessible and fairly easy to use. Nowadays, authors and designers are able to incorporate practically all forms of media into their books. No longer limited to the pen, typewriter, word processor, or letterpress, writers are able to integrate virtually all types of inscription and media into a single object—the book—using various design software on their personal computers. This convergence in large part explains why we have seen the book-archive as a mode of writing and bookmaking emerge when it has.

The rise of archival poetics also overlaps with various responses to supposed threats brought on by digital technology to print and media culture, reading practices, public discourse, social trust and cultural memory. Central to multimodal book-archives are matters of textual authenticity—that is, of determining whether a textual artifact is real or fake, genuine or a copy. And of course, issues of authentication typically tip over into questions about authorship and attribution as well.

So while artificial intelligence and social media, for instance, have created real and pressing concerns pertaining to matters of authenticity, book-archives have tended to respond to these matters by drawing attention to how subjectivity, knowledge, discourse, and cultural memory are increasingly configured through distributed networks of people and artifacts in different social and institutional spaces. Book-archives, in other words, use the book object as a vehicle for interrogating some of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century.

In my next blog post, I will attempt to tie some of these threads together with a discussion of Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books

1] Those interested in reading more about archival poetics and multimodal literature may wish to read my interviews with Warren Lehrer and Bill Bly, both published at electronic book review. I have also published articles on Anne Carson, Bill Bly, and Mark Z. Danielewski.

AI AND AB (ARTIST BOOKS) // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 18:19:24 GMT

Recently I have been fascinated to learn more about how to use AI for teaching purposes. I have found it to be a great resource, always disclosing to my students that I am using it so that they use similar best practices and cite its use. To demonstrate some of what AI can do I asked ChatGPT a few questions. It is interesting to see its answers and how they represent ways that the information we share with AI influences the results it can provide. For clarity’s sake all the questions below are from myself and all the answers in all their redundant glory were generated by the ChatGPT’s AI.

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Peter Tanner Question (PT Question): What is ChatGPT and what can it do?

ChatGPT AI Answer: ChatGPT is a conversational AI model developed by OpenAI, based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture. It's designed to generate human-like text based on the input it receives. ChatGPT is trained on a vast amount of text data from the internet, allowing it to understand and generate responses across a wide range of topics and contexts.

Here are some of the things ChatGPT can do:

1. Answer Questions: ChatGPT can provide information and answer questions on a wide variety of topics, drawing from its extensive training data.

2. Engage in Conversation: ChatGPT can engage in text-based conversation, responding to prompts and interacting with users in a manner similar to human conversation.

3. Generate Text: Whether it's writing stories, poems, articles, or even code snippets, ChatGPT can generate text in a coherent and contextually relevant manner.

4. Assist with Writing: ChatGPT can help with writing tasks by suggesting ideas, providing feedback, or generating content based on specific prompts or requirements.

5. Language Translation: While not perfect, ChatGPT can assist with language translation tasks by converting text from one language to another.

6. Creative Exploration: ChatGPT can be used for creative exploration, generating ideas, brainstorming, or providing inspiration for artistic or design projects.

Overall, ChatGPT is a versatile tool that can assist with a wide range of tasks involving natural language processing and generation. However, it's important to keep in mind that while ChatGPT can produce human-like text, it doesn't have understanding or consciousness like a human does.

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PT Question: What is an artist book?

ChatGPT AI Answer: An artist's book is a medium of artistic expression that uses the book format as its primary means of presentation. Unlike traditional books, which focus primarily on conveying written content, artist's books emphasize the visual and tactile experience of the book object itself. They can take many forms, including handmade books, altered books, unique or limited-edition works, and even sculptural or multimedia creations.

Artist's books often blur the boundaries between visual art, literature, and design. They can incorporate a wide range of materials, such as paper, fabric, metal, wood, and found objects. Artists may use various techniques such as painting, printmaking, collage, photography, and typography to create their books.

The content of artist's books can vary widely, ranging from narrative storytelling to abstract expressionism to political commentary. Some artist's books explore themes of identity, memory, or social justice, while others experiment with the structure and format of the book itself.

Overall, artist's books offer a unique and immersive artistic experience that engages the viewer on multiple levels, challenging conventional notions of what a book can be.

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PT Question: Can AI help create artist books?

ChatGPT AI Answer: Yes, AI can certainly play a role in the creation of artist's books, either directly or indirectly. Here's how:

1. Content Generation: AI can be used to generate written content for artist's books. For example, a language model like GPT-3 could be prompted with themes, ideas, or specific text passages to generate narratives, poetry, or other textual elements that can be incorporated into the book.

2. Design Assistance: AI tools can assist artists in designing the layout and visual elements of their books. For instance, software programs equipped with AI algorithms can help with layout composition, image editing, and typography selection, ensuring a visually appealing and cohesive design.

3. Collaborative Creation: AI can facilitate collaborative creation processes between artists and machines. Artists can interact with AI models to explore new ideas, experiment with different styles, or generate content collaboratively, leading to innovative and unexpected outcomes.

4. Automated Production: AI-driven automation technologies can streamline the production process of artist's books by handling repetitive tasks such as image processing, text layout, and even physical bookbinding in some cases, allowing artists to focus more on the creative aspects of their work.

5. Inspiration and Exploration: AI can serve as a source of inspiration and exploration for artists, providing access to vast amounts of data, images, texts, and other resources that can spark creativity and inform the conceptualization and execution of artist's books.

While AI can provide valuable assistance in various aspects of creating artist's books, it's important to recognize that human creativity, intuition, and artistic sensibility remain essential throughout the creative process. AI should be viewed as a tool to augment and enhance human creativity rather than replace it entirely. Ultimately, the synergy between human and machine capabilities can lead to exciting and innovative outcomes in the realm of artist's books.

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PT Question: What are key artist books from United States?

ChatGPT AI Answer: The United States has a vibrant tradition of artist's books, with numerous influential works that have contributed to the development of the medium. Here are some key examples:

1. "The Birds" by Edward Ruscha: Published in 1972, "The Birds" is a seminal work by American artist Edward Ruscha. It features black-and-white photographs of various species of birds, accompanied by simple, descriptive text. Ruscha's use of photography and text in a minimalist format has had a profound influence on the genre of artist's books.

2. "A Humument" by Tom Phillips: Tom Phillips' "A Humument" is an ongoing project that involves altering and reinterpreting the pages of a Victorian novel, "A Human Document" by W.H. Mallock. Phillips paints, collages, and obscures the original text, creating a new narrative and visual experience. The project blurs the boundaries between literature and visual art and has inspired generations of artists.

3. "Diary of a Victorian Dandy" by Duane Michals: This artist's book by Duane Michals combines photography and handwritten text to create a fictional narrative about the life of a Victorian-era dandy. Michals' innovative use of sequencing and storytelling techniques has made "Diary of a Victorian Dandy" a landmark work in the genre.

4. "Seven American Deaths and Disasters" by Kenneth Goldsmith: Published in 2013, "Seven American Deaths and Disasters" is a provocative artist's book by conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It consists of transcriptions of radio and television broadcasts related to seven iconic American tragedies, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the September 11 attacks. Goldsmith's appropriation and recontextualization of media texts raise questions about representation, memory, and collective trauma.

5. "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski: While not strictly an artist's book, "House of Leaves" is a groundbreaking novel that incorporates innovative typographic design and unconventional page layouts to create a complex and immersive reading experience. Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental approach to storytelling challenges traditional notions of narrative structure and has inspired artists and writers alike.

These are just a few examples of the diverse and influential artist's books that have emerged from the United States. They demonstrate the country's rich artistic heritage and its ongoing contributions to the field of book arts.

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PT Question: What was the first artist book?

ChatGPT AI Answer: Pinpointing the "first" artist's book can be challenging due to the broad and evolving definition of the genre and the long history of artists experimenting with book formats. However, one early example often cited as a precursor to the modern artist's book is the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," published in 1499.

The "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" is a Renaissance-era book that combines text with lavish woodcut illustrations. It tells the story of a protagonist, Poliphilo, on a dreamlike journey through a landscape filled with classical architecture, mythological figures, and erotic encounters. The book's intricate design and integration of text and image make it a landmark work in the history of book arts.

While not a contemporary artist's book in the modern sense, the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" exemplifies many characteristics of the genre, including the integration of visual and textual elements, the exploration of unconventional narrative structures, and the use of the book format as a vehicle for artistic expression. It has inspired generations of artists and designers and continues to be celebrated for its beauty and innovation.

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PT Comment: All the previous answers were generated by the ChatGPT AI. For many of you and myself, the repetition that we read can be grating, but that is important to note because it separates us from the AI. But also think about what these answers represent: An AI provided the definition of the artist book. That represents a non-research-based consensus found on the internet. It created a list of the most important books in the history of artist books in the United States, but it did not choose Twenty-six Gas Stations, which may perturb many readers. What should be readily apparent is that while there are vast amounts of information available for AI to use, there is a great deal of serious academic research that is not available for access by either AI or Google’s search engines. AI can only present us with an amalgam of the data that we have fed to it. The adage “garbage in garbage out” comes to mind. AI can generate many types of information. However, as humans and specialists in our fields we are the content authorities. The metadata is a proxy, not “the” thing.

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PT Question: Who is Peter Tanner?

ChatGPT AI Answer: As of my last update in January 2022, I don't have specific information about an individual named Peter Tanner who is widely known or recognized. It's possible that Peter Tanner could be a private individual, a professional in a specialized field, or someone who has gained prominence after that time. If Peter Tanner is associated with a particular field or area of expertise, providing more context could help in providing relevant information.

Peter Tanner teaches Spanish Language and Literature at Utah State University and is Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art. He has a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, an MA in Latin American Art History, and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

MUSING FROM THE 2024 COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATE CONFERENCE // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT

In February of this year, I was in Chicago for the annual College Art Association (CAA) conference. It was, as usual, a fantastic opportunity to take the pulse of art historic trends, and it was also a chance to raise awareness about CBAA as I co-chaired a session with Levi Sherman on artist books. As I attended the various sessions that were of interest to me, I was struck by how often I encountered theories and practices that are relevant to book art and book art theory.

In one session, an infamous book from México El libro negro del terror nazi en Europa: Testimonio de escritores y artistas de 16 naciones (published in Mexico City in 1943 under the auspices of the exile press El Libro Libre) was analyzed as a document that proves that information was escaping from Europe about the horrors of Nazi concentration camps to at least México, if not all of Latin America at a very early date, perhaps even before the U.S. knew of such atrocities. It emphasized to me the fact that books are and contain testimonies of assembled knowledge.

In another session about community engagement with art and art history outside the lecture hall, artists and art historians both discussed how to use art object production in association with collections from regional museums and diverse art aficionados. This panel’s presenters discussed how teaching about diverse art objects from diverse communities enhanced student experiences in primary and secondary educational institutions. They also spoke to the importance and presented examples of taking art to the community. At one of these institutions, art history students and art students worked with people from a center for the blind and visually impaired, through interviews and descriptions, to create art that both permitted non-visual appreciation and opened up students’ understanding of diverse communities’ wants and needs. We could use some more outreach like this.

There were also other sessions where theories relevant to the artist book and from the history of artist books were presented.

The shallowest mention was in a session about how to get published. In that session one audience member asked the editors present if their particular publishers published artist books. My ears naturally perked up. I took the opportunity after the session to ask the person who asked that question what it was that they had meant by publishing an artist book. They had meant a monograph of some sort on a particular artist’s work, which is what I had suspected. However, to my surprise they had not heard about our field of activity, nor had they thought that an artist book could have any other meaning. I explained the difference in the time that I had with them, hoping to not appear to be as much of an artist book kook as I really am. The point of this interaction is that wide-spread knowledge of our field is not something that we can take for granted. To this point, one person who attended our panel had never heard of artist books nor CBAA until this conference. We are all ambassadors and educators for our field.

One very interesting question that came up for artists and art historians involved how each discipline navigates its connection to advancing technology and AI in particular. AI represents a new connection between art and technology, and as such raises manifold questions and implications that are too broad to be discussed here. What I will ask instead is what kinds of artist books can be made using AI? How will artist books in all their varieties engage with similar technologies? While I do not believe that AI will replace humans or artist books and their makers, I do think that people who can use AI will redefine what we think of as possible in the creation of artist books.

The most direct and profound reference to artist books was in a session co-sponsored by the Association for Latin American Art (ALAA) and the Institute of Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). In this session the keynote speaker, Dr. Esther Gabara, from Duke University, presented research from her 2022 book titled Non-literary Fiction: Art of the Americas under Neoliberalism, in which she explicitly applied to art in Latin America the theories developed by Mexican book artist and theorist Ulises Carrión (1941-1989). She argued that those theories contributed to a new way to interpret Latin American conceptual and theoretical art. However, what she missed is Carrión’s connections to the larger world of artist book creation (though I am hoping she points that out later in her book, which I have yet to finish).

Through my attendance at CAA, I became further aware of two very important but conflicting perspectives. Artist books and book art have a great deal to contribute to the theoretical understanding of art and its long and manifold connections to technology, but it also labors in relative obscurity. What kind of solutions to these problems do you see?

KEEPING MOMENTUM // Beth Sheehan

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 07:00:00 GMT

One of my favorite questions to ask artists is: if there was an apocalypse and you were the only person left but all of your basic needs were met (electricity still works, you have plenty of food, etc.) would you continue to make art?

In my Considering Everything article, I discussed idea generation and where to start when you are beginning a project. But after you have your idea there are still a lot of decisions to make and all of the effort that goes into the creation of your work. The art-making process can be draining and it seems inevitable for artists to experience maker’s block at some point, so how do you keep your momentum and motivation as an artist? How do you stay interested in what you are making over the course of your artistic life? What do you do if you get stuck along the way? I do not believe there is a universal answer, so I would like to present some solutions and encourage a discussion about additional solutions.

Monotype by Beth Sheehan

Sometimes artists get stuck at the idea generation stage. When this is the case for me, I find that there are two primary causes. First, my output can only be as good as my input: similar to the way gas tanks function, if I have not filled my tank, my creative practice will run out of momentum. So, if I am not having success generating ideas and artwork, I consider what I have been reading, watching, listening to, and looking at. Inspiration can come from anywhere, but it has helped me to recognize what kinds of sources provide me with inspiration more frequently than others and then turn to those kinds of sources again and again.

The second cause that typically blocks my idea generation is often a processing issue. I may have many ideas and a lot of creative fuel, but if I do not spend time processing and organizing my thoughts, the fuel is not usable. To assist in my processing, I prefer to journal about my ideas. I usually ask myself questions such as:

● What interests me most about this idea?

● What part of my idea feels the least solid?

● What are the most important aspects of this idea?

● Should this idea become several separate projects?

● Are there any rules that I would like to impose on this idea (such as a specific size, form, medium, etc.)?

Beth Sheehan graining a litho stone

Sometimes artists get stuck at the execution stage. Perhaps you enjoy coming up with ideas but do not enjoy the actual making. There is precedent for creating non-object artworks, one form being what Gao Minglu terms “proposal art (fangan yishu)”[1]. However, there are also ways to push forward into actually making your work, as well. It should be noted first, though, that art does not have to be made within a specific timeframe, you are allowed to work on more than one artwork at a time, and you are not a failure if you abandon a project that is no longer enjoyable (it is good to remember that just because you have spent time, money or energy on a project, does not mean you need to continue with it, as per the Sunk Cost Fallacy).

During the execution stage, I find that it is easier to move forward if I produce test prints, material tests, or make multiple mock-ups of my ideas. Alternatively, I occasionally find it more beneficial to make smaller projects that I do not treat seriously. By focusing on something that is lower stakes and more immediate like a quick one-page book, a collage, or a monotype print, I can get into the mode of making without the pressure of executing my actual project. Using writing prompts as making prompts or using ideation decks can be particularly liberating.

And finally, if I am further along in the execution stage and feel myself losing momentum, I find it best to invite an artist, art historian, critic, or curator to my studio for a studio visit. The visitor might see threads in your work that you have not seen, they may suggest artists or media for you to research that help reinvigorate your passion for your project, or you may even disagree with their insights but through disagreeing, you find you are able to think through what you think about your work in ways you were unable to do alone.

[1] Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011), page 142.

Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harlan & Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

WHAT DO WE OWE THE VIEWER? // Beth Sheehan

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 08:00:00 GMT

Lately, I have been participating in discussions regarding the artist’s role in artworks, specifically if the artist’s background and personal experiences should manifest in their artworks or if artworks should be more universally relatable and non-auto-biographical. In these conversations, the predominant mentality is in favor of non-auto-biographical works, which seems heavily tied to a desire for artwork to be accessible to every audience. These discussions have prompted me to contemplate the question: What do artists owe their viewer?

My artwork is about memory and my drive to make my work comes from personal experience with Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). SDAM primarily manifests for me in an inability to visually replay moments from my past, thereby making it particularly difficult to determine if my memories are genuine recollections or if they were fabricated from a narrative I created or embellished. But memory is universally untrustworthy for all people and that universal unreliability also plays a role in my work as I use my own lack of memory to frame questions about the truth and reality of a past that is inaccessible in the present.

Beth Sheehan, “Memento,” 2015-2022

I find myself on a potentially less-popular side of the auto-biographical art discussion, as I would argue that artworks should not (and cannot) cater to every member of an audience. I would like to further assert that by generalizing the accessibility of their content, an artist can lessen the importance and impact of their artworks for the community that relates to the artist’s auto-biographical works. Further, the removal of the personal can rob a viewer of the potential to understand experiences that they are unfamiliar with.

Through my artworks, I have connected with people who did not realize that their cerebral experience was abnormal because discussing the intricacies of memory and perception presents a difficult stage for communication. For example, if two people are discussing a shared memory, both may use the phrase “I remember,” but one person may be using visual recall to replay the memory like a movie (episodic memory) and the other person may be simply accessing the factual information their brain stored (more similar to the way we recall trivia). If my work contained no relation to my personal experience and instead focused solely on universal experiences of memory, I feel I would be doing my viewer a disservice.

Beth Sheehan, “In the Moments,” 2023

However, even though my personal preference favors works that are founded in the artist’s experience, I also feel that everything is best in moderation. If an artist’s work stems from personal experience and that artist creates work that is self-referential and completely unrelatable, I would begin to question if the work should be shared with the public. So, then, I come back to my initial question: What do artists owe their viewer?

To unpack that question further, I’d like to consider the following as well:

- Does the artist owe the viewer relatability, understanding, connection, universality, authenticity, or their story/experiences?

- If the viewer is owed something, are they owed that thing within the artwork itself or in the artist’s statement or interviews?

- Is abstraction kinder to the viewer because it has the potential to be equally relatable/accessible regardless of the viewer’s experience? If the viewer presumes artwork will have a deeper meaning and then they cannot glean one from abstraction, will the work no longer be accessible?

- Should art be for everyone? Does your answer change if I phrase the question differently: Should all art be for all people?

-What are the sacrifices made when art becomes less personal and more universal? What are the sacrifices made when art IS personal?

- Do the expectations for the viewer/artist relationship change based on medium? Does visual art demand something different for the relationship than a medium like poetry?

ARTIST BOOK READING SERIES // AB Gorham

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT

For this post, I intend to create a space for conversation about the reading and performance of artist books, as well as introduce an Artist Book Reading Series co-hosted by myself and Aaron Cohick.

During Codex 2021, Aaron Cohick of New Lights Press and I began a conversation about the lack of reading events or book performances in the artist book world. Why weren’t public readings of books more common in the book art world? My own interest in reading and performing artist books started with my thesis defense in 2014 and became a practice I continued to engage with via CBAA conference panels (1, 2) and live poetry readings and other literary events in Tallahassee, FL and Reno, NV. Reading and performing my artist books has always felt like a natural progression of the artistic work of my book objects, as they include primarily poetic experimental texts and typography intended to be performed aloud. In a book object, the sound of the text being read aloud is determined by the shape of the page and the caesuras and margins offering visual and audible pause. I, like many writers, compose text aloud, so when that text is letterpress printed onto the page, the act of reading aloud (again) causes my tonal breath to mix with the sound of a finger rubbing along the paper edge of the book, the small crack of the spine giving. The reader of an artist book gets to have a similar engagement with text and object, except with their own inner reading voice. However, the performance of a book allows for another iteration of the book object. These readings and events can include elements of choregraphed performance, or audio and visual presentations.

The literary world, including the behemoth Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), has embraced the physical embodiments of literature, including performances (have you ever seen Abraham Smith perform his work?), reading events that include audience participation, or the like. The literary world and the artist book world have previously collided and there are a number of artists working in performative reading modes, including, I Wish To Say…Vol 2. By Sheryl Oring and Selected Durations by David Abel, two artist books in the Cynthia Sears Artists Book Collection Bainbridge Island Museum of Art as discussed by Yuka Petz on Artist’s Books Unshelved on June 17, 2023.

For a very recent example of artist book readings, this year at CODEX, Michelle Wilson & Anne Beck hosted an “evening of readings and performance” at the Rhinoceros Reading Room & Ephemera Collection. I hope this reading event is the beginning of a new series!

I’m continuing to research the history of readings and performance related to or happening within the book arts world, looking to the audience of the CBAA Book Arts Theory and Criticism Blog to chime in with some suggestions. I suspect there have been many of these performances or readings that may not have been documented in any formal way and I am hoping that book arts peers can help me build up that archive.

In the meantime, I will include the call for proposal for the Artist Book Reading Series co-hosted by Aaron Cohick and me.

SUBMIT PROPOSAL HERE

CALL FOR READERS

Artist books will be interpreted very broadly for this series. All visual/text formats are welcome: zines, limited editions, fine press, open edition artists’ books, visual poetry, comics, animations, digital art, hybrid media, etc., but all submissions must be tied to a physical book or other publication.
Individual readings will be 10 minutes long with four readers per event. Initial events will take place on Zoom but we are hoping to do some irl events in the future.
Readings can be live, recorded (audio or video), and/or can include visual elements. They could also be a combination of all those things (& maybe others!).
These are not talks about artist book projects. They are performative readings/enactments of the “books.”
All readers will be paid $150. Funding for this series will come from paying subscribers.
The deadline to submit for the May 2024 reading is March 1. The deadline for the fall reading is July 1.

AB Gorham is a book artist and writer from Montana and holds MFAs in Book Arts and Poetry from The University of Alabama. She is Assistant Professor of Book Arts and Papermaking at University of Nebraska Omaha. Her poems have been published in Puerto Del Sol, The Call Center, American Letters and Commentary, DIAGRAM, and Gulf Coast, among others. Her artist books are collected nationally and Unidentified Found Object Song was a semi-finalist for the 2022 MCBA Book Prize.

CULLING THE ARCHIVES // AB Gorham

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT

In Fall of 2023, I started as Assistant Professor of Book Arts and Papermaking at University of Nebraska Omaha. As newly appointed director, I was eager to make the book arts and papermaking studios my own. Taking over an institution like the UNO Fine Arts Press and Book Arts Program, with its long and robust history of fine press printing, and its excellent undergraduate book arts curriculum, was exciting, intimidating, complex, and also involved reassessment of the program’s aesthetic, vision, priorities, and budget.

The University of Nebraska Omaha Fine Arts Press and Book Arts Curriculum began with Harry Duncan in 1972. Duncan developed the curricular program and published as the fine press Abattoir Editions, producing fine press books in editions of 200-300. Naming the press after Omaha’s stockyards tied the publishing work to Omaha’s mid-western landscape and sensibility, and planted the roots of fine press publications until 1985 when Duncan retired. After his retirement, Bonnie O’Connell directed the UNO Book Arts Program until 2019.

Before I joined UNO, previous instructors, adjuncts, and gallery directors approached the task of clearing out and organizing the potential archival materials, even transporting those materials to the Special Collections Library on campus to be catalogued in the Fine Arts Press Collection. In fact, the recent exhibition at UNO Gallery, Pressing Matters, explored the history of UNO’s Fine Arts Press and the book arts curriculum. The exhibition occasioned an intensive inventory of the books and other archival materials, including its student work archive, as a way to organize materials for the display at the exhibition. This exhibition also used many items from the informal archive, including carved blocks by Karen Kunc (collaborator), newspaper articles about Harry Duncan and Bonnie O’Connell, and letters between Duncan and authors.

I have worked in extremely well-organized studios, such as the studios at Florida State University and Small Craft Advisory Press, and at University of Nevada, Reno, and Black Rock Press. Those studios have developed systems to determine what elements of an edition’s production to keep, and what elements can be recycled or upcycled into student work. These systems prioritize both “perfect” proofs as well as “interesting” proofs that contain the kind of misprints that look like a whole new piece of art. As a working artist, I’m inclined to keep every small scrap of paper (and all of the proofs) because paper is expensive and I need paper to make mockups for the next project. But I know for the most part what the imperfections of each print look like and can assign them value according to how close to the final edition they are. Understanding the value of materials I’m less familiar with is proving to be more difficult.

In the UNO book arts studio, I have encountered stacks of unbound sheets, original drawings and early mockups by Bonnie O’Connell, Harry Duncan, former students, and even surplus Abbattoir and Fine Arts Press title labels for books. Absolute treasures! The history of fine press printing is told by these stacks of sometimes-unfinished editions. Luckily, I can call on Bonnie to clarify whether some of the parts of books are TBB (To Be Bound) or simple overage that can be whittled down to a few copies for the Harry Duncan archive in the Special Collections Library on UNO’s campus. However, and for example, Abattoir Editions has not produced much new fine letterpress printed work since 2001, but much of the completed books and material components of print and binding production remain in the Fine Arts Press studio storage area, leaving me with decisions to be made regarding where or if to archive these materials.

Surrounded by the materials, separated into stacks for the UNO archivists to peruse, I’m asking myself the following questions:

What are the benefits for keeping some of the archive in-studio?

These materials can be used for examples for class
They allow me to make repairs to books, including those that are in the Fine Arts Press archive in the UNO library and beyond
For studios that house Presses, the students are exposed to the overage, and can integrate them into their projects
Students can see the process of a piece, including sketches, inspiring new ideas and approaches, encouraging them to keep going during the slog of makeready.

What are the downfalls for keeping so much archival material in the studio? Mostly, it is an issue of space. And, somewhat, a preservation issue. I don’t yet have archival boxes for keeping documents in an acid-free environment, but I plan to build up this system of safe-keeping in the next year or so.

LET IT BLEED, PART 2: VARIATIONS IN FULL BLEED INTERACTIONS // Jeff Nilan

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 19:00:54 GMT

In this follow up post to Let it Bleed, part one, I will explore further the relationship between basic color interaction theory and the ways that full bleed photographs influence one another. I will compare three artist books – two made by former students from my Book Arts classes – along with one of mine that I have used in classes as a teaching tool for the past few semesters.

The first book, The Nature of Us by Ashley Swindell, is a case bound book with full-bleed images and flyout pages throughout. This combination allows for the flyouts to be pulled out to interact with a page spread or tucked back away at any time. The photographs in her book depict the transition from previously rural small-town Ohio into a more suburban new housing development reality. The images in the book layer upon one another; past, present, and future are inextricably linked both in binding and in image interactions. As there is no space between the images, they are always seen in relation to one another. Flyouts at times appear as details of faraway elements in the photographs. Other times they extend the image outside of the standard book length, and when left out they inform the subsequent images. This relates to the subject matter of The Nature of Us in that it embeds and expands the dialogue between loss of the rural and replacement with the suburban; we cannot see one without consideration of the other.

The Nature of Us, consecutive page spreads, case bound book, Ashley Swindell

The second book, Home by Maggie Myers, is a “cased-in” accordion binding with occasional “half-pages,” and the page spreads throughout the book are full bleed photographs. In Home, Myers is conflating photographs taken in her childhood home with photographs taken in her college apartment. The photographs are close ups of walls and surfaces. Light and shadows move through the accordion pages, with the binding knitting together the two separate spaces. Diagonal rays of light seem to transcend the edges of the individual images, resulting in a sort of panoramic viewing of one single space. In this, a comparison can be made to the study showing three colors appearing as two (see color study example in part one) in that images of like subject matter/formal relationships can reduce down, such as three images becoming more like two.

Home, accordion binding, Maggie Myers

The third book, Ground by Jeff Nilan, was initially constructed as a “board book” with full-bleed photographs and one “flyout” page spread. I have always been fond of this book – the photographs and their sequential order – but to me it has never felt like it was settled or comfortable in its binding. Over the past few semesters, I have used this book as a teaching tool by redesigning the layout and binding style while keeping the original nineteen photographs in their original order. With this, I can begin to talk to my students about image/layout /binding relationships through a direct comparison of the same content. The images below show the same page spread as presented in three different binding types: an accordion binding, a Japanese four-hole binding, and the most recent iteration, a traditional case bound book. The case bound iteration is the first to include space between the images, along with removing the potential for altering the sequence as is possible in the accordion version.

Ground, case bound page spread, Jeff Nilan

Ground, accordion page spread, Jeff Nilan

Ground, Japanese binding page spread, Jeff Nilan

Relating the image interactions of these three books to our discussion around color relativity, flyout full-bleed images, and accordion image progressions is like adding additional background colors to the Albers style color studies. In the color study example below, we see that the turquoise strip on the bottom is the same as the strip and individual bars within each of the four backgrounds. There are five distinct color files being used for the study. However, due to the color subtraction and simultaneous contrast effects, we get the appearance of nine hues – 5 distinct colors interact to appear as 9 hues. The turquoise hue is changed in varying degrees of value, intensity, and hue, depending upon which background it interacts with. The turquoise then is a constant, but an inconsistent one; it is unable, when submersed into the full bleed background colors, to show itself for what it is on its own. The turquoise is always seen and interpreted in relation to the background color. Colors influence one another and so, too, images influence one another, especially when the images are flush against one another on at least one contiguous edge.

5 hues appear as 9, digital color study, Jeff Nilan

Jeff Nilan received an MFA from Indiana University in 1999. Growing up in Nebraska, Nilan’s art draws influence from the landscape and culture of the Midwest and he is interested in the ways art reflects and shapes the mythology of this region. Jeff resides in Delaware, Ohio and is Professor of Studio Art at Ohio Wesleyan University.

LET IT BLEED: COLOR THEORY AND PHOTOGRAPHIC SEQUENCING FOR BOOK ARTS, PART 1 // Jeff Nilan

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT

For the past twenty years I have taught three courses: Color/Design Fundamentals, Photography, and Book Arts. One place where the concerns of the three courses meet is in designing page spreads for artist books. In my book arts courses, students often use the convention of the "full bleed" page layouts when using photographs in their books. I would like to explore the qualities of full-bleed images in book design, as it relates to the concept of "simultaneous contrast" and "color relativity.”

In my color/design courses, I posit that color is relative – always influenced by light and proximity to other colors. I stress that this relativity happens whether we want it to or not, so we should understand how it works. I base this study on the findings of a nineteenth century French chemist, Michel Eugene Chevreul, who published the book The Laws of Contrast of Colour: And Their Application to the Arts, in which he outlines the idea of "simultaneous contrast" in color interaction. Speaking about the juxtaposition of adjacent colors, contiguous on one edge, Chevruel writes, "now as these modifications cause the colours to appear, when looked at together, more different than they really are, I have given them the name of the simultaneous contrast of colours."[1]

Clarity of the color effects can be seen in the classic teaching studies of Josef Albers, who was influenced by Chevreul [2], by making studies in which 3 colors appear as two or three colors appear as four. In these simple arrangements, placing two full bleed color blocks adjacent to one another and adding one additional hue into both blocks will result in either an expansion or a reduction of the individual hues.

Digital color study examples by Jeff Nilan

In my photography courses, we explore how images influence one another in a group, a series, and ultimately in a sequence. We come to see that the information in photographs, regardless of the color/tonal qualities, is also relative. Like color, images are influenced by proximity to other images. This subject matter seems especially pliant when images are placed flush against one another with a "contiguous edge." As this happens whether we intend it to or not, we should understand more about how it works. A book that I regularly show in all three of my courses, that combines the concept of simultaneous contrast with photographic imagery, is Some(W)here by Andres Gonzalez.

I stumbled upon Some(W)here years ago at Photo-Eye Books, when I randomly pulled the small cloudy grey casebound book off of the shelf because it had a blank spine. In fact, other than the title on the front and back covers and a minimal colophon, there is no text throughout the book. Opening the book, we are drawn into the sequence with a close up of landing gear on an airplane. What follows is a seeming travelog of images, both disparate in subject and related in tone, that are knitted together as full bleed page spreads with occasional partial pages.

Gonzalez, Andreas (2012). SOME(W)HERE. Amsterdam: MartSpruijt

Images in the book often transcend the gutter, sometimes pinched, with the main focal point of the photograph sinking into and out from the gutter. Images become layered when passages of partial pages interact with previous and those yet not arrived at, such as horizon line from a yet unseen landscape. Full width pages then become hints, fragments, place holders, that we can we hang on to for brief passages, before they disappear back into the text block.

Just as a brown rectangle in the Albers' study mentioned above surrounded by red and green cannot be seen as it is when surrounded by white, in Some(W)here, I would suggest, the images can never be viewed as individuals, uninformed and shaped by the others. They are, as full bleeds, a continuous vibration of subject matter.

[1] Chevruel, M.E. (1861, 3rd Edition). The Laws of Contrast of Colour: And Their Application to the Arts. London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge. Link to the Getty Center Library PDF: https://ia803206.us.archive.org/20/items/lawsofcontrastof00chev/lawsofcontrastof00chev.pdf

[2] https://clarencewardartlibrary.tumblr.com/post/189845887016/color-theory-chevreul-albers

[3] Gonzalez, Andreas (2012). SOME(W)HERE. Amsterdam: MartSpruijt.

INTIMACY AS MORE THAN A EUPHEMISM // Carley Gomez

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT

I frequently see the word “intimacy” associated with artist books. But what exactly does it mean? What we lack in a shared understanding, we make up for with diverse definitions that offer myriad ways to experience and interpret artist books. Yet, lurking beneath these definitions is a shared sense of euphemism, one that limits what intimacy can be. First, I will catalogue several existing uses of the concept in our field. Then, I will offer a more expansive vision of intimacy.

Intimacy as exchange

Having an “intimate” experience with a book is conceived as an imaginary meeting-of-minds with the book’s creator. In an article for The Art Newspaper, tellingly titled “In an ever-mediated world, artists’ books offer an intimate encounter,” Jacky Klein discusses the increasing popularity of artist books: “The growth of the sector also attests to the continuing lure of the book as a space for an intimate, unmediated encounter with its maker.” [1]

Tia Blassingame and Ellen Sheffield describe artist books similarly in a Bainbridge Island Museum of Art exhibition, “Troubling: Artists’ Books that enlighten and disrupt old ways of being and seeing.” They write, “Artists’ books have an uncanny ability to take even the most challenging, complex, polarizing content and mix it with techniques from papermaking to paper engineering and printmaking with almost any other elements…in order to have a conversation with the reader/viewer. These conversations may be intimate, emotional, educational, thought-provoking, opinion-altering, and world view expanding.” [2] However, this form of conversation is often one-sided and reduces the potential for other types of intimacy.

Intimacy as disclosure

In The Century of Artists’ Books, Johanna Drucker uses Duane Michael’s Take One and See Mr. Fujiyama to discuss a category she calls photo-narratives with text. She writes: “The captions are handwritten under the images and have all the characteristic immediacy and intimacy of personal jottings.” [3] The implication is that unedited, or at least, unpolished statements create “intimacy,” that the direct trace of the artist’s hand reveals a certain rawness. The viewer performs the role of voyeur, witnessing something private, illicit, but placed in plain sight by the artist’s own hand.

Intimacy as physical closeness

In gallery didactics and artist statements, I often read “intimate” as a euphemism for “small” — the smaller the book, the closer one must be to properly experience it. Such closeness may, but does not necessarily, entail the disclosure of personal jottings or shared thoughts and feelings of the definitions above.

This physical closeness is not just a feature of the book and its reader but also of elements within the book. We see this in Clive Phillpot’s essay “Some Contemporary Artists and Their Books.” He writes, “The fact that certain bookworks combine words and pictures intimately, in a non-illustrative manner, complicates [analogies to film and poetry] and makes for further richness.” [4] As a formal feature of the composition, physical proximity is meant to inform the viewer’s interpretation, but this is a unidirectional form of meaning-making. It also isn’t clear how intimacy here differs from mere closeness, or whether all comingling of text and image is intimate.

Toward a new intimacy

Despite the variety of uses above, the euphemistic connotations of “intimacy” saddle the word with conservative baggage. Quality and value are absent from phrases like “being intimate,” and its default use assumes an interaction between two people. It is no surprise that the “intimacy” of the artist book often mirrors the heteronormative encounter — artist and reader, giver and receiver.

However, Johanna Drucker pushes beyond this conservative paradigm, writing “No single encounter with a successful book closes off its polyvalent possibilities.” [5] On the following page, Drucker uses “intimate” as physical closeness, but she also gestures toward an expanded definition: “Enclosure and intimacy are two familiar features of this spatial embrace, and as a personal experience offering itself anew to each viewer, the book is unparalleled for its richness of detail, variety, and repleteness.” [6]

That experience is not rich in spite of the book’s embrace but because of it. The agency of the book mediates the exchange between artist and viewer. By recognizing the third party in this relationship, we can trouble the heteronormative paradigm of intimacy. This further expands the multiplicity of experiences and meanings already implied in Drucker’s claim that each reader sees the book anew.

Previous forms of “intimacy” conceive of two people as close together, physically and/or metaphorically, as possible. In the context of artist books, such an intimacy erases the object it is supposed to theorize. Instead, we must recognize another, queer, polyvalent intimacy. In this expansive and inclusive intimacy, the book is not an inert layer of mediation between two people, it is an agential object that amplifies their experience.

1. Jacky Klein, “In an ever-mediated world, artists’ books offer an intimate encounter,” The Art Newspaper, April 22, 2020, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/04/22/in-an-ever-mediated-world-artists-books-offer-an-intimate-encounter.

2. Tia Blassingame and Ellen Sheffield, “Troubling: Artists’ Books that enlighten and disrupt old ways of being and seeing,” Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, accessed December 3, 2023, https://www.biartmuseum.org/exhibitions/troubling-artists-books-that-enlighten-and-disrupt-old-ways-of-being-and-seeing/.

3. Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York City: Granary Books, 1995), 264–265.

4. Clive Phillpot, “Some Contemporary Artists and Their Books” in Joan Lyons, ed., Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop, 1985), 129.

5. Drucker, 359.

6. Drucker, 360.

Carley Gomez is an artist and writer in Madison, Wisconsin. She is co-founder of Partial Press.

COLLABORATIVE VOICES FOR CANCER & LOVE: PART II. Midwifery, VSW Press // Kathy Hettinga and Tate Shaw

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT

I am grateful for the collaborative work of Tate Shaw and his decision to publish Cancer & Love as a VSW Press book. As I mentioned in Part I, the book began during the start of the COVID pandemic, necessitating a long-distance collaboration. During the lockdown, I experienced expanses of productive time, married with long gestational periods. Tate’s description of his work as that of ‘midwifery’—helping the artist to birth their vision—is aptly true for Cancer & Love.

Cancer & Love, Kathy T. Hettinga, French-fold Mohawk Superfine, 7x7.75, with 5x7 booklet.

Below Tate describes his work as editor: “As the current editor of VSW Press, I consider myself less an editor and more a facilitator of artists’ visions for a publication made with available means. When I’m selecting or inviting an artist to publish a book with VSW, I’m conscious of how the work is in dialogue with—or making completely new additions to—the themes and perspectives found in the roughly six hundred titles published by the Press, founded by Joan Lyons in 1971. About 85% of the Press’ catalog was published by Joan. Women telling their own stories through images and texts (including diaries) to make books about being women, lovers, bodies, having health events and encounters with the healthcare industry, all are present in that history. Connected to Cancer & Love, specific past titles from VSW Press that come to mind are Joan’s own book The Gynecologist and Susan E. King’s Treading the Maze.

Cancer & Love, Kathy T. Hettinga, French-fold Mohawk Superfine, 7x7.75, with 5x7 booklet.

“I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on Joan’s work as a publisher and my own work with artists in part because I was recently asked to interview Joan for a kind of retrospective of her work at a prominent gallery in the region. In addition, as part of a 50^th anniversary issue of Afterimage: the Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, I was interviewed in connection to an earlier interview I did of Joan that Afterimage published in 2004, when I was her student. Here is what I said in that piece:

“‘Despite being more comfortable and friendly with Joan after two decades, I was more intimidated to interview her the second time, earlier this year. As a student, I believed I knew more than I did about her practice and publishing approach. She is often described as a feminist artist—and she is—but I had a narrow, masculinist view of what that meant. I’ve been party to Joan’s commitment and fierceness firsthand and have always heard stories about her willingness to wade into conflicts. I think I anticipated she would be assertive and authoritative about her role as an editor and publisher. Back then I wanted her to tell me the secret to selecting and shaping books to be published because that’s exactly what I wanted to do and I wanted to be seen as such an authority in the field. But she basically said that she worked in service to artists’ visions and midwifed productions into being. And after learning to do just that for years with VSW Press, I understood Joan’s approach more from lived experience, which is humbling and edifying. I see more of the pluralism in Joan’s feminism now and attempted in our most recent interview to reframe that same question for her to discuss how she helped ground and support a plurality of voices through her work as an artist, printer, and publisher.’”

“So all that to say, when I’m working with artists I try to model Joan’s approach of midwifery (if I can claim the metaphor). Where I’m most directive is being open to and suggesting that artists draw from their interests in other modes and media like literature, film, sound, etc. or to affirm and be supportive of ideas that may seem crazy to them or ones they haven’t seen before. This leads to more intersectional and experimental publications and more creative challenges. Unfortunately, I’m always mindful as well to try and keep editions at a relatively inexpensive retail point of less than $75, if possible. Because I’d like people to read the books we make and not just have them be collected or boxed up somewhere (or remain in the Press storeroom, for that matter). My experience working with artists on books is they will have ideas and approaches to their material that would never occur to me to personally try and accomplish, which was very much the case with Cancer & Love. It’s been a creative puzzle we’ve been handing back and forth for years to try and resolve for ourselves and for the reader.”

Cancer & Love, Kathy T. Hettinga. Early clothbound dummy on left, final wrap-around post structure on right, with 6 booklets in French fold envelopes.

Given the grace of time and Tate’s ongoing support of the vision, it became apparent that the book needed to incorporate more text from my chemo journals. The reader may read as much (or as little) as desired. The growing text necessitated numerous structural dummies, that in the final puzzle became saddle-stitched booklets, fitted into envelopes formed by French folds. These in turn created the need for spine-padding, which in turn necessitated the cover design to morph from a clothbound codex to a wrap-around one. Tate shared that opening the wrap-around cover and laying the booklets out, created the necessary material/immaterial space to read Cancer & Love. Solving the ‘creative puzzle’ with Tate was a deep and engaging privilege!

Kathy T. Hettinga is a book artist, designer, photographer and hospice chaplain. Awarded the Distinguished Professor of Art, her books are in collections from Harvard’s Fogg Museum to UCLA. Residencies include: Yale Research Fellow, Luce Center for Arts and Religion, Pyramid Atlantic, WSW and VSW.

Tate Shaw is an artist, writer, publisher, and curator. At VSW Tate is the Editor of Visual Studies Workshop Press where he works with artists and the community to conceive, produce and distribute books. He is also the Director of Tower Fine Arts Gallery and Associate Professor at SUNY Brockport.

COLLABORATIVE VOICES FOR CANCER & LOVE: PART I. THE TEXT EDITOR // Kathy T. Hettinga and Jerremy Lorch

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT

Cancer & Love began as part of Visual Studies Workshop’s Project Space artist residency just as the COVID pandemic closed all non-essential organizations. Tate Shaw, Editor of VSW Press, offered to work with me long distance via email, phone, file uploads, and mailed dummies to publish my artist’s book as a VSW Press book. This began a creative collaboration that has resulted in a fitting and complex structure that appropriately contains the story of my cancer journey and the love story with my oncologist—both filled with terror and awe.

Cancer & Love, Kathy T. Hettinga, French-folded Mohawk Superfine, 7 x 7.75 in.

The twenty-year narrative is shaped with selected text from seven journals, many photographs and digital microscope images from my pathology slides. The text grew, and the solution was to make six saddle-stitched booklets that fit within created envelopes. I am grateful that Tate recommended Jerremy Lorch, an editor sensitive to the needs of book artists. What follows is Jerremy’s reflection on his collaboration with me on the text of Cancer & Love.

“Artist books are singular and not served by a run-of-the-mill editing process, which threatens to strip away their nuanced interplay between image, text, and texture, between visual and verbal style, or between layers or choices of meaning. You can’t just bump them up against the Chicago Manual of Style and walk away with a “clean” text without potentially damaging them. The goal is still to help the author effectively convey ideas, but “effectively” here can be subjective. Clarity isn’t always the gold standard; it’s often as much about conveying feeling as it is about conveying meaning. You still need to consistently apply rules, but you are freer to establish a unique set of them for the book.

“Cancer & Love arrived in my inbox as a collection of files. Word documents containing various pieces of text and PDFs that included pictures and showing the layout. Just as I would casually flip through a physical copy of an artist book to understand it as a book object before settling in to read/immerse myself in it, I began by scrolling through the main PDF file. Once I had an idea of the ways in which form, image, and text would come together to create this object and convey Kathy’s story, I started my work with the text, beginning a skeletal assembly of the ruleset. After my initial review, Kathy and I had several conversations to flesh out that ruleset. Our conversations centered around the desired transmission and reception of the work and then moved to the creation and adaptation of stylistic, grammatical, syntactical, and formal conventions and their effect on the tone of the book.

Cancer & Love, Booklet 1, Kathy T. Hettinga, saddle-stitched, 5 x 7 in.

“This work is a bit like creating the laws of physics for a new world—you get to decide together how things operate within the space and you can be flexible and liberal in your choices, opting for non-standard stylistic and formatting elements and conventions that can contribute to the tone, visual appearance, reception, and conveyed meaning of the book.

“One goal of the editing process is to eliminate unintentional distractions, like simple mistakes or inconsistencies. The main goal, however, is to help the author to connect to the reader and better transmit his or her desired meaning and feeling. When I returned the files to Kathy, they had the typical markups of simple corrections and straightforward changes, but the real value that I was able to contribute to the project was in the marginal notes. It was here that I described my reception of the piece as a reader and offered suggestions—to be acted upon or not—along with the reasoning behind them. Because this type of editing is more collaborative and less rigid than others, those suggestions often took the form of a description of a potential pitfall, followed by multiple options for its resolution, along with comments on how each option could affect the reader’s reception.

“More than a year has passed since I returned those files to Kathy. It is a space of time for which I am grateful. It will allow me the distance to return to Cancer & Love in its finished form as something of a fresher recipient of Kathy’s story.”

Kathy T. Hettinga is a book artist, designer, photographer and hospice chaplain. Awarded the Distinguished Professor of Art, her books are in collections from the Fogg Museum to UCLA. Residencies include: Yale Research Fellow, Luce Center for Arts and Religion, Pyramid Atlantic, WSW and VSW.

Jerremy Lorch is an independent editor based in Rochester, New York. He has previously been a writing instructor at the University at Buffalo. He holds master’s degrees in English Literature from SUNY Brockport and the University at Buffalo. For more information please visit his Linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerremylorch/.

THE ACCORDION AND THE FOLD // Stephen Perkins

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 07:00:00 GMT

The typical codex allows the reader a single, fixed point of view, while the accordion offers the reader, both literally and metaphorically, a panorama of viewpoints. I want to explore some other avenues through which to approach the accordion, namely the domestic sphere and the body.

An accordion is a length of paper with alternating equidistant folds that create parallel uniform-sized sections or pages, often with front and back covers or a protective sheath.

Anne Boyer, in a review of the artist Hannah Wilke’s recent retrospective [1], addresses the centrality to her practice of what Wilke called her “one-fold gestural sculptures”[2], which were small vulva-like folded works that were made from a variety of materials. Boyer, in a particularly lucid response to Wilke’s folded works, inquires into the nature and definition of the ‘fold’ itself:

“Folding is the gestural equivalent of paradox, in that it takes what had neither inside nor out and, without transforming its substance, gives it both. Before a flat plane is folded, we know it as surface — superficial, exposed. Once a flat plane has become a fold, the same material becomes an intriguing half-secret — the fold alerts us to the once clandestine affordance of surface." [3]

Boyer continues, examining the broader landscape in which Wilke’s folded works are located, and notes the following:

“Important too to Wilke’s work is that the fold is a gesture linked to feminized labor, what was once understood as ‘women’s work’: doing laundry, diapering, preparing dough. The efficiency of the fold, done over and over, mimics the ongoingness of folding as care work, while it simultaneously creates mystery out of shallowness, dimensional form out of apparent flatness.” [4]

In opening up the activity of folding through the concept of ‘feminized labor’ Boyer also broadens the larger terrain within which folding is located. It becomes clear that folding, as in folding newspapers, letters, dish cloths, napkins, clothes, and all the other myriad things we fold, is an activity deeply embedded, but largely unnoticed, within our everyday lives.

Brendan Murphy, Folding Linens, oil on wood panel, 2019.

Locating the domestic sphere as an active site of folding links it to another term for the accordion. Leporello is named after the character in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787), in which Don Giovanni's numerous seductions are exposed by his manservant Leporello, who produces an accordion style list that unfolds to reveal 2,064 names. Leporello’s choice of the accordion format was wise, as the accordion is eminently suitable for economically organizing large or small amounts of information for storage and retrieval. No doubt we have all made shopping lists and folded them to make them more manageable.

The term leporello, with its German and Italian origins, has more currency in Europe. In the United States, the preferred term remains accordion, with its own musical connection. The accordion’s innate ability to expand and contract, to fold and unfold, is derived from the opening and closing of the pleats of the bellows of an accordion, which can be likened to that of breathing for a singer.

The accordion’s often unwieldy length presents the reader with both a physical and intellectual challenge. To hold, and then open, an accordion is to enter into a unique visual and literary relationship with a sculptural object. Closed, an accordion functions as a discrete book-like object and can be read page by page, like a codex. But once opened, it requires spreading one’s arms in a kind of open embrace to take in the measure of the body of the accordion. Add the breath-like expansion and contraction of its folds, and an encounter with an accordion is shaped by a unique physical intimacy.

In these intimate interactions, we must fold the accordion into our body to ensure its safety. And, like Hannah Wilke's folded vulvic works, our encounters with accordions make us aware of how our own bodies, with their sheath of endless folds, protect and nourish us.

1] Anne Boyer, “Living as Art,” Art in America, September/October, 2021, pp. 38–47. The exhibition was: “Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake,” Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Saint Louis, 2020–2021.

2] Nina Renata Aron, “Hannah Wilke’s ‘labial’ artwork challenged both the patriarchy and feminists,” https://timeline.com/hannah-wilke-labial-art-97c5bc488a67, accessed March 21, 2022.

3] Boyer, p. 40.

4] Ibid, pp. 40–41.

Stephen Perkins is an art historian, curator, and artist living in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the curator of the home gallery Subspace.

ARTIST BOOK REVIEWS AND PHOTOPOETRY // David Solo

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT

"It is my purpose to show that many of these famous lines, some written centuries ago, can today be given a new and original interpretation through the dramatic medium of modern photography. In other words, I am attempting to "re-sight" poetry through the lens.”[1]

"I am sure there cannot be too close a relationship between the photographs and text, for it would be impossible to in any real sense illustrate the text. The question is, how loose can it be?”[2]

“Photopoetry is more interesting and engaging when the photograph is not a literal illustration of the poem; likewise, if the poem is not a literal description of the photograph. Both poem and photograph should be able to stand alone in their own right.”[3]

In the conversation here with Levi Sherman in Aug-Sep 2023 on book review platforms and criticism (themselves collaborative endeavors), I mentioned my interest in image/text and in particular combinations (often collaborations) of poetry and photography in book form. With the current display on view at the NGA Library in Washington DC on Poetry and the Book Arts [4] I thought I’d expand a bit more on looking at photopoetry books.

This is part of an ongoing project to explore the global history of photopoetry publications beginning with the earliest example (as far as I know in 1850) and continuing to the present. While not a widely recognized category and difficult to search for in library or bookseller catalogs, there is a rich history of making such books and there are currently about 1000 volumes in my collection. These range from unique or deluxe editions to trade publications and zine and chapbook projects. My goals are to collect a wide range of such material, think about how to categorize and assess such work, and hopefully to broaden awareness and interest in the genre.

The quotes presented at the top of this post are representative of how I approach looking at photopoetic work - asking not only are the individual works (poems and photographs) interesting in themselves but whether they elicit, encourage, and especially reward revisiting and reinterpreting each other and avoid simple captioning or illustration. This goes along with looking at how the collaboration/combination comes about (e.g., an active partnership, an editor making pairings, one artist doing both) and the arrangement of image and text (e.g. facing pages, different sections). In some cases, the physical book design also plays a key role.[5] These types of questions have also arisen in conversations with the artists and publishers involved with the making of photopoetry books and with other readers and audiences similarly thinking about what makes such books successful, which helps to refine my own understanding of the medium. My intent is to continue to understand how these collaborations work rather than to try to propose a canon.

For me, these two examples show all of these dimensions including physical designs working together successfully. Both rely on multi-directional unfolding which allow and encourage both multiple entry points and multiple paths through the work and which take advantage of the form of the book to influence the reader’s experience.

Cover of Flemming Arnholm & Klaus Rifbjerg (untitled - Fotografier og digte fra New York)

Cover of Iollann O Murchu (One Story Leads to Another)

The first is an untitled Danish book, published by Forlaget Rhodos in 1969, with photographs by Flemming Arnholm made during work in NY along with poems by Klaus Rifbjerg and design by Michael Malling. The images are street photographs made in NYC in 1968 capturing different aspects and reflecting the pace of city life in the late 1960s while the poems, mostly written years earlier, convey a similar sense of energy while describing various elements of American culture and place unrelated to the images. While it is possible to completely unfold the work (as shown in the illustration), a gradual unfolding and folding of the pages and rotating of the book is more likely. The latter is further encouraged by the different orientations of the images and text and perhaps mimics trying to process all the stimuli experienced routinely while walking through New York.

Details of the Arnholm/Rifbjerg book

The second book is One Story Leads to Another (Tarraingíonn Scéal Scéal Eile) self-published in 2022 by Iollann O Murchu with images, text, and design (along with Graham Dow), all hand produced by the artist. The work brings together Irish landscape, mythology, and folklore and if the NY book is working to unsettle the reader this book is much quieter. As with the NY book, there is no single path through the book but rather collections of images and text that the reader can meander through. Once unfolded, there are 3 separate sections the reader can choose to engage with to experience the atmosphere created by the photographs and text. These elements produce a cumulative effect rather than any narrative or linear one, an effect which might be lost in a conventionally bound book.

Details of the O Murchu book

In addition to following up on last month’s conversation, I hope I’ve prompted you to notice and to think more about projects combining poetry and photography and how such books do or don’t work. I’d welcome more discussion and thoughts about this topic - as well as more suggested examples. I’ve also started to investigate critical models for visual poetry - but that is both more elusive and a topic for another post.

[1] Constance Phillips, Photopoems (Covici Friede, 1936) This book by Phillips also is the first use of the term photopoem.

[2] Paul Strand, Time in New England (Oxford University Press, 1950).

[3] Norman McBeath, Robert Crawford, “Photopoetry: A Manifesto” in Chinese Makars (Easel Press, 2016).

[4] “In the Library: Poetry and the Book Arts”, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2023/library-poetry-book-arts.html

[5] David Solo, “Photopoetry and the Artists’ Book” in Artist’s Book Yearbook 2022/23 (University of the West of England, 2022), 106-113.

David Solo is a co-founder and co-editor of Book Art Review (BAR), a criticism initiative founded at Center for Book Arts in 2020 and serves on the boards of the Grolier Club, 10x10 Photobooks and the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation. He is a collector and researcher based in Brooklyn focused on artists’ books and photobooks.

THE KNIFE'S EDGE – BALANCING PLANNING AND PLAY IN BOOK ARTS // Bryn Ziegler

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT

Here’s a note from my planner: Three two-sided press sheets (each three-color) equals 18 print runs over six days. With an April 8th print deadline, plates should be made by March 15th, films must be printed by March 10th, and files completed by March 5th. Final deadline for imagery: February 28th.

Spontaneity is not a hallmark of book arts. Although I’ve never met a book artist who likes rulers, it’s imperative to calculate borders, plan impositions, and set timelines. There is a range, of course—as a UArts student working with visiting artist Sarah Matthews and master printer Amanda D’Amico in the Borowsky Center, my cohort was able to complete an entire book in one day, a strong contrast to the often months or years-long process of development. But even Sarah Matthews’s quick collaborative book required a set of decisions about edition size and layout and preparations like pre-carved stamps to set the stage.

Even so, the necessity of structure does not make book arts rigid. For book arts, planning and improvisation are dance partners. I see three significant opportunities for creativity and playfulness in the book arts process: learning, iteration, and moments of action.

Book arts is a field of continuous education as a result of its breadth of mediums. As an acolyte of books, you never finish studying niche or historical structures, trying unusual print methods, or testing new paper fibers. I’ve observed that the practice of collecting techniques is a great source of inspiration and challenge: “What narrative suits this structure? What happens if I fold this way?” I believe this is why the book arts field has such a robust workshop circuit: learning is the flashpoint that sets long-term structured projects in motion. For me, trying a simple pants fold led to a book formed entirely from one shaped sheet of handmade paper.

Bryn Ziegler, Return, Recall, 2022, handmade paper, 6 in x 6 in x .5 in,, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

For my colleague, Grace Johnson, mastering the drum leaf inspired a laminated board book that exploits the binding’s ability to open entirely flat.

Grace Johnson, Constructure, 2022, offset lithography, 4.5 in x 9.25 in x 0.5 in, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Mock-ups, the practice of testing book format through one-off iterations, are a natural continuation of learning exploration. Mock-ups are an opportunity to work directly without consequences. They’re also where book artists first make their ideas physical, exercise unconventional thought, and frequently innovate on the book format. Mock-ups are the strongest illustration of direct play in bookmaking and a significant point of intersection between creativity and planning. Erica Honson’s book If Shoeprints In Concrete are Urban Fossils is an excellent example—you can see their creative process in the shift from the first model, a fantastical amalgam of folding structures and fluctuating page sizes, to the second, a more measured object acting as a tool to work out the concrete (pardon the pun) aspects of the book. The finished piece, made from shaped sheets of handmade paper and letterpress printed, required enormous forethought and precision. But, like many artist books, it started with iterative, freeform exploration.

Erica Honson, If Shoeprints in Concrete are Urban Fossils, 2021, handmade paper and letterpress techniques, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Finally, we have moments of action. After extensive preparation, it’s time to print and bind. And therefore time to trust yourself to make the right moment-by-moment creative decisions for your project. No matter how calibrated the plan, there is always an unpredictable element: the artist…and sometimes studio humidity, press temperament, or any number of factors. Whether by re-mixing an ink, shifting an image two picas, or ordering a custom stamp to disguise a missing page number (not that I’m speaking from experience), the lengthy planning process culminates in an exhilarating spate of creative problem-solving.

I often speculate about what unites us as printers and bookbinders. To print, you must cultivate the ability to think in reverse, not only by reversing your imagery but also by starting from the intangible end result and working backwards. Who does that appeal to? My theory is that the greatest creativity is inspired by imposing structure. Limitations encourage inventive solutions, prompting artists to push the boundaries of their ingenuity. It’s hard to think outside the box without knowing where the borders are. As book artists, it’s essential to consider how the inherent structure of book arts is a draw for the field. It isn’t a foil to the playful aspects of the process; it’s a prompt for them.

Bryn Ziegler is a Philadelphia-based artist and educator specializing in intricate narrative books. She holds an MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from University of the Arts. Bryn’s artistic practice embraces both contemporary digital techniques and profoundly traditional craft, giving her a dynamic perspective on the development of books today.

A SERIES OF PROMPTS // Matt Johnston

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT

In 2021 I authored Photobooks &: a critical companion to the contemporary medium (Onomatopee). It is a publication that set out to connect the newly consecrated photobook to contemporary cultural situations, historical photographic relationships with the page, and the logistics of making public. Ultimately the book asked whether celebration of the photobook and its production were solidifying its status as an art object or creating an insular environment of little relevance for audiences to which both the book and photography have much to contribute.

This tension is likely familiar for readers of the Book Art Theory Blog. The photobook has gone through a similar turn of legitimisation as the artist book, now recognised by individuals and institutions as a medium of considerable import rather than an adjunct or curiosity. Such acceptance brings notable benefits in the form of institutional support, scholarly activity, and market prices but with it the possibility for a clouding of specific publishing purposes. In excitement over the rich variety of publications emerging today and the communities that bring them to life, we should be mindful that photobooks are not only representations of the medium but are texts in the world. The vitality of the photobook should not be confused with, or transferred to, the vitality of an individual work.

What does this *book seek to do in the world?

Who would enjoy seeing this *book?

Who needs to see this *book?

(excerpts from A series of prompts)

If we wish to position the medium as one that can ‘catalyse real change’ [1] and make our world ‘visible, understandable and alterable’ [2], a focus must now be brought to the making public of publishing. This most essential component of book-based practices is frequently overlooked in favour of the apparently more exciting creative aspects of concept, design, and production. It is an occurrence exacerbated when we see that contemporary photobook makers primarily produce works for other photographers and book makers. As photographer Laia Abril concisely puts it: 'the public is us' [3]. In this environment, collective values in production and shared reference points as well as common spaces of photographic encounter construct a safe harbour.

How does the *book fit into a larger plan of publishing?

Does the *book act as a beginning, way-marker or end-point?

What knowledge does the *book rely on?

(excerpts from A series of prompts)

Engaging with readers beyond an established and expectant audience for whom the book is a reference point – rather than an object of challenge or change – is not easy. It involves a rethinking not only of production choices but also the language we use in books, their price, distribution requirements, non-purchase accessibility, and republishing possibilities. To complicate matters, strategies must be custom-fit in recognition that just as each book 'has a specific flavour', so too that flavour should be 'accompanied by different ways of helping it to be out in the world' [4]. It is work not yet rewarded by peers or institutional accolades, but it is work I have sought to encourage in a series of questions to makers, readers, and all those involved in the ecology of the photobook that I posed in Photobooks &.

In an effort to nudge discourse towards situations of reading over production I used these questions at a number of workshops and lectures in the UK, but still their reach was limited. And so, A series of prompts is an attempt to amplify and activate anew. Its form is easy to distribute by pixels or post and its simplicity more inviting than the weight and formality of Photobooks & to many. Returning to an idea not fully realised has also provided an opportunity to energise content with other audiences in mind than those I considered two years prior. I have adopted ‘*book’ in place of ‘photobook’ in response to conversations with readers and the progress of my thinking that has led me to consider the need for more reader- and audience-centred approaches in fields other than the photobook alone. For while there are more examples of works and discussions that overtly include the reader under the broader terms of poetry, art publishing, and the artist book, tensions between the author(s) vision and audience are constant and universal.

A series of prompts is available in its second riso print run for free by contacting the author and is also able to be downloaded as a DIY layered pdf for riso printing via the link here.

The front and back of A series of prompts.

[1] Cataldo, Antonio. ‘Foreword’. In Photography Bound: Reimagining Photobooks and Self-Publishing, ed. Antonio Cataldo and Adrià Julià, 6–12. (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2023), 10.

[2] Gilberger, Ruth. ‘Together We Are More’. In The Photobook in Art and Society: Participative Potentials of a Medium, 27–30. (Berlin: Jovis and The PhotoBook Museum, 2020), 32.

[3] Abril, L., Ramon Pez, and G Golpe. ‘Let’s Kill the Ego’. In The Book: On Endless Possibilities: Independent Publishing Fair, Barcelona 2015, ed. Natasha Christia, 24–31. (Barcelona: The Folio Club, 2015), 28.

[4] Reader, Manuel. ‘On Distribution’. In Books Is Books: A Statement of Intent from Minimum Efficiency Press, ed. Andrew John Beltran and Margherita Huntley. Minimum Efficiency Press, 2023.

Matt Johnston is a visual practitioner, educator and researcher at Coventry University, where he is Assistant Professor in photography. For the last decade, his research and visual practice have been concerned with the post-millennium situation of the contemporary photobook and how it may become better equipped to engage new readerships.

ARTIST BOOK REVIEW PLATFORMS: LEVI SHERMAN AND DAVID SOLO IN CONVERSATION – PART 2 OF 2

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT

In July of 2023, Levi Sherman and David Solo sat down over Zoom to talk about some of their goals and issues they’ve encountered in running platforms for artist book criticism and reviews. This is Part 2 of that conversation. Read Part 1 here.

Book Art Review online contents for issues 1 and 2.

What observations about the nature of artist books arise from running these platforms?

LS: In the 1960s and ‘70s, people like Dick Higgins and Ulises Carrión saw artist books as a vehicle for revitalizing literature (and art). Now the field has matured to the point that an artist can set out to make an artist book, to contribute to this tradition without challenging or galvanizing literature or art more broadly. Good or bad, this seems like a fundamental difference. It brings us back to the issue of artist intent.

With the maturity of the field, two conflicting tenets have emerged. On one hand, “production, not reproduction” means the critic should consider every aspect of how a book was made. Artists often facilitate this with extensive paratext. On the other hand, there is a belief that the artist book itself should tell the reader how it should be read. If the work succeeds, readers will handle an unfamiliar structure or read through challenging content. I don’t think these are mutually exclusive, and critics can evaluate how artists navigate the tension. For example, if a book is destined for an institutional collection, the artist can rely on more paratext than an activist anonymously distributing pamphlets.

BAR Issue 2 article on Something Else Press.

DS: Another facet of books going into institutional (or private) collections is the potential for those books to disappear and complicate the desire to view and study them. A related challenge working with institutions involves balancing their mission to preserve/conserve books and the desire for visitors to experience the book as it was intended and handle it. While setting up reading rooms or events for live engagement with books can be great for expanding visibility, many organizations are reluctant or not able to do so unless they have “disposable” duplicate copies.

LS: Many libraries do a great job selecting and showing books, but how much time is spent really reading? Imagine taking a film class where you only watched the trailers, or fast-forwarded every film? That seems analogous to a lot of institutional artist book encounters. I’d like to see more artist books on coffee tables and nightstands, and for artists to consider how the reading environment informs pace and duration.

DS: Digitization (including page-turning videos/applications) can provide some help (within the restrictions of copyright and subject to makers’ preferences). A lot of work has been done to make both contemporary and historic photobooks viewable online which seems to affect the way they’re written about. Critics, publishers and artists have all contributed to this which perhaps also reflects the photobook as a major means of getting the photographer’s work seen. The large number of prizes and the huge number of annual “top 10” lists for photobooks also contribute to the greater visibility of such works. It’s also interesting to think about how that might translate to the wider artists’ book world.

LS: For artist books, digitization is stymied by two factors. First, book artists are more invested in materiality and hapticality than many photographers, so digital surrogates don’t seem adequate (although I personally think the benefits outweigh the shortcomings). Second, collection managers are very wary of copyright. So much of the art librarianship literature about artist books is about copyright, but I rarely hear book artists worry about a collection photographing their work. Digital access seems especially important since the artist book field doesn’t have many awards and prizes or other platforms. More prizes and events might be good, but a silver lining is that the pace of criticism can be slower and less oriented toward marketing.

One side of the printable mini-zine version of a review from Artists’ Book Reviews (ABR). Each review is limited to five photographs to respect copyright and fit various formats, from full-length print and online reviews to abbreviated Instagram versions.

How does criticism relate to the idea of a canon?

DS: I’m less interested in revisiting the canon or creating multiple canons than in expanding the discussion of books that are interesting (in a variety of ways and to different audiences). It’s OK if these are mostly individual opinions (as are prizes). We want to recognize that and promote more discussion of what someone thinks is a great book and why — especially for overlooked or underrepresented areas. Shining a light on overlooked histories of the artist book (or photobook) is rewarding as we’ve also been working to do with 10×10 photobooks. It’s more about exposing those works rather than trying to then interpolate them into a new “top 100”. More useful is “Here’s a lot of great books that most of you have never seen.” Anointing a list as “the right answer” feels dangerous for any list.

LS: I don’t think criticism should try to build or revise a canon, but if we ignore whatever artist book canon already exists, we may use it unwittingly as a benchmark. We should examine how our values reflect works that have been institutionalized and consider what those values exclude.

As an art historian, I am interested in (re)inserting artist books into mainstream art history. That doesn’t mean adding books to the art historical canon, though — in fact, artist books might be a good vehicle for deconstructing the boundaries between center and periphery. Through my own research into artist book historiography, I’ve learned how contingent the canon is (except, of course, the influences of structural racism, and sexism, etc., which are sadly predictable). Other research, including Megan N. Liberty’s institutional history reveals how the field has formed. I’m not sure whether criticism can contribute to this, but knowing the history will help critics avoid pitfalls.

Levi is the founder and editor of Artists’ Book Reviews (https://artistsbookreviews.com/), a website for reviews and interviews. David is a co-founder and co-editor of Book Art Review (BAR), a criticism initiative founded at Center for Book Arts in 2020 by Megan N. Liberty, Corina Reynolds, and David Solo. BAR is both a print and online (at https://centerforbookarts.org/bar ) publication.

ARTIST BOOK REVIEW PLATFORMS: LEVI SHERMAN AND DAVID SOLO IN CONVERSATION – PART 1 OF 2

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT

In July of 2023, Levi Sherman and David Solo sat down over Zoom to talk about some of their goals and issues they’ve encountered in running platforms for artist book criticism and reviews.

Levi is the founder and editor of Artists’ Book Reviews (ABR) (https://artistsbookreviews.com/), a website for reviews and interviews. David is a co-founder and co-editor of Book Art Review (BAR), a criticism initiative founded at Center for Book Arts in 2020 by Megan N. Liberty, Corina Reynolds, and David Solo. BAR is both a print and online (at https://centerforbookarts.org/bar ) publication.

The first 2 issues of BAR were published in Spring 2022 and Spring 2023.

What are ABR and BAR trying to achieve and for whom?

DS: For BAR, the main goal has been to provide a platform for criticism and discourse about the artist book and that engages with the book as an object. Why and how does it work as a book as distinct from an exhibition on the wall or as a catalog of works? We don’t believe there is a right or wrong approach but rather that there are and should be a wide range of perspectives and the writing should express clear opinions supported by specific points.

LS: I try to write about things in a way that contributes to artist book discourse. Often the book does most of that work for me, but I might stretch more to write about a zine or pamphlet in a productive way for an artist book audience.

DS: We’re looking to reach both the existing artist book audience and also to expand it. One approach has been to look at how we can draw from the criticism of other artforms. Regardless of their background, people seem very comfortable criticizing a movie and the different components (script, casting, sound, etc.) that go into making a film. There can also be analogies with music criticism and the way an album is put together — looking at both sequencing and individual songs. It would be great to bring that same dynamic to artist books. It can be fun; it doesn’t always have to be serious.

LS: Film, music, and literature can all assume mass audiences. With a few exceptions, we can’t assume that another interested person has read a particular artist book or even has access to it. Exhibition reviews are a common solution for art writing in general, but exhibitions don’t offer a representative sample of the artist book field. I have noticed more platforms publishing artist profiles, interviews and collection spotlights, but these are not geared toward interpreting or evaluating art works.

DS: Regarding mass audiences, if you can’t assume that your reader will be able to access the book, how does it shape a review? For writers, editors, and people running platforms, what does it take to make a review meaningful in those circumstances? The selection of images to include (or links) becomes especially important in these cases and can influence what gets reviewed.

LS: I review what I receive, so there is a feedback loop between my readers and the books I review. Interesting micro-trends emerge: a review of a Portuguese book elicits more submissions from Portugal, or a review of asemic poetry taps into that world. Now that ABR has a few other reviewers, they can pursue their areas of interest and expertise. As editor, I help them connect with the broader book art audience.

As the pandemic recedes, I have also been asking how criticism can build community. I recently used the ABRcollection for a few lectures and events, and it felt great to put people in direct contact with the books.

Levi Sherman setting out books from the ABR collection for a show and tell event at the James Watrous Gallery in Madison, WI. Levi appeared with Kayla Bauer and Stephen Perkins to discuss collecting and curating in conjunction with Stephen’s exhibition, Stephen Perkins: Mining the Archive.

DS: BAR is also experimenting with various components and collaboration — through conferences, workshops, visits and working with organizations. That includes the collaborative production of Issue 2 with Appalachian State, launch parties, happy hours/salons, etc. We also hope such events will help attract writers as well as readers and those who want to participate in the conversation and build the community.

We have found that finding and attracting writers interested in long form critical writing is a major challenge (not only for artist books, it seems) and so are working on partnerships, resources and other activities to help support aspiring writers from a range of backgrounds.

How does book art criticism intersect with book art theory? What questions should it ask and answer? What factors should it consider?

DS: The “type” of artist book — and its context — can play a role in the way it’s reviewed. I might assess, and write about, a piece with a small budget intended as an experiment or immediate response to a current event differently from the way I would approach a deluxe livre d’artiste or book developed over many years. I’m not sure that counts as theory, but we wrestle with the question of how much we talk about context. Many artist books and zines are created to address social and political issues, whether rapidly or over a long period of time, so to what extent should the criticism consider the intent? Context feels even more important for historical works although the reviewer might have to speculate more about the context of a work produced 50 years ago.

LS: It makes sense to consider artists’ intent and their position within the overlapping practices that constitute the book art field. I take reception theory seriously (as do good artist books that leave room for interpretation), but artists today are highly professionalized and often explicitly articulate their goals. We can reject an artist’s claims, but they still offer useful context.

DS: A lot of the work I’m personally interested in is collaborative, especially between image-makers and writers, and I do find it interesting and helpful to understand how the collaboration worked, which might not be readily apparent. Drawing on paratextual material, which may be more process than intent, can also be useful. A review that draws on background information is fine, and so is one that says, “I picked up this book and here is my response.” A good editor should help the reviewer decide about including such information and what they can expect their audience to know and in ensuring the sources of such information are acknowledged.

LS: I want reviewers to consider what their readers might think, but I also want them to share how they personally responded to a work. I find myself deleting a lot of passive language, even from good writers. I started out trying to be comprehensive and objective, both of which are boring and impossible.

In some ways, ABRmight be art appreciation rather than criticism. That doesn’t mean I won’t mention an aspect of a book that falls short, but in general my goal is to help people understand and appreciate artist books. I find people rarely need help finding flaws or disliking things.

Mediocre books often fail in the same ways, so another format might be better than piling onto a single work in a review.

DS: One approach would be more of an essay looking at individual trends and evaluating and describing when it works and when it doesn’t with specific examples.

LS: Perhaps a book that was bad in a unique or novel way could make for an interesting review.

BAR Issue 2 article on “The Economics of Publishing.”

DS: Part of our larger objective is to foster wider accessibility for artist books and make the elements that go into a book more visible. That might involve discussing individual decisions — “did it need that insert?” or “perhaps it could have used one more edit” — in an otherwise positive review. Not that the decision is right or wrong, but making clear the reviewer’s reaction to the book and why. Sometimes these decisions are consequences of the tradeoffs that take place during the process of designing and publishing a book and in the most recent issue of BAR, we’ve also tried to shine more of a light on that, looking at the economic and other constraints associated with producing and distributing a book. This approach relates as well to our multiple audiences — both pointing readers to books that are interesting but also providing feedback to artists and publishers.

THINKING BOOKS // Carley Gomez and Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT

In 2022 we edited and published an anthology of conceptual artist books titled A Physical Book Which Compiles Conceptual Books by Various Artists. The books in the collection exist only as verbal descriptions, statements, or provocations. However, we found the Conceptual label too narrow for many of the books. Through the project, we learned the many ways and reasons that an artist book might go unrealized. The purpose of this blog post is to share some of those ways and reasons, and to consider what they tell us about the field of artist books.

Faced with the challenge of categorizing the wildly diverse artist books we received, we organized our anthology according to Francis Bacon’s lofty system of human knowledge: Memory, Reason, Imagination. Recognizing such a system’s limitations, we added a fourth category: Touch. Any number of other organizational systems would have been possible (and many of the works fit just as un/comfortably into more than one category). Accordingly, this post will categorize books in yet another way, one that accounts for immaterialities beyond Conceptual art: conceptual, unrealized, implausible, impossible, and ekphrastic. From these, we can begin to learn what books can and can’t do, why books seem suited to certain topics, and what artists need for a sustainable practice.

Conceptual

When Levi first envisioned the anthology, he pictured conceptual books in the vein of 1960s and ‘70s Conceptual art, and we did receive such books. Like many Fluxus publications, these conceptual books build a frame through which to view everyday experiences in a new light. An Index of Beginnings and Endings by Ellen Bruex makes this explicit: “Instructions: Move through your days with awareness of new beginnings and final endings.” Some instruction pieces lend themselves to execution, relying on chance to produce novel outcomes. Random Color Generated Instant Book by Esther K Smith & Susan Happersett exemplifies this approach with detailed, plainspoken instructions and everyday materials. Other instructions are more poignant as mental exercises. In this category, we would place Who Has Seen the Wind by Cathryn Miller of Byopia Press. One could feasibly print her ninety-nine sonograms of the wind, but it is Miller’s Duchampian declaration that these imagined prints are art, specifically asemic poems, that is so striking. Despite their variety, these works all share Conceptual art’s emphasis on the viewer/reader rather than the artist. They remind us that reading is a creative, constitutive act.

Ellen Bruex, “An Index of Beginnings and Endings,” page 1 of 2, in A Physical Book Which Compiles Conceptual Books by Various Artists, eds. Carley Gomez and Levi Sherman, 2022.

Unrealized

Whereas Smith and Happersett’s conceptual book can be realized repeatedly according to chance operations, other books describe a more determined form. Perhaps the clearest example is Bruno Neiva’s Open your book!, which is bound on both sides and meant to be torn apart to relieve stress. A physical version of Open your book! was published by Team Trident Press a month after our anthology.

Other books say more by remaining unrealized. In Coma (deep sleep), Amandine Nabarra grapples with the difficulty of grieving her stepmother without saying goodbye due to COVID-19. Her frank description of guilt and pain alongside that of an unfinished collage is surely as poignant as the finished piece would have been. Linda Parr’s Circumnavigation outlines a book-in-progress meant for an exhibition celebrating Magellan’s quincentennial in 2020. The pressure to make art during an unprecedented pandemic seems perfectly captured by Parr’s reflections on Magellan, whose 1520 departure is celebrated but not his 1521 death or the 1522 return of his expedition under Juan Sebastián Elcano. Other unrealized books require elaborate installations or resources beyond most book artists, and still others — like Kristen Lyle’s Just a Phase — describe perfectly feasible projects where life has simply gotten in the way.

Amandine Nabarra, “Coma (deep sleep)” in A Physical Book.

Implausible

Without negating the real circumstances that result in unrealized books, whether structural or personal, we consider implausible books a separate category. These books are technically possible, but they place significance on mental processes — the reader’s imagination and the artist’s hypothetical thinking and mental problem solving. Nervous System by Andrew David King entails: a hidden bunker, a burlap sack of dirt, a single chair, a redacted facsimile of Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz’s Dachau diaries, a cassette tape and player, and an iron supplement in a paper envelope. King’s piece is far more affecting than it seems from the description above, and perhaps the physical installation would be even more moving, but Nervous System seems written in lieu of that version, not as a practical plan. Not only is Nervous System more accessible in its verbal form, King has pruned and polished the writing as carefully as any poem. Contributions by James Spyker range in plausibility, from Clean After Reading, in which printed glycerin sheets are pressed into soap bars and then read as they are used, to Read it or else, which envisions a book as “voluntary ransomware” that must be painstakingly read to relinquish the reader’s computer. Implausible books make use of the book as a physical, time-based medium as well as its symbolic value.

James Spyker, “Clean After Reading” in A Physical Book.

Impossible

Impossible books also engage the book as a medium, but do so by pointing to its material and temporal limits. Nathanael Kooperkamp desires a sort of time travel in Future Memory Photo Album. Kyla Anne Spencer’s An accordion book (never ending) explicitly invokes infinity as does, effectively, VON WEIT HER(GEHOLT)’s imagined bestiary Life, Life-Size: Complete Collection. Numerous books connect the duration of books and lives. In Everything I never told you, Abigail Guidry imagines adding a signature to a codex on every birthday. Annelyse Gelman’s Tamagotchi-like PET requires care to remain readable. Even as such thought experiments challenge the limits of books, they also metaphorize the ways ordinary books and reading already transcend these limits. Narges Porandekhial’s Nothing and Everything and Nanette Wylde’s soul haiku both explore notion that no reader can encounter the same book twice.

Nanette Wylde, “soul haiku” in A Physical Book.

Other impossible books are plausible books in impossible worlds. Genocide Incorporated by E.L. Gamble and The Book of Davron by ossa are both set in dystopian, sci-fi futures. Another form of speculation accounts for other impossible books, books which cannot even be described. Constanze Kreiser’s A Book on Jellyfish asks how a book might adequately capture the animal’s essence — not unlike Sydney Anne Smith’s make a book like a dog.

Ekphrastic

Ekphrastic books are a literary device to explore other subjects. Almost pataphorical, these books are fleshed just enough for the writer to move beyond them. In Ben the Hoose, Bea Drysdale makes a pamphlet while staying at her parents’ house, plumbing her grief and fear while her ailing father is quarantined in the hospital. In Maureen Alsop’s haunting prose poem Tally Ho Écriture Féminine Mechanique, the book is “the ash and the remaining cigar boxes,” “an interrupted line of thought.” Merridawn Duckler also explores relationships in Big Book of Nothing, which begins like a Conceptual instruction book, but in a long litany asks the reader to consider “someone you love who is indifferent, someone who loves you but is uneasy, someone with whom your love is reciprocal…” and so on. At first, the book seems absent altogether in Lily Oliver’s Appendage, though a footnote mentions reading. Conspicuously absent, the book has a way of claiming other objects, spaces, and stories — perhaps the crawl space is a book, and the camera with a single photo is almost certainly a book.

Merridawn Duckler, “Big Book of Nothing,” page 1 of 2, in A Physical Book.

Thinking Books

In 2015 Levi contributed a post to this blog titled “Book Thinking,” arguing that artist books offer critical and analytical tools for other disciplines. The artists above illustrate the potential of book thinking by thinking books. If book thinking is critical or analytical, thinking books is its creative counterpart. Just as these artists think books into existence, the reader can think them into new categories and make new discoveries about artist books as a medium and as a discipline.

Carley Gomez is an artist and writer in Madison, Wisconsin. Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews. Together they run Partial Press, publisher of A Physical Book Which Compiles Conceptual Books by Various Artists.

NOTES ON EDITORIAL PRACTICE, PART 2 OF 2 // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT

As I endeavor "to think what I am doing" (thank you Hannah Arendt).

6. In 2008 OEI published a special issue on the "aesthetics of editing”: “trying to reflect upon every possible aspect of the editorial work, from the commission of a text, or the appropriation of a selected document, to the editing of this text or document, the montage of texts and images, the choice of specific fonts or a certain paper, and the different degrees of collectivity involved in the work, in this specific space of tensions and unresolved questions that constitutes an editorial office.”[6] I consider how to make room for the “space of tensions and unresolved questions” in the task in front of me. Accepting that some questions are unanswerable.

7. A quick google search for "aesthetics of editing" returns primarily film and video production, a smattering of literary editing. I find little exploration of this specific comprisal of activities that is artbookmaking, when one is both editor and designer (in addition to perhaps printer, binder, publisher, possibly many other roles . . .). Similarly, White's book Editing by Design presumes that the editor and the designer will be different people; the book's aim is to ease a collaborative process between different individuals and even different departments, not explore this singular yet multi-faceted process of being designer-editor / editor-designer[7]. I am pleased when google offers an article by Ramia Mazé entitled Bookmaking as Critical and Feminist Practice of Design, highly relevant to my interests, but it explores bookmaking as a team-based process, and not this more autonomous venture I face at my desk. While Codish and I are collaborating on this book, it is very different from what Mazé describes[8]. Codish shares remarkable material from her archives, lists of people to interview, and enormously helpful feedback, suggestions, and moral support. I couldn’t make this book without her. But our roles aren’t codified. She is not sitting here every day, driving the mouse, nor discussing the choice of this and not that.

8. This and not that. How to visually represent an idea, or an emphatic point in the story? Grönberg has described her picture editing approach as “the visual material could make a proposal, or propose an argument, in a different way than a theoretical essay or another form of writing, but with the same intention to contribute to a way of conceptualizing an issue, a question, or a problem. Given of course, that the viewer/reader is willing to engage in looking at the images and reading the documents: to give them time.”[9] I consider this as I place scans of textual documents in the book file; how to encourage they are read rather than flipped past? When does it make sense to show the original document, and when does it make sense to typeset it anew? I had thought that my answer would be that when the form is important to the content, when it was carefully considered in the original, it should be scanned. Yet an ‘undesigned’ typewritten page has specificity and materiality. It is a loss of contextual, historic information to typeset it anew. On one hand: is all information equally important? Surely not? On the other: might my default be to show documents in their entirety, and only content that had no visual textual form (i.e., transcriptions from audio and video) be newly designed for the book?

9. On Father's Day I visit my parents. My mom is a quilter; both of my parents are avid gardeners. We play rummy. I realize that all these activities (quilting, gardening, rummy) are forms of editing: rearrangement of what is there, to achieve a desired outcome. Of course, in quilting, you seek out other fabrics to work with your stash; in gardening you identify what will function and flourish and accordingly transplant; in rummy, you draw cards to build your hand. In my work, as I cut out shapes and arrange the pieces and make relationships, I also identify absences, possibly needs. I wonder which might benefit from being left open as space.

NOTES

1.Jonas (J) Magnusson, “Editing OEI,” https://www.oei.nu/w/6.html, accessed June 15, 2023.

2.Jan V. White, Editing By Design (New York: R.R. Bowker Company, 1982).

3.Ramia Mazé, Bookmaking as Critical and Feminist Practice of Design (Aalto University, Finland). https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/35990, accessed June 17, 2023

4.Cecilia Grönberg, “Image Editing OEI,” https://www.oei.nu/w/6.html, accessed June 15, 2023

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993. She is an Associate Professor of Graphic design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Emily is currently working on a book with feminist activist K.D. Codish, former director of the “non-traditional” New Haven Police Academy.

NOTES ON EDITORIAL PRACTICE, PART 1 OF 2 // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT

“What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”—Hannah Arendt [1]

1. I'm in an editorial-design phase of an archival-research-based book project that I began in 2020. That’s a lot of hyphens for one sentence. I will try again. I am adding pages to an InDesign file, cutting and pasting various text and images I’ve acquired over the past three years. I am resizing, rewriting, deleting, layering, interspersing, scaffolding, rearranging. On my desk I have a flexible outline of nested post-it notes that I refer to, remix, and add to. While I work, I've been reflecting upon this editorial process as one of the lesser discussed book arts. By “editorial process” I do not mean the mechanics of editing for grammar and clarity (although there is that too, I’m condensing many transcripts), but rather the larger editorial project of selecting, guiding, steering, (re)presenting. As Jan V. White writes in Editing by Design, the “Editors’ greater purpose is to organize the material in such a way that its significance shines out.... What matters is that some message, some point of view, be communicated to the viewer”[2].

2. I am neither writing the text nor creating the images for this book I am “making.”

So what am I doing?

Pointing out

Asking questions

Extracting

Arranging

Researching

Investigating

Interviewing

Choosing

Selecting

Framing

Contextualizing

Introducing

Positioning

Sequencing

Referencing

Pacing

Organizing

Citing

Putting into relationship

Cutting & pasting

Moving things around

Testing

Montaging

Designing (is all the above comprised in this one verb?)

3. As I compose this list, I think of Jenny Odell's Harvard Graduate School of Design 2020 commencement speech, published as the lovely slender volume Inhabiting the Negative Space. Odell offers that “the most substantive work you can do” as a designer is operate as an “orchestrator of attention,”[3] referencing Sarah Hendren's terrific 2016 Eyeo Festival presentation. In this talk, Hendren muses that synonyms for “designer” might also include “impresario” / “translator” / “curator” / “believer” / “amplifier”/ “archivist” / “conduit” / “midwife” / “radical generalist.” Hendren quotes George Saunders (also a favorite writer of mine), “When you tunnel deep into what you don’t know, sometimes that becomes your voice”[4]. Yes. All of this resonates deeply with my current activities. I am definitely tunneling into what I do not know. That is the main thing I am doing, in fact. Add it to the list in #2.

Editorial Thinking, Image by OEI (https://camdenartcentre.org/content/uploads/2022/09/OEI_editorial_thinking_print.jpg)

4. Or, as Jonas (J) Magnusson and Cecilia Grönberg of the Swedish “extra-disciplinary” magazine OEI phrase it, “To edit is to work with what exists”[5]. In this particular kind of bookmaking, I am working with what exists to make what does not yet exist.

Founded in 1999, OEI has published 97 issues, which they describe as “experimental forms of thinking, montages of art, poetry, theory, visual culture, and documents; critical investigations, infrastructural poetics, localities, ecologies, new epistemologies, and counter-historiographies."

Last October at the Camden Art Centre in London, I had the pleasure of seeing Magnusson & Grönberg present about their editorial practice. While the OEI exhibition is a one-night pop-up, its installation is characteristically thoughtful. Individual issues, which appear not like magazines but rather as large, hefty softcover books, are dispersed among tables for perusal. A slideshow of images, including an intriguing diagram of “Editorial Thinking,” is projected on the wall. The sound of an operating printing press—an audio recording—fills the gallery.

I extract small gems from their talk:

“Outsource as little as possible”

“Proofreading is untheorized”

"Prepress work = labor intensity + care + differentiation"

Building an archive of an area — collaborating with experts about the area (scientists, historians, etc.)

Fieldwork, editing, “radical publishing”

Exhibitions, events, readings, are all seen as editorial events in 3 dimensions

Micro-communities, localizing publishing (much of their work is in Swedish)

“Giving a location a mirror of its history”

“Cultural counter-history”

“Montages”

“Very material work”

You can only bind up to 6cm in Sweden!

In answer to an audience member's question, “Why don’t you publish digitally?" Magnusson replies, “It wouldn’t be fun.”

5. I remind myself: what makes this type of bookmaking wholly engrossing is being wholly engaged in all the parts of making the book. It is very material work. It is multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, extradisciplinary. And it is fun. Fun, I tell you! (Sometimes I need reminding).

(To be continued July 15)

NOTES

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), 5.

2. Jan V. White, Editing By Design (New York: R.R. Bowker Company, 1982), 2.

3. Jenny Odell, Inhabiting the Negative Space (Cambridge: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021), 23.

4. Sarah Hendren, Design for Know-Nothings, Dilettantes, and Melancholy Interlopers, Eyeo Festival 2016, https://vimeo.com/179040817, accessed June 19, 2023.

5. “Public Knowledge: OEI.” Camden Art Centre. https://camdenartcentre.org/whats-on/public-knowledge-oei, accessed June 17, 2023

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993. She is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Emily is currently working on a book with feminist activist K.D. Codish, former director of the “non-traditional” New Haven Police Academy.

THE SMALL PRESS & REFLEXIVITY // Rachel Zavecz

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT

In The Century of Artist’s Books, Johanna Drucker describes a mode of self-reflexivity specific to the artist’s book as an auratic quality which returns the reader’s attention to the physical form of the book object. Where readers might usually enter a mental state in which the object disappears and the text exists purely as its meaningful information, an attention to the construction in this way creates an energizing space in which the material and the imaginal are not opposed to each other and, in fact, vibrate, spark, bounce off, and connect in multiplying, generative, and surprising ways. In considering the concept of an editor’s/maker’s intent, I find it more direct to think about my own approaches in crafting such an object.

In founding the small press Carrion Bloom Books in 2019, my partner Jace Brittain and I wanted to publish innovative writing which could burst from its codex container and realize the kind of energizing qualities Drucker describes. We were aware of some remarkable writing (and had a sense that there must be much more) that wasn’t being published, and we thought that the form of artist’s books might help such works take a shape which would realize the thorny, grotesque, sparking potentials that made those texts innovative and challenging in the first place. Beyond showing or containing a text, we wanted to find forms which could shape and be shaped by their content.

Our edition of Hannah V. Warren’s Southern Gothic Corpse Machine, like many of our publications so far uses an exposed longstitch binding. Warren’s chapbook is constructed of three signatures of 16 pages (4 folded sheets) each. Three signatures being slender for the longstitch, a form whose visible threads already seem to provoke a desire for carefulness and preservation, there is a preciousness to these objects which is productively challenged by Warren’s perverse and visionary poetry. During its production, I made decisions about the makeup of a book already tuned in its text toward filamentous algae, roadkilled armadillos, and moldering monstrosity. Choices about paper, thread, and design which echoed and answered the book’s radical qualities: collisions of disintegration, vibrancy, vitality, atrophy, preciousness and perversion. A reader, approaching the form with apparently fragile intent, in this case is turning the first pages of Warren’s text in exactly the right mood.

During the production of each of the books Carrion Bloom has published, we’ve committed to adding at least one physical element which is totally new to us as bookmakers. With leia penina wilson’s call the necromancer, we experimented with allowing the lead type to leave a deep impression which we later rubbed with white charcoal. The result evokes something spectacular, confounding, and elusive in wilson’s work, an unstable sigil and not-quite frottage which rubs off a little on its reader. Our chalky fingerprints appear literally on many of those covers, and these marks appeal to us as visible evidence of an object which felt closely collaborative. And, the visibility of this process models formal self-reflexivity.

In the case of our newest book, dossier for the postverbal/ by Carleen Tibbetts, we used a fading split fountain print on the cover in an attempt to capture some aspect of Tibbetts’ cosmic grappling with concepts of ephemeral data and deceptive language. Tibbetts’ poem describes “a darkable network ruined in such intervals,” spaces where language won’t cohere in symbol and images disintegrate, and we thought that such transcendent and extravagant writing deserved a form that might offer continuing collaborative engagement with those ideas.

I believe that readers respond deeply and meaningfully to such engagement. And there are many projects forthcoming from a diversity of exciting presses that advance new ways to read across translation, challenge conceptions of the page, and give complex attention to structural form. I continue to feel profoundly emboldened and energized by the books and projects being produced by Ugly Duckling Presse, Inside the Castle, Cloak.wtf, and so many more. These ecstatic book objects range widely from pamphlets to perfect bound volumes to digital artifacts, and it’s truly inspiring to be working and creating as a part of this community.

Rachel Zavecz is a book artist and writer living in Salt Lake City. She co-edits the small press Carrion Bloom Books with fellow writer Jace Brittain. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame, and is a PhD candidate in Fiction at the University of Utah.

Post moderated by Emily Tipps.

COLOR BY THE FOOT: BOOKS AS INTERIOR DESIGN // Emily Tipps

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT

I recently attended an event in the community room of a new urban apartment building. The room featured sleek contemporary furniture and was decorated in soothing, muted colors (think sage, pumpkin, sand). Various items adorned pale wood shelving and end tables: minimalist vases, useless wicker spheres, and monochrome stacks of books. In the context of this innocuous, semi-public space, the books were decidedly not a library intended for use, but rather a design decision.

As a reader, writer, and book maker, I’m interested in public and private symbology, use, and perception of physical books, so I forayed into the internet wormhole of book-based design. I found my way quickly (via home goods giant Wayfair) to Booth and Williams, whose catch phrase is “design by the book.” Online, Booth’s customers can search for “ColorStaks” and “BookWalls.” Books are grouped for sale according to the hues of their covers or wrapped individually in colored paper to suit designers’ palettes.

Selections from Booth and Williams’s Color by the Foot offerings

One description reads, “Take your design to a new level with the Modern Beach Book Wall . . . Seventy-five authentic modern hardback books in crisp shades of off-white. All books are published 1980-present and include a variety of literary works, period novels and topical texts with light overall wear. Books total approximately 7.5 linear feet. . . . Actual titles will vary from those pictured but will remain the same color pattern. Book titles could be repeated after three linear feet.”

Sample context for Booth and Williams’s Modern Beach Book Wall

In the above description, reference to content is cursory and general, couched among physical descriptors. But Booth and Williams does offer a few themed sets; customers can purchase a “Vintage Curated British Library” or “Mini Christmas in July Book Set.” But no one is expected to read these books. Rather, the themed sets emit a slightly more genred ambient aesthetic (cozy study or seasonal spirit, maybe) by virtue of their general subject matter and appearance. These options are just different shades of the iconography of the book.

Booth and Williams’s Vintage Curated British Library

So why use books for interior design? A book is an important cultural signifier that conveys a message without the need for anyone to open it and read. First, the book signifies literacy—and tangentially knowledge, education, intelligence, and even wisdom. The book also implies privilege; book owners must have the wealth to purchase them, the space to store them, and the leisure time to read them. While these assumptions may not be strictly true in 2023, they are contained in the legacy of meaning physical books carry. Perhaps also the totemic presence of books offers relief from increasingly digital lives.

Books embody many of the material qualities interior designers exploit like texture, color, and shape. Their modularity opens them to multitudes of arrangement. Composed of organic materials like cloth, paper, and leather, books can lend warmth and comfort to a space. With all these factors combined, it is not difficult to see how books occupy this niche.

I’m unsettled by these books chosen only for their covers. Their raison d'être feels tenuous. What happens when crisp shades of off-white go out of style? Yet the unread shelf of books is nothing new (War and Peace, Moby Dick). My personal bookshelves house plenty of books I haven’t gotten to yet, and I do enjoy the atmosphere they create in my space simply by existing. So what’s the difference? My unread books are hopeful; I aim one day to read them. The titles reflect my past experiences, enduring interests, and future ideals. They are recommendations from friends and mentors and have come to the sanctuary of my collection one-by-one. Read and unread, they are also the chaotic and contradictory amalgam of all their contents.

The commercialization of curated book sets for interior design raises a bevy of question that are worth asking in the age of books’ changing position and which I’ve barely touched on here. Next time you see a color-coordinated stack of random books in a waiting room or real estate open house, you might ask: Where do these books come from? Who is putting these sets together and wrapping them in paper? Who is buying them and where are they displayed? What are the historical precursors to this practice? Are we printing too many books? How do these displays stack up (pun intended) against those repurposed for art, or used for insulation, or ground into cat litter? And what else are we doing with books, aside from reading them?

Emily Tipps is Associate Librarian, Instructor, and Program Manager at the University of Utah’s Book Arts Program, and the owner/operator of High5 Press.

LIBROS DE ARTISTA EN CDMX / ARTIST BOOKS IN MEXICO CITY // Peter Tanner

Virginia Green — Mon, 15 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT

Recién estuve en CDMX. Mientras ahí pude ver varias cosas que he anhelado ver por mucho tiempo, incluso el Azteca/Mexica Piedra del sol y la Coatlicue monumental, Cabezas colosales Olmecas, el Castillo de Chapultepec, y murales de los tres grandes del muralismo mexicano, Orozco, Siquieros, y Rivera, el campus de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), y el Ballet Folklórico de México en el Palacio de Bellas Artes. Fue impresionante ver y considerar toda la historia posible que comparten y contienen estos restos y espectáculos en esta ciudad que presenta una cultura cosmopolita y tan universal como única.

Hay una frase en un libro religioso que leí que dijo que todo lo que estaba escrito en tal libro representaba solo una pequeña medida de todo el conocimiento concerniente a ellos, para que sus descendientes sepan algo que tiene que ver con sus antepasados. De todo lo que sabemos del pasado, ni una centésima parte entendemos de todo lo que ocurrió en culturas y pueblos anteriores. Así es como me sentí al contemplar lo que sabemos y no sabemos de la historia de México que está escrito, y ausente, de sus libros.

Poster for Trayectorias paralelas / Parallel trajectories. Artist's books and artisan and independent publishers at the National Library of Mexico. The exhibition is open to the public from February 24 to May 26, 2023.[1]

Mientras ahí, como detallé en la entrada del blog anterior, pude visitar una exhibición de libros de arte en la biblioteca nacional en el campus de UNAM. Luego presenté una lista de editoriales que encontré ahí. Para continuar, quisiera hablar de algunos detalles que pude encontrar en esta exhibición.

Una cosa interesante que surge de hablar del género de libro de arte en castellano/español es que el término artist book tiene dos equivalentes en castellano, el uno libro de arte y el otro libro de artista. En castellano no hay necesidad de debate sobre dónde poner el apostrofe en su ortografía porque la pregunta no se trata de quien hizo el libro, sino de cantidad y género en la gramática castellana/española.

Octavio Paz. Marcel Duchamp O El Castillo de la Pureza (Marcel Duchamp Or The Castle of Purity). 1968.

Unas obras sorprendentes que incluyeron en la exhibición fueron: Un libro del autor mexicano Octavio Paz (1914 – 1998) que se trata de la obra de Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968) de 1968. Estoy esperando poder acceder a una copia para aprender más de ella.

Octavio Paz y Vicente Rojo. Discos Visuales (Visual Discs). 1968.

Vicente Serrano y Vicente Rojo. Prosa del Popocatépetl (Popocatépetl Prose) 2003.

Otras sorpresas fueron dos libros creados por colaboración entre el pintor español-mexicano Vicente Rojo (1932 – 2021) con Octavio Paz de 1968 y con el poeta mexicano Vicente Serrano (n. 1949) de 2003.

Por supuesto, con tan solo estar ahí un puñado de días no pude profundizar mucho en el asunto de la historia de estas obras. Eso entendido, quisiera relatar algunas cosas que me resultaron fascinantes de esta exhibición.

Fechas

Las obras de esta exhibición incluyen un amplio rango de fechas, desde 1792 hasta 2023, con la mayoría creada desde 2016, la mayoría de las cuales eran de 2022. Por si acaso Uds. no supieran, la primera imprenta europeo en las américas estuvo fundada en la Ciudad de México en 1539. También, hay una historia aún más larga antes de eso, que incluye la creación conocida, y desconocida, de códices creados por las culturas anteriores al encuentro europeo con las culturas de México y la América Central. Esta larga historia de la elaboración de libros en las Américas representa una necesidad paralela al desarrollo histórico de la información portátil por todo el mundo.

Diversidad

A pesar de que la exhibición está en la capital nacional de México, hay obras de todo el país y hasta de artistas de libro de otros países, como Venezuela, quienes ya viven en México.

Cuestiones estéticas

En los textos presentados en los 4 afiches grandes en las paredes de la exhibición los organizadores de esta muestra hablan de los libros de artista como “extensión … de la memoria.” Hablan de cómo el libro, por medio del arte nuevo de hacer libros, ahora incluye “experimentar con otras estructuras que producen distintas modalidades de lectura: cajas, biombos, pop-ups, carruseles.” Incluso habla del uso de “diversas prácticas artísticas, como la pintura, el grabado, la fotografía, la escultura” y de “alejarse de las lógicas de producción y distribución comerciales, con lo que se abre nuevos caminos.” También habla de “editoriales artesanales e independientes” y la gran “variedad de formas, materiales, formatos y estructuras que el objeto libro ha tenido tanto en el presente como a lo largo de su historia.” Esta exhibición presenta “ejemplares históricos” y “el resto de la historia del libro” [2] en diálogo paralelo. Estas cuestiones clásicas de la producción y teoría de los libros de arte son de gran importancia no solo en México sino por todo el mundo. Todavía tenemos que reconocer que la producción del libro de artista y su interpretación y reinterpretación es una práctica tan universal como la de leer, desear saber y aprender. No hay fronteras ni límites en tal búsqueda.

¡Adelante!

Giovine, et al. “Presentación (Presentation).” afiche de la exposición Trayectorias Paralelas, 2023.

Giovine, et al. “Editoriales artesanales e independientes (Artisan and Independent Publishers).” afiche de la exposición Trayectorias Paralelas, 2023.

Giovine, et al. “Libros de artista del MUAC (Artist Books at the University Museum of Contemporary Art).” afiche de la exposición Trayectorias Paralelas, 2023.

Giovine, et al. “Horizontes infinitos para la creatividad (Infinite Horizons of Creativity).” afiche de la exposición Trayectorias Paralelas, 2023.

Recently I was in Mexico City. While I was there, I saw many things that I had desired to see for a long time, including the Aztec Sun Stone and the Monumental Cuatlicue, Olmec monumental heads, the Chapultepec Castle, murals done by the three great Mexican muralists, Orozco, Siquieros, y Rivera, the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and the Mexican Folk Ballet in the Palace of Fine Arts. It was impressive to see and contemplate all the history shared and embodied by these artifacts, art works, and spectacles contained in this cosmopolitan cultural center that is as universal as it is unique.

There is a phrase in a religious book that I read that says that everything that was written in that book represents only a small measure of all the knowledge concerning the culture that made the book, so that their descendants would know something that has to do with their ancestors. Of all that is known of the past, we cannot understand even a hundredth part of everything that happened among any previous culture and its people. That is how I felt contemplating what we know and don’t know about the history of Mexico that is both contained, and absent, from its books.

While I was there, as I described in the previous blog post, I was able to visit an artist book exhibit at the national library on the campus of UNAM. I then included a list of publishers that I found there. To continue, I would like to talk about some details that stood out to me from that exhibition.

One interesting thing that arises from talking about the artist book genre in Spanish is that the term artist book has a primary equivalent in Spanish, libro de artista (artist book). In Spanish there is no need for a debate about where to put an apostrophe in spelling the term because the question is not one about who made the book, but about quantity and gender in Spanish grammar.

Some surprising works that were included in this exhibition were: A book by the Mexican author Octavio Paz (1914 - 1998) that is about the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968) from 1968. I am currently waiting to get access to a copy to learn more about it.

Some other surprises were two books created in collaboration by the Spanish-Mexican painter Vicente Rojo (1932 - 2021) with Octavio Paz from 1968 and another work by Rojo with the Mexican poet Vicente Serrano (b. 1949) from 2003.

Of course, because I was only there a handful of days I did not have time for any deep research into the history of these works. That said, I would like to share some other things that I found fascinating about this exhibition.

Dates

The works in this exhibition include a broad range of dates, from 1792 until 2023, with the majority of them created since 2016, the majority of which were from 2022. Just in case you did not know, the first European printing press in the Americas was established in Mexico City in 1539. There is also an even longer history before that, that includes the creation of known, and unknown, codices created by the pre-contact cultures of Mexico and Central America. This long history of book creation in the Americas presents a parallel historic need for the development of portable information all over the globe.

Diversity

Despite the fact that the exhibition is in the national capital of Mexico, there are works from all over the country and even book artists from other countries, like Venezuela, who now live in Mexico.

Aesthetic Questions

In the texts presented on the 4 large posters on the walls of the exhibition, the organizers of the show talk about artist books as an “extension … of memory.” They talk about how the book, through the new art of making books, now includes “experimenting with other structures that produce different reading modalities: boxes, screens, pop-ups, carousels.” They even talk about the use of “various artistic practices, such as painting, engraving, photography, sculpture” and “Moving away from the logic of commercial production and distribution, thus opening up new paths.” They also address “artisanal and independent publishers” and the great “variety of shapes, materials, formats, and structures that the book object has had both in the present and throughout its history.” This exhibition presents “historical works” and “the rest of the history of the book” [2] as parallel dialogues. These classic questions of the production and theory of artist books are of great importance, not only in Mexico but throughout the world. We still have to recognize that the creation of the artist book and its interpretation, and reinterpretation, is as universal a practice as reading, seeking knowledge, and learning. There are no borders or limits in such a quest.

¡Adelante!

Obras citadas/Works cited:

[1] Exposición: “Trayectorias paralelas. Libros de artista y de editoriales artesanales e independientes en la Biblioteca Nacional de México.”Accessed May 9, 2023. https://www.iib.unam.mx/index.php/instituto-de-investigaciones-bibliograficas/difusion-y-docencia/exposiciones/888-exposicion-trayectorias-paralelas-libros-de-artista-y-de-editoriales-artesanales-e-independientes-en-la-biblioteca-nacional-de-mexico

[2] Giovine, María Andrea, Alejandra Hurtado, Cuauhtémoc Padilla, Martha Romero, y Laura Elisa Viscaíno. “Presentacion.” afiche de la exposición Trayectorias paralelas. Libros de artista y de editoriales artesanales e independientes en la Biblioteca Nacional de México, 2023.

Peter Tanner is an Associate Instructor in Spanish at the University of Utah and Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art. He has a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, an MA in Latin American Art History, and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

UNA EXCURSIÓN A CDMX / AN EXCURSION TO MEXICO CITY // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT

Durante la semana del 17 de abril tuve la oportunidad de viajar por primera vez a la Ciudad de México (CDMX) para presentar en la conferencia de Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA). Había viajado antes a otras ciudades de México como turista, pero nunca había tenido la oportunidad de conocer a la CDMX. Luego de estar ahí por una semana entendí como fue que los surrealistas se enamoraron tanto de ella. Hay tantas cosas únicas en toda esa ciudad que por fin entendí el gran sentido de orgullo y amor que tienen mis colegas y amigos mexicanos por su país. Por cierto, hay cosas malas y buenas en todo parte, y no estoy diciendo que CDMX es lo mejor de todas las ciudades, sino que es una ciudad fascinante, y que al pasear y ver la ciudad la palabra que me salió de la boca con más frecuencia fue “¡fenomenal!”

Mientras que estaba ahí pude ver a cienes de libros de arte, y conocer a varios artistas del libro. Pues, con esta entrada del blog quiero compartir algunos datos que conseguí por ahí.

Es libro de arte esta vivo y se esta iterando de muy distintos indoles por todo México y todo el continente americano.

Aquí les presento una lista de varios editoriales de las cuales aprendí en tan solo una semana en CDMX. Espero que les sea útil.

+++++

During the week of the 17^th of April, I had the opportunity to travel for the first time to Mexico City in order to present at the conference of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA). I had traveled to other cities in Mexico as a tourist, but never had had the chance to get to know CDMX. After being there for a week I understood how it was that the Surrealists fell in love with it. There are so many unique things all over that city that I finally also understood the intense pride and love that my Mexican friends and colleagues have for their country. Of course, there are bad and good things everywhere, and I am not saying that CDMX is the absolute best of all cities, but that it is a fascinating city, and that while I walked around and saw the city one word frequently kept popping out of my mouth, “¡Fenomenal!” which can be translated to English as amazing, great, fantastic, phenomenal, awesome, brilliant, and tremendous (All those meanings in one word, “¡Fenomenal!”).

While I was there, I was able to see hundreds of artist books and meet various book artists. So, for this Blog entry I want to share some of the information that I acquired there.

The artist book is alive and is being created and recreated in many different ways all over Mexico and the entire American continent.

Here is a list of the various publishing houses that I found out about in only a week in CDMX. I hope it is useful to you all.

Lista de editoriales / List of publishers

Hydra + Fotografia
Tampico 33
Roma Norte
CDMX
enlace@hydra.lat

Malulu Editions
malulu.com/malulueditions

Gato Negro Ediciones
Jalapa 51m 803
Roma Norte
CDMX
www.gatonegro.ninja

Ediciones Hungría
CDMX
www.edicioneshungria.com/

La Maquinucha Ediciones
Oaxaca, México
www.iago.com.mx/taller-el-alacran-y-la-maquinucha/

Suárez Juárez, Tania Elisa. Xanini. Oaxaca: La Maquinucha Ediciones, 2022.

La tinta del silencio
CDMX
www.latintadelsilencio.com

Niño Down Editorial
CDMX
www.facebook.com/ninodowneditorial/?locale=es_LA

https://twitter.com/down_editor?lang=en

Quadrivium Editores
Temixco, México
www.editorialquadrivium.es/nosotros.html

Ediciones Odradek
Huitzilac, México
www.facebook.com/edicionesodradek/

Vodevil Ediciones
CDMX
www.facebook.com/vodevilediciones/?locale=es_LA

Polvoh Press
Oaxaca, México
www.polvohpress.com/

La Duplicadora
CDMX
www.instagram.com/laduplicadora/?hl=en

Haz Encuadernación
CDMX
www.facebook.com/hazencuadernacion/

Petra Ediciones
Zapopan, México
www.petraediciones.com/

NO GRUPO, Artist’s Book, 1982. Impresion em ladrillo. Fondo No Grupo. Located at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), CDMX, UNAM Campus.

Ediciones Kaput Kollectif / Tramedia.
CDMX
issuu.com/edicioneskaput

Kena Kitchengs
Toluca, México
kitchengs.wordpress.com/

Editorial Cayuco
CDMX
www.instagram.com/editorialcayuco/?hl=en
editorialcayuco.mx/

Monomántico
CDMX
www.instagram.com/monomantico_design/?hl=en
www.facebook.com/monomantico/?locale=es_LA

La Cartonera
Cuernavaca, México
edicioneslacartonera.blogspot.com/

Victor Ríos. Chess-Land (2022). Litografía y huecograbado, montados en madera, piezas de ajedrez y estampado.

Peter Tanner is an Associate Instructor in Spanish at the University of Utah and Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art. He has a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, an MA in Latin American Art History, and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

LETTERPRESS IN THE STUDIO AND THE MAKERSPACE (PART 2) // Kathy Walkup and Jeff Groves

Susan Viguers — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 07:00:00 GMT

This posting is based on conversations and correspondence between Kathleen Walkup and Jeff Groves that have been edited for form, clarity, and concision. Kathy is Lovelace Family Professor Emerita at Mills College, now Northeastern University Oakland. While at Mills, Kathy inaugurated the first separate graduate degree in book art in the U.S. and later co-established the first MFA in Book Art & Creative Writing in the country. Jeff is the Louisa and Robert Miller Professor of Humanities at Harvey Mudd College, the founder of The First-Floor Press at the Claremont Colleges Library, and the inaugural faculty director of the Harvey Mudd College Makerspace.

Jeff: In our previous exchange, we suggested that studio art typically begins with concept and then moves towards technology, whereas makerspace practice often starts with technology and builds towards a project. So both the studio and makerspace environments are creative, but creativity is developed in different directions. Exceptions abound, of course! But in both environments, there are certain necessary, routine practices that artists and makers need to take seriously. Think about type distribution, for instance. In either environment, undistributed type is a tool that can’t be easily utilized without a significant investment of time by a new user. In the studio, I find it’s easy to insist on distribution–near the end of the semester I tell my students that I will check every galley in the rack, and I will not award a final grade to students who have not distributed their type. In the makerspace, though, there are no grades with which to discipline practice, and not necessarily any strong supervision of students using the letterpress station once those students have gone through a training workshop. Each time I walk by the press in the makerspace, I notice a bit more undistributed type on galleys, and so I’m working on how we can more successfully build distribution into the letterpress training and make the expectation of distribution a value in the user community.

Kathy: There is no question that, in the letterpress studio, handset metal type is the most vulnerable material. At Mills we not only withheld a final grade but put a student’s record on hold if their type was not dealt with; luckily, this rarely came up, although more than once I received a call from housekeeping to say that they had found some weird-looking letters in someone’s abandoned dorm room and wondered if they had anything to do with us. The way we were more or less able to keep the type in check was to constantly look through the galleys to make sure they were identified by type and student and then keep track of when that type was distributed. The studio manager always expected to have the studio lively with students on the very last day each semester when they could get in to deal with their type.

I once was invited to work in an academic studio where the community was allowed in one Sunday a month to print. While this was a noble gesture, it was literally impossible to work in that studio after several years of this: untied metal type spilled over on galleys, I couldn’t find two slugs that were the same length, and the collection of rare wood type was stacked in unruly piles on top of every type cabinet.

It may be that students in makerspace environments have to earn the right to use the type, which would otherwise be off limits. This might seem harsh, but we both know that a letterpress studio can become unusable in as little as six months if the type isn’t kept under strict control. Of course in studio classes, students support each other in their work. And while they rarely rat on someone whose individual studio practice is less than stellar, they do find ways to let someone know when a student is making work difficult for the others. I’m not sure how that concern for a workable collective environment translates when it comes to workshop or makerspace classes. What have you found?

Jeff: I think the answer will be found in community building. The HMC makerspace is largely student run. We have a staff manager, but beyond that we depend on more than forty student “stewards” to make the place hum. The academic literature about makerspaces suggests that having a student-run shop, instead of depending primarily on staff members, is a potent way to create a collaborative maker community, and part of creating that community is building norms or expectations for behavior. We do that through our student-developed policies and training programs. Within our steward workforce, we also have a group of six head stewards who work closely with the manager and me to direct the efforts of the other stewards. Training the stewards to compose and print just got underway this year, and I’m hopeful that as we begin to build some letterpress experience among the stewards, and as they in turn share that with other students through our training program, all our users will see more fully than they do now the need for proper distribution. I have great faith in our stewards. We can touch base again in a year to see how the community building is going. Beyond distribution, what other press-room practicalities do you see that might differ between studio and makerspace?

Kathy: Yes to community building! It sounds like you have found a great way to do this in the makerspace environment. In the studio environment, community is built by the instructor, of course, but also by teaching assistants. Before Mills had a grad program in book art, I developed a system for volunteer teaching assistants. These were usually students who had graduated from Mills but were sticking around the Oakland area, although in some cases I brought in students from other programs in which I taught, like Community College of San Francisco. The assistants got press and bindery access in exchange for a set number of office hours per week in which they were available to students who were currently in the classes. This was so successful that we kept up the volunteer TA program even after we had actual graduate assistants.

Speaking of graduate assistants: I had a great conversation with Rebecca Josephson, a recent graduate of the Mills MFA in Book Art who largely took over my classes when I retired. Becca has been teaching the workshop classes initiated by Northeastern University when that institution took over Mills. When she was asked to set up these courses, she initially had the same concerns about studio practicalities that you have had. What she did was, first, say no to teach one-off classes in which students would spend only one or two sessions in the studio. Instead she proposed four-session workshops in which students were given the time to develop a small project while they also learned basic studio practice in setting and distributing type, handling ink, elementary lockup, safe studio practice and, not least, press cleanup. While she was not happy to lose some semester-long classes, she did see that students were able to be excited about their projects while also learning to treat the studio with respect. What was missing, and what she particularly mourned, was the ability to have students in an open studio environment outside of class, since, in the absence of TAs, there was no one to supervise the time. And unless students can be trained to do those supervisory jobs over longer periods of time (by someone that the college is willing to pay as an instructor/supervisor) that option will most likely remain off the table. Becca has done an impressive job of making workshop classes work, and I have suggested that she might want to write a future blog post about her process.

Jeff: I appreciate Becca’s solution and that her new structure has allowed for student excitement. Perhaps the makerspace or workshop can serve as a gateway to more prolonged and rigorous studio practice? I think I’m seeing some developments in that direction with my fall enrollment. A fair number of makerspace stewards who I trained to use our letterpress station have enrolled in my for-credit course. I’m hopeful that they’ll then return to the makerspace with much more expertise and a greater sense of how to keep the whole operation running. We’ll see!

In the meantime, Kathy, we should probably stop here, but only after inserting some photos of our respective spaces! Good as always to talk to you. I hope our conversation spurs some further discussion, and I also hope to see a posting from Becca in the not-too-distant future.

The First-Floor Press at the Claremont Colleges Library.

The letterpress station in the Harvey Mudd College Makerspace.

Poster for spring 2023 workshops in the Mills letterpress studio taught by Rebecca Josephson, who designed the poster.

LETTERPRESS IN THE STUDIO AND THE MAKERSPACE (PART 1) // Kathy Walkup and Jeff Groves

Susan Viguers — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 07:00:00 GMT

Kathy: To get things started, let’s each give a little background information to establish our perspectives on our topic. Mills College, where I taught for over forty years, promoted innovation in the arts. The college did so by encouraging rigorous exploration of contemporary forms in the disciplines of music, dance, and studio art. It was in this environment that the fledgling field of book art—which didn’t have a name when I began teaching at Mills in the late 1970s—came into fruition. The program was grounded in letterpress and hand bookbinding, but intentionally moved students away from the outmoded master/apprentice approach of these traditional fields. Instead, students were encouraged to locate their own voices through self-generated projects while practicing and perfecting the craft practices of these two disciplines.

Jeff: My background is quite different from yours. By training, my field is literature, although most of my research has been in the area of American book history. I didn’t start teaching letterpress until the last third of my career. Harvey Mudd College, where I’ve taught for thirty-five years, is a science and engineering school where students are required to take a quarter of their coursework in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Hands-on learning is common across the curriculum, including in the letterpress workshop I teach every semester and in the work that students do in the college’s new makerspace. While I see my studio and the makerspace as different in many ways, they both foster creativity in my students. Can you say a bit more about what makes a studio work well, in your experience?

Kathy: Good studio programs are built on a framework of conceptual practice. Students learn to build their art on the solid ground of a well-thought concept, and they learn to develop their craft so that those ideas can be realized in the strongest possible way. In the process, students learn good studio practice: how to use and, just as importantly, care for the equipment, how to evaluate materials for their projects, how to function in a shared studio space, how to respect that space and the people who use it with them.

Jeff: Yeah, good studio practice–learning how to use the equipment, thinking about materials, leaving the space in good working order for the next user–is really important to me, and in my workshop I try to drill all those things into my students over the course of the semester. Good makerspace practice, however, tends to be more experimental, and I’d say it generally works the other way around–from learning the technology to developing an idea of what you might do with it. I’ve built a small letterpress facility into the makerspace, and students are very interested in learning how to work in it, but they tend to do so based on a training system that utilizes other already-trained students as instructors. The users seem less interested in the conceptual side of what they produce, at least initially, and more interested in seeing what the technology can do. In that sense, “makers” are not conceptual artists, really, but they still manage to unleash their own creativity. That they are not instructed in a class setting over the course of a semester does create some interesting challenges to maintaining the letterpress facility.

Kathy: What you are describing is much more in line with workshop teaching, at least in the sense that workshop students (and this is highly generalized) tend to be less interested in concept. In book art workshops, students are very often focused on the level of craft they can achieve, which can come at the expense of a developed idea. They want a product to take home. What I’m seeing now in academic programs is a tendency toward more workshop-type classes, either credit-bearing or extracurricular. These short-term classes might be instructor or institutionally driven, and can result in satisfying products, but often at the expense of process-driven work that takes time but can lead to serious exploration and innovation. For instance, I would give my grad students short-term proof-of-concept projects in their grad seminars. The idea wasn’t for them to come up with finished work; instead, they focused on the conceptual nature of the assignment and developed quick prototypes with little or no craft focus. By removing the pressure of perfected work, the students had space to explore purer forms of their ideas, based on the concepts I set forth.

Jeff: One of the recent innovations I appreciate in my printing course is that students are now utilizing the technologies of the makerspace to supplement the technologies of the press room. They’re creating printable surfaces with laser cutters, water-jet cutters, and 3D printers, then using those contemporary products on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century presses in conjunction with hand-set type. There again, though, I’d say the impulse is somewhat counter to the studio practice you describe. They experiment with the technologies, and then come up with an idea they can develop over the course of the semester. Of course, there’s some sense of what they’d like to do that precedes the experimentation, but that idea is rarely fleshed out before learning the makerspace equipment.

This project-level merging of the press room and the makerspace, though, creates some challenges for the discipline of the medium, such as proper use of tools, learning practical methods with the equipment, estimating the difficulty of a project, or even efficiently moving through the routine distribution of type. I’m curious about whether there are similar problems in your studio experience, but perhaps that’s the conversation for our next installment!

Kathy: Letterpress is of course relief printmaking. One of the exciting developments is the increasing adaptation of various relief modes (think Legos, for example) to the medium. And students should experiment with expanding the technology when they have the opportunity and the tools. What you describe here does, however, also have some affinity with a very common mode of book art instruction, which is to teach a structure and then have students pour content into that structure. My own instruction in book art classes tended toward teaching basic structures as tools that students could use in the development of their ideas, while encouraging them to use these basic structures as armatures for further experimentation rather than as fixed practices. And yes, I agree we should next explore specific issues around workshop-type classes when it comes to the letterpress studio. As you say, next installment!

CONSIDERING EVERYTHING // Beth Sheeham

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 07:00:00 GMT

When I was in undergrad (Memphis College of Art, R.I.P.) we had a fantastic foundations class called Idea, Process, and Criticism (IPC). I hated every minute of it because it felt like the goal of the class was to show us just how depthless, expected, and trite all of our ideas were. So many of us were trying to make projects about giant topics like climate change and body image and our own voices were hardly in the work. That class, along with the rest of my education at MCA, was an important catalyst for changing my approach to idea generation and helped me become more confident in my decisions as an artist. But even with the boom of accessible online learning spurred by the pandemic, I still find myself wishing that the equivalent experience existed in the non-art-school environment.

There are plenty of assumptions about what being an artist means or what it looks like and most of those assumptions are manifestations of the (ridiculous) idea that “creativity can’t be taught.” In this brief article, I want to go back to the beginning of the art making process: the ideas; and I want to start a conversation about methods, tools, and teachings for idea generation that lead to deeper and more nuanced artworks.

When you are first starting anything, it can feel like you are floundering - never quite sure if you’re going about things in the best way and not sure if you know all the “rules.” This can be especially true with more abstract processes like idea generation. In that first semester of undergrad, I knew (in theory) that art could be about anything but through the assignments and discussions in IPC, I had to confront my preconceived notions regarding what I unconsciously thought art should look like, what it should be about, and what my role was as an artist - all of which were caricatures of the truth.

When you finally believe that your work can be about anything, where do you start? How do you continue thinking about ideas and at what point do you start making? There are so many things to consider:

What topics are you interested in?
What is the goal of your work?
Why does this work have to be an art piece?
Who is your audience?
What do you have to say that differs from what others have said?
How does your work fit into a larger context?
How can aesthetics/processes/materials aid your ideas?
How do you want your work to be experienced?
What do you want audiences to take away from your work?

And so much more. It’s a lot. But you have to eat an elephant one bite at a time.

I start by asking myself what I’m interested in. You’ll notice I did not say “what do I want to make work about” because that is already jumping too far ahead. What topics do you actively seek out more information about; if you had to talk about a topic for hours, what would that topic be; is there a topic you find yourself perking up for if you overhear others discussing it? My answer to various forms of that questionwould probably be: memory, the function of time, sci-fi and speculative fiction, perception and reality, LGBTQIA+ stories, multiple universe theories and quantum physics, relative truths, dinosaurs, how memories inform our identities, and cryptids. (Honestly, sometimes it’s also helpful to make a list of things you are not interested in.) All of those topics are still huge though, so let’s narrow the focus.

What’s the goal of your work? I think a lot of artists think their work has to do something big and important which is why many of us in IPC immediately tried to make work that confronted huge issues. But one artwork can’t possibly solve such large problems and expecting your work to do so isn’t fair to the work, nor is it fair to the topic. So what is your goal for this one artwork? Why do you want to make this piece? Along those lines, beginning to answer that question can also help you start to think through how the work will manifest. It’s a slow process to work your way through continuously asking questions about your artwork before you begin creating, but I feel like the quality and effectiveness of artwork raises with each additional consideration.

Note: All images are of my studio.

TROPIC BOUND: HOW LOCATION CHANGES BOOK ARTS // Beth Sheehan

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 08:30:00 GMT

February 16th-19th, 2023 was the inaugural Tropic Bound fair and symposium: the first international biennial artist book fair set in Miami, Florida. As with many things, the pandemic changed the original timeline for Tropic Bound, causing the fair to be years in the making but therefore also highly anticipated. As I walked around the fair, elated to finally be amongst all of those incredible books and book-lovers, I found myself thinking about the way location (and the slightly more abstract notion of place) impacts the way one experiences artist books and the like.

Michele Burgess, Director of Brighton Press, showing her artist book The Blood Book

Location and place play a large role in the way something is contextualized, affecting the attitude people approach something with, the connections and associations people make with something, and the reception of that thing. The contextualization of artist books is mused over relatively often within the community, although mostly in regard to situating book arts among fine art or craft, where those lines should blur, and where distinction and labels are beneficial. But what about place?

How does a place like an artist book fair contextualize the artworks present in a way that a place like the Institute of Contemporary Art (located only a block from where Tropic Bound was) doesn’t? How do fellow exhibitors contextualize the work of other exhibitors at a fair? How does the city the work is seen in contextualize the work itself?

Aldeide Delgado, founder & director of Women Photographers International Archive, discussing works with Tayina Deravile

With the inundation of digital spaces becoming the new Normal during the pandemic, the general sense of place seemed to blur for everyone as events fluctuated from being solely location-dependent in-person events to accessible regardless of their base location through digital space, then occasionally utilizing a hybrid model and finally, now, often back to location-specific in-person events.

Naturally, seeing the work over the backdrop of Miami adds a different flavor than one would experience in a different location and Tropic Bound took place within Paradise Plaza in Miami’s Design District, surrounded by stores including Gucci, Louboutin, Balenciaga, and Givenchy. This may seem like a somewhat comical pairing when considering the differing price tags, but Miami’s Design District embraces contemporary fine art, both on the streets and within those luxury stores in a way that high-end retail districts in other cities do not. Furthermore, Miami’s Design District is situated just north of the Wynwood district: an arts district known for its colorful street art, skate punk aesthetics, and funky nightlife. Because of the nature of Miami as a place, the eclectic collection of the sixty-three exhibitors at the fair felt especially harmonious, with each table displaying an excellent range of niches within the book arts community that mimicked the ranges within the city. Exhibitors showed all manner of books: from chapbooks to fine press books, movable books, zines, portfolios, art objects, tools, and so much more – each feeling equally at home at Tropic Bound.

Dale Zine and O, Miami exhibitor tables

Furthermore, the influences present from the base locations of the exhibitors themselves added to the contextualization of the works. With Miami’s proximity to Central and South America, the fair included quite a few exhibitors from Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile as well as featuring eight exhibitors from Florida itself. Additionally, the fair’s line-up seemed to hint at its East-Coast accessibility with the bulk of exhibitors coming from the Northeast, although there was still moderate representation from other locations as well. With this unique group dynamic, I felt like I noticed commonalities among areas of the book arts community that I would not have noticed among a different group of exhibitors. As I circled the fair, I couldn’t help but relate the works I saw on one table to the works on several others: noticing common themes within the topics contemporary makers are exploring in their projects, discovering similarities such as more makers using traditional print techniques, or spotting ways certain books changed the way I interpreted others.

Sarah Horowitz with Two Ponds Press showing her book titled Footprints

Tropic Bound left me inspired by everyone’s creativity, care, and passion for artist books and their tangents and I am excited to see how this new avenue for community continues to expand connections in its next iteration in 2025.

BOOK THOUGHTS // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 08:00:00 GMT

I received a beautiful handmade book for Christmas from my wife. It was a book that she made at a book making activity at the library where she works. I love this book. Beyond the sentimental reason that my wife knows me enough to give me something that I think is beautiful, I think that the craft of this simple book is lovely.

The book I received for Christmas 2022.

I love the touch and smell of the suede leather cover. I love the beautiful long stitch cover binding. I love the saddle stitch bound quires. I love the tooth of the paper, though I cannot see a watermark on it to tell what specific kind of paper it is. This book, like most handmade books, is a smorgasbord of sensual stimuli. I enjoy this personal book so much that I have no idea what to do with it. I do not want to disturb its pristine state. I could use it for a journal, but I already have one. I could use it for notes, but notes end up getting thrown away eventually. I could use it as a sketchbook, but then it will get dirty!

I never had these sorts of conundrums about my sketch and note books as an undergraduate in art school. At that time the use of materials was about discovery, exploration and mastery of process through making mistakes and, as a result, learning what works and doesn’t.

The personal nature of this gift, and my own pondering about what to do with it, has prompted me to muse upon what is a book's purpose? Is it there to be beautiful or to be used? Or is any use of a book beautiful?

When I read books that are works of literature or critical theory, I underline them copiously. When I am critically examining artist books and book works, I take pictures of them, capturing them from every angle and transcribing any text that is present. Then, I print out the text and images and underline salient points, circle important visual details, so that when I write about them, I can highlight what from my perspective are the most important portions of the work in question. The books and printed-out iterations of artist books that I read and evaluate look like coloring books when I am done.

Interacting with books, interacting with book art, interacting with information in books, either visual or textual, is a physical and intellectual dance for me. Reading books, experiencing artist books and book art satisfy a need to connect both visual and literary aesthetic threads together. The connection between the two leads to the contemplation of ideas about how they connect and disconnect the visual and the textual. Therein lies a problem for me.

I am usually reading multiple books and articles at the same time. Recently I have been reading about the historic vanguard/avant-garde in Latin America and how artists created networks of ideas between art theories and individuals all over the Americas and Europe. I have also been reading manifestos of publishing that relate to artist book production across the globe. I also frequently return to the prose and poetry of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who regularly examines the importance of books and writing. I recently started reading Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1986) that addresses the dichotomy of high-art and mass culture and how the two have been separated based upon a question of quality. In his introduction Huyssen states, “to reduce all cultural criticism to the problem of quality is a symptom of the anxiety of contamination. … The boundaries between high art and mass culture have become increasingly blurred, and we should begin to see that process as one of opportunity rather than lamenting loss of quality and failure of nerve. … Neither postmodern pastiche nor the neoconservative restoration of high culture has won the day.” [1]

The conflation of these theories and histories and their application to artist books and the book arts all rolling around in my mind have produced the same questions as the beautiful but utilitarian book that I received for Christmas: Do I want to get these theories dirty in the liminal world between literature and visual culture? The personal nature of my reading of such theories and ideas causes me to ponder: What is the purpose of theory? Is it there to be beautiful or to be used? Or does any use of theory produce a beautiful, or at least mildly innovative, result?

All of this rumination has resulted in my desire to ask you the reader, the book arts practitioner, the book arts theorist, members of CBAA, what theories are you talking about? What is fascinating to you right now? The readership of this blog represents a broad spectrum of people interested in the book arts that extends from the novice to the most skilled practitioners. I am hoping to hear some of your interesting ideas.

Some topics I expect to see are the following:

The importance of the haptic nature of the book.
Personal rituals/processes/spiritual approaches to book creation.
Book markets, pricing, marketing, and distribution.
Representation and spaces for works from marginalized peoples and cultures.
Books as interdisciplinary frameworks.
Materials, and what they represent as physical objects that reference different cultures and cultural printing practices.
Structural analysis of the book.
Artist books and the book as alternative mise-en-scene.
Appropriation as practice.
Conceptual art and writing.
Reading and readership.
Self-publishing.
Feminism.
Queer identities.
Social context, publishing, and public space.
Tackling western-centrism (overcoming anxieties of contamination).
Corrupted and not-as-corrupted economies.
Print-on-demand (POD).
Internet, digital and post-digital publishing.
Poetics of the everyday.
Material conditions of book production.

Other ideas that you have, which have not been touched upon above.

Honestly the only thing I would be disappointed with would be if no one comments at all.

Still further, if you have an idea that requires an extended forum for its elaboration, as editor of CBAA’s journal Openings: Studies in Book Art, I think I can find a place for your article.

[1] Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. 1986. pp. ix and xii.

Peter Tanner is an Associate Instructor in Spanish at the University of Utah and Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art. He has a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, an MA in Latin American Art History, and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: ON THE EXACTITUDE OF SIMULACRA // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 08:00:00 GMT

In a New York Times opinion piece from January 15^th, 2023 [1], Frank Pavich presents gorgeous images from “Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1976 version of ‘Tron.’” [2] The images in the article are beautiful vintage stills from the incomplete circa 1970’s film. The catch is, these stills do not come from an incomplete film. Instead, they were generated by an A.I. program called Midjourney. The A.I. images were easily created:

“A simple prompt is all it took. A few words – in this case, slight variations on “production still from 1976 of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tron” – followed by under a minute of waiting, and a computer deep in the racks of a data center somewhere, sifting through the numbers encoded into its memory banks associated with the words “Tron” and “Jodorowsky.”

“It has scanned the collected works of thousands upon thousands of photographers, painters and cinematographers. It has a deep library of styles and facility with all kinds of image-making techniques at its digital fingertips.” [3]

This description highlights the importance of the quality and quantity of metadata that connects subjects across collections between “photographers, painters and cinematographers.” These descriptive textual connections provide the foundation for a network of signification. This concatenation of text is translated by the A.I. into works of visual art that appear authentic, at least relative to the searched-for subjects and terms. Pavich rightly questions:

“To what extent do these rapidly generated images contain creativity? And from what source is that creativity emerging? Has Alejandro been robbed? Is the training of the A.I. model the greatest art heist in history? How much of art-making is theft, anyway?

“What will it mean when directors, concept artists and film students can see with their imaginations, when they can paint using all the digitally archived visual material of human civilization? When our culture starts to be influenced by scenes, sets and images from old films that never existed or that haven’t yet even been imagined?” [4]

What impact can this type of technology have upon the book arts? Artists, photographers, book artists and others create new and fascinating works. All artists already create using portions of the archived cultural materials of human civilization. And so it is incredible to imagine how book arts could move forward in new and creative directions if they were based upon art and images from the history of art that never existed, but which appears plausible enough that it should be incorporated with the archive. In Jean Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra” (1981) he begins by talking about what he considers “the finest allegory of simulation: the short story by Jorge Luis Borges titled “Del rigor en la ciencia” or On the Rigor of Science (1960) [5]. This short story tells how in a lost empire there were cartographers that were so precise that the map of a province was the size of a city, and the map of an empire was the size of a province. Eventually the cartographers, unsatisfied with these previous disproportionate maps, created a map of the empire that was the exact dimension of the empire and coincided exactly, point by point, with the empire itself. As the empire declined, it witnessed “the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the desert.” [6] Baudrillard then points out that:

“Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the [Borgesian] fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours.” [7]

The book, and by association book arts, are the most portable, and arguably the most permanent, repository of human experience and knowledge. While books are perceived as preserving territories of referential being, artist books and the book arts have manipulated, and will continue to manipulate the “referential being or substance” of all history. However, as the metanarratives that define “referential being or substance” are pushed aside by all forms of art, there are many new permutations that can, and will, occur. Using the book as the locus of physical creation, like the map of the cartographers, book artists are creating “the map that precedes the territory.” The simulation mirrors a reality that was not, but that could have been.

“It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance.” [8]

The creation of a movie that was fabricated by an A.I. able to extrapolate what things could have been and provide a hyperreal simulacrum of what it can interpolate based upon shreds of metadata that represent the last vestiges of the map presents a reason why the book arts are so important today. They can take the cast-off metanarratives and ideologies that propose absurdities regarding what could happen, but probably should not, and promote a new way of looking at the world that could employ the irrational in order to alter our perception of the past, and thus reconstitute what it means to live in the present. Imagine as a project, for example, the fabrication of a simulated hyperreal history book, which employs near authentic facsimile images of history to recreate and alter history from what it was to what it could have been. This represents both an incredible tool for education as well as indoctrination. It’s enough to give the cartographers the willies.

[1] Pavich, Frank. "This Film does Not Exist: [Opinion]." New York Times, Jan 15, 2023, Late Edition (East Coast). https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/13/opinion/jodorowsky-dune-ai-tron.html?searchResultPosition=1. [2, 3, 4] Ibid.

[5] Borges, Jorge Luis, “El hacedor” (1960), from Jorge Luis Borges. Jorge Luis Borges: Obras completas. Tomo 2. Emecé Editorial, 2005. p. 241.

[6] Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. 1994. p. 1. [7] Ibid. [8] Ibid., p.2]

PHILIP GUSTON'S BOOKS // Emily Tipps

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 08:00:00 GMT

Hanging on my office wall is a poster of Philip Guston’s “Book” (1968). In it, an open book floats amid broad, lively strokes of gray gouache. Rows of vertical tick marks line the book’s facing pages.

Book, 1968; Gouache on panel; 30 x 32 in.; Promised gift of Musa Guston Mayer to The Metropolitan Museum of Art

I purchased the print at the Tate Modern gift shop in 1998 as an undergraduate student with chaotic interests in language and visual arts. I was not at all familiar with Guston’s work and had not seen the painting in the flesh, but even in its filtered state of reproduction the image immediately resonated. I didn’t question this feeling; instead I snatched up the print like one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets. Over the years, it has hung in dorm rooms and apartments and now in my office. I have carried it as a personal emblem and even imagined it as a portent of my life’s trajectory. Clearly it is easy to get mystical about this image. But I am less susceptible to magic and more inclined to dissection these days, so What is it about this picture of a book?

Of course this is not Guston’s only picture of a book. When he eschewed abstraction for figuration (or “things”) in the 1960s, he painted dozens of them. Many stand alone as in the piece described above. Occasionally a finger touches or points toward the book, indicating its tangibility. In later, more complex canvases, books appear as still life elements and props. The book is only one of many recurring image-objects in Guston’s work, and seems to be among the less discussed. Certainly a simple book is less unsettling than a pile of shoes, not so visceral as a tangle of hairy knees or giant unblinking eye, and certainly not as disturbing as hooded Klan figures smoking cigars, driving cars, or painting canvases.

Untitled, 1969; Acrylic on panel; 30 x 32 in.; Private Collection

But Guston’s books warrant a closer look. While potentially neutral at first glance, amid his other preferred talismans the book can take on a sinister aspect (hateful rhetoric, violence-inspiring dogma). Or it can be read as a beacon or touchstone amid the debris of societal trauma and personal pain: a means of escape, connection, or even the possibility of enlightenment. Formally, Guston teases out the visual relationship between books and other objects in his canon, like shoes and buildings, making visual metaphors that work in multiple directions. Removed from its relational context, the floating book might connote any of these things and more; it reflects the viewer.

The illegible symbols in Guston’s books imply meaning, and can mean diversely. The capacious quality of the symbol of the book (in Guston’s works specifically, and in general) is part of its attraction as an artistic medium. The term “blank canvas” alludes to a starting place of pure potential; “the book” as a starting point might be figured as rife with the practical and the magical. Concretely, the book is a tool of communication, which affords artists opportunities for pacing, sequence, and tactility, as well as material and compositional intention. But to begin with the book is to start with a powerful signifier—one that can hide in plain sight, on a table, say, or appear to vibrate out of the second dimension, like that poster on my wall.

Painter's Table, 1973; Oil on canvas ; 77¼ x 90¼ in.; The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C

Sources:

Tallman, Susan. "Philip Guston's Discomfort Zone." The New York Review of Books 68.1 (2021): 12. Web.

The Guston Foundation: https://www.gustoncrllc.org/home

Emily Tipps is Associate Librarian, Instructor, and Program Manager at the University of Utah’s Book Arts Program, and the owner/operator of High5 Press.

MICHAEL HAMPTON'S UNSELFMARKED // Kathy Walkup

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 08:00:00 GMT

In Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists’ book, Michael Hampton’s goal is to shift the grounds on which scholars seek to answer that perennially pesky question, “What is an artist’s book?” In a gray-papered and un-illustrated 26-page (numbered A-Z) Exposé bound into the middle of Unshelfmarked, Hampton files the artist’s book in an “ecosystem” that ranges from tramp art to pooh sticks via hopscotch, sewing bees, football fanzines and “rubbish of every kind.”

Hampton uses Germano Celant’s Book as Artwork 1960/1972 as his initial frame of reference. He has worked with this catalogue previously; in 2011 he published a manifesto, THEARTISTSBOOKANEWHISTORY, that also referenced Celant. Hampton’s manifesto forms the basis of this current longer work. In both, Hampton takes fundamental exception to the notion that the first true artists’ books were made by William Blake. Instead, he offers several examples of medieval manuscripts as truer harbingers. Leaving aside the obvious differences between Blake’s completely self-generated work and that of the scribes who wrote other people’s words in the psalters and Bibles they made beautiful, the idea that an enormous range of historical work feeds into the current notion of what constitutes artists’ books is compelling, if not exactly new.

Hampton contrasts his broader definition with that of the “informal guild” of authors who have written about artists’ books. Hampton’s list represents an accurate assessment of recent writing on the medium. It includes among others Lucy Lippard, Clive Phillpot and Anne Mœglin-Delcroix. Not all of the writers on Hampton’s list, however, embrace a unifying definition: Johanna Drucker, for instance, titled her 1995 book The Century of Artists’ Books as an intentional challenge to Riva Castleman’s earlier catalogue of livres d’artistes, A Century of Artists’ Books.

In 1978 Joan Hugo, who formed her ideas about the book’s possibilities while working as a librarian at MOMA, the New York Public Library, and the Sorbonne before landing at a small art college in Los Angeles in 1957, curated the first of two of the most influential early exhibitions that envisioned what the artist’s book could become. Hugo stated that before printing all books were made by artists, and later wrote, “. . . one has only to recall of the history of the book from painted stones and cylinder seals to Medieval jeweled covers and Russian Futurist books on wallpaper, to see how flexible these limits [of artists’ books] actually are.”

Hampton’s fifty examples of artists’ books fit within Hugo’s parameters and would generally receive no argument from the authors in his “guild.” His canon includes Ed Ruscha, Dieter Roth, Marcel Broodthaers, Ronald King, and the Bechers. Also included are the Lindisfarne Gospels, a Vesalius anatomy, an advertising volvelle from the 1940s and a stack of Charles Babbage’s punch cards. This broad inclusiveness underpins much contemporary understanding of the medium while helping to create barriers to a formal definition of the form and even to a discussion about whether artists’ books belong in the gallery or the library. Hampton might perhaps say neither.

Michael Hampton. Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists’ book. Axminster, Devon: Uniformbooks, 2015. 174 p. ill. ISBN 978-1-910010-06-8. £12.

Kathleen Walkup is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she taught studio, history, and theory classes in book art for 40 years. Her course What We Printed: The history of women & printing will be offered through California Rare Book School in July 2023. She is a founding director of College Book Art Association.

WHY MAKING MIGHT MATTER // Kathy Walkup

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 08:00:00 GMT

This post is adapted from an essay I wrote for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) newsletter in 2003. I present this as some preliminary groundwork about the potential tension between teaching and learning in academic book art studios and in maker spaces. Professor Jeffrey Groves, Harvey Mudd College, and I will explore this topic here in Spring, 2023.

Several years ago I was a student in a bibliographic seminar with a renowned scholar. As a practitioner of bookmaking, I found myself more and more concerned as the seminar progressed at the sheer volume of misleading or simply incorrect information that the scholar was passing on to the students. There were two of us in the seminar with extensive hands-on experience (my specific production knowledge is with letterpress printing, although I was also employed in the offset trade for several years). We spent our evenings chuckling over the unlikely production scenarios being discussed during the day. We also wished that the scholar could allow for correction and discussion in class, but it was not that kind of seminar. Finally, I began to wonder if in fact the incorrect knowledge that my fellow and sister students were absorbing even mattered very much in the long run. Wasn’t it true that the scholar had been passing on this same misleading information for years without any evident effect on either the scholar’s reputation or that of the students under the scholar’s tutelage?

Actually, I suspect that it does matter. As the book as artifact comes under closer scrutiny by historians, students, and scholars of literary criticism, an understanding of just how its component parts came together should provide greater insight into its overall material functionality. An appreciation for the basic production methods of bookmaking allows for the recognition and acknowledgement of anomalies when they appear. Similarly, research may yield odd disparities and unlikely occurrences among the textual explanations of, say, a particular printing methodology that the scholar can feel more confident in questioning if he or she has a solid baseline of practical knowledge. Curious references to unlikely production scenarios not only prompt caution with regard to the immediate source, but suggest the need to query other production-based statements the writer may be making.

Hands-on knowledge can be useful in iconographic study as well. A nineteenth century advertisement for Hoestetter’s Stomach Bitters has had a home for some time among my slides of women printers. In the foreground, a row of women are sitting on low stools at small platen presses, their backs to the viewer. Behind them, a row of men are standing, likewise turned, in front of a bank of type cabinets. From this evidence it is reasonable to assume that the seated women feed the platen presses but perform no other tasks requiring movement such as inking, lifting the forms in and out of the bed, or even removing the stacks of printed paper to the bindery, while working in this mixed-gender environment. In another image from the same time period, a single woman is shown standing at a large treadle-powered platen press. The image is on a poster advertising the Women’s Co-operative Printing Union in San Francisco. That the woman is standing is indicative of a much more interactive relationship with the machine than that of the women in the stomach bitters ad. This woman is actually a printer, with control over the same facets of the operation that the first women lacked. The researcher without first-hand printing experience might notice and comment on the disparity of these postures, but might not link the two postures to separate practical working methods and might not undertake, say, a census of employees in the print shop to determine who might be performing other work there.

Granted, iconography can be misleading. Many ads for early typesetting machinery show elegantly dressed young women sitting daintily at various Rube Goldberg-style contraptions which, according to the makers, will finally allow type to be set mechanically. More than one of these machines resembles more a home pipe organ than a piece of useable typesetting equipment. The misleading information in these ads, however, is the appearance of women as the operators. In fact, the ads suggest not that women would be operating these machines – an unlikely occurrence at that time in the face of the powerful typographers’ unions – but that the machines are so easy to operate even a woman can do it.

Mining the books themselves for their artifactual evidence is, for the maker of books, an essential component of research. The idea that microfilm or a digital surrogate could substitute for the hands-on knowledge of the artifact itself is not workable. For non-contemporary books, I want to know the condition of the type or plate from which the book was printed, the depth and evenness of the impression, the heft and opacity of the paper, the production method of any images, the quality of the binding materials and whether the book is in its original binding or, if not, when it might have been rebound. Articulating the rationale for the often crude productions of the American Colonial period, appreciating the high level of mechanical reproduction in the nineteenth century, and evaluating the reliance on hand-work in the machine-age printing of the Bauhaus are acts which the book scholar can undertake, of course, but are actions which become more viscerally understandable in the wake of actually having undertaken them.

I am not suggesting that any scholar whose interest lies within the materiality of the book would not comprehend and appreciate the same aspects of the book without practical training, nor am I suggesting that every scholar with an interest in incorporating artifactual aspects of the book into his or her research should do hands-on training. On the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt. Bibliographic presses connected to library schools, now largely made redundant, recognized the value of practice coupled with theory. Acknowledging the need to understand process as part of the scholarly training could lead, at the very least, to discussions between the scholar and the person with hands-on experience.

TEXT INTO CONTENT // Kathy Walkup

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 08:00:00 GMT

When did text become content? Using the idea of transition in book art as a presented viewpoint, one way to examine this transition is by looking at both the vocabulary of bookmaking and the language/s used in the books themselves. If we choose one set of terms, text and content, we can consider one point in time when the vocabulary of bookmaking moved from discussing the historically correct text-and-illustration axis toward referring to the various aspects of the book – words, pictures, materials, form – as its content.

This transition from text to content has its contemporary grounding in the 1970s, when the term artists’ books first came to prominence. (Stefan Klima places the first use of the term in 1973.) [1] The roots are formed in a complex web of events and movements that appropriately do not limit themselves to simpler categorizations. One avenue moves through the territory of conceptual art. This pathway led the art historian Lucy Lippard to consider the artist’s book the paradigmatic art dematerialized object, which she does partially by assigning literary value – that is, text – to books such as those of the wordless books of Los Angeles pop artist Ed Ruscha. Other aspects of Lippard’s definition – use of a serial scheme, time-motion involvement, and above all a denial of the expected identity of the form--help us to begin to formulate a definition for artists’ books, which is of course still elusive nearly forty years later. [2]

Lippard along with others opened Printed Matter in NYC in 1976, which helped to solidify the place of the democratic multiple as cheap, portable and accessible, important for their “adaptability as instruments for extension to a far broader public.” [3]

Lippard was also a pivotal voice in another movement of importance to a transitional art world, based in second-wave feminism. Her interest in the democratic stance of artists’ books (in her definition of them) is echoed in the philosophy of the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building. From there, in 1975, the graphic designer Sheila de Bretteville and her founding colleagues artist Judy Chicago and art historian Arlene Raven stressed the need to contextualize women’s design through the just-polished lens of feminist art historicism.

The women’s work that de Bretteville promoted had much in common with Lippard’s de-materialized object, as reflected specifically in the 1975 catalogue, Women and the Printing Arts. [4] The emphasis in this work was “mass produced personal statements” with a focus on production methods, the use of multiples and a reciprocity at the maker-reader axis through the use of invited response to the work in question. The word creativity is in fact avoided in nearly all of the early descriptions of these multiples in favor of less signifying words and phrases such as ‘activity’ in the ‘printing arts.’

The 1970s provide us with several avenues for tracking some new directions in bookmaking. In Rochester, NY, Visual Studies Workshop was already actively seeking new solutions to expression through the book, through books by its co-founder, Joan Lyons, and the work of many other artists.

On the West Coast, the deep tradition of fine printing provided a pathway for using the abandoned technology of letterpress to cross over into territory that afforded more opportunity for a stronger integration of elements and a more conceptually-based framework from which to operate. This territory was informed in part by an active and visible alternative culture, with its appropriation of conventional forms such as the Art Nouveau poster and the comic book to speak to new and selective audiences. In San Francisco the prankster has been an endearing presence, and in the 1970s Holbrook Teter and Michael Meyers used traditional letterpress and relief printmaking techniques along with found images to turn their books into performance art. [5]

Other publishers whose self-definition was vacillating between literary fine press printer and book artist were subverting the fine press format to create revisions to the codex form, while visual artists like Nat Dean were studying traditional fine binding in order to translate its principles into a new language of form and scale. And the conservators, particularly Gary Frost and the energetic teacher Hedi Kyle, were traveling the country peddling their explorations of form at weekend workshops. Based on the necessary exploration of materials and the need for non-intrusive binding models, these conservators were explaining in a fundamental new way, as Frost puts it, how to operate a book.

As these books began to migrate from the library to the gallery, the problems associated with exhibiting 3-D, tactile, often small-scale forms in a white cube whose hallmarks were size, distance, and untouchability sent many artists seeking more sculptural forms for their work in order to make them accessible in that format. While that experiment continues, there is now little need to challenge the comprehensive meaning of content in contemporary artists’ bookmaking, nor to question the acceptance of new dialects in the language of the book.

This essay was first delivered as a paper in 2003. It is offered here in the spirit of continued appreciation for the history and development of artists’ books.

[1] Klima, Stefan. Artists Books: A critical survey of the literature. NY: Granary Books, 1998.

[2] See Lippard, Lucy, ed. Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 . . . Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 1973.

[3] Lippard, Lucy. “The Artist’s Book Goes Public.” Lyons, Joan, ed. Artists’ Books: A critical anthology and sourcebook. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985, p. 48.

[4] Women and the Printing Arts: a catalog is a set of 38 ring-bound 5x7” cards, each advertising a different book by women artists, most of whom were connected with the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building, Los Angeles. It was designed by Janet Bubar, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Penelope Suess and issued in 1977.

[5] For information and work by Teter and Myers, partners in Zephyrus Image, see Alastair Johnston, Zephyrus Image: A bibliography, Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 2003, and Spirit Photography: A Fireside Book of Gurus, a facsimile produced by Cuneiform Press in 2012.

Kathleen Walkup is Professor Emerita at Mills College. Her research interests focus on the history of women and printing and conceptual practice in artists’ books. The catalogue for the exhibition she curated, Possibilities: When artists’ books were young, is available through the San Francisco Center for the Book website. She is a founding director of the College Book Art Association.>

ARTIST BOOK PROJECTS: SOME CONSIDERATIONS // Stephanie Wolff

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 08:00:00 GMT

What are some considerations as an artist book is planned?

Lately I’ve been thinking about this topic, prompted in part by a comment from artist Sarah Nicholls. There are probably as many approaches as artists. I know I haven’t used the same one for each project. Sometimes an idea comes quickly, inspired by an observation or experience. Other times ideas emerge from deep research, reading, and thinking about a topic, and much experimentation.

Regardless of how ideas come, here are some broad questions one might consider as the work evolves.

1. What is my piece about?

If I can write this down, it’s helpful both for making the work, as well as presenting it. A succinct statement can be a touchstone as the work evolves, and it can evolve as well.

2. Who is my audience?

This was the question Sarah Nicholls mentioned to me, one that she keeps in mind. She paired that with: When is the work for (now and/or later)? I hadn’t thought in those terms exactly, but they are good questions. And they lead to follow-up ones. If I know who will read the book, where, how often, and why it would be read, it can affect decisions about materials, structure, final cost, distribution, access, and even content. For example, if a book is delicate or complicated to operate, certain collectors may have less interest. I can always choose to ignore the question of audience, if I just want to make the work I want to make. And sometimes it does find an audience.

3. How can I keep a high level of craft?

This is of importance to me. I generally want to produce all parts of my work myself. But sometimes there are stumbling blocks to this: access to equipment or lack of expertise in a technique. Hiring fabricators or collaborating with others can solve this problem, but it can increase a budget and add challenges to an efficient workflow. Some projects will be worth the added expense and complexity. When it is not, I can change the means of production to something I can do well. Limitations can sometimes inspire creative solutions, but it can be a frustration.

An artist book of mine, largely completed in mid-2019, remains unfinished for such reasons. I imagined a wooden box that would both protect and activate the item, but finding the right woodworker was a challenge at the time. I reconsidered my concept to something I could build myself, but that solution wasn’t quite right. I still haven’t prioritized completion of the project, but finding a way to achieve my original concept is on my list of goals for 2023.

4. What are the economics of the project?

Detailed budgets are valuable and especially important if using fabricators or expensive materials. They are also helpful in determining a cost-effective edition size and in justifying (if only to myself) the price I ask for my work. This includes keeping track of the labor for the book’s production. There are real costs in making art, and it’s important to know them.

5. How can I complete the book?

Let’s face it, many of us have ideas that we explore and eventually discard. It can be a challenge to complete a project. Here are a few suggestions to keep on track:

• Care about the idea. If I don’t care about it, others probably won’t. And I’ll be less likely to finish the work. I’ve put projects aside or dropped ideas and moved on after working with them for a time. There’s no harm in that. Sometimes there’s not enough there.

• Write out a schedule to keep momentum. Or a set of instructions to complete a particular task. Anything seems possible when broken down into manageable steps. I find this especially useful when working on an edition or reacquainting myself with a technique, even if it’s just the order in which to proceed.

• Make the project big enough for budget and time efficiencies, but not too big or complicated that it becomes unmanageable or lasts longer than my interest in the topic. Maintain an effort-reward balance.

• Have an accountability partner to help each other stay on track with projects. This has been useful for me in the past. More important I find is to have a first reader-viewer who helps me know how someone interacts and understands the book. These don’t need to be the same person. As an independent artist, it’s very valuable to have conversations about my projects with trusted art friends.

I once gave a very complete model to someone for feedback. Not only did I see her stumble slightly with the form, but she didn’t quite understand the text as it was until I added one more line of information. I was too close to the subject matter to realize these issues until I witnessed someone reading the book. Because I hadn’t finished the book yet, I could make adjustments.

• Make the entire edition at once. My editions tend to be small, but I find it more efficient to set up in production mode and complete the edition in one span of time. And it feels great to have it completed.

What questions do you ask yourself? What are your considerations?

Stephanie Wolff works with paper, text, textile and the book form, often with content drawn from research in libraries and archives. Her artist books have been exhibited in the U.S. and Germany and are in many collections, public and private. She teaches book arts workshops both online and in person. stephaniewolffstudio.com @stephaniewolffstudio

FROM PHILOSOPHY TO SALES PITCH // Richard Minsky

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 07:00:00 GMT

Recently we had a post about a book that was made from a series of paintings, carefully lit and photographed, color corrected to get as close as possible to the originals, ending with a link where to buy the book. Along the way is the story of the Kickstarter campaign to raise production funds. Is this book art theory? Is it book art?

In a 2015 post, Elizabeth Kealy-Morris quotes Johanna Drucker, defining the artist’s book as: “… a book created as an original work of art, rather than a reproduction of a preexisting work and […] a book which integrates the formal means of its realization and production with its thematic or aesthetic issues.” [1]

Is the book of paintings an art book rather than an artist book? Does it matter? A text was added to the book, but although many images of the paintings are shown, the text is not. If it is an important part of the book, integral to it as a work of art, the relationship between the text and paintings should be seen in the post, not just inferred. Does intent make a difference?

I happen to like the concept behind the paintings, but that’s not the point. I ask: is the economics of book art a suitable subject for a book art theory blog? We’ve had other posts about the economics of publishing, but is selling a specific book, whether art book or book art, something that the blog should do?

We’ve completed seven years of twice monthly Book Art Theory blog posts, about 170 things to think about. The authors are mostly practitioners, varying in experience, including college students, recent graduates, unaffiliated artists, librarians, publishers, and senior faculty who have created and administered book art programs.

In 2016 we voted to revise the blog’s mission statement. You can read all about that, and the theories behind the Book Art Theory Blog. We aim to make it more inclusive, with diverse voices and representation from marginalized communities and individuals. Some book artists are misfits who got into this field as a refuge. I identify with this and have had students from a wide variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds who were marginalized within their communities as strange.

It’s worth reading every post on this blog. Sometimes the essay prompts discussion as interesting as the original post, such as Critical Questions. Blog posts often present a personal experience of working, whether it’s making as meditation, studio as sanctuary, or haptic nostalgia.

Among the topics addressed with insight and good links are social engagement, critique of bookworks, preciousness, experimentation, and legibilities,

A theme that has been appearing more frequently is the politics of book art. Several posts are on gatekeeping, inclusivity, and cultural appropriation within the field. Some take up a specific issue, like gun safety. Others deal with the general dynamics of book art as activism and the conceptual framework of publishing book art.

Peter Tanner took a chronological approach to this blog and came up with a different set of posts. Well worth your time to explore.

There’s something to learn from each post, even those by novices who are thinking about topics that have been explored for decades but they approach naively. Sometimes that gives a fresh viewpoint. And if you have something to add on the subject, participate! It’s a conversation.

[1] Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 2004) 2.

Minsky is a book artist, curator, and historian. Founder of Center for Book Arts, Incorporated 1974, the first organization of its kind. He serves on the CBAA Book Art Theory subcommittee. The Richard Minsky Archive is at Yale.

SOLEMN SEASON: THE ARTIST BOOK THAT GREW OUT OF EXPLORING SACRED TRADITION (PART 2) // Brian Behm

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 12:38:18 GMT

This story is continued from the previous post.

For years I’ve split my time between a graphic design career and making paintings. My first design job was at a magazine, then I moved through a couple different agencies over the years before going freelance. This meant that I had the tools, knowledge, and experience to create a professional-quality book of my paintings. The biggest challenge in making a book wouldn’t be the design process, it would be the funding.

In order to produce a first edition of books, I’d be pretty far in the hole before I had a single sale. Even a small run of small books could cost thousands of dollars. What I needed were pre-orders. If collectors could buy their copy ahead of time, I could run the edition once I had enough orders confirmed in advance.

With the next Lent quickly approaching, I decided to use that season to collect pre-orders through the popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. (Forty days is a little long for a crowdfund, but that number carried so much meaning for the project—I couldn’t resist making that connection.) I put together a marketing plan to launch my Kickstarter campaign complete with photo-realistic mock-ups of the book and a rough production schedule.

See the crowdfunding campaign webpage and watch Brian’s overview video on Kickstarter.

I contacted a videographer and an editor and began to plan a project overview video explaining what I made, what I learned, and how excited I was to turn it into a book. I set tiered offerings that could be added on to a book pre-order including postcard and poster sized art prints, and I promised to autograph them.

In the first 24 hours, I received enough pre-orders to get the project 40% funded. Later that week it passed 50%. After 40 days of waiting, thanks to family, friends, and strangers, the project was fully funded. With the initial hurdle overcome, I had a new challenge: real orders to fulfill.

First, I set up a photoshoot in soft natural light and captured detailed, high-resolution images of each painting. I found that lighting the surface of each work at a slight angle helped the canvas texture and the metallic gold accents stand out well. Then I painstakingly touched up each image and color-corrected it to look as accurate as possible to the original paintings.

Laying out the book was fairly intuitive. I kept the pages sparse with a clean white background and simple, classic typefaces. I wanted to print the paintings at actual size: 4 inches square. This would lend a sense of realism, allowing the viewer to clearly see the canvas texture and brush marks. The 40 paintings have been laid out across nearly twice as many pages. This left enough room to intersperse short phrases of poetic prayer that Victoria wrote. (Learn more about Victoria and her involvement in this project in Part 1 of this post.) I also included introductory pages and a few closing statements that tie in with Good Friday and Easter at the end of Lent. Instead of typical page numbers, I decided to number each painting. This would allow a viewer to keep track of the passing of Lent with a daily painting.

For the cover, I planned a contrasting dark dust jacket that featured metallic gold accents from one of the paintings.

Adapting this collection of paintings into an artist book is the perfect form to naturally pace a viewer slowly through the collection, allowing them to consider each painting one at a time and interact with the work at actual size—it’s the next best thing to seeing the full collection in person. As of this writing, I’ll be getting a proof copy from the printer any day now, and I’m eager to preview it.

Successfully launching my first crowdfund was stressful and thrilling. I’m thankful to see the support for this project, and I’m honored for the opportunity to create my first artist book from a collection that has been so meaningful for me creatively and spiritually.

Solemn Season is still in production with expected delivery dates in early December. Around that time, a limited number of signed, first-edition copies will be available at http://www.BrianCBehm.com.

Brian Behm is an artist working at the intersection of abstract and sacred art. His home studio is in the woods near Durham, North Carolina, and his work can be found online on Instagram or at his website where he sells work directly to collectors and accepts commissions.

This post was moderated by Kathy Hettinga.

SOLEMN SEASON: THE ARTIST BOOK THAT GREW OUT OF EXPLORING SACRED TRADITION (PART 1) // Brian Behm

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 07:00:00 GMT

It was quite by happenstance that I stumbled upon the concept of placing my paintings in a book. In fact, the idea wasn’t even my own; my spouse, Victoria, suggested it. The idea hit me with a bright burst of energy. A limited, signed first edition would be the perfect vehicle to share my most recent series of small paintings.

About a year prior—at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic—Victoria and I quarantined with our kids at her parents’ farmette in rural Pennsylvania. After a few months, we got news that Victoria was accepted to Duke University to study theology, so we all decided to move together (my in-laws in tow), to central North Carolina. There, in a disrupted routine, without a proper studio available, I wondered what would be next for me artistically.

Many of my recent abstract and landscape paintings explore the horizon line as a metaphor of the meeting place of the divine and the human. I develop an atmosphere on either side of that thin line with deep brown, subtle grays, and muted blues. Often, I punctuate the soft environments with stark black or white, or rich 18 karat gold. It becomes a conversation between foreground and sky—something like a prayer. I’ve enjoyed leaning into painting as a means to explore spiritual connections and church traditions.

Most church traditions, however, are fairly new to me. I was raised in a big American church—the kind of church that had a multiple-thousand-seat auditorium instead of a sanctuary—so when the season of Lent came around, it intrigued me. In reading and talking with Victoria, I came to understand Lent as something powerful and poignant for exactly the time we were going through. There was the pandemic, of course, which upended everything, and I was in a season of lament, uncertainty, and self-examination. Similarly, Lent, as I came to learn, is a somber period of waiting and reflection, a time to remember that the world is not as it should be, nor as it will stay. With that knowledge, I wanted to see what it would look like to participate in the tradition for the first time. I decided to create 40 four-inch paintings over the 40 days of Lent.

On February 17th, Ash Wednesday, I began the daily ritual of creating a single, introspective painting in contemporary, minimalist marks. I worked in a restrained style with contrasting elements juxtaposed purposefully: light and dark, precious and common, hopeful and somber, holy and base. Metallic gold accents reference the use of gold in holy sites around the world and in centuries of art on crosses, halos, and statues. I also used gold to mark each Sunday in Lent with a blank, all-gold canvas. On those days, I didn’t paint. This lined up with the weekly sabbath rest, which is typically taken as a break from the observation of Lent.

As I created the pieces, I posted them on my Instagram account and enjoyed discussing the pieces with viewers in the comments. When the series was complete, I considered how to present the work. Ultimately, the series worked best when presented in a modified grid that matched the calendar layout of the days of Lent. It begins at the top of the 4th column, a Wednesday, and rows are filled out sequentially, with every Sunday being noted by a blank, all-gold canvas as the first painting in each row of 7 days.

Solemn Season, Brian Behm, 2021, Acrylic and 18k Gold on Canvas.

In the end, I sold the piece as a set to a collector in Tennessee who was eager to show it off in a revolving series of churches. Afterward, though, I felt there was more that could be done with the piece. I could make postcards out of them. Or a large poster that showed all of them. Maybe I could sell prints? But I was skeptical there would be interest in those things. I discussed this foggy thought with Victoria, who, by then, was neck-deep in a masters program at Duke and was about half way to receiving her degree.

“Why don’t you make a book?” she offered. As I thought about it, I got chills.

That’s ingenious! A book!

The sequential nature of the project fits nicely into the pacing of pages. The book would need to be small, intimate, something you can easily hold in your lap. And I thought it should include some writing. With all of her involvement in my processing, not to mention her continuing theological studies, Victoria was the perfect candidate. I asked her to write a longform poetic prayer that I could intersperse between the prints of the paintings. The plan was set. This will be great.

But how do I make a book? . . . to be continued.

Brian Behm is an artist working at the intersection of abstract and sacred art. His home studio is in the woods near Durham, North Carolina, and he can be found online on Instagram or at his website where he sells work directly to collectors and accepts commissions.

This post was moderated by Kathy Hettinga.

MOCK-UPS: THINKING THROUGH PLAY // Jerushia Graham

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 07:00:00 GMT

“Out of a playful movement of elements whose interrelations are not immediately apparent, patterns arise which an observant and critical intellect can only evaluate afterwards. The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.” Carl Jung

“The best way to have a great idea is to have a lot of ideas.” Linus Pauling

Mock-ups and sketches are fundamental to my artistic practice, and I would posit that they are fundamental to most creative endeavors. Yet so often we focus on the finished product giving little regard to the many mock-ups that occurred before the finished piece. This act of creating multiple iterations offers valuable lessons and developments in emotional growth and skill building. Though students often desire to skip this process in an effort to save time, and established artists may cut corners confident in their experience, both rob themselves of the unexpected discoveries that occur when you experiment with size and materials.

The creation of mock-ups is a way of thinking through the hands, an act of play, an application of design thinking. Play has often been defined as being a spontaneous activity that is joyful, having the absence of consequences and the removal of constraint. [1] The mock-up is the act of play applied to design thinking.

Nielsen Norman Group

There is no way to replicate the freedom of association that can occur when the mind is allowed to be “absent of consequence and constraint,"[2] at least for a little while.

I am reminded of a story relayed in Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It is said that a ceramics professor divided his class at the beginning of the semester into two groups. One group would be graded based on quantity and the other on quality. The students in the quantity group would be graded on the number of pots they produced and the quality group was to be graded on producing one “perfect” pot. When the day came to inspect the work, it was clear that the quantity students had produced the higher quality work because they learned from the experience of every pot they built while the students responsible for producing a single pot had mostly spent their time theorizing their designs and did not have the physical understanding of the medium to execute the work. Creating mock-ups removes the pressure of perfectionism and allows you to focus on creating intimate knowledge of the material. Ironically, it is the understanding of the medium through “play” that enables a higher level of execution in future constructions.

Respecting the value of mocking-up ideas is one of the most powerful tools for both artists and scholars. We would all do well to remember the value of mock-ups both as a way to build experiential knowledge and as potential reference tools. They don’t have to be pretty or perfect; they just need to help you decipher pros and cons of each option conceived and tested. Studying mock-ups/prototypes also assists scholarly speculation in tracing the progress and development of book forms, techniques, and artistic voices. It is my hope that more book artists and especially those who are also educators will strongly promote and share the prototyping side of their creative practices.

[1] Gareth Loudon, Gina Deininger, Paul Wilgeroth, “The Importance of Play and Creativity in the Design Curriculum,” International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education, Artesis University College, Antwerp, Belgium, September 6-7, 2012.The Importance of Play and Creativity in the Design Curriculum

[2] Ibid.

Jerushia Graham is Museum Coordinator for Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking. She served as the North American Hand Papermakers’ inaugural VP of Exhibitions/Curatorial. The Georgia Committee for the National Museum of Women in the Art has recognized her artwork. Graham earned her Book Arts/Printmaking MFA from the University of the Arts. https://jerushiagraham.wixsite.com/jerushiagraham

WHERE DO BOOK AND PRINT ARTISTS BELONG? // River Kerstetter

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 07:00:00 GMT

As a child, the library was one of my favorite places. I would spend hours lost in fantasy novels, art history books, comic books, and science magazines. I still get the same feeling of adventure and wonder when I enter a library or open a new book. Books are an invitation to belong.

By 2017, I am a graduate student in an interdisciplinary book arts program. I am exploring what print media can do; how words and images work, how pages and bindings themselves can tell stories. I am fascinated and inspired by the endless ways that my peers and mentors reinvent the book. I experiment with letterpress, offset lithography, and screen printing, artist books, zines, comics, and video.

The program feels like a home for me and my peers, but even as we are finding our voices, the walls start coming down around us. The college decides book arts aren’t relevant (i.e., lucrative), and as we try to finish our degrees, walls are literally torn down, architects interrupt our work to measure floors, presses are sold, and our hard-working mentors are laid off. The community I have with my cohort never goes away, but academia no longer feels like a place I belong.

Now in 2022, I’m not sure where I belong — in the city, the book and print communities, or in my career. Creating our own paths as artists is powerful, but when artists must make ends meet by piecing together gigs, only the very lucky or very privileged can make it. Only artists with family money can risk going months without work. For those of us who are not so privileged, pursuing art can have serious consequences for our wellbeing. Even knowing the risks, we choose this path because we need art in our lives. It is unjust that the game of professional art is easy for some and life-or-death for so many others.

When artists like me have limited access to institutional resources and struggle to survive as independent artists, it impairs our creativity and the entire field. As an artist preoccupied with survival, my work takes much longer to incubate and develop. Without a community studio, I work at home, where I must acquire my own tools instead of sharing abundant communal ones. Freelance work, which I enjoy, at times takes me from projects that align with my core practice. Hustling for limited opportunities creates competition, which can discourage artists from collaborating or lifting one another up. Together these obstacles make our work much harder, and steer us away from the rich collaboration, dialogue, and innovation that we all seek.

The field of book arts also loses something when artists are not welcomed or supported. When classist, racist and sexist systems marginalize working-class, BIPOC, and women and trans artists, the arts lose diversity of thought and perspective. If all artists were supported by their communities, our discourse, debate, research, and innovation would improve.

In Chicago, many brilliant people are building better support systems. Sixty Inches from Center and Chuquimarca support scholars and artists and foster important conversations about who belongs in the art world. The Chicago Arts Census collects data to improve working conditions for us all. And while Chicago has a few community print studios, I haven’t always felt welcome in these spaces as an Indigenous artist, a working-class artist, or a queer trans woman. It can be exhausting just to be the only brown person, or trans person, in a room. Even with the efforts above, we need more spaces of our own.

When I imagine an art world where we belong, I see community studios that aren’t exclusive or prohibitively expensive to join. I see universal healthcare and guaranteed income. I see grassroots groups pooling resources, knowledge, and networks for their collective benefit. I see society-wide, WPA-style art programs, without the nationalism.

Book and print arts could soar. Freed from minimum wage, meager contracts, or racist institutions, we could all create better art. We could take greater conceptual and practical risks, and we could do the job that artists have always had: tell stories that comfort the marginalized and challenge the powerful.

River Kerstetter is a queer transfeminine artist of Onʌyota'a:ka and European descent based in Chicago. She explores memory, identity, and history through printmaking and design. River is a co-founder of the Center for Native Futures in Chicago, and co-hosts TIES, a reading series for Indigenous queer, trans, and Two-Spirit writers.

APPROACHING THE PRESS THROUGH THE SPIRIT // Ruby Figueroa

Susan Viguers — Sat, 13 Aug 2022 20:07:23 GMT

The last time I went to work on the machine, I was carrying a box of paper, trying to balance the bottom but stumbling on bushes, grasses, and flowers that had grown much taller than me. The weeds belonged in this place, so no one ever pulled them. My boots sank into the mud, and it was time to take deeper and more intentional breaths. It was important to be calm when I got to the door I was looking for. There is no path to the door, only traces of footsteps left by others, leading to a clearing surrounded by all this greenery.

Learning to open the door was the easy part; remembering how to walk there through the garden took the most practice. Several people showed me, some more than once. With each walk I took notes and made mental reminders so I could get back. I enter the familiar space and the door shuts behind me, leaving me in complete darkness. I set my paper down on a table using my hips to navigate and, with my hands now free, I clap twice and the lights flood into the room — a full letterpress studio. There’s a Vandercook Universal no. 1, a number 4, an SP 25. Any press will appear if you ask for it.

The studio exists because artists needed a space to work outside of institutions that lock their tools away. This space was created by community, word of mouth, rituals, practice, tradition, the powers of wish fulfillment, and tactical steps. Everyone has a different way of getting here. The best way to remember the path is to return as often as possible.

Inside, I allow my energy to acclimate to the space and to the machine. I whisper my prayers. Soon my mind, body, and heart are in sync and I'm off like a rocket. For me it’s about the release of energy, about sharing parts of my life. I find myself entranced when I’m arranging type on the press bed — the puzzle that will reveal itself only with color or pressure. It’s the perfect process for my jittery brain. I pick the brightest ink possible, just for the thrill, and grab my paper, hands dirty, but too excited to stop to wash. I use language to make prints and once a print leaves my hands it is open to interpretation, but I can feel the transfer of energy from myself to my materials.

The machine is a tool for creating vessels, like books, but the machine is also a vessel. This process, this space helps me navigate and stay afloat regardless of circumstance. To come to this place again and again is a necessity but it’s also a choice. When I can, I give care to my practice. When I can, I give care back to the body. My direct relationship with the machine helps me remain present and accountable to myself. Some of the objects I create on the machine have energy, and I can make a human-like connection to my prints because, through the letterpress process, I feel an activation of the materials.

I’ll admit, it’s been a while since I’ve been back to this place. I let the fear of judgment far worse than my own hinder my process as I try to sustain a practice too often clouded by whiteness. I’ve let anguish and anger about navigating life under capitalism overshadow my path. My spirit wants nothing more than to return to this place, yet I realized I needed this stillness to regain the energy I had poured into my art practice. This break from the machine is not just a penance; it is also a rest, which is necessary because I am human. I must know by now that this place still exists in me because of all the times I’ve left my trace on that path. In the meantime, I keep my words and wishes in notebooks and post-its until I can return to the place where I go to make sure I don’t bury the voice inside of myself.

Ruby Figueroa is a visual artist and writer from Chicago, IL. Their autobiographical work is a mix of nonfiction, prose and poetry seen in their letterpress prints, zines, artist books, monoprints, broadsides, and videos. Ruby’s work explores home and the relationship between humans, loss, time, and heartbreak.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN THE BOOK ARTS: PART II // Steph Rue, Radha Pandey, Catherine Liu

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 07:00:00 GMT

Though we are certainly no experts, here are some guidelines that may serve as a starting point for non-BIPOC artists to think about cultural appropriation in their work. We humbly put these forth in hopes that non-BIPOC book and paper artists will begin to consider if and how their work is truly respectful and inclusive, and to recognize their privilege and positionality as part of the dominant culture with a history of colonization and imperialism.

1. Non-BIPOC book/paper artists/makers: do you have a press or studio name, or have works with titles containing Asian-sounding words? If so, have you thought about why you chose this name, the cultural or historical context from which these words come? Have you profited from the name sounding more Asian, even though you yourself are not Asian?

2. Non-BIPOC book/paper instructors: Have you taught workshops or classes on traditional techniques that come from cultures that you are not a part of? If you have the resources to teach, consider redirecting these resources into supporting Asian heritage instructors who are already teaching these topics and/or mentoring or supporting up-and-coming Asian makers to help them become the next generation of workshop instructors. They may not have the experience, skillset, or connections to teach workshops like you do, but they have a key connection to the culture, which is an important distinction.

3. If you are inspired by Asian culture and insist on expressing that in your artwork, and if you are not already doing so, we urge you to find ways to deepen your commitment to and allyship with Asian cultures and peoples. During the pandemic and amidst increased instances of anti-Asian violence, many of us in the Asian American community have been hurting and grieving. If you truly love Asian culture enough to use it in your own artwork, and if you want to go beyond cultural appropriation, we urge you to listen to your Asian neighbors/friends/colleagues, find ways to support and come alongside. If you borrow something from someone, how are you giving back?

4. If you have used Asian imagery or borrowed from Asian culture in your work, have you asked for consent? Have you provided adequate reference or documentation of your source material? If not, and if you are still profiting from this work, consider revisiting these works and thinking through if and how these can be revised. Though potentially inconvenient, this is the type of work that demonstrates responsibility, accountability, and care within our book art community.

5. On an institutional level: book art curriculum is dominated by European theories, methods, and pedagogies. Educational institutions may consider offering courses about other cultures, so that students can be exposed to non-western design practices. Ideally these courses would be taught by folks with direct ties to the culture, but if this is not possible, it is worth asking: what is a responsible way of teaching about a culture that the instructor may not be a part of?

Examining our use of cultural appropriation as individuals and as a field is but one piece of a greater project to decolonize the book arts. We can start to ask ourselves about other areas in our field that need examination on a greater structural level, such as collections practices, book arts curriculum, representation, equitable access, cataloguing, and so on. We welcome further explorations and conversation around any of these areas, and also welcome thoughts and feedback on how we can together cease harmful practices such as cultural appropriation. All of us in this field will be better for it.

Steph Rue is an artist and papermaker based in Sacramento, CA. She received her MFA at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, and studied traditional book and papermaking on a Fulbright to Korea in 2015. Steph is co-founder of the Korean American Artist Collective and co-founder of Hanji Edition.

Radha Pandey is a papermaker and letterpress printer based in Norway/India. She earned her MFA at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and specializes in Indo-Islamic Papermaking techniques, teaching classes in India, Europe, and the US. Her artist's books are held in over 90 public collections internationally.

Catherine Liu received a Master of Fine Arts in Book Arts at the University of Iowa Center for the Book in 2019. To further their knowledge in natural dyes they received multiple University of Iowa Graduate Fellowships, a Stanley Award for International Research, and a Fulbright research grant to study dyeing, printing, and papermaking practices in China and Japan.

This post was moderated by Kathy Walkup.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN THE BOOK ARTS: PART 1 // Steph Rue, Radha Pandey, Catherine Liu

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 07:00:00 GMT

Recent posts in the Book Art Theory blog have raised questions regarding equity, gatekeeping, accessibility, and inclusivity in the book arts. In keeping with this important and necessary line of inquiry, we want to talk about cultural appropriation in the book arts, specifically the appropriation of Asian imagery, aesthetics, design, materials, traditions, techniques, and language. This is an occurrence that is found all over the art world, not just in the book arts, and not just with Asian cultures. But as we are three Asian book artists, it is what we know and can speak to.

Image description: a person presenting as a white woman, wearing white makeup, black kimono, and floral hair piece, and holding a fan. Free image on Shutterstock.

Some instances of cultural appropriation that we have noticed: The use of random Asian words or characters to make something seem more "exotic" or have "Asian flair." Random references to Zen and/or Buddhism. Indian symbology like Om or meditating Buddha, prayer flags, or the arbitrary use of Asian calligraphy to create symbols. The "clever" use of chopsticks or bamboo in typography (this is not only culturally offensive, it is tacky). The erroneous use of the word "rice paper" to refer to Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese paper when there is no rice in the paper. Not to mention that using the term “rice paper” to conflate all of these different Asian cultures perpetuates a view that Asian culture is a monolith, which further strips Asians of their individuality.

We have no problem with cultural appreciation and collaboration, where there is a deep respect and intentional effort to learn directly from the source. We admire non-Asian book/paper artists who have spent significant time in Asian countries, learning the language and/or working directly with master artists, deeply investing time and money to humbly learn an art form that is not of their own heritage. Institutions like the Fulbright Program encourage and support this kind of thoughtful cultural exchange. We appreciate when these non-BIPOC artists have an awareness of their immense privilege, to have the resources to travel to previously colonized countries and extract cultural knowledge, and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that they might receive special treatment for being white.

When elements of Asian culture are cherry picked and used in a way that feels exploitative, disrespectful, or tacky, this feels less like collaboration and more like appropriation. When the maker has no apparent connection or desire to deepen their understanding not only of the culture from whom they borrowed, but also of the people who carry the heritage – this feels like appropriation. And when non-BIPOC folks have a savior complex about the cultural knowledge that they are “rescuing” – this is not cultural exchange, this is colonization and appropriation. Even institutions that purport to encourage cultural exchange (such as the aforementioned Fulbright Program) can perpetuate this harmful practice of white saviorism – for instance, so many white Americans come to India to “discover” natural dyes, classical music, or other pieces of Indian culture, and then lecture about it while in India, to an Indian public. It is also problematic when we see that the instructors or cultural practitioners in North America/Europe are almost exclusively white, rather than those with lived experiences and cultural ties, such as immigrants.

As artists, it is important to recognize the historical precedent for people from the dominant culture taking elements from marginalized people's cultures and using them for their own profit without consent, without acknowledgment of histories of oppression, colonization, imperialism, erasure, and violence. As educator Emi Ito states, "cultural appropriation has always been part of propping up the violence of white supremacy."

Borrowing from other cultures is often necessary in our field, and artists find inspiration from all kinds of sources. As book artists, we pride ourselves in our versatility and ability to draw from so many disciplines and traditions to create a bookwork. As our field is relatively new, we can only benefit and grow stronger as a field when we start to ask ourselves critical questions about how or why we make or use certain cultural elements in our work.

This blog post is in two parts. In Part 2, we offer some guidelines for non-BIPOC book and paper artists to think about and reconsider cultural appropriations in their work.

Radha Pandey is a papermaker and letterpress printer based in Norway/India. She earned her MFA at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, and specializes in Indo-Islamic Papermaking techniques, teaching classes in India, Europe and the US. Her artist's books are held in over 90 public collections internationally.

This post was moderated by Kathy Walkup

INSPIRATION FROM COLOR SYSTEMS, LANDFILL CULTURE & DOMESTIC WORK // Sarah Bryant, with Kathy Walkup

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 07:00:00 GMT

Sarah:

In November of 2019 I traveled to Yale University in search of swatch books and color cards. The Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color is home to a comprehensive selection of texts, historical examples, artist books, and other resources, including eleven bankers’ boxes of textile samples and paint chips. Color systems on a large scale, and individual sample books on a smaller scale, are attempts to communicate color across distance, disciplines, and cultures. Our personal interactions with samples and swatches are less rational and more emotional, driven by touch and memory.

I was drawn in by the tactility of these samples, the beauty of their presentation, and the kinetic structures that protect them. I was also interested in the nuanced historical context for the production of these books. Like all manufactured objects, these color and textile samples were made in response to shifting technologies, economic factors, and complex national agendas. Color forecasting, the issuing of color cards in advance of a season, was an early form of planned obsolescence, and is still a major engine in the global economy. These color cards and sample books are part of our origin story as a landfill culture.

Fairmont Color Card

Early on in the design of Fairmont Color I planned to produce a series of color cards using my domestic surroundings. The pandemic interrupted the project and interfered with the foundational ideas for the book: what it means to be in a domestic space, how much (or how little) time I spent contemplating the colors and textiles that made up my private spaces. I shelved the project for a few months in the beginning of the pandemic, returning to it when I could find the time to engage in the repetitive tasks (thread winding and collage) that were necessary for its production.

Kathy:

When I saw this project, I was immediately struck by the connection that Sarah’s work was making with the work of feminist artists in the 1970s who were foregrounding the materials and processes of domesticity in their radical art. The painter Miriam Schapiro in particular created collage paintings that repurposed fabric swatches and traditional quilt patterns into large-scale wall pieces that re-stated women’s domestic work as an art form.

Miriam Schapiro, Nine Patch Gold, 1973, Courtesy Mills College Art Museum. (Gallery view, Possibilities: When artists' books were young, 2022, San Francisco Center for the Book, Kathleen Walkup, curator)

When Faith Ringgold began her experimentation with fabric and quilts, working alongside Willi Posey, her seamstress mother, to create stuffed dolls, masks and story quilts that told of the oppression of Black people, her art was dismissed as craft. One gallery refused to hang two of her masks with other art in the gallery. Ringgold withdrew the masks and instead wore them to the opening. [1]

Sarah’s work implicitly acknowledges this legacy while at the same time questioning how these intensely personal and familiar materials of her own domestic space contribute to the very twenty-first century challenges of social and environmental justice.

Sarah:

Thank you for those observations! I came to the use of fabric and textile organically through the research I was doing on color and industry (see Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s excellent book The Color Revolution). Once I had determined the course of the book and made the decision to use my clothes and bedding and primary materials, I found myself using my hands and body in unfamiliar ways. No longer tied to the press, I was engaged in hand skills that were outside of my experience but had a long history in connection with femininity and domesticity. Artists like Schapiro and Ringgold were certainly on my mind. I also found myself thinking a great deal about my mother, who for a time sewed all of her own clothes.

I believe that this book was also made possible by collaborative work that I have been engaged in since 2013 with Shiftlab Collective. Working with other artists, watching their process and material choices, designing our projects collectively all have expanded my independent work. Katie Baldwin and Denise Bookwalter in particular are printmakers and book artists who incorporate textile and quilting into their process. Spending time in their company certainly has expanded my ideas about materials and the nature of the book.

[1] Auther, Elissa. String Felt Thread: The hierarchy of art and craft in American art. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Sarah Bryant produces artist books and prints under the name Big Jump Press. She is currently an assistant professor at The University of Alabama where she teaches for the MFA Book Arts Program. Her work can be found in many collections, including The Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, and The Yale Arts Library.

THE HAND AND THE BOOK // Brian Allen

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 07:00:00 GMT

Why do so many people, when first exposed to the book arts, find themselves enthralled?

I think a large part of it is in the physicality of using their hands in the processes they’ve just been exposed to.

Many people now have never played in a sandbox or have forgotten the simple joys of playing in the dirt. But we all started our lives finding out about the world by using our hands to touch it, feel it, taste it, and having our fingers cut and burned.

Here in the twenty-first century, as you know, our lives are increasingly filtered through disembodied electronic portals – screens that flatten our experience, distancing us from direct engagement with the physical world, antithetical to the deeper connections and texture we need to feel fully human. The book arts serve as a restorative, of physical action combining with intellectual activity and content. People new to book arts can be startled with a recognition of what they’ve been missing or have forgotten they had the capacity to do.

Over the centuries writing has been an expression of societies and broader cultures. For example, Northern European mediaeval societies had variants of spiky architecture, spiky writing and spiky hierarchical thinking. It was a little less severe In Southern Europe.

When I learned European calligraphy in the mid-1970s, I started from the beginning – wedges pressed into wet clay, using brushes and blunt reeds. Physical acts of making marks with my writing hand. I learned the seven or eight major writing styles from Trajan capitals to the Baroque copperplate of the mid-Eighteenth Century. In repeatedly tracing the “ductus” of alphabetic forms I absorbed their history and adaptations, learned context of the societies they were written in, and benefitted from their legacy. And I appreciated their formal malleability over time and culture.

Tools for opposable thumbs

The physical actions of letterpress printing reinforce my sense of the allure of the book arts through the reconnection, and cooperation, of hand and brain. Each metal letter is a real thing to be put next to another letter. I told students in my private printing classes that in the print shop a nothing becomes a something: a word space is a real thing, with weight. Anaïs Nin writes well about the letterpress experience in Volume 3 of her Diary: 1939-1944: “You can touch the page you wrote.” “The words which first appeared in my head, out of the air, take body. Each letter has a weight. I can weigh each word again, to see if it is the right one.” Building physical structures to hold text or image equally engage hand and brain.

60 and 72 American pica point Cloister Initials, from Frederic Goudy

Frank Wilson, a neurologist, in his 1998 book “The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture,” traces the evolution of the hand and its components and posits its influence on creating language – the hand points to or holds a thing that needs an identifying word. Our concepts about reality are largely drawn from a confirming touch. A substantial amount of the information the brain must work with comes through the sensing capacity of the hands.

Wilson also argues that American education pushes children away from manual exploration to purely intellectual activity too early, stunting the hand/brain co-development process. I believe that this, at least in part, is the source of people’s joy, exhilaration, and relief that they have found where they belong when encountering the art of the (hand) book.

Parenthetically, I think book arts programs could help other academic disciplines to reawaken the wonders of their fields by offering hands-on sessions, for example making a Jacob’s Ladder structure. Other disciplines don’t seem to pay much attention to their histories and processes like book arts does – whose skills and techniques are by nature historical. Philosophy classes would be enriched by directly experiencing the boundary of thought and touch. Wilson relates that mechanical engineering companies didn’t like to hire young engineers – they hadn’t played in a sandbox and had trouble conceptualizing the third dimension.

36 Didot point Diethelm Antiqua, released by the Haas foundry around 1950. I had acquired a run of it as part of the Swiss/Canadian shop purchase I made in 2007. I may have been the only printer in the US who had it. I speculate it was Haas’ competitor to Palatino, released a little earlier by Stempel.

Brian Allen is retired from 45 years working with letterforms, from calligraphic to phototypeset to letterpress to digital. Twenty of those years were spent in digital font production for startups, IBM, and Monotype. He enjoys the art, craft, and culture of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

MAKESPACE 2022: ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSIVITY AS PRACTICE // Elaina Brown-Spence, Meera Mittal, Erica Honson

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 07:00:00 GMT

Share Public Access to Creative Endeavors, or the SPACE coalition, was created to combat physical and cultural barriers within the art world for marginalized communities. We, Elaina Brown-Spence, Erica Honson, and Meera Mittal, formed the coalition while in the MFA Printmaking and Book Arts program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We wrote a quasi-manifesto addressing our values as artists and issues of accessibility within the art world. This document, which was later offset printed by Erica Honson and Amanda D’Amico in the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts and made into a zine, was the launching point for us to join the movement to expand inclusivity within the art world.

We began specifically addressing book arts within our quasi-manifesto by asking, “Who gets to be in Special Collections, museums, libraries, universities, et cetera?” These establishments provide legitimacy, status, economic gain, and avenues for professional growth for the artists whose work they accept. The quantity and locations of exhibitions and collectors on an artist’s CV affects whether gatekeepers will afford that artist another opportunity. And each of those opportunities connects an artist to a network of people who may afford them further opportunities. Furthermore, an artist’s confidence in their ability to succeed professionally, and their sense of value within society, can directly impact their career. Part of that self-perception is built from the validation of being chosen by exhibition spaces — by seeing one’s identity, history, community, and voice as being worthy of public representation.

makeSPACE, a quasi-manifesto, offset zine, 2022

The way artist books, specifically, are presented, read, and interacted within exhibitions often limits their accessibility. Most artist books are meant to be interacted with by human hands as an integral aspect of their content, materials, structure, and reader experience. But many exhibition locations are inaccessible physically and culturally to numerous communities. This is also due, in part, to the practice of preservation in the book arts field. In response to this, we wrote, “Artist books, regardless of content, are not accessible when acquired by Special Collections. This needs to change. Books in Special Collections remain unread; they lose their “bookness.” Books need to be held, read, touched. Preservation shouldn’t be at the cost of seeing and handling books in person…. Liberate the libraries.” One of the tasks of the Special Collections librarian is to create a certain experience for the reader. When a librarian immediately acts suspicious towards a visitor, interrogates them about why they want to look at the books, and hovers over them during reading, all in the name of preservation, that artist book was not truly read, and the reader may not wish to return to any Special Collections. So, there is a need for more and different spaces for artist books to be read, for artists to have multiple avenues of advancing their careers, supporting themselves economically, and sharing their work as it is intended to be shared. For community members consuming the art, having opportunities to interact with artist books in spaces which are welcoming and inclusive could create richer dialogues and greater cultural impact which are essential to the purpose of art itself.

Our next action was curating an open-call exhibition, titled makeSPACE, held both in a gallery at the University of the Arts and virtually via Instagram. We sought to utilize the privileges of being students in a graduate program at a private arts university to create an exhibition opportunity for artists who may not have access to such establishments. Our open call for submissions encouraged artists with any identity, educational background, and level of artistic experience to submit their work. For one artist, makeSPACE was the first time they had work accepted to a gallery, and for another, it was the first time their pieces were accepted outside of a student show. The artist books in the show were displayed on open pedestals, with a sign that told viewers they could touch and handle the books (in our call for submissions, we stated that any artist books in the show must be available for handling). By opening this gallery to people outside of the university, we hoped to create chances for communities within and outside of the institution to connect, for people to experience artist books as they are meant to be experienced, and for marginalized artists to have opportunities to be seen and heard.

makeSPACE exhibition, Gallery 224, 2022

https://www.instagram.com/heymakespace/

In joining the conversations on and movement towards accessibility in the arts, we wanted to acknowledge and speak with people who have been doing this work for some time, hear about their practices, and share space. To do so, we organized a panel discussion with Nasheli Ortiz-Gonzalez from Taller-Puertorriqueño and Yuka Petz. In tandem with the panel and the exhibition, we also hosted zine workshops at the Free Library of Philadelphia. All events were free and open to the public. It was important for us to meet people in their community at the library for the workshop and online via Zoom for the panel discussion to reach people wherever they may be.

Elaina Brown-Spence, Meera Mittal, and Erica Honson make up the 2022 graduating class from the MFA Book Arts and Printmaking program at UArts in Philadelphia, PA. Together they formed the SPACE Coalition in 2021 working towards accessibility in the fields of book arts and printmaking and the art world at large.

GATES WIDE OPEN: PART 2 // Beth Sheehan

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 May 2022 07:00:00 GMT

In this article, I would like to unpack some of the reasons gatekeeping can perpetuate. I believe most of the reasoning is understandable and justifiable, but I want to encourage our community to think through ways we can open gates of all sizes.

Students don’t have access to equipment, so they can’t learn this technique.

Fair, but equipment access is a privilege and there can be economic barriers preventing access to that equipment for all makers, not just students. Additionally, there may be times when artists will not have access to equipment for other reasons, such as at many artist residencies. It can be difficult to teach certain techniques without equipment, but even just adding a quick mention to your students about the kinds of workarounds they could research may eliminate a mental barrier that would keep them from making books or prints again.

It is also important to be transparent about the costs and benefits of investing in quality equipment. Some workarounds/DIY equipment can be so frustrating, the maker abandons book arts when they could have invested 10 more dollars for a better brayer, awl, etc. and eliminated most of their struggle. Additionally, newer makers may not be aware of the grants and assistance available, so even just briefly mentioning that possibility can open gates.

Book artists and printers love to talk shop – we are constantly discussing what down-and-dirty tricks work, what style press has which common problems, and what equipment is worth purchasing or skipping. This kind of “institutional” knowledge is almost impossible for students or new book artists to research in an effective way, so by freely giving that information to newer makers, the community opens space for innovation.

This is too advanced to teach.

I hear this mostly regarding workshops and, given time constraints, equipment constraints, and participant experience constraints, this is a valid concern. However, many advanced courses in book arts and printing are only offered through higher education programs. Enrolling in one of these programs can be a huge barrier if one does not have the time, finances, or learning style best suited for higher education. Additionally, academia can manipulate aspects of these advanced courses – adding pressure to boost enrollment which may change the curriculum, limiting student access to instructors who juggle terrible schedules as they try to live on adjunct pay, and forcing external standards for grading, etc.

There are, of course, some advanced courses taught as workshops outside of academia, but I would like to encourage an expansion - not only in number but also in topic. I would love to see more courses (introductory and non-introductory) about critical theory, concept + content, professionalism, the role of words in book arts, implementing multimedia, problem solving, and innovations in technology for book artists.

Students don’t need this information; they only need this information.

This may be a choice made for the sake of time or to limit confusion – it is often accidental gatekeeping. I do not think this kind of curation needs to be eliminated. However, it is important to make efforts to provide resources to students and new book artists so they may acquire the information themselves. This may be as simple as reminding them that there are multiple ways to accomplish something – while teaching a letterpress course, mention that some printers and artists print by hand – or by recommending resources the students can use to expand their knowledge. (Here is a resource guide I have been working on.)

These students are too young or too old to learn this.

It is more common to hear this argument when considering what topics to cover in children’s workshops. However, I am surprised at how often I have heard this in reference to undergraduate students or the age of workshop participants compared to graduate students. This argument is intentional gatekeeping and feels lazy to me. I genuinely believe anyone can learn anything and it is not the place of the instructor to hold knowledge back. Allowing age to act as a barrier shows an unwillingness to adapt one’s own teaching style. If individual instruction is needed, additional time can be built into your course. If physical limitations exist, there are tools to assist.

Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harlan and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

GATES WIDE OPEN: PART I // Beth Sheehan

Virginia Green — Mon, 02 May 2022 12:38:20 GMT

Generally, I have found the book arts community to be welcoming and happy to have conversations that seek to expand rather than limit ideas about book art. However, I also feel that gatekeeping, or limiting access to something, is still too commonplace within the tight-knit book arts world. Gatekeeping shows up in many ways: through elitism about education, stigma against certain processes or techniques, opinions about the validity of works based on the price tag or amount of time put into the piece, or discrimination against artists of specific demographics. It can be hard to navigate, especially for those new to book arts. In our digital age, and particularly with the pandemic spurring such an intense pivot to online and video-based learning, information has luckily been more equitably accessible than ever before. The switch to virtual learning opened the gates for people in locations where there are no book art centers, people who are agoraphobic, and people who find it difficult to fit in-person classes into their schedules. Often Zoom classes are recorded as well, which provides better access for people with severe anxiety, those who need to receive instruction at a different pace, or those who prefer to understand an entire process before they attempt it themselves. With live captioning technology, virtual learning also opened gates for anyone who needs or prefers captions when receiving auditory instruction. Additionally, many organizations implemented pay-what-you-can or sliding scale models to their services, classes, and memberships which opened the gates to those that found the financial investment of participating in aspects of the book arts community to be a hurdle.

While there has been an excellent push toward equitable accessibility in the ways mentioned above, I feel there are further discussions that need to happen to open our community even wider as some of the paths toward greater accessibility are not as clear. Early in the switch to online teaching, I noticed conversations about the types of classes students could handle through virtual learning, an expected lack of quality due to the format, and concerns about recording intellectual property. These points are important to think about but are also areas where gatekeeping can seep back into actions. In my next article, I will breakdown some of my thoughts on these points, but I want to encourage open discussion about them as well as about other points that I may have overlooked.

Some of these points are: - Students don’t have access to equipment, so they can’t learn this technique. - This is too advanced to teach as a workshop. - Students don’t need this information, they only need this information. - These students are too young or too old to learn this. - No one wants to be on Zoom for more than 2 hours, so I am limited in what I can teach. - It’s impossible to see anything in online classes/teaching - online is too difficult. - Teaching workarounds or methods for making without equipment is too difficult or pointless because the equipment is too important. - If I share my process as a video, I’ll be out of a job – anyone can share my video instead of taking my classes.

The book arts community has so many published books depicting binding techniques but so few published books on printing techniques and an incredibly sparse amount of (quality) video tutorials available, so the explosion of accessible classes has been incredible. As that explosion stabilizes, our community has the opportunity to consciously decide how we are going to add to the culture. Putting in the work for equitable access to high-quality information and instruction is a promising way forward.

There were plenty of growing pains in the last few years, but many organizations and institutions have made it clear that the additional access provided by virtual learning was in fact growth and not a temporary adjustment. It is exciting to see the number of virtual offerings that are continuing even as we have started to transition standard operations back to in-person and it is exciting to think of how much more access we can provide for people in the future through methods we haven’t explored deeply yet.

Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harlan and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

INTERSECTIONS: ARCHIVES, NARRATIVE, AND METAPHOR IN ARTIST BOOKS // Michelle Wilson

Virginia Green — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 11:21:03 GMT

For many book artists and book art educators, there is an increasing dialogue in making books in collaboration with and response to archives and Special Collections. To have artists working with those collections supports their vitality, assuring that such holdings are not just relics of the past, but instead active and continual contributions to current inquiry.

The most successful responses to archives are when an artist forms an intersecting narrative between the archive and personal allegory. In her Sobre Adaptaciones y Engaños a Primer Vista (On Adaptions and Deceptions at First Site), the artist Viviana Carlos (https://vivianacarlos.com) mines an archive for material and goes on to transcend this material by crafting a narrative about collective and personal memory and the human experience.

Sobre Adaptaciones had its origins when Viviana Carlos was hired by a private photography collection in Los Angeles to serve as its cataloguer. Carlos, a transplant to Los Angeles from Mexico, had become interested in the history of palm trees in Southern California, and the collection where she worked had numerous historical images of palm trees throughout the city. She learned that these iconic trees of Los Angeles were themselves transplants. The Spanish missionaries who colonialized California originally planted palm trees for decorative purposes and, in the case of date palms, for food. Going through the archive of images, seeing many of them repeatedly, Carlos began to see them as a personal metaphor for her own story of migration.

As the concept for the book developed, Carlos found herself struggling with questions. As first, she didn’t know how it would evolve, but knew that the central idea was transplantation. At first, she asked herself, with no ownership of these images - did she have a right to use these them? As a cataloguer, she had the skills and knowledge to research the Doctrine of Fair Use and Creative Commons, so she was certain that there would be no copyright violations. Yet these images were part of a history that she did not feel she belonged to as an immigrant. In addition, she was plagued with a deeper question - did she have a right to tell her story? She felt conflicted because her story of migration – one of legal documentation – was not as difficult as that of others.

With these questions in mind, Carlos made the intuitive leap to tell her story through metaphor rather than literally. Sobre Adaptaciones is made of images of palm trees sourced from the collection in which she worked that were in the public domain.

The text, in Spanish and English, provides a series of facts about palm trees.

As the book unfolds, these facts become an elusive description of the human condition. Through this, Carlos creates a narrative that transforms the historical basis of the archive to become a personal mythology.

To keep archives and special collections thriving, we as educators must ask ourselves how to develop ways for students to connect these collections to their own identities. We must find ways for students to see these collections not only as relics of the past, but to help them find metaphor and meaning that are relevant to their experiences. Carlos credits her time studying with instructor and documentary photographer Celeste Alba Iris of Miradas al Foto Libro (https://www.miradasalfotolibro.com) as forming the conceptual basis for thinking of an archive as materials and personal symbolism.

By encouraging students to mine archives, we must ask them to go beyond appropriation. This is not just because appropriation is currently debated, depending on who is asked, as trendy or as inappropriate, but because the art of the book demands a deeper, more nuanced and layered approach. Yet the question remains, how do we do this? One method is to introduce works like Sobre Adaptaciones to our students, allowing them to see examples of diverse voices responding to collections and archives as models for artist books.

Michelle Wilson is an interdisciplinary thinker, whose work involves papermaking, printmaking, book arts, installation, and social practice. She holds an MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking from the University of the Arts. She exhibits widely and is one-half of the collaborative duo the Rhinoceros Project. She teaches printmaking, papermaking, artist books, and seminars at San Jose State and Stanford.

THE CHALLENGE OF GENRE IN ARTIST BOOKS // India Johnson and Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 07:00:00 GMT

If we take books like Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Yves Peintures (1954) as examples, rock music emerged as a genre roughly around the same time artist books cohered as a medium for modern art. Since the ‘50s and ‘60s, rock has fractured into many sub-genres, while also maintaining a coherent identity that distinguishes it from other major genres, like country or pop. So the term “artist book” or “artist publishing” might be about as useful a term as “popular music.” Occasionally, we need to talk about all of popular music, but it’s more common to write about specific groupings of musicians, fans, producers, songwriters, etc. We need the umbrella term "artist book," but whenever we want to write about artist books, market artist books, buy artist books, plan an artist book fair, etc. we should consider the advantages of classifying books in terms of audience. This doesn't mean the categories have to be rigid or limit artistic expression — consider that musical artists make legendary work both by blurring/transcending genre (Lil Nas X) or embodying genre (Chris Stapleton).

In his history of popular music in seven genres, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argues that “the idea of transcending genre suggests an inverse correlation between excellence and belonging, as if the greatest musicians were somehow less important to their musical communities, rather than more. (Did Marvin Gaye transcend R&B? Did Beyoncé?) … It is strange, anyway, to praise genre mixing without also praising the continued existence of the genres that make such mixing possible” (xi). [1] Just as musical artists work within and against existing genres, artist books participate in existing literary and visual art genres. There may also be genres that are unique to artist books, but it is these shared ones that provide inroads for larger and more diverse audiences.

The link between classification and audience is key, and thus existing classification projects reveal a great deal about the intended audience. In “Developing a Book Art Genre Headings Index,” Mary Anne Dyer and Yuki Hibben of Virginia Commonwealth University discuss their effort to develop a “local genre headings index to be used in the online catalog to provide enhanced access to the libraries’ collection of artists’ books.” However, “the list of genres was composed of terms representing book art facets of structures, binding techniques, mediums, and formats.” [2] Calling ‘accordion fold’ a genre is like calling ‘guitar’ a genre, and most rock fans want to discover new rock artists, not a country artist who happens to play guitar. Genres should open up the field, not just help people who already make artist books.

The inherent interdisciplinarity of artist books poses challenges, but also opportunities for connections, which genre can facilitate. For example, India’s partner uses artist books to teach public history. He has a collection of artist publications featuring facsimiles of primary sources, with and without commentary. Content type and subject matter are what is salient, not the binding or material. Book-as-primary-sources might not be a genre (yet), but it demonstrates that a collecting parameter can be narrow and still expand the use of artist books beyond practitioners.

We’re interested in the possibilities of genre for every player in the publishing communications circuit. We are readers, looking for more of what we like, more easily. We are makers, hoping to reach the audience for our niche publications more easily. We are critics, scholars, and thinkers, writing with specificity about segments of an ever-expanding field. We are publishers, placing publications and their creators into meaningful dialogues and debates. We are educators, teaching about artist books but also using artist books to teach other topics. We are collectors, changing the meaning of our library with each book we add. We are information workers, cataloging and describing works to make them accessible. We are curators, soliciting proposals and offering opportunities, who need to articulate what we can accept, fund, care for, and make meaningful.

Yet questions remain: Does genre exist without marketing and middlemen? Are genres only characteristic of mainstream sectors of the culture industry? Is genre really a question of type or just taste? Will naming genres stultify the field? Or will leaving them unspoken serve only those whose work fits into our existing, implicit taxonomy?

[1] Sanneh, Kelefa. Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. Penguin Publishing Group, 2021.

[2] Dyer, Mary Anne, and Yuki Hibben. “Developing a Book Art Genre Headings Index.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 31, no. 1 (2012): 57–66. https://doi.org/10.1086/664914.

India Johnson makes books and non-books. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Center for the Book. She also attended fine bookbinding school at LLOTJA Conservatori Arts del Llibre. Based in Iowa City, India exhibits her work locally, nationally, and internationally.

Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.

THROUGH THE BODY, TOWARDS THE MIND // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 07:00:00 GMT

A constant consideration in the analysis of the book as art object is its relationship to the body: i.e., the direct physical reaction of the viewer/reader, and book artist, to the book object’s materials. This is compounded by the fact that it is frequently impossible to articulate and share the physicality of this experience with others that have not had corporeal encounters with book art objects. The difficulty of describing and articulating this experience could conceivably be the reason why there are so many differing opinions regarding what constitutes a definition of the artist book. To wit, Simone Murray in her book about contemporary print culture (2021) describes the difficulty of the definition of the book in the following way:

“[A]ll definitions should keep sight of the fact that the nature and role of the book are constantly in flux, and any attempt at definition needs to counterbalance analytical precision with sufficient capaciousness to respond to current (and future) developments.” [1]

In summary, the definition of the book, and to a greater extent the definitions of the artist book, book art object, letterpress book, zine, chapbook, etc., are in a state of “flux,” meaning not just change, but also a flowing and commingling. Due to this state of fluctuation and intermingling of bookish traits, definitions require both detailed investigation of the subject and matter that constitute a sufficiently vast understanding of the book in its manifold variations. [2]

Beyond recurring questions of definition, such as whether book work is art or craft or how publishing is a political act and can be a form of activism, there are questions regarding the essence of the book as a medium for communication. What is interesting is how the “flux” of the book makes it simultaneously capacious and particular enough to engage with a diversity of forms that other mediums cannot. The format of the book provides a versatile material construct that can either question or acquiesce to norms and expectations of what a book is as a means to question and engage with the viewer/reader. Unlike other mediums, the body of the book engages directly with the body of the viewer/reader as they hold and touch the book object; turn the pages; hear the pages, papers and binding move; smell the glue; and travel conceptually through the art object to understand and absorb its captivating ideas and position. Gillian Silverman puts it this way:

“In seeing, there is recognition, but in touch, there is the primal experience of contact-the fingers press against that which is foreign and in the process the boundaries between self and other are obscured. All touched objects function briefly as prosthetics, extending the body in new directions, creating, through the erasure of distance, a formal unity.” [3]

Touching, the haptic experience, has traditionally been mistrusted while sight has been considered the reigning perceptive mode because of its clinical and functional distance from the subject. Nevertheless, as Rosalind Krauss points out, sight is also a mediated and curated form of discernment. Krauss points out that seeing and recognition has been conditioned and formatted by the frames situated around perception. Historically speaking the visual picturesque was crafted by landscapers, paintings were framed and focused on particular kinds of subject matter. Even photography, that most venerable supplement to vision “acts as a kind of prosthesis, enlarging the capacity of the [eye]” [4] at the expense of the tactile.

Thus, visual cognitive perception continues to be privileged and distanced from proprioception. This conflict is one that has existed for millennia, though the modern version was formulated by René Descartes (1596–1650) and is known today as the mind-body problem. The question presented by this dichotomy is the apparent disconnection between how the natural or material world includes the presence of an immaterial mind.

The book art object, or artist book, represents perhaps the most gloriously fecund arena within which to address and redress the mind-body problem. The artist book “is particularly useful in destabilizing the boundary between optics and haptics or art and the everyday. Perhaps this explains why so many artists interested in such intersections have chosen the book as their medium.” [5]

The artist book’s destabilizing capabilities foment questions and create alternative paradigms that directly challenge and question the mind-body problem. They build curious and quizzical bridges that break down boundaries and establish new connections between mind and body. They present works that address and cross pollinate material objects as embodiments of immaterial thoughts.

They interrogate the relationship between the human body, as a living material that contains immaterial thoughts. They present a supplemental haptic experience that transgresses the mind-body split to transgress and present, through the body of the book, to the body of the viewer/reader the visual, literal, allegorical and metaphorical immaterial thoughts of a mind made flesh in the material world by the book artist. Thus, the body of the artist’s book is a supplement to the mind that can be touched, and to touch something is always also to be touched.

The mind-body problem is an issue for the book artist as they are holding and molding, literally, visually and materially, ideas and their perception within the material construct of the book. The immaterial mind is in their hands and as they touch it, it touches them back.

De libris cogito, ergo sum. (I think of books, therefore I am.)

[1] Murray, Simone. Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture: Books As Media. 2021. Print. p. 2.

[2] Addressing this point Michalis Pichler proposes that: “we are no longer only talking about books anymore—more capacious than book, the term publication is better because it can encompass digital files, hybrid media, and forms we have yet to imagine. . . . Publishing or publications as an umbrella term would include any form of circulating information, including books, zines, loose-leaf collections, flyers, e-books, blog posts, social media and hybrids, as long as they are (or are meant to be) viewed or read by multiple audiences.” Though there is something important to the question of definition there, he is trying to take the easy way out. Pichler, Michalis. “Artist's Book as a Term Is Problematic.” 3am Magazine, 9 Dec. 2019, https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/artists-book-as-a-term-is-problematic/.

[3] Silverman, Gillian. “Touch.” Matthew Rubery and Leah Price. Further Reading. 2020. Print. p. 193.

[4] Krauss, Rosalind. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” October, vol. 19, 1981, p. 32.

[5] Silverman, p. 196.

MARCH OF HISTORY: THE BOOK ART THEORY BLOG: 2015-2022 // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 08:00:00 GMT

The College Book Art Association’s Book Art Theory blog has presented engaging and absorbing topics over the previous six plus years of its online activity. Its posts reflect trends and theories that are shaping the discourse that surrounds the artist book in all of its manifestations. Here is a curated selection of some of the ideas and trends perceptible in the CBAA Book Art Theory blog.

2015: The first post, on the 30^th of September, 2015, was titled “Does Text-To-Be-Read Belong in the Artist’s Book?" This post discusses an issue that is still a theoretical concern for book art: the visual languages of format, image, and text. Other posts in this nascent period appeal for a more diverse history of book arts and the practice of “Book Thinking."

2016: Amidst the offerings of this first full year of the blog is an article that raises the fascinating proposition present in a material reading of the artist book This year also includes what could be the most cited entry from the blog, titled “ The Artist Book and the Sailor Suit.”Though the title sounds glib, this post deals with the question of “to apostrophize or not to apostrophize” when discussing artist books. This year also consists of posts regarding subjects like: “Erasures: Absence and Presence,” “What Does Theory Want?,” and “Book Art and Social Practice.”

2017: Many of the entries this year address the concerns of book artists in their capacity as educators and studio artists. Among these posts are those that question the unmonitored and silent distribution of digital materials in the internet age and also tackle how artist books as artifacts are simultaneously accessible and inaccessible.

2018: The thought-provoking topics raised during this year include how to live with art, the question of craft versus art, and the task of “paying attention.”

2019: This year authors broached subjects as diverse as the paradigms that define the artist book, spaces and places for writing, physically embodying poetics as part of the practice of book creation, along with problematic and interesting possibilities that arise from inverting the new art of the book into a vision of an older book art.

2020: This was a year of questions. It might be conceivable to recall our ignorance and uncertainty regarding a viral pandemic in addition to how to schedule and hold online meetings. At the threshold of this change the question of whether or not a new theory of the artist book could be generated was introduced, experiences beyond language were considered in relation to artist books, and the revelatory aptitude of memes became even more relevant as extended hours were spent online. Introspective questions surfaced on the blog, involving subjects such as papers romance with the book, word tornados, space time relationships presented by bookworks, and whether or not as artists “[We’re] Doing It All Wrong.”

2021: Nevertheless, book artists continued forward, assisting each other, and developing new practices for online instruction. The listening book was proposed as a curious opportunity for further investigation. Soon thereafter attention was given to the artist book’s ability to extend literature and include non-literary sources. The examination of the significance of both size and scale was demonstrated to be very relevant to book art. Finally, “Printing Through the Pandemic” disclosed in what way collaborative print work was possible, why it was and is important, and how it is absolutely necessary in addition to being therapeutic.

2022 This year has begun by questioning the place and relationship of the narratives that are crafted around the book arts, and the importance of “book arts environments” to bridge gaps between institutions and communities, as well as what are often seen as disparate academic disciplines.

Some themes that have become apparent through this analysis are: definitions and identities; histories of the medium(s) as histories of the field; relationships between text and image, as well as text versus image; haptic and intellectual hybrid experiences; techniques (including paper production, printing methods, binding methods) and materials (are you a Codex or a Printed Matter person); mutual support and strategies during a time of crisis; the book arts market place; assembling histories and diversified reading lists artist books as activism; and of course many other diverse questions of a theoretical inclination.[*]

This is what the Book Art Theory blog has unveiled to one reader. What has it revealed to you?

[*] If this brief summary has left out mention of your specific blog entry, it is simply because there was not enough room to do justice to each of the excellent blog entries that are available. Still, at least you know that your words have not gone into the void. You have at least one fan that appreciates your work, your voice and your skill. Thank you for participating in the blog. It is what it is because of you and your efforts.

BOOK ARTS IN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES: PART 2 // Kyle Clark

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 08:00:00 GMT

The next few paragraphs will be dedicated to highlighting a small sampling of book arts environments within three universities or college libraries. In order to better understand the role the book arts play in each of these communities of higher education, I arranged conversations with the directors of each program.

The Book Arts Studio, University of Richmond, Boatwright Memorial Library, directed by Jen Thomas. [1]

UR students worked with Jen in the Book Arts Studio to develop creative writing strategies utilizing alternative book structures, which they taught to their partners at the Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center.

The University of Richmond’s Book Arts Studio is a dynamic space that engages with students and faculty in course instructional sessions in addition to community engaged projects and initiatives, the latter being a truly remarkable aspect of Thomas’s work as director. The community engaged projects that Thomas organizes bring together not only students within UR but also the surrounding community, including local high school students. One such collaboration, titled The Spirit of Armstrong, pulled together 11 University of Richmond students with 21 high school students from Armstrong High School, a historically black high school, to document the voices of students and the community in which they live and learn through the creation of an editioned artist book. The creation of the edition resulting from the collaboration allowed students to explore personal narratives through the shared act of creation that is necessary when producing collaborative book works.

Members of an HIV support group worked closely with students in an American Studies Seminar to create book pages chronicling their journeys living with HIV. The books were bound with a Japanese stab binding and hung in an exhibition in The Valentine, a local history museum.

Other community collaborations have been arranged with the Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center working alongside UR students in the First Year Seminar: Storytelling and Social Change to capture story and feeling as embedded within student created accordion books. Another of Thomas’s orchestrated projects worth mentioning is that which brought HIV community members and Richmond students together in order to tell stories of living with HIV through the creation of four collaborative cascading books.

The Library Book Arts Workshop, Dartmouth College, Baker Library, directed by Sarah Smith [2]

Students from a Spanish class learned to set type—touching their Spanish words—and printed a group broadside.

Sarah Smith’s work at Dartmouth College’s Library Book Arts Workshop focuses more heavily on the institutional community through course support and offering book arts workshops (open to both the college and local communities). In discussing the Library Book Arts Workshop with Smith, what stood out to me the most was the collaborations Smith puts together with faculty spanning multiple areas of study within the Dartmouth community. One of Smith’s stated goals is to work with as many areas and courses across Dartmouth’s campus as possible. There are many courses that engage through interdisciplinary collaborative work in the Library Book Arts Workshop at Dartmouth; 7 course instructional sessions/projects are planned for the winter of 2022. A few of those collaborations have involved environmental studies, Latin, English, and Native American Studies courses.

A student (Tia Yazzie, ’19, Navajo) from Native American Studies course, Pen & Ink Witchcraft holds up the postcard she just printed using the studio’s Cherokee syllabary type. The text is from Cherokee artist and poet Jeff Marley and it says, “Your words are not fleeting”.

One of these courses, ENGL 52.18, Netflix and the Victorian Serial Novel, provided an interesting opportunity for students to engage through the Library Book Arts Workshop during the lockdowns at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students were able to explore the topic of seriality and its historic and contemporary implications on readership/viewership through the creation, production, and dissemination of serial pamphlets, created in collaboration with Smith and the Library Book Arts Workshop. The course HIST 96.08 Seminar: Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Native American History Through Treaties collaborated with the Library Book Arts Workshop to engage students through the tactile experience of printing Cherokee type, drawing meaningful and tangible connections to historic injustices through letterpress printing and written communication.

The Book Arts Lab, Wellesley College, Margaret Clapp Library, directed by Katherine Ruffin [3]

Students made paper in the Papermaking/Screen Print Studio at Wellesley College.

Differing slightly from the previous two book arts programs, the Book Arts Lab at Wellesley College hosts for-credit courses within the visual art and writing departments taught by BAL director Katherine Ruffin, typically 1 full class per term. These for-credit courses include ARTS 112 Introduction to Book Studies, ARTS 109 Two Dimensional Design, ARTS 222 Print Methods: Typography/Book Arts, and WRIT/ARTS 115 Word & Image Studio. Additionally, these courses are offered in conjunction with BAL instructional sessions for other academic courses. Much like the course support/instructional sessions offered by Smith at Dartmouth and Thomas at Richmond, in developing and facilitating instructional sessions Ruffin acts in a similar fashion to a librarian subject specialist, coordinating with faculty to build rich and meaningful content in support of course curricula. Ruffin and collaborating faculty use the BAL and library resources as jumping-off points for bringing disparate disciplines to form deep and meaningful enduring understandings through book arts driven content exploration. Each semester Ruffin will coordinate 10-15 instructional sessions per semester.

A faculty workshop being hosted in the Book Arts Lab.

The juxtaposition of book arts studio environments to library stacks, special collections, and archival material (not to mention maker spaces) has the potential to build and support information literacy, promote learning, and provide entry points to information in ways that may not have been previously supported by traditional library settings. Ruffin points out that the BAL’s proximity to special collections, archives, and other library resources creates unique creative synergies that encompass both historical and contemporary research.

An additional facet of Wellesley’s BAL worth mentioning is that it is also home to Annis Press, a literary and fine art press originally began in the late 1940s under the imprint of Red Bud Press. While not overly active, Annis Press on occasion will produce work with students, faculty, and visiting writers and artists such as Kiki Smith, Toxicology, 2009. [4]

Bibliography

[1] Clark, Kyle, and Jen Thomas. Book arts in college and university libraries. December 16, 2021. Personal interview conducted over Zoom.

[2] Clark, Kyle, and Sarah Smith. Book arts in college and university libraries. January 5, 2022. Personal interview conducted over Zoom.

[3] Clark, Kyle, and Katherine Ruffin. Book arts in college and university libraries. January 7, 2022. Personal interview conducted over Zoom.

[4] Smith, Kiki. Toxicology (letterpress and relief printing), Annis Press, 2009, Whitney Museum of American Art, https://whitney.org/collection/works/36104.

Kyle Anthony Clark is an artist and educator living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Kyle works at the University of Michigan Library’s conservation laboratory and as an instructor in the Book Arts Studio. Kyle maintains an independent practice and teaches courses and workshops on artists books, bookbinding, letterpress, and papermaking.

BOOK ARTS IN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES: CENTERS FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY CREATIVE SCHOLARSHIP, EXPLORATION, AND LEARNING // Kyle Clark

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 08:00:00 GMT

Clive Phillpot, former head of the library at the Museum of Modern Art, loosely defines artists’ books as: “distinguished by the fact that they sit provocatively at the juncture where art, documentation, and literature all come together…. What really characterizes artists’ books is that they reflect and emerge from the preoccupations and sensibilities of artists, as makers and as citizens”[1].

Kyle Clark teaching students the fundamentals of letterpress and pressure printing at the University of Michigan Library’s Book Arts Studio. Photo by Alan J. Piñon, director of Communication & Marketing at the University of Michigan Library.

“[A]t the juncture where art, documentation, and literature all come together”[1], libraries have and continue to be defined as centers for learning and growth that extend beyond the covers of the Book, or traditional information media. To many, the integration of creative tools within library resources encourages creative freedom and more engaged forms of learning and growth. Book arts studio environments, encompassing a variety of book arts related tools and resources (i.e. letterpress printing, print media, bookbinding, hand papermaking, calligraphy, etc.), have emerged in several college and university library settings within the United States as places that facilitate creative research opportunities and engaged forms of learning. These book arts studio environments provide students and researchers with an opportunity to make critical connections through artistic and scholarly processes while also allowing these library patrons to produce creative work (artists’ books, prints, book art objects, etc.) as both research process and product through varied arts-based inquiry and research methodologies.[2] In a college or university library setting (or a public library setting) this mode of creative engagement lends itself well to providing opportunities for collaboration across disciplines, academic departments, and external communities.

Among the American colleges and universities with library embedded book arts studio environments are institutions such as Wellesley College, Dartmouth College, University of Richmond, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, University of Utah, Colorado College, and several others. Each of the college and university libraries that host book arts studio, workshop, or laboratory spaces have a common grounding in their relationship to libraries as hubs for information, research, scholarship, and creative output. It is relevant to note that a few of the above-mentioned library-based book arts environments incorporate small press models for artist book and fine press publishing (i.e., those at Colorado College and the University of Utah).[3] The small press model within library settings, separate from academic departments, creates an environment where free expression can take place, transcending academic and artistic disciplines.

In an effort to better understand the place of the book arts in current college and university libraries, I was fortunate to have been able to have conversations with the directors at three of the above-mentioned book arts environments: Katherine Ruffin, director of the Book Arts Lab at Wellesley College; Jen Thomas, director of the Book Arts Studio at the University of Richmond; and Sarah Smith, director of the Library Book Arts Workshop at Dartmouth College. Each of these programs is unique, serving their home institution through a combination of book arts programming. Such types of programs include: course instruction/instructional support, non-academic workshops in the book arts, and in some instances providing open studio times for students and library patrons to work on class or independent book arts projects. One of the main commonalities of note within the library-based book arts programs of Dartmouth College, Wellesley College, and the University of Richmond is their collaboration with faculty (from a wide range of disciplines) in order to provide instructional sessions through their respective book arts environments. This type of engagement allows students to explore topics and themes from their coursework through the lens of book arts production, including through the production of artists’ books, prints, zines, and related book arts objects. Sometimes elements of book history or the study of the book as material objects are incorporated into these instructional sessions, as was described by Katherine Ruffin of Wellesley College.[4] In other instances, the book arts serve as a tool or methodology for critically examining complex areas of study. The latter was described by Jen Thomas at the University of Richmond in which a group of students from the University and local HIV community members explore and record narratives through the creation of artists’ books.[5]

For the next Book Art Theory blog post I’ve written short vignettes highlighting the library-based book arts programs at Dartmouth College, Wellesley College, and the University of Richmond based on conversations with the directors of those three programs. Within these brief overviews, I have attempted to bring attention to aspects that are unique to each program while describing creative projects and/or the programming central to their operation within academic libraries and higher education.

[1] Lauf, Cornelia, and Clive Phillpot. Artist-Author: Contemporary Artists' Books. 31. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998.

[2] Rolling, James Haywood. “A Paradigm Analysis of Arts-Based Research and Implications for Education.” Studies in Art Education. Routledge, n.d. doi:10.1080/00393541.2010.11518795. If you are unfamiliar with arts-based research methodologies, this is a nice place to start. As an artist practitioner-educator, I find an enormous amount of value in the work that has been written on arts-based research and its implications for creative scholarly communication.

[3] “The Press at CC.” Colorado College, April 1, 2021. https://www.coloradocollege.edu/library/press/. “Red Butte Press.” Red Butte Press - Marriott Library - the University of Utah, January 4, 2020. https://lib.utah.edu/collections/red-butte-press/.

[4] Clark, Kyle, and Ruffin, Katherine. Book arts in college and university libraries. January 7, 2022. Personal interview conducted over Zoom.

[5] Clark, Kyle, and Thomas, Jen. Book arts in college and university libraries. December 16, 2021. Personal interview conducted over Zoom.

ARTIST BOOK INFOGRAPHICS, PART 2 // AB Gorham and Levi Sherman

Virginia Green — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 21:09:22 GMT

In our previous post, we rounded up existing infographics about artist books and encouraged our readers to plot them on a Venn diagram of our own. Then we each did this exercise as a way to get our collaborative conversation going. Things are slippery in the book arts world, hence the many versions of diagrams attempting to wrangle these objects and publications. We decided to lean into these different versions of categorization and post two versions, with a bit of justification.

Levi Sherman’s proposed categorization of artist book infographics.

Only one section of our Venn diagram remained unpopulated: infographics that deal exclusively with artist intent or audience. The book arts field seems to emphasize books rather than the people who make them or read them. This is notable since related fields had turned their attention to social, political and economic relations around the time many of these infographics were made. The best-known example may be book historian Robert Darnton’s 1982 “Communications Circuit,” which tries to account for the creation, reception, and survival of a book through all the humans that interact with it, and through the book with one another.

Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 65–83, figure 1.

Hiding beneath a misleading title, we did find one infographic that takes a similar approach: Kione Kochi’s “Clive Phillpot's diagram updated to illustrate new complexities in the age of digital publishing.” At first blush, Kochi’s corrective seems to be technological and thus a matter of materials and processes (a trail of ants march away from Phillpot’s fruit, each carrying a digital publishing technology). However, Kochi’s real innovation is populating Phillpot’s diagram with people and institutions (dealers, collectors, distributors, commercial galleries, chain bookstores, gatekeepers, museums, book art organizations, and artist publishers). Inasmuch as Kochi’s infographic deals with digital publishing, it is about changing relations among players in the field rather than the evolution of the book object itself.

Kochi, Kione, “Clive Phillpot's diagram updated to illustrate new complexities in the age of digital publishing,” Temporary Services / Half Letter Press, 2015.

Kochi’s intervention demonstrates the influence Phillpot’s fruit diagram has had on the field, so we were interested to see its evolution over time. One version differs from the fruit diagram only in the phrasing of “literary books” as “just books” and the use of simple geometric shapes instead of fruit. Did the fruit diagram dominate the discourse simply because it is more fun, or is there an important observation that, while art and books exert equal force on artist books, they are fundamentally different from one another (apple and pear rather than circle and circle)?

Likewise, the fruit diagram organizes books into unique and multiple, whereas another version groups them by visual, verbal, and verbi-visual. Does the preference for the former reflect (or create) a field more interested in materials and process than conceptual organization and subject matter? Perhaps the utility of Phillpot’s fruit diagram is its ability to define or describe the field for outsiders, while other infographics we found do more for those already inside the field. Kochi’s ironic update is certainly meant for insiders, and so is Daniel Mellis’ “Handmade-o-Meter,” which was published in the Journal of Artists’ Books. By contrast, Ulises Carrión’s interdisciplinary media theory and Philip Zimmermann’s analysis of photobooks bring readers in from other fields.

AB Gorham’s proposed categorization of artist book infographics.

One could argue Manuel Portela’s diagrams capture the artist’s intent, although originally we hadn’t put them into that category. Portela is attempting to visualize the conceptual and textual strategies of the Danielewski text in a way that feels like a “close reading” but with visual workflow.

Throughout our exercise, we thought of the infographics as either primarily verbal or primarily visual, but then decided to demarcate those infographics that make use of text and visuals equally. For example, there is a clear distinction between Philip Zimmermann’s photo-bookwork chart (which is essentially a list) and most of the other infographics, but some of the Phillpot diagrams are combinations of simple geometric shapes and concise wording. This may seem less important than the subjects of the areas of the Venn diagram, but it is certainly a part of the argument and perhaps reveals something about how the design of infographics affects the field.

As mentioned above, Kione’s introduction of “digital publishing” to update the classic Phillpot infographic could itself probably use an update to address the myriad ways that digital media is being incorporated into the artist book world. It would be interesting to see how means of digital publication could become a set of categories for classifying artist books. What would these categories look like? What about books with apps, books with video components, books with digital soundtracks or video games connected to them?

Ultimately, this structural exercise isn’t about finding the correct answer to our Venn diagram question. It’s about using the data collection of existing book arts (and book-adjacent) infographics and diagrams to get an understanding of the ways in which artists and theorists are thinking about book arts and publication. In this way, these diagrams are as much about the present state of the book and publication arts world as they are about the future — let’s focus on the gaps.

Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.

AB Gorham is a book artist and writer from Montana. She is the Director of Black Rock Press where she teaches book arts in the Book and Publication Arts Program. Her artist books have been exhibited and collected nationally.

ARTIST BOOK INFOGRAPHICS // AB Gorham and Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 08:00:00 GMT

There is a prevalence of infographics about artists' books. Infographics that display an inheritance from dematerialized/conceptual art; infographics that describe and demarcate the field of artists’ books; infographics that fulfill the need to communicate about a medium that is both spatial and time-based; infographics that function to teach bookbinding and letterpress printing (book arts). Why are there so many infographics about artists’ books? What do they tell us about or offer to the field of book arts?

Is this unique to artists’ books? Are we in a field obsessed with defining itself? And what we might learn by surveying them?

In order to answer some of the preliminary questions we looked at a set of example infographics and attempted to organize them according to "circles of meaning." Being that infographics are spatial, playful, and reductive, we agreed to start with mimicry in order to better understand how they function.

In terms of data visualization, the relationship between the bookbinding worksheet and a manual for machinery is that both are pragmatic and a sort of meta-publication. Maybe this connection is related to design practices. Design practices stem (partly) from necessity (the need to organize and plot out on paper where to print, fold, bind when there are so many planes of existence in a book format), but also include the artistic impulse to visually manifest an abstract idea or emotion. It’s possible that these book arts infographics are a result of the artistic/design impulse to create a visual, as well as practical, guide for a field that has its foundations in an existing form or medium (the book). The inherent interdisciplinarity of artists’ books and its conception/metaphorization as a “field” or a zone of intersection lends itself to spatial representation, and, the ongoing concern with self-definition and self-examination continues to produce infographics in this vein.

We evaluated the sample infographics and placed them into 3 large categories: Materiality/Process; Conceptual Organization/Subject Matter; Artist’s Intention/Audience.
The resulting diagram brings up a few key ideas:

1. artists' books are interdisciplinary, so it makes sense that the liminal spaces and boundaries will be important (even if they aren't represented)

2. the point of a structuralist exercise might be to see the limits of discourse, i.e., what positions in the graphic ought to be populated and, if they aren't, what (social or material) factors are preventing them from being populated?

3. if the infographics are indeed reductive, how has that affected the field's self-conception?

We propose using this Venn diagram to gauge infographics about book arts in the same way we would use those book arts infographics to gauge the bookishness of art or the artiness of books. Maybe this infographic becomes a way to talk about the types of critical theory and language used when discussing book arts and brings up larger ideas about the gaps. It will be interesting to see how people plot the various infographics on the structure we’ve created; we anticipate that some will be straightforward and others will be controversial. For example, Smith's conceptual books could be all about artist's intent and thus about artist/audience...but of course that is inherently contrasted to materiality and process, etc.

In the spirit of book arts as an experiential art form, we would like to take this opportunity to ask the reader to participate in this exercise by deciding where each of the linked diagrams might fit.

Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.

HAVING FUN AT THE WAKE // Peter O'Brien

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 08:00:00 GMT

James Joyce’s final book Finnegans Wake is simultaneously the most resistant and the most generous artwork that exists.

Resistant because although Joyce said that he could justify everything within it, this circular linguistic extravaganza remains labyrinthine, intransigent, and largely impenetrable to anyone approaching it (exactly, I think, how Joyce wanted it, overflowing as it is with riddles and inventions, and cross-historical and instantaneous perambulations).

Generous because it is continuously inviting us into its expansive, ubiquitous, and welcoming sui generis existence (this process, as Ovid and Giambattista Vico and Nature itself inform us, has to be continuous because that is the way the world effortlessly and insistently and without cease reprocesses and recreates and repossesses itself). (And what do artists do except reprocess, recreate, and repossess?)

I’ve been reading Finnegans Wake for about 45 years and still have a long way to go.

Some years ago I decided to annotate the book for myself, and to draw upon (both drink from and decorate), and to disrupt it – sticking my inquisitive nose where it wanted to go, intertwining my meandering musings with its body, and jabbing it with marks and colours (and various found objects, including the whole range of bodily fluids and humours) as I saw fit and as I hoped would fit.

Yoking together my twinning interests in the illustrative and the intellectual, the verbal and the visual, the pallet and the palette, LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE, my current multi-year artwork, is a way for me to have some fun with the book that Joyce spent 17 years building.

The tree outside my window is a simple place to start. Covid-bound as I am, it’s often the first and last thing I see. In the midst of my own idiosyncratic glossings – I integrate the research of various guidebooks (my knowledge of Persian, Rhaeto-Romanic, and Shelta is pretty shaky, to say nothing of my familiarity with the artificial language Volapük) and then embroider the text with my own specific amusements – I’ve painted and depicted various versions of this tree onto the pages.

The roots and the trunk and the crotches and the branches: trees can take on an uplifting amount of words and weight. I jigsaw as I go, fitting a few letters or words here and there, crafting the edges just so, making room for the thing to breath, and then trying to prevent myself from following my natural horror vacui instincts.

So is my artwork an artist’s book? At the end of my project (if such a thing will or should exist) I’ll have one copy of 628 pages of words and colours. But some of the originals are already being dispersed, so the entirety of LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE may never be entire. If I think too much about that, I begin to tire. So I just keep marking the time.

Who knows what an artist’s book is? Do I know? I’ve always been partial to Marcel Duchamp: “It’s an artist’s book if an artist made it, or if an artist says it is.”

Peter O’Brien’s most recent book, Dream Visions: The Art of Alanis Obomsawin, was published in October 2021 by Viggo Mortensen / Perceval Press. His next book, Love & Let Go, will appear in March 2022. He has been working on LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE for about six years. More on the project: www.peterobrienart.com.

SHOW, DON'T TELL // Peter O'Brien

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 08:00:00 GMT

The new publication Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History opens with a self-confident and self-aggrandizing flourish. On its website https://inscriptionjournal.com and within its first two issues (mid-2020 and mid-2021) it gives us various introductions of itself.

“Journals,” it says, “work the minor miracle of being both item and series: the pearl, and the string of pearls. Here at Inscription we aim for the mobility of the seventeenth-century pamphlet, the intellectual rigour of the monograph, the walk-through-wonder of the art gallery, and that delighted dance between form and content.”

The beginning of the new journal, Inscription

Inscription looks us in the eyes, earnestly, and informs us that it is intoning the multimedia magazine Aspen (1965-71), and the Vorticist, two-issue magazine Blast (1914-15). It speaks to us with a learned lilt to tell us that it is “an exciting new publication featuring work by practitioners – book artists, printmakers and writers – alongside academic discussion. Its focus is not just on the meanings and uses of the codex book, but also the nature of writing surfaces, and the processes of mark-making in the widest possible sense: from hand-press printing to vapour trails in the sky; from engraved stones to digital text.”

And once more, with academic feeling, Inscription tells us it is “both a journal of cutting-edge research and a playful and innovative multimedia artefact.”

So how is it on the fulfillment side of this promising serial ledger?

The issues are supersized and expensive – so much so that no physical copies were made available by the journal for review. I had to depend on my MacBook Air and my iPhone, which along with iPads will be how most people access the journal. Neither of my devices provided a compelling or even a pleasant reading / viewing experience.

The opening piece of the enterprise is “On Stone,” by Serena Smith, a poetical essay on lithography that wanders back and forth through time. At play here, says Smith, is “the virtuality of duration, its tangible inscription, and the substrate of lithography stone, in an operation that brings together worlds of geology, autobiography, technology, and writing.” Smith writes with informed sensitivity about the marks made by history and hands. She’s working, after all, with objects that have the “capacity to ignite latent memory.”

In the first issue we also have an intriguing essay on epitaphs in 18th-century England by Rebecca Bullard, which documents the idiosyncratic metamorphoses that have come down to us on monuments, in manuscripts, and impressed onto paper. And there’s a searching and touching essay on skin / parchment / inscriptions by Kathryn James.

I found some of the offerings, in particular “The Work as Will: Roland Barthes Reading Group,” rather pedestrian. Not Barthes – he is seldom pedestrian, except when he wants to be – but these fleeting fragments of commentary didn’t add much to my reading or to the pages of the journal.

The first issue is printed dos-à-dos, and with each spread on a slightly different rotational axis than the previous one. The format did add to my reading experience, but only to its frustration. I’ve got perfectly serviceable electronic devices, but I have no desire to tilt my damn laptop at a different angle to read each different page.

I would suggest to the editors a bit less “look at us!” dos-à-dos cleverness, and a bit more of a musical “Do Si Do,” or at least more “do / see / do” going forward.

Inscription 2 was easier to read on a screen (no rotating text!) and had stronger graphic material, although this time we get a series of PDFs rather than a complete one (which causes its own ponderous sequential challenges).

Fionna Banner, Full Stop

Among the insightful pleasures for me in the second issue is the piece on organic and spontaneous library wormholes by Dianna Frid, Carla Nappi and Ian Truelove; the gushing, watery hole on the cover by Fionna Banner (who issued herself an ISBN in 2009 and registered herself as a publication: “a sort of self-portrait as a book,” as she says); and Christian Bök’s maelstrom soundscapes “The Oracle at the End of Time” and “Afterthoughts in the Void.”

I was prepared to make use of Inscription to get closer to Carolyn Thompson’s piece “The Beast in Me,” but I was unable to capture it from the Inscription website. I did eventually find the piece on Thompson’s own website, and its circular, tumultuous love is certainly worth a wider audience.

Some of the concerns I had with Inscription 1 are still evident in number 2. Co-editor Gill Partington introduces Erica Baum’s artwork “Piano Rolls” with the words “strange and compelling,” “subtle reconstruction that seems to elicit new possibilities of meaning,” and “an enigmatic kind of visual poetry.” I like Baum’s work, but do I need my hand held by Partington quite so firmly, quite so insistently, quite so helpfully? Please: let the work read and be and show itself.

Of passing interest to me was “Cigar Burn Apertures” by David Bellingham. I was intrigued that he describes at some length his art-making talents, but does not reference Antonin Artaud’s crazed, cigarette-burnt magic spells.

Carolyn Thompson, The Beast in Me (detail)

One thing about Aspen: the contents of the gathered pieces complemented the forms in which they were presented. There was engagement and wit and newness and playfulness. I would be delighted for Inscription to meet or at least approach its own lofty ambitions. No thematic topic has yet been mentioned for issue number 3, which will begin to take shape in early 2022. Here’s a suggestion: “Show, Don’t Tell.”

Peter O’Brien edited the journal Rubicon, which included interviews with Margaret Atwood and Mavis Gallant, poems by Eavan Boland, and artwork by Ann Hamilton. His books include Cleopatra at the Breakfast Table (about studying Latin with his daughter) and Dream Visions: The Art of Alanis Obomsawin, published in 2021 by Viggo Mortensen / Perceval Press.

PATHWAYS TO CONCEPTUALIZING THE BOOK // Kathy Walkup

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 08:00:00 GMT

For several years I taught a graduate Book Art seminar at Mills College that met several times a semester. These classes grew out of a full-semester grad seminar, The Material Book, that I taught for many years. Students in that class asked that the work of the material book seminar be extended beyond one semester (the first semester of their two-year MFA in Book Art studies) in order to continue to discuss the issues that came up in their first fall of study. [You can read a bit more background in my Book Art Theory blog post “[Im]material specifics: Zooming through the pandemic,” March 1, 2021.]

The main seminar focused on the theoretical, conceptual and historical study of the book as a material object. The three semesters of follow-up seminars continued those studies, but the nature of the projects for these seminars shifted from completed projects to rough outlines of ideas. These proof of concept projects generally were set as response to reading we were doing in the seminar, although other prompts (artist talks, a video, an article in the newspaper) could also apply.

Usually the prompts were simple:

Read: Magali Rabasa, “Radical Politics and Organic Books in Latin America [1].

Project: Make an organic book that takes into account the principles around the ways print books create community and a space for radical politics.

Occasionally they were more detailed:

Read: Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy and Book from the Ground [2].

Xu Bing describes his iconic work, Book from the Sky, as ‘a paradox full of contradictions’ [p. 176]. He adds further contrasts: solemn yet absurd, external appearance vs. internal “essence.” Referring to the texts as characters denies the function of his pictorial forms; calling the work a book fails to recognize that it doesn’t qualify as one. There is an emergence of hyper-realism and abstraction, another point of possible tension.

Using at least one of these areas of contrast as a point of departure, make a book that signals one of more of these sets of contradictions. Feel free to challenge Xu Bing’s ideas about his own work if you would like. And of course you can also work with his “doubts and sense of alarm about existing forms of writing.”

The books that the prompts called for were meant to be not finished pieces, but drafts. I was always mindful of how much work the students were undertaking in the studios, and usually there was at least one student who was preparing for their thesis exhibition. What the students brought to the classes were rough to very rough mockups, with enough detail (perhaps one page spread filled in if the book were meant to be in page spreads) that we could grasp what they were trying to do and make comments on the concept.

Of course sometimes the results were not at all what I expected. One of the prompts was based on Kurt Johannessen’s Shine [3]. Johannessen is a Norwegian artist whose work is highly conceptual and often interacts with the nature of light. I consider Shine one of his most intriguing books. In it are fourteen photographic portraits printed in a glossy white ink on a white background so that the pages appear empty at first glance. You read the portraits by changing the way the light hits the pages. The portraits are not identified, but they appear to be possibly friends or family members. What I see are portraits that are almost ethereal, as if I were somehow glimpsing into their disembodied selves. What the students saw were fourteen white portraits of fourteen white people. It was impossible for them to separate the lack of diversity in the portraits from the conceptual backbone of the book, which led to some scintillating discussion.

Time after time, the students came up with striking concepts that were eminently workable as fully realized books. Since there was no time for them to realize these works, the projects became placeholders for future investigation. Many students expressed excitement in the idea that they would have at least one conceptual framework to develop into a finished work once they graduated. The projects became a bridge into the future, a material presence that offered life, and art, after grad school, with some initial critique already thrown in.

[1] In The Book Club of California Quarterly, vol. LXXXV, no. 4, Fall 2020.

[2] In Marshall Weber, ed., Freedom of the Presses: Artists’ books in the twenty-first century. Booklyn, 2018.

[3] Kurt Johannessen, Shine. Zeth Forlag, 2006.

Kathleen Walkup is Professor Emerita at Mills College. Her research interests focus on the history of women and printing and conceptual practice in artists’ books. In 2022 her exhibition, Possibilities: When artists’ books were young, will open at San Francisco Center for the Book. She is a founding director of the College Book Art Association.

A Few Notes on Teaching the Book // Kathy Walkup

Virginia Green — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 16:51:41 GMT

When I walked into the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University recently, an installation immediately caught my eye. Ranged along three sides of a large balcony above me were bookcases filled with what looked to be thousands of books bound in bright cloth. As it turns out, there were 6000 books in the exhibition, all wrapped (not bound) in Dutch wax-print fabric. On the spines of some but not all of the books were gold-stamped names in large capital letters, some recognizable (Cameron Diaz, Steve Jobs, Teju Cole, Tiger Woods), some not. The order of the books appeared to be random. I say books, but in fact since they were wrapped we have only the artist Yinka Shonibare’s word about that. The label for this work stated that the names are “first- and second-generation immigrants or their descendants, or those who moved in the Great Migration . . . .”

The label had a complex explanation about the use of Dutch fabric with its Indonesian batik designs, but no explanation for the books, nor does the website (theamericanlibraryinstallation.com) even mention the books beyond stating that the covered objects are, in fact, ‘hardback books.’ This must be a critical piece of information for the artist; what should we as viewers make of this? In the absence of seeing what the actual titles are of these books, a hardback book represents more authority than a paperback: We imagine what is printed in it has more value than its paper counterpart. Since we can can’t touch the books, we can only imagine—but we do—their heft and their permanence. What they have to say is clearly irrelevant since we have no access to that information even if we could pick up the objects.

The artist thought it important to use books as the medium for this particular message, but if I were critiquing this project I would ask, as I have countless times over the decades of my teaching, why the books are there. Sure, stories are told in books, but books as objects also tell their own stories, and if you want to create work that is grounded in the book form, you had better have a clear conceptual pathway toward that making. Otherwise they are merely vehicles, the way, for example, the concept behind Tom Phillips’ iconic altered book project A Humument has circuitously led to legions of books being hacked into fantastic shapes as if they were hunks of soap, or to failed experiments (or ‘artwork’ as Wikipedia labels it) like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes.

In my graduate seminars at Mills College we worked mostly with the codex. Alan Loney, whose The Books to Come (Cuneiform Press, 2012) was a staple of those courses, writes that book = codex + text. While I don’t limit the use of the word book to the codex, I do stress that, in its millennium or so of existence, the codex has not exhausted its possibilities. To explore those possibilities we might begin by reading about the page through the eyes of Bonnie Mak (How the Page Matters, University of Toronto Press, 2012). Mak’s examination of the non-verbal elements of the page and their expressive function is a strong jumping-off point, an initial way to understand the page as both a technological device and a holder of the ‘cultural residue’ of authors, scribes, sellers, owners and readers. Pairing Mak’s exploration of the page with Dick Higgins’ brief essay on the book as a ‘container of provocation’ (Dick Higgins, A Book, 1982) provides a broad basis for conceptualizing the book through the lenses of technology (the hide and reveal of page turning), history and art. Close reading of iconic examples of the codex like Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover, Ed Ruscha’s Twenty-six Gasoline Stations and Sol Lewitt’s Four Basic Kinds of Lines and Colour allows students to follow some pathways that artists have taken to explore the form.

Of course students also did hands-on work to consider the conceptual nature of books. In the next blog post I will describe some of the proof of concept projects that students undertook in the seminars. Had the Shonebare work been available to us, we could have explored that installation through study and practice, perhaps by wrapping and amassing books to test and question the theory behind Shonibare’s approach to his work.

* When you think about it, that category includes nearly everyone in the U.S. Who, after all, would be left, outside of the indigenous peoples of the land (who are not addressed here)?

Kathleen Walkup is Professor Emerita at Mills College. Her research interests focus on the history of women and printing and conceptual practice in artists’ books. In 2022 her exhibition, Possibilities: When artists’ books were young, will open at San Francisco Center for the Book. She is a founding director of the College Book Art Association.

Time and Book // Beth Sheehan

Virginia Green — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 20:57:56 GMT

Exploring where Book Art fits in the broader art world and pushing the boundaries and definitions of Book Art is exactly what we’re here to do. That work is made easier because artist books lend themselves to expanding definitions and context anyway. Book Art situates itself along certain in-betweens – it can’t be placed in the same category as flatworks like much of painting, drawing, and printmaking, but it also isn’t exactly in the same category as more dimensional art like sculpture, ceramics, or even installations. Artist books often borrow visual language from typical 2D and 3D art forms, but a key element that works its way into discussions about books is the element of time.

Artist’s book by Beth Sheehan.

I would argue that a majority of artist books invite time into the equation as a viewer: flips through pages, picks up the book to turn it around and inspect it, unrolls or unfolds or moves the book in other ways. This dimension of time through interaction is not necessarily absent from more two-dimensional art works, but it is not expected of those mediums. Three-dimensional art forms are more likely to encourage an interaction, triggering the additional dimension of time for the work, but even sculptures don’t carry that expectation in their core in the way that books do.

Mock-up made by Beth Sheehan.

Time’s role in books becomes more evident when trying to accurately document artist books. To fully capture an artist book, multiple photographs are needed at minimum. I would even argue that a recording of the book being handled is infinitely more preferable, and even then, the recording can hardly compete with interacting with the book yourself.

Artist’s book by Beth Sheehan, alternate view.

But this addition of time in Book Art doesn’t place it completely in a time-based artwork category either. Artworks that are typically called Time-Based art are more along the lines of videos, sound art, or performance art. This article by the Guggenheim explains that in addition to dimensions that the artwork may have such as height or width, these works all have the added dimension of a duration. Unlike the works discussed in that article, Book Art again fits just outside of the category because while time is a dimension of most books, duration is not.

Book Art’s relationship with time feels like its defining factor for me. Each book will ask each viewer for a different amount of time each instance that the viewer interacts with it. It feels to me like the book’s gravity is fluctuating and time is dilating in response, like Einstein’s theory of general relativity (then proven through this cool experiment). The more gravity the book has affecting the viewer, the slower time flows for that viewer when handling the book.

“Outside of Time” bookish installation by Beth Sheehan.

This is why artist books don’t have a set duration. The amount of time a viewer spends depends on the amount of pull the book’s gravity has on them. Then, I’m left contemplating ways to increase the gravity of my books and wondering which artist books that I’ve encountered had the most gravity, pulling me in and bending my time.

Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harland and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

Repetition in Book Arts: Kink or Catharsis // Beth Sheehan

Virginia Green — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 10:42:20 GMT

To me, repetition is indivisible from book arts. So often, bookbinders are creating multiples of the same book object through editions or within a series. Even in cases where we decide to create a single book, bookmaking still incorporates so much repetition – poking holes for sewing, gluing page after page, making fold after fold.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is punished for his hubris and the punishment befitting him was an eternity of repetition. He was doomed to roll a boulder almost all the way up a hill, just for it to inevitably roll back to the bottom causing him to repeat the process over and over, forever.

This myth begs the question, is repetition a punishment? And if so, are book artists gluttons for punishment? My answer to this question changes based on where in the bookmaking process I am.

Image of Beth in a moment of frustration with a book project; a cheeky nod to Ai WeiWei’s Study of Perspective.

Enjoying the punishment of art making, sacrificing for your artistic practice, and becoming the cliché of the “tortured artist” seems right along the lines of what someone would expect from a maker whose preferred medium is something as labor-intensive as the production of artist books. In fact, the myth of the Tortured Artist is so prevalent for all types of creatives that there have even been scientific studies conducted to research connections between creativity and mood disorders or mental illness. It is far easier to not make art than it is to make art, so deciding to create is a choice that requires a lot of buy-in from the artist.

Artist book edition by Beth Sheehan titled Beloved.

Punishment is much easier to endure with the right motivation, though. Unlike Sisyphus’ boulder rolling, bookmaking is not futile. All the potential struggle and punishment that book artists put themselves through results in something of value – the artist book. This positive outcome then changes the narrative of the effort required. Instead of seeming useless, the work put into producing an edition of artist books becomes a devotion.

The value of the end product may provide enough motivation to cause an artist to shift from a state of statis to creation, but it still doesn’t condone repetition. The cost-value does not grow proportionate to the number of books produced, so where is the justification for the added punishment of creating more of the same book?

Beth’s stack of boxes in progress at Small Editions, Brooklyn.

Maybe repetition that results in a positive outcome becomes mediation. There have been several scientific studies about the benefits of repetition, including one in 2015 that looked at the act of repeating mantras and the effects that this has on one’s emotions and cognition. The results of that study state, “We demonstrate that the repetitive speech was sufficient to induce a widespread reduction in [blood oxygenated level-dependent] signal compared to resting baseline.” Repeating the mantra had a physiological effect on the participants, calming them down. I wonder if a study about the effects of physical repetition through bookbinding would find a similar result.

I have heard countless book artists express the feeling that the production side of making their work becomes meditative. There is something so nice about doing tasks that keep our hands busy, but allow our minds to wander. Getting into the rhythm of editioning can be a moment of respite and catharsis in and of itself, ending in the added satisfaction of creating something.

Edition of books, freshly cased-in by Beth at Small Editions, Brooklyn.

In lieu of all my speculating, I should instead pose the question to the book arts community. What value do you find in the repetition of book arts?

Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harland and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

PRINTING THROUGH THE PANDEMIC // Marnie Powers-Torrey

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 07:00:00 GMT

The repetition of printing offers consistency—each pass affirms progress through the stack of blank printer’s sheets, and the racked prints exude productivity. In early March 2020, under orders to evacuate the print shop, Emily Tipps and I hurriedly printed the title page and portfolio for the Festschrift for Bill, which I took home to build and disseminate. The project kept my mind and hands committed to progress. Two months later, still isolated from the presses and the people who use them, I shipped the completed portfolio to participants, receiving messages of warm appreciation in return. Connecting with the book arts community in response to the passing of Bill Stuart of Vamp and Tramp Booksellers was a powerful healing and celebratory opportunity before the pandemic hit, and the impact was exponentially greater once the global grief began to settle in.

Feeling debilitated and disconnected, I responded to an open call on social media for Fluffle: a second Tiny Bunny Print Exchange, organized by Lisa Hasegawa and Yuka Petz. The invitation to indulge in furry cuteness also offered the ease of creating on a small scale (20 prints measuring 3”x 4.5”) in any media (not to be more than 40% digitally produced). I completed my edition with what I had at hand—a drawing from a stock image, “printed” pochoir with a carbon paper trace monoprint. The randomly selected prints received in return were a comforting reminder that real people were out there, alive and making.

Prints from top left to bottom right by Aimee Rosner, Taylor Cox, Lisa Hasegawa, Ryan Lindburg, Mary Jane Parker, Kiernan Dunn, Kerri Cushman, Rochelle Gandour-Rood, Monica Wiesblott, Yuka Petz, Jessica Peterson, Gabby Cooksey, Jodi Genest, Sara White, Yuri Loudon, Kenny Harrison, Kat Brown, Bill Moody

In February 2020, Tony Guadagnolo invited me and 63 other SP20 owners to produce a 1920s jazz-themed print as a member of the 20 for 20 SP20 Print Collective. The Collective was formed as the pandemic took root, and the project was actuated “separately together” over the course of the year, with flexible deadlines in response to COVID-19 fallout. Tony kept in touch by emailing early jazz trivia questions and mailing collective T-shirts and printers’ manicules to participants. The following February, I joyfully received the smartly designed portfolio of 20 diverse prints. Simultaneously, I recognized that the critical value was in the collective productivity—being part of a larger whole whose individual members worked in parallel spaces in response to a common call with a shared timeline.

Work by Peter Bushell and Kerri Cushman

Dan Mayer, the College Book Art Association Southwest Regional Leader, organized a member exchange with the theme of Environment in March 2020. The theme was sufficiently open to consider global or more localized concerns that seemed amplified by the period of intense news-watching and ceiling-staring. I felt connected with other makers in my region, all thinking about place, and repurposed feelings of angst and hopelessness to fuel ideation and printing.

Print by Karen Zimmermann

Prints by Aaron Cohick and Amy Thompson

In November 2020, I received an invitation to participate in the Hope is an Action Print Exchange, organized by Jessica Snow, Kseniya Thomas, and Jenny Wilkson. The genius of the call was in encouraging participants to take action by hoping, something accessible to all, with individual and combined effort. I was struck by the inherent potential of collective problem-solving and the power of connection across geographic as well as political and/or cultural divides. During a period when the world seemed suspended in time, involvement in the project gave structure and meaning to my creative output.

Stefanie Dykes sent a spontaneous call to print-action in early January 2021 for the Ethic of Love Portfolio, inspired by bell hooks’s essay “Love as the Practice of Freedom.” I was propelled by the two-month deadline, the powerful essay, and the knowledge that other printers were making and loving in unison with me. By April, all 25 artists had received a full set of prints, each in a 10” x 5” priority mailer with a window that gave the enclosed exhibition the opportunity to travel and spread the love.

See participant list for artists' names

With the pandemic still raging, I’m grateful to be working on prints for Communities: West 5, organized by Sukha Worob and Andrew Rice, and Habitat, an effort by Mark Ritchie to “bring together” artists and writers to produce collaborative broadsides. The shared goals and deadlines help me prioritize the making—collectively, we are producing timely, innovative work that serves to connect us with one another and our audiences, despite our being distanced.

Marnie Powers-Torrey holds an MFA in Photography (University of Utah) and a BA in English/Philosophy (Boston College). Marnie teaches letterpress, bookmaking, artists’ books and other courses for the J. Willard Marriott Library’s Book Arts Program and elsewhere. She is master printer and production manager for the Red Butte Press.

A BOOK WORK IN MEMORIAM: VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER // Lyuba Basin

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 07:00:00 GMT

On August 18, 2019 a group of scientists gathered at the top of Ok volcano in Iceland. They weren’t there for a research project, but rather a memorial. And they weren’t alone. Among the scientists were mourners who came to remember the now “deceased” glacier Okjökull. Also in attendance: Iceland’s Prime Minister, Katrin Jakobsdottir; the Environment Minister, Gudmundur Ingi Gudbrandsson; and the former Irish President, Mary Robison. During the ceremony, a plaque was laid carrying a message to the future.

Although the “funeral” took place in 2019, Okjökull glacier was declared dead five years earlier. Oddur Sigurdsson, a glaciologist at the Icelandic Meteorological Office, had been taking photographs of Iceland’s glaciers for some fifty years. As early as 2003, he noticed that on Okjökull the snow was melting before it could fully accumulate. This meant that the glacier was no longer thick enough to stay alive. It was not moving. It was “dead ice.” His theory was confirmed when he visited the glacier in 2014 and found that Okjökull had shrunk to less than 40 meters thick, or the pressure limit which allows the glacier mass to move. Despite enlisting an Icelandic broadcaster to officially report the death of Okjökull, it did not result in much media attention.

Several years later, anthropologists from Rice University, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, arrived at Okjökull’s remains to embark on what they called the “Un-glacier Tour”—a guided hike to the top of Ok volcano that was “meant to be a reckoning with glacial demise as well as a celebration of glacial life.” The Un-Glacier Tour and a documentary film titled Not Ok described the events of the glacier’s death: melting down from 5.8 square miles to just 0.386 square miles, or 6.6% of its original mass. Inspired by their experience, Howe and Boyer decided to create an official memorial.

A bronze plaque cast by Icelandic metal worker Gretar Mar Porvaldsson was laid at Ok volcano. An inscription was written in Icelandic by author and poet Andri Snaer Magnason, along with a translation into English. It read:

A letter to the future

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.

In the next 200 years all our main glaciers are expected to follow the same path.

This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.

Only you know if we did it.

The text concludes with “415ppm CO2,” the ratio of greenhouse gases on Earth recorded in May 2019.

When this unique “funeral” for Okjökull was held in August 2019, an artist collective had come together for an unrelated meeting in Reykjavik. Melanie Mowinski and Joseph Ostraff were part of that artist collective and the ceremony at Ok volcano made a deep impact. It inspired them to create another memorial for yet another glacier—Vatnajökull. Vatnajökull is Iceland’s largest glacier, covering approximately eight percent of the country, with an area of more than 3,000 square miles, or about 7,900 km2. Vatnajökull National Park, which encompasses all of Vatnajökull and the extensive surrounding areas, had been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site just one month before the funeral for Okjökull. Perhaps this was a preliminary attempt to protect it from the inevitable; Vatnajökull was not yet dead, but as experts have predicted, it likely will be within the next two hundred years.

Melanie Mowinski (Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts) and Joseph Ostraff (Brigham Young University) worked together to create “an announcement for a funeral 200 years in the future.” Using material collected in downtown Reykjavik in August 2019, they created a series of collage posters to announce the inevitable death and funeral of Vatnajökull.

Twelve sets of posters—two-hundred posters per set, one poster for each year leading up to 2219—were distributed to institutions in the United States and internationally to participate in the performative act of announcing the death of Vatnajökull each year until the actual death of Vatnajökull, or until there is a reversal in the current climatic trend. The Rare Books department at the J. Willard Marriott Library is honored to be the steward of this set, encouraging the creation of conversation and activities about the evolution of environmental health.

A version of this post appeared on the Book of the Week blog, hosted by Rare Books at the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

Lyuba Basin is the Rare Books Curator at the J. Willard Marriott Library, at the University of Utah. Prior to completing an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Lyuba was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach in English in Argentina. Lyuba is interested in the materiality of the book and its relationship to historical, political, and cultural contexts.

WHEN SIZE IS SCALE // Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 07:00:00 GMT

The tension between size and scale has energized debates in the field of sculpture, but artists’ books have not benefited from a similar examination. Worse, artists’ books have inherited a tangled mess of definitions and conventions from both art and books. In fact, I would argue that artists’ books are so laden with references that size is never just size; it is always scale. The unique ways that size and scale operate in artists’ books has yet to be fully formulated, and this absence limits scholarship and criticism in the field. I cannot provide that new formula here, but I do hope to identify some considerations for artists’ books and demonstrate the limitations of approaches borrowed from other categories of art and books.

While scale is fluid and subjective, size is a literal, measurable attribute. Yet artists’ books complicate even size. For example, unlike most art, a book’s dimensions are variable. A codex doubles in width when opened, and other structures undergo even more dramatic transformations as they are read. Additionally, books are three-dimensional but also time-based. A long book might be a small one, and vice versa. Some terms borrowed from bibliography – like folio, quarto, octavo – are too loose for contemporary books since they are a matter of format, not size. Other terms are too rigid. For example, distinctions based purely on dimensions, such as the Miniature Book Society’s, ignore the fact that not everything small is a miniature and not all miniatures are small. In other words, miniature is a matter of scale, not size.

So, if the book world cannot offer what we need, what about the art world? The sculptor Robert Morris said, “the awareness of scale is a function of the comparison made between that constant, one’s own body size, and the object. Space between the subject and object is implied in such a comparison.” [1] This relational understanding is key for artists’ books since the embodied connection between the subject and object is even stronger in reading than viewing. Morris was reacting against a Modernist conception of sculpture as autonomous, of scaleless objects that existed in relation to themselves rather than their context. Yet even compared to site-specific sculpture, artists’ books are far more determined by their context since they exist in relation to a relatively narrow historical tradition. The difference in size (and scale) between the world’s smallest and largest books pales in comparison to the oeuvre of many sculptors.

Of course, a difference in scale need not entail a difference in size. Consider two 2 × 3-inch books, one set in 12-point type, the other in 4-point type. Though either would qualify for the Miniature Book Society, I would argue that the book with 12-point type is not necessarily a miniature. Type size is an interesting case since it relates to the subject (the reader) in terms of legibility and to other objects (typographic conventions), but scale often relates to specific objects rather than generalized conventions. For example, Richard Long’s A Walk Past Standing Stones playfully miniaturizes stone stelae in a structure that lets them stand upright like their full-size counterparts. The book is small, but its conventional typography makes it clear that while the stelae are miniature, the book isn’t.

Whether subject or object, the relationships above are all external – the book and something outside the book. What makes books so complex, however, is that they also enact relationships within themselves, including relations of scale. Artists are drawn to the book form for its ability to juxtapose elements and create tension between a part and the whole it belongs to. This relationality further places books in the realm of scale rather than size, amplified against the backdrop of external references, whether they are inherent like human hands, a matter of convention like trade paperbacks, or particular like the standing stones of Penwith Peninsula.

Scale may seem too simple to warrant theoretical or critical attention, but it is especially important in a medium where size is so predetermined. A critic who calls a book intimate just because it is small is not unlike a realtor who calls a studio apartment “cozy.” To move beyond euphemisms and fully understand the intersubjective relationship between a book and its reader, we must attend the inter-objective relationships within and beyond the book.

[1] Robert Morris, “Objecthood and Reductivism,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art In Theory: 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford 1992, p. 831.

Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.

PROBLEMS WITH BOOK ARTS THEORY // Peter Tanner

Susan Viguers — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:43:55 GMT

There are considerable problems with the very notion of book arts' theory. The interstices of literary analysis, art historical analysis, and textual scholarship have required and continue to require the production of instructive texts for the abecedarian to the fundamentals of the field. Unfortunately, therein lies yet another question regarding a hierarchy of definitions.

Though the need for a multidisciplinary approach is recognized, the multiple imbricated locations of contention are underestimated. Theorists of book art and artist books encounter conflicts between disciplines, raising multiple questions that confront assumptions and problematize ontologies throughout the field, including: art history, literary, book arts praxis, concerns regarding definitions, questions of cultural and racial hegemony, as well as the ever present conflict between artists’ theories and art historians’ interpretations. Each of these also complicates the application of theoretical lenses such as new criticism and phenomenology.

One crucial issue involves two essential elements in book production: literature/letters and the visual image. Art history, from which the dominant definition of the artist book is derived, privileges the development of visual art as a conceptually communicative element, relegating the textual focus to a secondary position, a position favored by many. This conceptual understanding of the artist book ties praxis into a particular convention focused upon the concept of the work as linchpin to differentiate artist books from other types of books. Alternatively, literary textual analysis examines the use of letters as communicative elements within literature, ignoring the visual to a large degree. Each approach marginalizes the other due to the artificial confines of each disciplinary focus and their refusal to mix genres. [1]

This ongoing encounter causes book artists to associate their art with one discipline (visual) or the other (letters) for various reasons and maintains a false dichotomy that image and text, both functioning as visual signifiers, exist separately from each other due to disciplinary boundaries. Book artists and theorists should discard this duality and recall that book art is a shifting territory that constantly produces liminal and hybrid artworks that question boundaries.

Book arts iconoclastic nature and multidisciplinary character is stymied when strict boundaries and definitions are applied. Book art theory, in the same way that book art exists in myriad forms, should not be locked into a specific conceptual artistic model and definition or it too will atrophy. Instead, there should be an examination of what has been used to separate conceptualist book work, as defined by the dominant Drucker-esque paradigm, that separates artist books from all other forms of book art, as well as their historical and cultural contexts.

Pablo Neruda y Col. José Venturelli, Alturas de Macchu Picchu (Santiago de Chile: Librería Neira, 1948), Cover.

A brief example from Latin America will help illustrate this question. In 1948 Pablo Neruda collaborated with artist José Venturelli to publish Alturas de Macchu Picchu. [The Heights of Macchu Picchu]. [2] This work at first blush is not an artist book but instead, by Drucker standards, a work that illustrates text, because it does not investigate the book form in any conceptual way. Nevertheless, this work presents several opportunities for critical analysis once this restrictive criterion is discarded. The division between letters and art is an important one because this work inherently asks two questions: what was the author’s literary intention when working with a visual artist to create a book and what was the visual artist’s intention when engaging with literature and the book format? Wrangling with these two questions activates a more nuanced examination that constitutes an interpretive conceptual engagement with the work and its fabrication. In this case, it can be easily seen how this line of inquiry, as well as investigation of questions of culture and context demonstrate how this work pushed each artist beyond their scope of expertise into a new oeuvre to create a new material and conceptual constellation, intertwining arts with letters through the material form of the book. This example represents one of the many interdisciplinary encounters that fall outside of the canonized conceptual standard that currently divides the book arts.

Neruda y Venturelli, 24-25.

Book works interweave interdisciplinary theoretical and material considerations, constituting a field rich in untapped potential. Questions need to be posed, and there should be a specific location where critical voices are allowed to question the validity of prevailing positions and dominant definitions. There needs to be a place for the critical voice in this interstitial sphere of constellations and relationships. CBAA’s Theory Blog and Openings journal are already home to critical theory and will continue to open new doors for scholars and artists to interact and challenge each other regarding the incredibly flexible and polemic nature of the book arts.

[1] Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre. Trans. by Avital Ronell.” Critical Inquiry, 1980, p. 55.

[2] Hellion, Martha. “Artists' Books from Latin America - A Table by Martha Hellion.” Printed Matter, 25 Jan. 2018, www.printedmatter.org/catalog/tables/26.

Peter J. Tanner is an Associate Instructor in Spanish at the University of Utah and Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art. He has a Ph.D. in Spanish literature, an MA in Latin American Art History, and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

RECLAMATION AND THE EFFICACY OF WONDER, PART II // Betty Bright

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 07:00:00 GMT

The experience of wonder, as discussed in my first post, is not only evoked by works of beauty. Wonder also accompanies surprise, from the “unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.”Reclamation: Artists’ Books on the Environment also includes books that invite wonder through imagery of fantastical worlds, which, when reframed through an environmental lens, emerge as harbingers of loss.

Before the reframing, however, there is the invitation: book artists must first initiate and hold a reader’s focus. Paging activates that dynamic. Eyes directed toward the page, book in hand or opened on a surface, the rhythmic movement of paging prompts a reader’s autonomic nervous system to down-shift, as the heart rate lowers, breath elongates, and attention deepens. In this quietude, the artist’s negotiation between structure, content, and a reader can take full effect, with wonder a kind of aphrodisiac, prompting a reader’s pursuit of the unfolding story. Two books from Reclamation immerse a reader in the wonder of an unreal world, to then refocus on an underlying foreboding that constitutes the work’s true voice.

A reader’s initial impression of Lucy Helton’s Transmission (above),for example, is foregrounded in the book’s superannuated technology of thermal printing, associated with the fax machines prevalent in the late twentieth century. Along with technology, access plays a critical role, as a reader must first free the book from the cardboard tube that holds it. Once released, the rolled thermal prints require a reader’s constant manipulation while paging or the sheets will curl back up. At the same time, handling the book is inexplicably sensual, as the flimsy thermal prints, secured at one end with metal clips, are barely restrained beneath a luscious synthetic paper wrap. The resulting reading experience requires a level of concentration distinct from the tranquil perusal of Lizzie Brewer’s scroll, Ten Meters of Mycelium, discussed in my previous post. Transmission is resistant; its message will only slowly accrue.

Transmission’s wonder arises from its mix of nostalgia with the mystery prompted by the book’s title: what message is being conveyed? The thermal prints display grayscale panoramas in images of distant mountains rising out of scrub, and moonscapes reminiscent of long-ago glacial incursions. Only at the end does the colophon relate the backstory, that the artist’s father, an environmentalist, authored a science fiction novel in which nearly all humans lived on other planets so that Earth could survive as a wildlife reserve. The reader holds Helton’s response, not a utopia, but a dystopian warning of an earth devoid of life, the warning reverberating in the mind like a bell tolling unnervingly close, marking the world’s rush toward a future’s worst outcome.

A second book, Solastalgia (above), by Sarah Nicholls, also shifts a reader between worlds. The term, solastalgia, refers to the experience of the simultaneous emotions of nostalgia and a sense of loss, common in the world today. Unlike Transmission, Solastalgia revels in color, printed through risograph and letterpress, with pressure prints, woodcut, linocut, and polymer plates on a variety of papers and glassine. Solastalgia begins by enveloping the reader in visions of the lost civilization of Atlantis, its imagery conveying a utopian retreat, in fantastical scenes and fragments of historic maps, vibrant in a tropical palette. Other imagery suggests a shift, in topographic contour patterns that overlay a rippling water motif—land and water converging. Nicholls’s text reflects on the role islands play in the collective imagination, as sites of projected desire and retreats from reality; for example, “We can’t see it, so we don’t really believe it exists / nothing ever truly disappears”.

The story shifts, the idyll dissolves, and readers leave paradise to confront the environmental realities facing the South Pacific. Solastalgia tells of Nauru, a tiny island in Micronesia, whose interior is decimated due to strip-mining for phosphate, a natural fertilizer. Readers also learn of the Marshall Islands, which endured atomic bomb tests in the twentieth century, and now faces rising sea levels, forcing its residents to permanently relocate to the U.S. as climate refugees.

Two books, two distinct voices, Transmission and Solastalgia each conjure a spell by instigating an experience of wonder, and, once held in thrall, open a reader to warning or revelation. Voice upon voice, the works in Reclamation ask each of us to find our own voice in this global community of stewardship.

Betty Bright is an independent writer, curator and historian who helped to start Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA). In 2005 she published No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980, and continues to write and curate, including contributing to the forthcoming Materialia Lumina (Stanford University and The CODEX Foundation, 2021).

RECLAMATION AND THE EFFICACY OF WONDER, PART I // Betty Bright

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Wonder is underrated today, even dismissed, relegated to sensational headlines in glossy magazines or social media drama—in other words, treated as irrelevant or hyperbole. But wonder, defined as “a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable,” can be a powerful strategy for an artist, and particularly for an artist wishing to entice and involve a viewer.

In their 2001 book Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park trace the shifting status of the state of wonder through history. In the preface, the authors stake out their different perceptions of wonder: “One of us believes that wonders appeal because they contradict and destabilize; the other, because they round out the order of the world.”[1] It is in the meeting of those two responses—to disrupt and then reclaim—that wonder exerts its power, which can be especially useful to artists who make work about difficult truths.

Wonder is on show in the exhibition Reclamation: Artists’ Books on the Environment, which arose in response to a global call to action. Peter Koch and others called for artists to “raise a ruckus” in 2021, to educate and demand change around environmental threat and loss. Jeff Thomas, Executive Director of San Francisco Center for the Book, agreed to host the show and publish an illustrated catalogue with essays. Thanks to another prompt from Koch, San Francisco Public Library signed on as a second showing site. [2] I was invited to write two blog posts, as co-curator of Reclamation with Jeff Thomas, and as one of the show’s three jurors and catalog essayists (joined by Mark Dimunation of the Library of Congress, and Ruth Rogers of Wellesley College). As jurors, in addition to prioritizing works of excellence and compelling content, we sought works that would reach across the chasm of anxiety and disbelief that many subconsciously employ to distance themselves from unsettling and threatening content.

Wonder bridges that gap. For example, Judith Tentor’s accordion book, A Photograph of Feather Boa Kelp (above), draws attention from its deep blue cyanotype contact print. A cyanotype is activated when an object is laid atop photosensitive paper, allowing the action of light to create a negative silhouette when the object is removed. Feather Boa Kelp’s initial impact is in its scale of nearly fifteen feet, an accomplishment in the cyanotype medium. Equally striking is the work’s lacy patterning that ripples along the folded sheet as if the kelp (a subgroup of seaweed) is still afloat. Once a viewer advances into reading proximity, the text reveals that its openwork pattern is evidence of the feeding of a seaweed limpet, which has followed the kelp in its expanding range due to the warming ocean. Tentor’s specimen was found in the waters off San Diego, and the kelp’s range now reaches from Alaska to Mexico. As an artist’s book, Feather Boa Kelp carries evidence of climate change directly into a reader’s hands.

A second work, Ten Meters of Mycelium by Lizzie Brewer (above), also draws a viewer’s gaze through the beauty of its ink and graphite drawings of mycelium, the vegetative part of a fungus, depicted here in fine white filaments that gather and release across the sheet. The title also notes the scroll’s extraordinary length of ten meters (thirty-three feet), the majority of which remains hidden, furled within the scroll structure, viewable only in increments. Wondrous indeed, a viewer can imagine slowly exploring the sheer breadth of it, as the exquisite renderings come into view only to be tucked away again as the scroll is forwarded. Like a microscopic sample brought into focus, Brewer’s drawings of magnified mycelia represent billions of fungi, mycelia, and roots. This life-giving network produces and nurtures the soil’s biosphere across the earth’s surface—literally sustaining the ground under our feet.

Through wonder, A Photograph of Feather Boa Kelp and Ten Meters of Mycelium transform our familiar but unnoticed forays into a heightened mindfulness of the urgency of climate change, while exploring a shoreline or simply walking on terra firma.

[1] Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998) 11.

[2] Reclamation: Artists’ Books on the Environment is on show at San Francisco Center for the Book from June 9 – September 26, and at San Francisco Public Library from June 19 – September 5. I also wish to thank Jennie Hinchcliff of San Francisco Center for the Book, and Joan Jasper of San Francisco Public Library, for their dedication throughout this project.

A HISTORY OF THE ACCORDION BOOK: PART II // Peter Thomas

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Ancient examples of accordion-folded books have been found in many parts of Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, India, and Burma. In China the accordion (musical instrument) is called a shou feng qin, which literally means “hand-wind-instrument.” The name for the book structure is jingzhe zhuang: jingzhe means “neat-folded paper” and zhuang means “binding.” The earliest examples of jingzhe zhuang bindings are from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE). There were two earlier systems in China for “binding” texts. Some texts were written on silk cloth, usually rolled up as scrolls. The Chinese word for this structure is shoujuan, which literally means “hand roll-up.” Texts were also written on wood, usually bamboo cut into thin vertical strips, laced or knotted together horizontally with cord, then either rolled like a scroll or folded back and forth in a stack. The folded variation of this binding style is known as jian du, and examples date back to the fifth century BCE. It was not until after the invention of paper, in the second century CE, that Chinese bookmakers adapted the jian du structure to make jingzhezhuang bindings. A miniature jingzhe zhuang (10 x 14 cm) was found at the Dunhuang archaeological site in Western China, and thus, made before 900 CE, it is the oldest-known miniature accordion book.

In Japan, the accordion-folded book structure is called an orihon. The word combines the root words ori (fold) and hon(book). According to legend, it was during the Heian period (794–1185 CE) that a Buddhist monk squashed his sutra scroll and then folded it up, thus inventing the orihon binding. Japanese orihon books were made using paper: either a single long strip folded back and forth, or several smaller strips connected together before folding. Another variation of the orihon binding was called a sempuyo. In this binding, individual folded sheets are arranged with the folds all facing the same direction, and then each fore edge is adhered to the adjacent fore edge. The cover is adhered to the first and last pages of the text block, but it is not attached to the spine. Because of this, the sempuyo is often called a flutter book: if it is dropped or blown by the wind, the pages will flutter but remain attached to the covers. It is said that monks used such books medicinally, believing that the breeze created by moving the pages of the holy sutras could heal an injury.

In pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America, the Aztec and Maya made books with folded structures. These books are commonly called códices. Mayan códices were written in hieroglyphic characters, called glyphs, on amate, a paper-like material made from the bark of a certain type of fig tree. There was a Mayan glyph for the word códice, juun, but it looks more like a hamburger than a book. Written pages were pasted together and then folded back and forth to create an accordion-folded book. The Spanish invaders destroyed most of the original códices, and though some original text blocks survived, there are no original bindings. Some scholars believe the text block was glued to wooden covers, others that the text block and covers were wrapped together with leather cords.

It is unknown when the first accordion book was made in Western Europe. The oldest extant example I could find was handwritten, in Cyrillic script, in 1330. This manuscript, known as Canones et carmina sacra quae…, is now in the Netherlands’ Leiden University Library.

While there were other examples of accordion-folded manuscripts, the binding structure was not used in the early printed books. Although there were over 30,000 distinct editions printed during the incunabula period (1450–1500 CE), no known incunabulum has an accordion structure.

Other than the Canones et carmina, the earliest accordion books made in Western Europe that I have discovered were miniature books printed and bound to be sold as souvenirs. As far as I know, none of those books include a printed date of publication, but some have the publisher’s name (for example, the Recollections of . . . series printed in London by J. Newman & Co.) and others have a traceable provenance, so we know they were made in the early to mid-1800s.

We may never know who made the first accordion book, or when it was made, but at least we do know when and who made the first real accordion book. Accordioning to respected book arts historians: in 2002 Peter and Donna Thomas cut the bellows of an accordion, allowing them fold back and forth, inserted paper panels printed with text and image into the folds, and made their first Real Accordion Book out of Peter’s old 12 bass piano accordion. That first real accordion book was followed by a series of others.

Peter and Donna Thomas. A New History of the Accordion Book. 2016.

The works are tied together by structure, text, and image. A collection of photographs rotates through the series – old favorites reappearing, new images being presented for the first time. The texts have, for the most part, been explorations into the history of the accordion and of the accordion book. We have tried to add new information to each subsequent book, and since a history of the accordion book has not been previously published, finding information has been hard. We hope that by sharing what we have learned in these blog posts, others will come forward with what they have discovered, and together, as a community, we can write a more complete history of the accordion book.

Peter and Donna Thomas are book artists who make editioned and one-of-a-kind books. They make the paper, print, illustrate, and bind their books, combining the precision of the fine press aesthetic with the creativity found in contemporary artists' books. Between 2009-2019 they traveled the USA as the Wandering Book Artists.

A HISTORY OF THE ACCORDION BOOK: PART I // Peter Thomas

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 07:30:00 GMT

In 2000 I had the idea to make an accordion book. Not your regular accordion book, this one would be made from a real accordion, with the keyboards as covers, and the bellows would be cut along the vertical ends, so that when it was pulled open it would look like a real accordion book! I play the accordion and couldn’t pass up the opportunity presented by the visual pun, but the real purpose for making the book was to address a point of confusion among book artists: whether a folded paper book should be called an accordion book or a concertina book. From playing both musical instruments, I knew that an accordion is rectangular, and a concertina is hexagonal. I made my first real accordion book in tandem with a book made out of a concertina to physically explain why, unless a book is hexagonal in shape, the correct term is accordion book.

Peter and Donna Thomas, The Real Accordion Book, 2001

Peter and Donna Thomas, The Real Concertina Book, 2001

Following is my short history of the accordion book, explaining how format came to be generally know called an accordion book.

The word accordion was first used early in the nineteenth century to describe a small, portable, box-shaped musical instrument. It had a button keyboard on the right-hand side for playing melody notes, another button keyboard on the left-hand side for playing bass and chordal accompaniment, and folded paper bellows connecting the two keyboards together. Metal reeds, attached to the keyboards, were mounted inside the bellows. When buttons were pushed while the bellows were being expanded and contracted, air was forced past the metal reeds, causing them to vibrate and produce sound. The term accordion book borrows from the musical instrument. It describes any book having a folded, rather than sewn, text block, where the pages are pleated – folded back and forth in a manner similar to the bellows of an accordion, rather than being folded as a map – and are viewed by expanding the book like an accordion.

The invention of the accordion was inspired by an ancient Chinese, mouth-blown musical instrument called the sheng. The sheng was first displayed in Western Europe in the late seventeenth century. It used free reeds in resonator pipes to create musical sounds, and this concept led to the invention of several different harmonica-like instruments. The success of those inventions encouraged organ-makers to try a new direction in their efforts to create low-cost pump organs for small-town churches; this, in turn, led to the creation of the accordion. Most historians credit Cyrill Demian, of Vienna, as the inventor of the first accordion. In 1829, he patented an instrument where the left hand operated a button keyboard and the right hand moved the bellows. He called his invention an Akkordion. The word is based on akkord, in this case referring to musical harmony, with the suffix –ion, being thought to derive from the word clarion, a sort of medieval trumpet.

In some countries the accordion’s name is a variation on the word harmonica (for example, harmonika in Bosnia and harmonikka in Finland). In Italy it is called a fisarmonica, said to be derived from physharmonica, the name given by Anton Haeckl to his 1818 invention that combined harmonica and bellows to make an instrument resembling the modern hand-held harmonium. Other countries have unique names; for example, in Sweden it is called a dragspel, where drag means pull and spel means play. The accordion also has nicknames: in English it is sometimes called a squeezebox, and in Germany it is sometimes called a schifferklavier (sailor's piano). Sometimes the accordion is mistakenly called a concertina, or vice versa, but the words are not interchangeable. Though the concertina is also in the aerophone family, it is typically smaller, shaped as a hexagon rather than as a square or a rectangle, and its buttons are organized differently.

Accordion books, like musical accordions, can also have different names. For example, German binders call accordion books Leporellos. In German dictionaries, Leporello is defined as “a fan of folded paper.” In the 1787 opera Don Giovanni, with music by Wolfgang Mozart and an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Don Giovanni’s servant is named Leporello. In Act 1, Scene 2, Leporello sings what is now commonly known as the “catalogue aria.” In this scene, Leporello takes a book from his bag and pulls out a long folding strip of paper that lists all of Don Giovanni’s romantic conquests. (I find it interesting to speculate which came first; was the servant named after the book structure or vice versa?) The term concertina book, for me a misnomer, is used by some English speakers to describe an accordion book. Perhaps this originated in England, where the concertina was more popular than the accordion.

While the history of the accordion began in the seventeenth century, the history of the accordion book is actually much older, and that will be the subject of the next post.

Peter and Donna Thomas are book artists who make editioned and one-of-a-kind books. They make the paper, print, illustrate, and bind their books, combining the precision of the fine press aesthetic with the creativity found in contemporary artists' books. In 2021 The Legacy Press published Peter and Donna Thomas: Bibliography, 1974–2020.

THE BENEFIT OF PIXELS // Beth Sheehan

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 May 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Most of our collective lives for the past year and a half have been filtered through pixels, but even before the major cultural pivot toward digital spaces that was made necessary by the pandemic, the digital age has been in full swing for a while now and artists have been finding it more important to consider the ways our tactile, dimensional, and time-based artist books are experienced virtually.

Artist books often require the maker to plan the entire project before even purchasing materials to begin making. If I haven’t decided on the binding or printing processes, I won’t know how much paper I need, what size sheets to purchase, etc. So, in that initial planning stage, is it also necessary to take into consideration the way the book will be virtually experienced and allow those considerations to change our projects?

It’s easy to see how websites and a social media presence are beneficial for artists, but an inevitable product is how the digital space can affect the art that is created. If algorithms boost bold, edgy, graphic images and your subtle, gentle, hard-to-photograph artist book doesn’t get high engagement, it may feel like a less successful project. Consciously or unconsciously, the artistic trends of today are coded by social media. Making an effort to embrace or ignore that influence is worth thinking about.

Image courtesy of Beth Sheehan and Small Editions

I believe that the idea or concept behind the artist book should dictate the materials, processes, and viewer’s experience of the book and in the same way, I think the intended experience should dictate the digital translation the project receives. If every artist book is documented as if it were a codex, the viewer is robbed and if every artist book is made so that it is easy to document, the viewer is robbed. Finding a balance that works for your art practice is important.

Even if you have not considered the way your artist book will be experienced virtually at the start of your project, documenting the finished book to accurately reflect the work is incredibly important given how much of the global audience will not see the work in person. Artist books are usually 3-dimensional, intimate, and time-based but standard photographing can flatten the work. Along with the usual considerations such as proper lighting, a quality background, image size and quality, color correction, and documenting multiple angles, you may also want to consider the following. Taking photographs of the book being handled gives the viewer an idea of scale as well as demonstrating the way the viewer should interact with the book. Photographing each page from the same angle to create a gif or slideshow can be helpful for instances where videos are not possible. You may also want to consider creating multiple short video clips that serve various purposes such as an instructional video about displaying the book, a “product” video that showcases the features, a behind-the-scenes process video, and an experience video that acts as the viewer handling the book themselves.

Image courtesy of the Quarantine Public Library

Additionally, there is a lot to be said for creating artist books that will live exclusively in a digital space and quite a lot of artists are producing projects that fully consider their virtual existence. Not only does a digital experience of an artist book make it more accessible but considering the benefits of digital media can push the world of artist books so much further. The Quarantine Public Library has made it a priority to provide access to artist books, as well as providing an avenue to begin or build your art collection. They are a virtual library containing one-page artist books for patrons to print, fold, and read at home for free. Bringing artist books to those that may not get the chance to see them otherwise spreads creativity and boosts the book arts community.

Image courtesy of the New Jersey Book Arts Symposium

The digital era has changed book arts in more direct ways as well. Book artists have been integrating digital elements into physical artworks, creating virtual exhibitions such as the exhibition titled Tumultuous Absence (pictured above) during the NJ Book Arts Symposium and pushing the definition of “artist books” through digital technologies. The worlds of virtual reality and augmented reality are spreading through the art world as well. One of the most exciting examples is an app called Tropi created by the non-profit Interactive Initiative. The app uses augmented reality to bring South Florida artists’ works to life, allowing viewers to physically walk up to and around the artworks that they are seeing through their phone. Imagine walking through one of your artist books!

Image courtesy of Interactive Initiative

Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harlan and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

INSIDER ART AND THE OUTSIDER // RICHARD MINSKY

Susan Viguers — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Intentionally bad typography: this meme has been circulating for at least six years.

"Authenticity" is one of the topics in my Critique Workshop. We see many works of book art that are made by people with a lack of training or experience, but with a lot to say. As educators we see lots of that. Some of the most powerful work I've seen was made by inner city teens in a series of Center for Book Arts (CBA) summer workshops titled Cultural Autobiography, conducted by Cheryl Shackleton Hawkins 1993-2000.

Work by Antonia Pocock for the exhibition Student Work and Cultural Autobiography. Center for Book Arts, Sept. 1 to Oct. 31, 2000.

Sometimes we see works that are done by highly skilled practitioners in a style that appears to be untrained. Is it simply fake outsider art, or does the intent of the creator play an important role in critical evaluation? Is it important that the viewer knows what the creator was trying to achieve? Does the medium in which it appears make a difference? Does it matter if the target audience is Artworld insiders or the general public?

This issue arose close to home last September, when CBA published "A New Manifesto for Book Art Criticism" as a full page ad in The Brooklyn Rail, as a web page, and as a PDF.

When I first saw it I sent an email to CBA asking if was done by a volunteer or a student, noting the inconsistent line spacing, justification, and other typographic issues. A reply came quickly:

"This design was created by knowledgeable, professional designers who are highly regarded in their field. And from a contemporary design perspective it is right on point. The word spacing, hyphenation, and box outlines are all conceptually related to the content of the manifesto and the history of artist’s book criticism."

I was confused and mystified. What is the conceptual relationship of ugly typography that is hard to read to a manifesto advocating criticism of typography and design? Was that the point? Was this meant to be criticized? Or to be seen by a specific audience? Was it a joke? I've read some artist book criticism, and written some, as well as conducting Critique Workshops for four decades. I needed to ask for advice from those who know more about typography, so I wrote to a few typographers, including the designers of the manifesto. Robert Bringhurst, author of The Elements of Typographic Style, was the first to respond:

"Professionalism has its pitfalls as well as its benefits. You of all people will recall the distinguished economist Arthur Okun’s observation that 'anyone except an economist knows without asking why money shouldn’t buy some things.' I fear it’s also true, in the present climate, that anyone except a 'cutting-edge typographer' knows lazy and incompetent typography when they see it.

"I was delighted to read that the CBA plans a new periodical, the Book Art Review. But its 'New Manifesto for Book Art Criticism' delivers a self-contradictory message because it’s incompetently composed.

"Four of the fifteen paragraphs in the manifesto are set with the 'block justification' switch turned on. This forces the last line of a paragraph to fill out to full measure, at the cost of outlandish word spacing in all lines from first to last. This is what you see in the bottom paragraph of the first and second column, the top paragraph of the third column, and the final bulleted paragraph, farther along in the third column. First-week design students often make mistakes like this. Anyone who charges money for doing typography, or who undertakes to teach the craft, ought to laugh at such errors, or scowl, as their temperament permits. But to defend such an error is blatant self-incrimination.

"The justification and word-spacing in the other eleven paragraphs of the manifesto is also pretty lousy, and this is because the typesetter failed to set the justification parameters to reasonable values. Tuning a justification engine is slightly more complicated than just turning a switch on or off, so I don’t expect typography students to learn it until the second week of instruction. If they don’t have it down by the third week, I will start dropping hints that they should consider a different profession.

"Those are the two most obvious problems with the design and execution of the manifesto. It would also help if the authors could spell the name of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé – the only authority they quote. And it would help if the text were set using text figures (old-style figures) rather than lining figures. Lining figures belong in classified ads. They do not belong in books nor in any discussion of book arts, nor in a proposal for a book arts periodical.

"Incompetence per se is not hard to repair, and institutions like the Center for Book Arts were created for just that purpose: to teach those who are willing to learn. Proud and defiant incompetence is something else again. Those who broadcast their ignorance and insist they have nothing to learn (like a certain American president I can think of) are a menace to their fellow citizens.

"The claim that the design of this manifesto 'was created by knowledgeable, professional designers who are highly regarded in their field' and that 'the word spacing, hyphenation, and box outlines are all conceptually related to the content of the manifesto and the history of artist’s book criticism' is just pretentious nonsense. The setting is incompetent, and anyone whose eyes are not stitched shut can see that this is so."

Next I heard from Ellen Lupton, Design Chair at MICA and Senior Curator, Contemporary Design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum:

"Whether the effect successfully communicates its own confidence is a matter of opinion. This design is an example of what is sometimes called 'default modernism.' Just because the designers know what they are doing doesn't mean that readers necessarily get the joke."

Wael Morcos, Partner at Morcos Key, wrote:

"It’s part of a design movement self-dubbed “critical graphic design” using graphic design as methodology for research into other disciplines like politics, sociology, sustainability… Sometimes the formal interpretation is surprising and detached from the needs of a corporate client. Sometimes it’s just another affectation, an attitude, a trend. I personally don’t buy the argument that if it’s rigorous thought, it has to be unpleasant to look at or deliberately confusing."

The final word came from the manifesto's designers, Jas Stefanski and Lauren Thorson of Studio—Set, who also designed the new CBA Website and this spiffy animated Instagram post for the Center's annual benefit, which takes place May 11. They clarified the objective:

"In regards to your question, it was not intended to be a joke nor look like outsider typography. The typography emphasizes the immediacy inherent to newspapers, mass produced/circulated printed formats, etc."

After reading the replies to my query I had a better understanding of why I was confused, and an appreciation of how difficult it can be to communicate an idea typographically when readers come to the page with many different perspectives.

DEAR BOOK ART: A LOVE LETTER – A SELECTED COLLECTION OF RESPONSES

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 07:00:00 GMT

What would you write in a love letter to book art?

As graduate students from the Mills College Book Art program, our curiosity led us to ask this final question to people within the book art ecosystem. Emails went to poets, book artists, letterpress printers, book designers, professors, collectors, theorists, gallerists, and librarians.

“Dear Book Art,

Thank you. I'm so happy to have found in you the language my body already knew how to speak. xo e.” —e bond

“You begin with surface. The cover is a place of curiosity. Whose handwriting is this? What is the logic of visual presentation as it relates to the words within. May we never lose our connections.” —Truong Tran

“My artist’s book titled A Love Story (2018) is my love letter to the Book Arts field and creative process…. Related to making artist’s books with a social justice focus, A Love Story presents my process from conceiving an idea through completion and presenting. Between criss-crossing the country, I used the collage-making process to de-stress while maintaining focus on simultaneous book projects on various issues of race and racism. —Tia Blassingame

“My love affair with the codex began well before I knew the word. Despite the codex being a millennium old, its possibilities are still not fully exploited.” —Kathy Walkup

"You let me touch what I fail to see, and see ideas my brain cannot comprehend" —Brooke Hardy

“You've broken my heart so many times before but I keep coming back to you for reasons that were beyond me, until this very moment….Your conceptual beauty is far greater than mere aesthetics, but for some reason, you rely on these while you're in other people's hands too often. But you and I know these are only tricks…. I've seen you change lives while people leaf through your pages. Book arts, perhaps I'm jealous.... You are endless. I could research you to my dying days and still know only a thimble full of all you can contain. This is why I love you. No one can own you. You are wild, even when sitting on a shelf. You change from person to person, but maintain a form that I feel deeply at home with. Book Arts, I am only a printer, but I see what you truly are. You are humanity's answer to love. A record of our collective minds, bound for us all. Adaptable, selfless, and sometimes expensive.” —James Tucker

“I could see myself writing a love letter to book art as a form as a lover loving the body of book. Each book is so different just like a body. I would appreciate the curves, textures, flaws, ink and format of book art. ” —Amber McCrary

“I’m not going to comment on a love letter to Book Art. That feels too personal.” —Joel Benson

“un libro es como un abrazo

o una danza

tomo una mano del libro

y luego la otra

y juntxs

vamos” —Claudia Nuñez de Ibieta

Yours truly,

From the masked creatures who roam the halls of the Mills College Book Art buildings, presses, and rooms. Making pulp into paper, printing on the fibers, and binding into books.

Juan Pablo Ayala, Mills Book Art ‘21. Joel Benson, Dependable Letterpress. Tia Blassingame, Scripps College Press and Primrose Press. e bond, Artist/Book Binder. Brooke Hardy, Book Artist. Amber McCrary, Abalone Mountain Press. Claudia Nuñez de Ibieta, translator, PHX Cartonera Collective member, F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS co-conspirator. Truong Tran, Poet and Artist. James Tucker, Aesthetic Union. Kathy Walkup, Director, Mills Book Art Program.

THE ESSENTIAL HAPTIC QUESTION: A SELECTED COLLECTION OF RESPONSES // Mills College Book Art Graduate Students

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Do you think an artist’s book can exist solely in a digital space, or does it need a haptic component in order to be an artist’s book? What are the essential haptic qualities of a book you can’t live without?

As graduate students from the Mills College Book Art program, our curiosity led us to ask these questions to people within the book art ecosystem. Emails went to poets, book artists, letterpress printers, book designers, professors, collectors, theorists, gallerists, and librarians.

"My gut says no because I love the touch and feel of a book that has the evidence of the human hands in the making, in the turning of the page, all the things that make a book, that make us unique as human beings.” —Truong Tran

“I think an artist's book can be created in a digital medium instead of a [three dimensional] one, so then to read that book is to engage with it in a digital realm. And a digital artist book can do things a physical codex cannot, they operate under different rules and limitations.… [But] taking away the haptic component of art... cuts one's physical experience of the book off at the knees and some meaning is lost in the digital translation.” —Brooke Hardy

“I do believe an artist's book can inhabit only a digital realm. It all depends on the outcome the artist wants the user to have and if it's the most effective method to do so.“ —James Tucker

“Haptic qualities I can't live without is flipping the pages of a good book and looking for all the highlights and reading them.… I think some books can solely exist in digital space like books that have limited texture or are simply print and paper. But books that have special formats like pop ups, wonderful texture or special binding, I think those would be hard to appreciate in a digital form.” —Amber McCrary

“While I think it is possible for artist booklike forms to exist in a digital space, I do believe that with the loss of the full haptic experience, the tradeoff is a certain loss of attention. This is a difficulty not only in times of quarantine, but in in-person exhibitions where artist books are frequently shown in vitrines or cases.... The haptic experience of the book is the romance, to touch, to hold.... I believe the connection the viewer experiences with this vulnerability ... is part of what instills the sense of wonder in the viewer. Does work that necessitates a haptic experience still matter today? Hell yes. Is it difficult to exhibit? Also yes.” —Michelle Wilson

“Touch, textural contrasts & the ability to play with scale are big qualities I would miss, but I feel like it would present a fun challenge to try to explore those things in a digital space.” —e bond

“...[R]ules are made to be broken, so if I say no, then someone very smart will do something in the digital realm that would prove me wrong.… I am interested in hand skills and the way we interact with and manipulate materials that we learn to know intimately through practice and experience. The object then embodies that human experience.… For me, the most essential haptic quality of a book is the feel of the paper as you turn the page. The type of paper, the binding, whether the paper is folded or loose, the grain, what the printing and the ink has done to that paper, all affect the experience of turning the page.” —Joel Benson

“I typically suggest that students view [book] documentation, particularly the videos, as alternative artist’s books or a different iteration of their book. To experiment ... can free the artist and give them a different understanding of [their] relationship to their work....

"While I love the tactility and deep connection made possible with an artist’s book, books are more than that. Just as my experience of a book can be enriched and may be even enlivened by experiencing the audiobook version, I expect an artist’s book in the digital space could excite my sense.” —Tia Blassingame

“...[Y]es, I believe an artist's book can exist solely in a digital space. Would I like it? That's another question.… I think more than haptic, an essential quality of an artist's book is the ability to unveil a unique, layered, and oftentimes embodied reading experience.” —Inge Bruggman

“Let’s start with the proposition that not everything has to be a book.... You are free to call anything by any word or sound—language is not a fixed condition, but a continually evolving process of creating meaning using context to orient communication.... Haptics are often cited as a missing element in digital work, but I argue that since we experience all digital media through some kind of physical device, there are always haptics included in the experience of a digital work.... Screen life [...] is an impoverished sensorium, limited to just sound and low-ish rez [...] color space. Real life is so much richer.” —Clif Meador

“Heft turns out to be central, along with page manipulation and the ability to scribble marginalia.… While I am not willing to say that a digital native artist’s book isn’t possible, I have yet to see any example that is at all persuasive.” —Kathy Walkup

“a book is a book is a book is a book.” —Yo Cuomo

Joel Benson, Dependable Letterpress. Tia Blassingame, Scripps College Press and Primrose Press. e bond, Artist/Book Binder. Inge Bruggeman, University of Nevada, Reno and INK-A! Press. Yo Cuomo, Book Designer. Brooke Hardy, Book Artist. Amber McCrary, Abalone Mountain Press. Clif Meador, Appalachian State University and Book Artist. Truong Tran, Poet and Artist. James Tucker, Aesthetic Union. Kathy Walkup, Director, Mills Book Art Program. Michelle Wilson, Rocinante Press.

MILLS COLLEGE GRADUATE BOOK ART STUDENTS ON THE EXPERIENCE OF THE HAPTIC

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 07:00:00 GMT

How has the pandemic changed the experience of the haptic in your book art practice?

“In some way I view this whole Global Pandemic as a vessel for democracy. Accessibility and Plurality. When we see the letters POD we think Print On Demand, but now I just think Publish On Demand. So many people generate works and copies of the work that are to be left behind building cities of forgotten books.

PublishOD is a relevant space to be considered. A space not yet fully understood. How many trees? How many books? Are we supposed to reserve forests for future books? Print and publish what is necessary and what is going to be used?” – Juan Pablo Ayala

“What does the haptic experience mean to a book artist? For a medium that is based in object/object interaction, quite possibly everything. With the only option to connect with people today being the internet, creating and experiencing the haptic proves to be a challenge. While challenging, it is not one that should not be ignored. Computers, the internet, and the digital world offer ample opportunity to explore how books can exist in a synthetic world. We should take this chance to explore this reality, and not have to wait for new technology to free the digital medium.” – Joey Gage

We are currently reading Glenn Adamson’s Thinking Through Craft. In his book, Adamson introduces examples of art/work to illustrate and provoke thought about the delineation and relationship between craft and art. Though he does not include book art as one of the disciplines, the discussion is applicable. During the pandemic, we share book models digitally on Zoom. This has forced us to translate the experience of our craft verbally. Ironically, the digital barrier has emphasized our understanding and awareness of materiality and skill. It has provided a different perspective as book artists. Craft and art join in the print studio and bindery, shared materials, smell of ink, conversation, music, and community. With the pandemic, this has been sharply curtailed, and given us time to appreciate what is on pause. – Joni B Bissell

Adamson, Glenn. Thinking Through Craft. 2007. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts; reprinted 2018.

“Despite all the drawbacks in presenting and viewing a finished artist book virtually, there is something to be said for showing the beginning ideas of a book over a screen. Perhaps in removing the haptic it allows for concentration on the idea itself and not the misaligned paper or the tape holding the pages in place. Though the haptic seems to be a necessary part of the finished product, maybe in removing it for just a moment during the planning process, the idea is really allowed to flourish.” – Rebecca Josephson

“What makes a book inherently a book? Is it the physicality of the object or the experience of the object through time and space? Is the physical interaction with the book inherent to the meaning of the book? What does the current lack of ability to have a physical interaction mean for the book as a work of art? What are books in a digital space? Does the digital platform become the medium of the book in the absence of a physical ability to handle or experience a book?

There aren’t concrete answers to these questions. Digitally interactive artists books do exist, but is it the same experience that a viewer has with a physical copy of that “same” book? The sudden lack of a haptic experience during the pandemic has forced us to question the convention of the book.” – Dina Pollack

“Experiences are informed through our senses and the haptic experience has moved to the platforms of digital screens and videos. The engagement of a modified version, “digital experience” of the visual, limits the haptic experience. The pandemic has imposed restrictions on closeness, public engagements, and for lovers of the sensory experiences lack of touch limits our understanding of the haptic. There will always be challenges for those that seek to engage in the work that asks more of its viewers/ participants even without a pandemic. My hands will continue to create dreams and move ideas into the consciousness of physical form.” – Cinthia Marisol Lozano

Juan Pablo Ayala ‘21, Joni Bissell ‘21, Joey Gage ‘22, Becca Josephson ‘21, Cinthia Marisol Lozano ‘21, and Dina Pollack ‘21 are graduate Book Art Students at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Together, they are collaborating and moderating blog posts for CBAA for the months of March and April.

(IM)MATERIAL SPECIFICS: ZOOMING THROUGH THE PANDEMIC // Kathleen Walkup

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 08:00:00 GMT

“The most conceptual works are always caught up in the most material specifics.” [1] Craig Dworkin’s statement describes in a nutshell the dilemma of teaching book art over Zoom during the pandemic. I miss the informal encounters in the studios over whatever challenge the Vandercook is tossing at someone on any particular day. Demonstrating Dworkin’s haecceity of paper under a document camera is no substitute for the “material specifics” and haptic experience of actual book handling.

In my graduate seminar at Mills College, I set proof-of-concept projects for the students based on a variety of readings, including “The Logic of Substrate.” These small projects are meant to be drafts, quick studies pointing toward an idea. The students’ No Medium projects often result in their most provocative solutions, ones that can be refined and developed into full-fledged artworks. Turns out working conceptually in the realm of Duchamp’s inframince can be highly motivating.

Nudisme: Still with Jean Marais from Jean Cocteau, Orphée, 1950.

In our MFA in Book Art program, the graduate seminars act as the through line during the two years of student residency. Students take the core seminar, The Material Book, during their first semester, then follow that with three more seminars. During that first semester we meet in the Heller Room, the room in the library that houses Mills’ Special Collections. In that space there were only two books that students were not allowed to handle, the Mozart manuscript and the First Folio. Ironically, once both of those were removed from the collection, the pandemic set in and now, rather than have the entire collection accessible, students have not been able to handle anything at all. This has had a crushing impact on our focus on material studies. To help make up for this, I have been lending books from my own library for grad student study, as has my colleague Julie Chen. And through a generous donation, the students also received two books made by the artist Clarissa Sligh which they were able to thoroughly study and then include in their own libraries.

Matching students and books turns out to be a challenging experiment. What do you choose when you are grouping five books and handing them to one student, who will in turn be creating a proof-of-concept project based on their perceived linkages among the books? In my teaching I prefer to have the students find their own meaning in the books they are reading and studying. My role, as I see it, is to lay the groundwork for that exploration by deconstructing basic book operation, by asking questions and providing prompts, by guiding them to other works that share similar conceptual scaffolding and yes, by sometimes modelling interpretation. This is close reading, but with artists’ books rather than literature. To that end, I do intervene when I think that the student hasn’t pushed hard enough, and I also try to provide a strong foundation through some grounding in theoretical and historical underpinnings. This work is best done in person and with the luxury of being able to grab an example from the Heller Room shelves that helps to magnify whatever discussion has developed during the session. When, in my undergraduate class on Freedom of the Presses: Resistance and Rebellion in Print, we were suddenly locked out of the studios and library last March, I switched to having the students read and examine the digital surrogates for real artists’ books on the highly accessible Women’s Studio Workshop website. Using these surrogates, we added a discussion about what students were missing when they couldn’t handle the actual books.

Of course it’s not only faculty who are struggling. Students, even when they continue to have studio access, as our graduate students have had, contend with critiques in which slides and videos have to substitute for handling of the work. The lack of informal studio encounters means that troubleshooting and questions become formalized, and oftentimes are simply absent. Over the next three blog posts, graduate students in the Mills College MFA in Book Art will explore the acts of navigation they and other artists have had to design and sometimes struggle with over the past year. I look forward to reading what they have to say.

[1] Craig Dworkin. "The Logic of Substrate.” No Medium: MIT Press, 2013, p. 25.

Kathleen Walkup holds the Lovelace Family Endowed Chair at Mills College, where she directs the Book Art Program and teaches typography and letterpress printing, artists’ bookmaking and a graduate seminar on the material book. Her research interests include the history of women in printing and conceptual practice in artists’ books.

NON-LINEARITY AND THE HYPERLINK // ALEXANDER MOUTON

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 08:00:00 GMT

Within literature, the challenge to linearity has fallen in and out of favor, though it generally manifests through either writing strategies, such as shuffling narrative pieces out of straightforward time, or through formal strategies that challenge the physical constraints of the traditional codex. B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates is an example of the latter, in which the book cover is in fact a clamshell box that opens to reveal roughly 28 loose signatures that can be read in any order, with the exception of FIRST and LAST.

Linearity might suggest that truth can be revealed through a singular path. The hyperlink as defined by Ted Nelson [1], however, eschews linearity and in so doing posits that truth is instead positional. In his 1974 Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Nelson observed that, “the structures of ideas are non sequential” and offered the hyperlink as a means by which a user can be presented with alternatives to conventional hierarchies.

Within 25 years of Tim Berners-Lee’s contribution of the world wide web in 1989, two in five adults on the planet have been initiated in Nelson’s hyperlinking. Much has been written about how the internet has changed everything from the way our brains function to the way we socialize to how we understand “Truth.” In thinking about artist books in this light, I would like to look in particular at how the photobook as a genre of artist book reveals its influence by the non-linear hyperlink.

Whereas photo books since the nineteen-twenties have largely been single monographs, over the last decade, there has been an increase in photobooks which present a number of volumes in different formats in a container of some kind – a clam shell, a cardboard box, a slip cover, etc. The material consideration of the book formats in these photoboxes places them within the larger artist book tradition. More importantly, these book formats also reflect the influence of our experience of the world through the lateral movement of the hyperlink as opposed to the linear movement of the traditional single codex.

A fine example of an artist photobox is Kazamu Obara’s Exposure (2016). Exposure has as its focus Chernobyl and the box contains three formats – a soft cover, vertically formatted codex with text & images; a newsprint facsimile; and a horizontally oriented, hardcover photobook. Together, these formats provide three distinct perspectives: black & white found negatives with a reflective text; a historical reference; and a color view from inside a train and looking out as it transports workers to and fro from either side of Chernobyl. These 3 formats provide distinct perspectives that allow us to triangulate on the experience of this place: personal, historical, and documentary.

An additional layer of photographic content is the inclusion of film negatives set between a number of pages and facsimile 4x6 color photos tucked into others. These elements push the material attention further into the artist book realm. A finishing touch unifying the work includes a couple medium format film labels. They not only create the cover imagery for both the outside box and the b&w paperback book inside, but also they actually wrap around the box and the book inside, creating a seal (like the film wrap) that must be broken to open. This breaking of the seal can be interpreted in myriad ways.

Another notable photoboox is End. by Eamonn Doyle, Niaill Sweeney and David Donohoe. This 13x8in hard slip-cover, wrapped in translucent, neon yellow glycine contains a handful of variously formatted booklets with different thicknesses of paper, printing styles, number of pages, and fold-outs. The cumulative effect of End. is more associative and is distinct from Exposure in that it is heavily design oriented. There is a strong abstract sensibility throughout, with exceptional bursts of clearly composed, though somewhat surrealist, color photos from Dublin. While not as precise or poignant in its details, End. nevertheless uses the multiplicity of formats to interrupt a particular viewpoint, thereby challenging, poking fun with, and disorienting our vantage point as readers.

To conclude, these photoboxes prove radical in terms of being broadly influenced by the hyperlink – represented by a diversity of perspectives that create a break from the modernist, single perspective, authoritative viewpoint. I leave as an open question whether this shift also reflects a change in the photographic community’s conception of “Truth” as it relates to the photographic medium.

[1] Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, p. xxviii, ed. Ken Jordan, 2002, USA

Alexander Mouton has a background in film, literature, and photography. His artist books are self-published under the Unseen Press moniker, many of which are in collections internationally, including MoMA NYC and the Getty Research Institute, LA. Currently, Alexander is Associate Professor, Chair, Dep’t Art, Art History & Design, Seattle University.

EXTENDING LITERATURE THROUGH THE ARTIST BOOK // Alexander Mouton

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 08:00:00 GMT

There is an artist book tradition based on the alliance of literature and visual art, from William Blake to Cendrars and Delauney's 1913, La Prose du Transsiberian et de la Petite Jehanne de France. In both cases, the distinction "artist book" stems from the interdependence of the written and the visual, in book form (as opposed to a text with supporting illustrations or vice versa).

When considering a definition of "literature,” Jonathan Culler writes, "We can think of literary works as language with particular properties or features, and we can think of literature as the product of conventions and a certain kind of attention." [1] So, literature (and I would suggest the artist book as well) is at once, defined by properties exhibited in the form as well as the attention authors or readers/critics give the form as "literature" or as an "artist book.”

I would like to examine how the artist book might work to extend what we understand as literature. For example, Christian Patterson's Bottom of the Lake is a facsimile of an altered phone book and yellow pages. This most functional, utilitarian form in Patterson's hands becomes a humorous, semi-narrative, pathos filled, portrait (of a town in Wisconsin) and self-portrait of the artist.

Relating to the idea that literature can be defined by the attention that is given to it, on page 2 in the upper-left corner, is the letter range ALB-ART. However, the letters ART are circled by hand, thereby transforming the starting letters of a phonebook name to the word "art.” A declaration from the voice of the author.

Another notable alteration early on in Bottom of the Lake includes blue words spread top-to-bottom: “WHAT LIES AHEAD?” This establishes a narrative/visual arc that over the course of the book reveals itself. A last example includes an excerpt from a tourism pamphlet, "The purpose of this booklet is to present an honest and clear picture of Fond du Lac and the delightfully prosperous section of Wisconsin in which it is located. It cannot contain all of the information everyone desires. Citizens, boys and girls, read it seriously.” Patterson's inclusion has layers of meaning: The idea that the book will introduce a portrait of Font du Lac, the fact that it is a subjective view, and the tongue-in-cheek manner which suggests Patterson's will be a critical reading.

Throughout the rest of the book there are verbal puns, autobiographic additions, meta deconstructions, black and white photos, among numerous other literary devices. Together they can be interpreted and re-interpreted in a free-flowing manner over numerous, highly literary readings.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin's Holy Bible transforms scripture into literature through a similar mode of altering the original text with images and the underlining of particular words. However, where Patterson applies humor, Holy Bible is dark and penetrating. There are 512 images of an incredibly diverse range from the Archive of Modern Conflict, London, together with Adi Ophir's concluding text Divine Violence.

Textual alterations in Holy Bible are represented in a spread from Leviticus, where only the words "clean", "unclean", and "cleansing" are underlined in red, a total of 54 times, thereby pointing to the obsession with cleanliness and the dualism of the clean and the unclean. Pictorial alterations with text include a spread, where on the left side the red underlined text reads: "His own hands shall bring the offerings" and the overlaid image depicts two hands holding a spoon with a lighter underneath.

On the right-hand page, "blood" is underlined nine times, including the longer line "dipped his finger in the blood," which sits below an image of a figure shooting up intravenously. Together, these alterations meditate on the biblical notion of sacrifice, offerings, and the street experience thereof. Additional interpretations stem from the juxtaposition of the biblical with the real and reference to religion as the opiate of the masses.

Holy Bible unflinchingly questions our understanding of humanity's relation to violence as well as the relation the scriptural Bible has with violence. This work is very complex and my analysis does not pretend to be more than a look at the strategy these authors have taken to transform a scriptural text into literature through their artist book interventions.

In synthesis, these artist book makers have taken traditionally non-literary works, including the phone book and the Bible, and re-imagined them through the form of the artist book. In so doing, these artist books have effectively expanded literature to include non-literary forms.

[1] Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory, A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 28.

CONCEPTUAL MATERIALITY // Craig Dworkin

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 08:00:00 GMT

Tina Darragh's 1981 chapbook On the Corner to Off the Corner contains prose poems largely derived from the language of the dictionary. Moreover, Darragh often takes advantage of the patterns suggested by the mise-en-page of a single page or opening (a spread signaled by the titles of the poems, which are taken from dictionary headers) [1]. Darragh is frequently drawn to the geometric figures that illustrate mathematical terms, and further she figures the page as a geometric space in and of itself.

For instance, the poem "'-lent' to 'leptorrhine' for 'X'"opens, gnomically, with paraphrases of the definitions of gnomon: "removing a parallelogram from a similar parallelogram (by taking one of the corners) results in a shadow seen as a cylinder by squinting." The word denotes both the stylus of a sundial, as well as "the remainder of a parallelogram after the removal of a similar parallelogram containing one of its corners," a figure illustrated with a lettered line-drawing on page 970 of Webster's New Third International from which Darragh quotes. But her collage of dictionary entries goes on to suggest that the page itself might be curled into a cylinder; the poem continues: "cylinders are also obtained by twisting grain on a tree." The language comes from the definitions of gnarl ("to twist or contort"; "a hard protuberance with twisted grain on a tree"), which like many of Darragh's appropriations appear at the very lower left corner of the dictionary page, but that page itself is made of ligneous pulp that allows it to be flexibly turned.

With the description of "taking one of the corners" to create the kind of depth that can cast a shadow, and the shifts in visual perception underscored by "squinting," we can begin to see the alignment of the book's titular corners with the corners of the codex [from the Latin for "tree trunk"] and those words — including the header ranges taken as the titles for the poems in On the Corner to Off the Corner — that the reference-book browser not only reads but handles with the haptic recognition of the page as a material object in three dimensional space.

This sense of the page as a plane that both contains printed illustrations of geometric forms and also constitutes a geometric form itself comes to be fully realized in the poem "'mobilizer' to 'modern language' for 'U'".

Beginning on the top left corner of page 920 of the 1967 edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, with Möbius strip, the first entry on the first column, the poem ends on the previous dictionary page, at the top right corner, where the first entry on the top of the last column finds -mo, the suffix used in bookbinding, abstracted from duodecimo, to indicate trim sizes. By making the two entries contiguous, rather than separated recto and verso, the poem performs a möbius operation with the fore-edge strip, the trimmed page-edge talking about page trim, as if the outermost edge of the page were in fact twisted and collated to join itself into "a continuous one-sided surface."

The poem, in short, both talks about folding a sheet of paper in a book and imaginatively enacts the folding of the sheet of paper that contains the description. As another poem in the volume remarks: "The definition is surrounded by trees." The vaguely surreal statement is in fact quite literal, pointing to the conifer-pulp paper on which the dictionary — and Darragh's own displacement of its language — is printed. We may often imagine the defining materiality of artists’ books as an element of the artwork distinct from, or even in contrast to, the referential semantics of its text; in Darragh's case, in contrast, we can see a material imagination of the book emerge from the mere conjunction of the most literal, non-literary dictionary definitions and the most unremarkable trade-paper stock.

[1] Tina Darragh: On the Corner to Off the Corner (College Park: Sun & Moon Press, 1981). A digital facsimile is available at eclipsearchive.org/projects/CORNER

Craig Dworkin is the author, most recently, of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography [Fordham, 2020], from which the present post has been adapted, and Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality [Chicago, 2020]. He teaches literary history at the University of Utah.

VISUAL SPACE AND SILENCE // Jennifer Buchi

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 08:00:00 GMT

I am accustomed to thinking about design in terms of impact, where the goal is to produce in an audience an immediate response of belief or understanding. How do we come to believe or understand, especially ideas that are not new? Some of the things we want to communicate—or rather that I want to communicate, with you—like “love one another,” say, or “don’t be afraid,” toward which artists have been groping for millennia, aren’t easy to absorb immediately. They aren’t marketable: that is, the principles of effective messaging are not governing factors in the same way they would be if I were to convince you to pay for something.

The idea of one piece of art being more “impactful” than another implies competition, as though I must create the biggest collision at the highest speed. And I am all funned out with trying to provoke the biggest reaction, because the things I want to say to you—we’re strangers, after all—come not from me but through me. When I get those things confused, then what you hear is me—me, with my privileges and prejudices—instead of what I’d like to create for you, which, at its best, transcends those limitations. What would it look like, then, if I were to create a book that listened, instead of spoke? Because I have a feeling that being listened to and not spoken to is how we come to understand.

Within early illuminated manuscripts I chanced on books that listen—that rest and say little, so we can listen to ourselves. These books, when created—like the Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells—neither conveyed new information nor educated, because everyone who could read them already knew what they said. Unlike churches, which could not be moved if threatened, manuscripts could be hidden, opening their visual space to viewers wherever they were. I have heard that books from as far afield as North Africa, Europe, and the Near East made their way to Ireland in the hands of refugees from political and religious wars, seeking a place to rest—at least for a time—in safety.

The sanctity of illuminated manuscripts has to do, I think, with space—the interior space they contain for rest and reflection. Their page layouts create an ordered and highly patterned visual space, which is itself filled with ordered and patterned text and imagery, in ever-increasing complexity. These manifold textures share characteristics with mandalas and Islamic calligraphy; they create a sense of being drawn in deeper, in order to see.

The examples I’m using come from a religious context, where there is definitely a message behind the silence, but I think that message—whatever it is, doctrinally—comes second to image. The visual space engenders silence, and though someone might want to use the silence to proselytize, the silence came first and can stand on its own: as in, for example, cave paintings or ancient textiles, where the original message, whatever it was, has been lost to us, though the visual space remains powerful.

I have imitated these early page layouts using Robert Stevick’s The Earliest Irish & English Bookarts, a straight edge, and a compass. Attached are instructions for the layout of the Soiscél Molaise cover, so you too can, if you like, draw a design with just a compass and straight edge. And pencil, I guess, and eraser, probably. The process can be maddening. Still, the quiet of the work can be passed on from its original laborers to us, and when things are quiet, we listen well.

What is the impact of such a book? Maybe it “makes an impression,” but again we return to pushing, pressing; doing, that is, instead of being; or acting instead of resting, which is the idea I’m groping toward. I’m trying to do things all the time, because I have come to equate changing things with doing things. But is this right? In tracing the lines of a manuscript, what am I doing? It’s hard to say, but I’m drawn to it nevertheless, because it’s the kind of doing that just feels like being.

I’m Jennifer Buchi! I’m a poet, bookbinder, and cosmic dirt farmer living in Salt Lake City. You can reach me at jennifer.buchi@gmail.com, where you can also get a copy of the Soiscél Molaise instructions in PDF format if you’d like them.

EXPLORING THE ARTIST'S ACCORDION BOOK: PART 2 // Stephen Perkins

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 08:00:00 GMT

Schulz, Christoph Benjamin (ed), The Histories of Folded Books: Leporellos, Accordion Books and Folded Panoramas in Literature and Fine Art [Die Geschichte(n) Gefalteter Bücher: Leporellos, Livres-Accordéon und Folded Panoramas in Literatur und bildender Kunst]. Georg Olms Verlag: Hildesheim, Zurich/New York, 2019.

It was an exciting day when this wonderful book about accordion books dropped into my mailbox. Coming in at just under 600 pages, The Histories of Folded Books: Leporellos, Accordion Books and Folded Panoramas in Literature and Fine Art is comprised of nineteen texts by eighteen authors, with thirteen chapters in German, four in English and two in French. This book is exactly what this neglected area of artists’ book publishing has needed for many years, and it succeeds admirably in beginning to fill out a history of this bookform ranging from the fourteenth century to the contemporary moment, with an emphasis on accordions coming out of a variety of artistic and literary contexts in the twentieth century. I'm also happy to have a chapter included in which I examine three artists’ accordions that address issues associated with immigration.

Christoph Schulz introduces the book with a substantial and deeply researched survey of the history of the accordion fold throughout different time periods. His text is presented in twelve sections and he explores the use of the accordion format across different genres including the accordion as panorama, chronology, picture gallery, children's book, and an exploration of both nineteenth and twentieth century book art projects, among others. Coming in at one hundred and seventeen pages this introduction is both an original and substantial contribution to this emerging field of study.

Schulz also contributes another chapter titled “Folded Texts and Leporellos in the literary Avantgarde and experimental Poetry,” in which he surveys the use of the accordion fold in experimental literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, and then concentrates on accordions coming out of the visual and concrete poetry movements in the 1960s and 1970s. In this section he examines the works of assorted artists who produced books in the accordion format at different times during their careers, including Emmett Williams, Hansjörg Mayer, Arrigo Lora-Totino, Richard Kostelanetz. Once again this is a deeply researched survey text that succinctly outlines the experimentation with this format in the twentieth century, with a deeper exploration of the works of its experimental and literary-based practitioners during the 1960s and 1970s.

Since I'm under a strict word count for this article I will briefly mention four chapters that appealed to me, including my own. These four texts all examine accordions created by visual artists rather than those coming out of the century’s literary environments. I should also mention that my understanding of some of the chapters in the book, particularly those in German and to a lesser degree French, was not very comprehensive. I would assume that many English readers would also have the same issues with translation across two languages.

Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, a longtime writer on all aspects of artists’ books opens her text with the following, "The leporello is in itself only a binding, a way of folding the pages of a book so that it opens, as we say, 'like an accordion'. Nothing more. The word belongs to the technical vocabulary of the book and designates one of its modalities, one of its manifestations, one of its ways of 'making a book'. But, although it is tempting to think so, this does not determine a priori a function, nor does it privilege a priori a content.” This is a provocative opening statement, and one I would readily take issue with since the accordion's roots lie in other areas as well as the history of books. In her text Moeglin-Delcroix presents a succinct and insightful look at the accordion works of three contemporary artists: Peter Downsbrough, Bernard Villers, and Hamish Fulton.

Stephen Bann, another writer with a long interest in artists’ printed matter, contributes a brief, but nuanced overview of a selection of eleven of what the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay described as his ‘concertinas.’ Bann befriended Finlay in 1964 and has written widely on him. This text presents a fascinating and detailed account of these 'concertinas' and their place within Finlay's larger printed matter practice, with the concertinas developing from his early 'standing poems,' to folded cards with texts on both sides, and finally to fully fledged concertinas.

Jean Fremon contributes a rich text exploring the works and writings of Etel Adnan, and in examining her accordions she situates them within Adnan’s larger artistic ouevre which includes continuing activities as a painter, novelist, poet, and essayist. It was not until the early 1960s that Adnan encountered the accordion format, and this chapter includes an English translation of her fascinating 1998 essay "The Unfolding of an Artists' Book," in which she recounts her meeting with an old sailor in a cafe in San Francisco's North Beach, who introduced her to the accordion format, along with the rich possibilities inherent in this medium.

My own text looks at three accordions that tackle issues of immigration from three different viewpoints and I explore how the format has been used to express these stories. I spend some time exploring the interwoven themes in Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya, and Felica Rice's wonderful Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Control (2014). The second accordion, Migrant (2014) by José Manuel Mateo and Javier Martínez Pedro, is a vertical accordion that is taken up with a large drawing depicting a young mother, with her son and daughter, making the dangerous journey to the North. Finally, Eroyn Franklin’s Detained (2011) is a graphic novel about two detained immigrants in a deportation center who are slated for deportation, and the book recounts their interactions with other individuals in the center.

In conclusion, Schulz should be congratulated for bringing into the world this first book that so thoroughly explores the rich and multifaceted history of this unique bookform, and medium, and for laying such a solid foundation for further research.

Further Reading: See this post on my Accordion Publications Blog for a complete list of the book’s chapters and the publisher's statement.

Stephen Perkins is an art historian, curator and artist living in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the curator of the home gallery, Subspace.

EXPLORING THE ARTIST'S ACCORDION BOOK: PART 1 // Stephen Perkins

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 08:00:00 GMT

When I developed an interest in artists' accordion books I searched around for writings on the subject and found, with the exception of one very recent book (see Part 2 of this blog post), there is a paucity of literature on the subject. It was against this background that I started my accordion blog in 2010 in an effort to bring artists' accordion books out from under this cloak of invisibility and to document their fascinating and vibrant history.

With regard to that history, artists do not start using the accordion format until the early 1960s. From my preliminary research, the decade opens with an accordion by Yoko Ono titled Painting Until It Becomes Marble, which was collectively created by the visitors to her exhibition at the AG Gallery, New York in July 1961. This was one of her early 'instruction pieces,’ and aside from its beauty, it represents a radically alternative publishing model in which chance and audience participation are two vital ingredients.

The following year, Timm Ulrichs and Warja Lavater created their own very different accordions, respectively titled Fragment and William Tell. This early Lavater work establishes her pictographic style that would become a central feature of the accordions she created throughout her extensive artistic career. And, finally, let's not forget Etel Adnan who created her first accordion work in 1963 and has used the accordion format in her painting practice ever since.

The accordion book is a strange creature. Variously called an accordion, leporello, oriental-fold, zigzag, or concertina, it is a hybrid of the scroll and the codex, and it combines both the compactness of the traditional book and the expansiveness of the scroll. But it has one feature that neither of them possesses: when opened up, it reveals its sculptural presence.

Joe Tilson, Proscinemi Oracles, Edizioni del Cavallino, Venice, 1981, ed. 200.

The accordion format improved upon the scroll by offering the reader a greater ease of access to different parts of the story or text. One commentator has observed that the scroll has “a sequential access format” and the codex has “a ‘random-access format.’” Notable features of the accordion that improved upon the scroll include the ability to use both sides of the page and its protective covers, which enabled it to be transported safely.

The accordion book is defined by one crucial and elemental feature, the fold. The fold gives the accordion not only its compactness, but is instrumental in creating the accordion's most pronounced attribute — expansiveness. In their open state, accordions fundamentally challenge the idea of the traditional book, and in a very literal sense they function as ‘expanded books,’ and they provide a space in which a richer play of texts, images and pages is possible than in the ordinary codex.

Accordions also offer the viewer a very different reading experience than a regular book. Moving beyond our ingrained way of reading from left to right, the accordion offers the viewer a flexible way of approaching the book that includes reading and scanning the book from right to left, opening it up and viewing it as a whole, examining the individual pages and turning it over to discover what's on the reverse. An accompanying feature in any encounter with an accordion book is the high degree of handling and physicality required of the reader in their interaction with the book.

The accordion format makes possible a huge variety of page pairings and sequencing across its length. At one end, there is the seamless panoramic space when fully opened, at the other, with one image per page, the accordion is turned into a mini gallery, all of this coupled with the many different combinations in between.

Accordions also question the role of the reader, interrogating whether they are simply ‘readers’ or whether they become ‘viewers’ when confronted by these often very long bookworks. Accordions, in their own unique way, collapse any clear distinctions between the two terms and their associated modes of perception. To read, or to view, an artist’s accordion is to engage simultaneously on a number of levels with a multi-faceted bookform.

Acknowledgements: "Scroll," Wikipedia search, 8.7.90; Leporellos, Etel Adnan, Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris, 2020; and Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists' Books, Granary Books, New York, 1995.

Stephen Perkins is an art historian, curator, and artist living in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the curator of the home gallery Subspace.

CAN ARTIST BOOKS BE CATEGORIZED AS ACTIVIST ART? // Maymanah Farhat

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Nov 2020 08:00:00 GMT

Can artist books be categorized as activist art? This question nagged at me during the early part of 2019 as I began planning the Center for Book Arts’ summer exhibition, Poetry is Not a Luxury. Poring over a range of work by U.S. based women artists, I frequently came across examples that explore socio-political subject matter through a personal lens. The artist books, zines, and correspondence art that resonated most with me are unmistakably political given that they draw attention to critical issues, and yet most of these works have not been included in previous exhibitions or publications devoted to activist art. Searching through art historical monographs did not provide answers. What I found was that scholarly writing on book arts tends to privilege formalism, leaving little room for political content. Yet one can argue that the formalism of book arts in itself is political in the sense that artist books, zines, and correspondence art are accessible media, open to all levels of artistic ability and easily distributed to a wide audience. Reviewing the exhibition’s preliminary artworks—from Citizen 13660, a 1946 graphic memoir detailing a Japanese American artist’s incarceration in a concentration camp in Utah during World War II, to Survey (2010), a honeycomb-shaped accordion book that alludes to an artist’s experience as a recently arrived immigrant in New York—I was reminded of the feminist mantra “the personal is political.”

Abandoning my initial art historical research, I turned to the writings of Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Gloria Anzaldúa, and June Jordan, radical thinkers who were central to shaping Third World Feminism, the twentieth-century movement that mainstreamed terms like “intersectionality,” “identity politics,” and “people of color.” Third World Feminism embraced creativity as a way of documenting, addressing, and amplifying the experiences of women, including how racism and socioeconomic marginalization often intersect with gender-based discrimination. Adopting Lorde’s idea that creativity is thus a necessity for women allowed me to approach the exhibition’s featured works in a way that honors the emotive (and political) power of subjectivity. Creativity, as Lorde reminds us in her 1977 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” reveals “what we feel within and dare make real.” This understanding of the profound nature of creativity combined with the analytical lens of Third World Feminism seemed most apt for an exhibition that brings together a diverse group of artists who articulate the intersectionality that shapes everyday life in the U.S. for so many. By doing so, these artists encourage viewers to consider issues like war, migration, gentrification, mass incarceration, and xenophobia outside of statistical information and news headlines, to which Americans have become desensitized, bringing them instead into the realm of lived experiences. This leap from representation to engagement, from information to knowledge, is one of the essential aims of activist art.

In “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers” (1980), Gloria Anzaldúa reflects on the difficulty of addressing her peers, the Black and Brown women who were her friends and allies: “How to begin again. How to approximate the intimacy and immediacy I want. What form?” Anzaldúa chose a poetic letter as the most effective medium for her task in the same way that the artists of Poetry is Not a Luxury turned to book arts. Later in the text Anzaldúa warns that “[t]he danger in writing is not fusing our personal experience and world view with the social reality we live in, with our inner life, our history, our economics, and our vision.” My hope is that by bringing together these artists and presenting their works through this analytical lens that I’ve communicated how intimacy and immediacy are crucial to navigating our current political moment.

Maymanah Farhat is the curator of Poetry is Not a Luxury. Organized by the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan in 2019, the exhibition is currently on view at the San Francisco Center for the Book and will travel to the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts in 2022.

ON EXHIBIT: POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY AT SAN FRANCISCO CENTER FOR THE BOOK // Jennie Hinchcliff

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Audre Lorde’s 1977 essay Poetry Is Not A Luxury is compact in its 1,242 words, urgent in the delivery of its main message: that the “revelation or distillation of experience” – the poetry that women carry within themselves – is “not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

The exhibition POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY currently installed at the San Francisco Center for the Book showcases work of female artists who weave these aforementioned revelations and distillations through the core of their art practice. “There are no new ideas,” Lorde writes in her essay, “There are only new ways of making them felt…while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.” Curator Maymanah Farhat explains in her introductory catalog essay that artist books, correspondence art, and zines provide a landscape for female artists to explore ideas of feminism, personal autonomy, and artistic vision, often with an eye to easily sharing these narratives with others. For this exhibition, themes of community, collaboration, and communication are essential to Farhat’s curatorial choices, as well as Lorde’s message that “poetry,” for women, is an urgent necessity of one’s own personhood.

Exhibited in SFCB’s gallery, the artist book Ana Mendieta (2004) by Cuban publishing collective Ediciones Vigía in collaboration with Nancy Morejón is striking in appearance: tall, slender, with a silhouette of a woman criss-crossed in ropes on the cover. Flaming items surround her body: a cross, a dove, a lamp. Upon opening the book, a reader is confronted with a wealth of materials which reference Mendieta’s earthworks: sand, egg shells, earth colored paper. A true collaboration between poet (Nancy Morejón) and publisher (Ediciones Vigia), the reader also becomes a willing third collaborator, experiencing Ana Mendieta with each page turn.

Ana Mendieta :: Ediciones Vigía, Nancy Morejón

Oakland, CA artist Patricia Tavenner was best known for her work in the worlds of correspondence art and zines. Tavenner actively corresponded with other feminist artists such as Eleanor Antin, Lucy Lippard, and Kathy Acker; her publication “Mail Order Art” was one of the first collaborative magazines of the correspondence art genre to feature essays, artworks, and interviews.

As part of the current exhibition, Tavenner’s self-published Four Years and More (1979) is a collection of personal musings and artworks. Reading through Four Years and More, one quickly realizes that community building and fierce independence were important paths for Tavenner. Proclaiming “I AM NOT A CONVENTIONAL ARTIST AND I NEVER HAVE BEEN,” she writes about the early collaborative beginnings of “Mail Order Art”: “I had no idea whether other artists were into the concept of art-by-mail…what I wanted most from this art shopper/newspaper was dialogue. As it turned out, so did others.” Patricia Tavenner’s life exemplified Lorde’s idea that one’s personal poetry is the “skeleton architecture of our lives,” the inner scaffolding upon which we hang everything else we create, live, and do.

Four Years and More :: Patricia Tavenner

Jana Sim’s Language Möbius (2011) is an elegant 3D representation of communication and learning a language outside of one’s native tongue. Sim states:"The most difficult part of learning another language is everyday conversation where an immediate response is needed. Language Möbius is about my conversation process.”

Three Möbius strips housed in a Jacob’s Ladder clamshell box represent the parsing out of language, the different phases Sim goes through (she calls it “the loop in my brain”): hearing English, thinking in Korean, then translating and speaking a reply in English. Two smaller Möbius strips (which are halved versions of the complete third) symbolize, in Sim’s words “the two languages tangled up in my head while in translation, which is why the sentences (on the Möbius strips) can’t be read.”

Language Möbius :: Jana Sim

As an exhibition, POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY is a reminder that, for women, the printed word is crucial to sharing embodied ideas. The strengths and beliefs of each exhibited artist show us where we have been, where we currently are, and where we hope to be. Sharing women’s narratives – revelations and distillations, as it were – via the medium of artist books presents itself as one of the most viable options for illumination. Curator Maymanah Farhat writes: “accessibility (of artist books) not only implies the ability to reach a wide audience but also the ease and immediacy with which viewers are engaged.” It is this ease and immediacy which makes POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY a powerful, thought provoking exhibition, the embodiment of Lorde’s “new possibilities and strengths.”

POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY: July 10–December 20, 2020

For information regarding gallery appointments, https://sfcb.org/poetryisnotaluxury

Jennie Hinchcliff is the Exhibitions Manager at the San Francisco Center for the Book. She has curated numerous correspondence/artist book exhibitions. She currently lives in San Francisco.

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG (PART 3) // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 07:00:00 GMT

To my surprise this series of posts has become a love letter to collagraph as a process. I am going to keep following this direction, because I see the “atom level” aspects of process as being critically important to the construction of the social and discursive parts of the field. Collagraph is about access and possibility. It is about creative reuse of materials, and about embracing chance. Collagraph allows emergent form and dislegible texts, and it encourages beginners and experienced printers alike to find their own way through process. It can be a metaphor for a whole studio practice.

This post is technical. It gets into the details of how to make these ideas work and is structured around discarding some basic assumptions about letterpress printing:

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE EFFICIENT AND YOU DON’T NEED A PLAN

You need a place to start, time, and a willingness to fail, to keep going, and/or redo things. Stay with the process of printing to see where it leads.

YOU DON’T NEED ACCESS TO EQUIPMENT

I am framing my descriptions here around the use of a cylinder or platen press, but I realize that unrestricted access to that equipment is not a given. I think that it would be possible to adapt many of these approaches to hand printing because they don’t necessarily rely on large amounts of evenly distributed pressure to print. In fact—hand printing might open up even more markmaking possibilities. We are already seeing this with so much pandemic-era printing at home. (See Erin Beckloff’s post from September 1).

THE MATRIX DOES NOT HAVE TO BE TYPE HIGH OR EVEN ONE CONSISTENT HEIGHT

Variability in matrix height is one of the main ways to produce marks with variety. A lower matrix will catch less ink from the rollers and print with less force. A higher matrix will catch more ink and print with more force. In collagraph you can control the height and amount of relief on the block by adding or removing material from the plate itself. Height can also be adjusted by packing under the base block that the plate is attached to (or adjusting bed height if you have a press with that capability). This can also be done with a platen press—you can use a base block made of multiple layers, and add or remove sheets of paper between those layers to make adjustments to height. (More on the multi-layer base below.)

A single matrix can be printed at multiple heights to build up (or push back) color. A mark could be printed in one color, and then in the next run the matrix can be dropped in height, and printed with a new color. Building up color this way in painting is called scumbling. It produces a different color and surface effect than the layering of transparent solids and/or direct printing. There are other painting terms/techniques to explore in print-based markmaking: facture, pentimento, sfumato, impasto, manipulating edges, etc.

THE MATRIX DOES NOT HAVE TO BE STABLE—

or solid, or flat, or even, or consistent, or hard, or dry, or sealed against the ink, or composed of a single layer. The matrix is anything that can make a mark. A mark does not have to be pressed into the sheet—it can be brushed on, squeezed on, etc. There are so many possibilities—brush matrices, soft matrices, flexible matrices, multi-layer matrices, and things still to be invented. Matrices can be made to move, change, and/or decompose to produce a variable edition. A soft or flexible collagraph plate can produce marks of stunning delicacy and subtlety. Collagraph plates can also be made to glop ink on in impasto blobs. Dimension in letterpress can go both ways: into the sheet and coming off of it. (Pro tip: use oil-based inks or add cobalt free drier.)

A reduction process for linoleum or woodcut is great way to make multi-color prints. With collagraph you can use an additive process instead, or both additive and reductive at the same time.

YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN TYPE

The current remote teaching situation has shown that movable type can be a flexible and accessible material to work with. I am excited about all of the ways that people are combining hand techniques, digital design and fabrication, and what are essentially collagraph principles to make new type.

Here is a formula that I have been using to quickly get close to type high with blocks/type:

3/4 (0.75) inch MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard)

+ 1/8 (.125) inch masonite/plywood/acrylic

+ this barrier board from Talas (.056) inch

= .931 inch—slightly above type high (reduce packing on your press to compensate, and don’t be afraid to adjust the rollers too).

3/4 (0.75) inch MDF

+ 3 sheets of barrier board from Talas (.056)

= .918 inch—exactly type high

The above layers can be combined to make a base block—the MDF and either the masonite or barrier board, and then the last layer is whatever is being used for the type. A multi-layer base can be used on a cylinder or a platen press, and layers can be further split or subbed out with paper to manipulate height. The letterforms can be cut out of the masonite or barrier board, by hand or with a laser cutter or CNC router. Stick them to the base block with Boxcar photopolymer adhesive or double-sided tape. You can have type that you keep and reuse, and/or type that isn’t precious and can be destroyed in the process. This type can be combined with the collagraph matrix ideas described above. Type, like any matrix, does not have to be solid and perfect and precise—but it can be—or at least precise enough.

“Precise enough.” That is really the point here—as the printer, that choice is yours. You don’t need permission, “proper” training or “proper” materials, and you definitely don’t need to follow a pre-determined aesthetic. You only need a vision and a desire to chase it. Do it all wrong, and keep doing it wrong until you push through the doubt and criticism—the field will be better for it.

Aaron Cohick (he/him) is the Printer of The Press at Colorado College and the proprietor of the NewLights Press. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG (PART 2) // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 07:00:00 GMT

The first post in this series ended with a description of two ideas: dislegibility and emergent form. How can these concepts be applied? How might one experiment with dislegible text and emergent form in letterpress and books—two related disciplines that seem to demand careful planning and “clean” execution?

I started the answer to the above questions in a series of posts on this blog a little bit more than a year ago. (It seems I’m still stuck in that rut.) Those posts considered the process of bookmaking through the lens of the “emergent,” looking at the whole process of making a book and how it might be injected with more flexibility, immediacy, directness, and improvisation. This series of posts will focus more on the process of letterpress printing.

The traditional logic of printing says that there are only two options for marks: on or off, black or white, dot or no dot. A mark must be evenly inked, texture-less, and the ink must not exceed the boundaries of the mark as defined by the matrix. In letterpress the impression should range from not visible to maybe just enough of a bite to activate the three-dimensionality of the page. The diagram [above] shows the “acceptable” marks of printing—the singular “off/no mark” and the slight range of “on/mark.” The range in “on” comes from variability in impression and inking, usually determined by a printer’s personal preference.

Any mark outside of that binary is considered unacceptable—unintentional, not fully there, not controllable. These are stray marks, uneven marks made from a damaged or improperly made matrix, underinked or overinked marks, marks made with too little or too much force, dirt, variable marks, blobs of ink, etc.—all of the marks that we would treasure and cultivate in drawing and painting.

Drawing/painting involves markmaking with a tool pressed into or brushed against a surface. Relief printing is the same thing—a tool (matrix) pressed into or brushed against a surface. Yet most relief printing methods never seem that direct—they either require special materials and tools (woodcut, linoleum, wood/resin engraving) or expensive and environmentally questionable chemical processes (photopolymer). Relief collagraph, however, can be very direct, but it requires a reframing of approach, away from “imitating” linoleum or woodcut and toward a kind of direct markmaking.

Collagraph is a well-known technique and is usually taught as part of introductory letterpress courses. It has an immediacy and fidelity that is very exciting—you can stick a leaf or other flat object to a block, print it, and get a decent image of that object. Unfortunately it usually stops there. Those flat objects are hard to push beyond that initial single-color print. Linoleum, photopolymer, wood and metal type, and to some extent woodcut are all made to be “neutral” printing surfaces—flat and smooth. Trying to get collagraph to be flat and smooth begs the question: why use collagraph at all? In collagraph the material that makes the plate is not neutral—the material is exactly the point. That embrace of material and its many, varied effects and marks is what moves collagraph closer to the direct markmaking of drawing/painting. It makes all of those “unacceptable” (or abject?) marks readily available. Relief collagraph printed with letterpress equipment can be a method of painting or drawing in multiple, with control as good as—if not better than, but also different from—the hand. That control can also take advantage of the wild materiality that collagraph has to offer and use those “unacceptable” marks— consciously or unconsciously, carefully or recklessly. Collagraph and an embrace of all kinds of possible marks also opens the door to experimental printing without the use of a press. Collagraph and its roots (collage, drawing, bricolage) can even be a lens to reconsider what a press and movable type can be.

Aaron Cohick (he/him) is the Printer of The Press at Colorado College and the proprietor of the NewLights Press. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG (PART 1) // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 07:00:00 GMT

“Set-up sheets are the sheets a printer uses to ‘set-up’ the press: to get inking, pressure, position, registration or other elements of the printing process coordinated. Many printers reuse these sheets several times, creating elaborate overprinting effects of random patterns which can be treated as ‘found art’ or poetry, cut up, bound, and made into a book. Dieter Roth used this approach in a number of works, and it is an idea which I have seen occur to many people who see the set-up sheets around a press.”

When I first read the above endnote in Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books, I saw myself—the idea to use the set-up sheets had occurred to me as well. I have also seen it occur to others. As Drucker notes, the idea is a cliché. A similar cliché is used by the novice printer who declares that they “like” the textured, too-light printing of wood type or a linoleum block, when in reality they didn’t take the time to add more packing or ink. I always teach my students to print “correctly,” at least to start, but I also have to admit that even in the context of an educational environment that “correctness” feels disingenuous to me. I too “like”—or really I am absolutely fascinated by—those too-light, too-heavy, or accidental marks that the press/matrix creates along the way. Mistakes have potential. The set-up sheets themselves might not make for a particularly interesting book, but the processes, marks, and collisions that they contain are something that can be used intentionally.

The idea that “bad printing” can be good/interesting is nothing new. The concept actually appears in a later endnote in that same chapter from Drucker’s book (endnote #14). The printer Amos P. Kennedy, Jr. has been advocating for “bad printing” for many years, and his work shows a mastery of the approach. Kennedy’s way of working is a major influence on my own—he improvises, he tests, he builds layers and layers of color, he paints and monoprints with brayers and ink knives, and he combines and recombines elements to play with repetition and difference. The primary lesson that I have learned from Kennedy’s work is that the consistency of the edition is not as important as the generative power of the multiple and the markmaking possibilities of the press. “Ink on paper,” as Kennedy often says.

“Good” printing has a result that we already know. What I love about “dirty” or “bad” printing is that it can always be elaborated and worked into. The variations of bad printing that I am working with now are “emergent” and “dislegible” printing.

If “legible” and “illegible” are binary opposites, then the term “dislegible” is about looking at the space between those two poles. Dislegibility displaces, dislocates, deforms, and/or disrupts the process of reading, with the ultimate goal of making that process of reading (dis)legible to the reader. The dislegible can be read, but it resists closure or certainty. The dislegible is the flicker or the blur, one thing becomes another, then another. The dislegible is (ideally) not a code to be broken or a puzzle to be solved, but a constant, recursive wandering in the process of reading. Dislegibility is an important tool in constructing emergent form.

The emergent is something that is always in the process of being made—a state of being that is constantly in transition, or on the edge of exceeding its imagined boundaries. The emergent work of art resists a static state (as perceived by the viewer) through complexity, movement, lack of finish, unpredictability, failure, disintegration, the generation of noise as part of the system, etc. A classic example of emergent form is “analytic” Cubist painting. At no point do those paintings congeal into an image of the still life or person. They require constant movement of the eye and active—but futile—assembly by the viewer. The impossibility of that assembly is what keeps the paintings engaging.

For me, bad/emergent printing is an approach that has the chance material beauty of facture in drawing and painting, but that also uses the iterative nature of printing and the multiple to produce objects not possible in drawing and painting. An approach that purposefully loses control—that embraces noise, chance, failure, and difference through repetition.

Work Cited

Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 2004) 15, 17.

Aaron Cohick is the Printer of The Press at Colorado College and the proprietor of the NewLights Press. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

LETTERPRESS EDUCATORS COMMUNITY: ISOLATED BUT FAR FROM ALONE // Erin Beckloff

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Letterpress Printing students sharing their Small Beauties collage projects created with Visiting Artist Lindsay Schmittle of Gingerly Press.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unforeseeable challenges, but out of the darkness opportunities have grown for expanded and deeper connections. In Spring 2020 colleges and universities across the world made the unexpected, but wise, choice to move to remote learning. With little to no warning, educators were faced with a difficult transition to the digital environment, particularly studio-based courses that rely on specialized equipment and value physical making processes. Feeling uncertain about how to shift my letterpress printing and design courses, I turned to the printing community as a source of strength and support. I organized virtual meetings for comradery and commiseration, and created a Remote Letterpress Drive to serve as a hub for collaboration. Educators are encouraged to contribute remote teaching materials, and to use, add, and edit content and resources for the benefit of all.

Since early March, people teaching all levels of design, studio art, printmaking, and book arts, as well as representatives from printing museums, libraries, and archives have gathered for conversation. Each session has had about five to twenty participants, and over 70 individuals have attended at least one Letterpress Edu Chat. The international community has continued to grow to an email list of 180 people. Over the summer, a team and I founded LEAD: Letterpress Educators of Art & Design and will continue to host Chats. Email info@letterpresseducators.com if you would like to participate—all are welcome.

Chat sessions have been a time to discuss concerns, celebrate successes, and to offer support. Collective concern includes how to help students feel engaged and not have to rely on digital media while meeting learning outcomes from a distance. Educators discussed the need to provide empathy and flexibility and help students keep making and exercising creativity. The group shared ideas for finding parallel design processes without access to printing presses and type. Taking a digital approach, some faculty used Adobe software to simulate the printing process including the relationship of ink/color and composing with restraints of building a form with a limited type collection. David Wolske of University of North Texas, Globe at MICA, and others generously provided wood type scans, digital files, and typography references to the Shared Drive. Some faculty quickly put together supply kits of materials to DIY print and bind. Others encouraged the use of found materials and honored the role of the hand in the work through collage, stamping, and drawing letterforms. Facilitating collaboration at a distance and hosting virtual visiting printers was another important way educators helped remind students that we are all connected even when apart.

Remote Supply Kit assembled by Beckloff for Letterpress Printing at Miami University for Spring 2020.

Well before the Spring term had ended, discussion in the Letterpress Edu Chats turned to planning for the still uncertain 2020–21 school year. The Provisional Press created by Steve Garst arose as a significant solution for accessibility and adaptability for the continuity of letterpress education. Originally Steve developed the press as open source plans to be built inexpensively for anyone with little wood shop skills and access to a laser cutter. He hoped it would become a transitional press to enable students to continue to print once they no longer had access to studios. In the Provisional Press, the chat participants saw a solution to the need for remote and socially distanced face-to-face teaching. Steve collected feedback through a combination of the Chats and educators building the protypes and testing the presses. With the help of Scott Moore of Moore Wood Type, he adapted the design to fit a standard American galley or steel bed plate, increased the strength and durability, and produced 165 Provisional Press Kits for 21 schools. Other faculty are building over 100 of their own kits from the plans for the Fall term.

In the Chats, we discussed focusing on the importance of proactive planning and collective support of our community to be prepared for our institutional changes and challenges; as well as taking time to reflect on why we teach letterpress printing and letting that inform our future goals. Now more than ever is the time to share resources and expertise, to find and create opportunities within our current situation, and to communicate the value of the letterpress experience for students and institutions. Helen Ingham, Letterpress Technician at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, reflected that we all seem to be faced with the same battles, “Often I’ve felt I was in isolation, but now know this is far from the case.”

Character Prints Spring 2020
Maya Fenter, digital letterpress elements: wood type and wood engraving
Delaney Heisterkamp: tissue paper, digital typography
Maggie Walkoff: digitized wood type, hand stamping

Erin Beckloff is a designer, educator, printer and filmmaker (Pressing On 2017) who preserves anecdotal and technical knowledge of printing history and culture with a focus on education and community. She serves as an Assistant Professor of Communication Design at Miami University and has an MFA in Graphic Design from Vermont College of Fine Arts. http://www.erinbeckloff.com/ | @ebecks

CHEAP COPIES & "UNDERGROUND MULTIPLES" // Rich Dana

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 07:00:00 GMT

In 1962, Poet and provocateur Ed Sanders purchased his first used, hand-operated mimeograph machine and Fuck You Press was born. Pre-digital office duplicators like the mimeograph, “Ditto” machine, and small offset presses freed Sanders and other 60’s radical artists and writers from the publishing industry’s constraints and led to the creation of the underground press.

Sanders was not the first to use cheap copying technology to transgress against the aesthetic mainstream. Earlier producers of what would later be labeled “Democratic Multiples” may have found inspiration in an unlikely source… science fiction (SF) fandom. These young, mostly blue-collar fans of far-fetched adventure stories utilized cheap copying technology and created an international network of amateur “fanzines” well before World War II.

There is an oscillation between the tandem sine waves of the Avant-Garde and SF fandom throughout the 20th century. One can find many fascinating cultural commonalities in the development of both that beg for more in-depth scholarship. In the period between the world wars, artists’ publications and SF fanzines utilized a similar visual language to reflect on the debates surrounding socialism and fascism. The inclusion of non-white/hetero/male artists and the depiction of “others” in these genres is simultaneously far ahead of the mainstream and sometimes frustratingly puerile. Unfortunately, taking a deep-dive into these topics is beyond the scope of this blog post, but hopefully, it can provide a stepping-off point for further discussion.

During WWI, Dada artists began to use copying technology to produce handbills and pamphlets. Russian Futurists embraced the hectograph as an ideal way to print the crude, dynamic graphics that became a trademark of their publications. A few years later, in the US, young SF fans discovered self-publishing using the hectograph and mimeograph. Two parallel underground print cultures began to develop; on the one hand, avant-garde artists, revered by intellectuals and misunderstood by the masses, and on the other, “fandom,” the street-level popular movement that was reviled by the academy. The cultural thread that stretches from Dada through Futurism, Fluxus, Situationism, concrete poetry and artist books runs alongside the thread that connects science fiction fandom to punk rock graphics, Riot Grrrl zines and the “Maker” movement.

1943 was a critical point on the literary front of the mimeograph revolution. It was when “William Everson … helped run the mimeograph machine to produce his own X War Elegies, among other small volumes” in the conscientious objectors’ camp at Waldport, Oregon. [1] After the war, Everson and other “beatniks” laid the groundwork for further development.

During the 1960s, SF finally co-mingled with experimental poetry, avant-garde art, performance, and film. Shannon Davies Mancus describes it well in her essay “New Wave Science Fiction and the Counterculture”: “[C]ounterculture figures such as Abby Hoffman and the Diggers in San Francisco and New Wave (SF) writers such as Judith Merril and J. G. Ballard looked to other artistic movements that had rejected canonical methodologies in search of new realities which might prove less violent than the 'real world. ' . . Merril, Pamela Zoline, and Giles Gordon sampled methodologies such as textual collaging: the surrealists believed that odd juxtapositions and rearrangements of symbols reveal more about the original subject of inquiry than the narratively unified whole, and that exploring the subconscious creates a kind of cognitive estrangement that allows for a break with old, violent forms of thinking and creates new realities.” [2]

In the introduction to An Author Index to Little Magazines of the Mimeograph Revolution, 1958-1980, Michael Basinki wrote that: “The Mimeo Revolution did not instantaneously precipitate. Throughout the 1950s, there were little magazines publishing innovative poetry. They existed in the shadows of Eisenhower and McCarthyism. . . . The university system was expanding and was both inspirational and an easy target for those craving a frank poetic engagement. It was a heady time…. Their publishing was meant to be rebellious and, therefore, a romantic aura surrounds the Mimeo Revolution. Its legitimate parameters have yet to be fully established. Its full impact has yet to be considered. The context, materiality, and the history of the Mimeo Revolution await documentation. The stories of the editors, poets, and their mimeo magazines need to be written.” [3]

Were the teenage cover artists of 1930s fanzines aware of Russian Futurist art books? Were any of the poets and artists of the 1960s mimeograph revolution directly involved in SF fandom in their youth? More research is needed. Nevertheless, we can clearly see that there is a shared zeitgeist at work, a common revolutionary aesthetic, and a love of “cheap copies.”

[1] Clay, Steven, and Rodney Phillips. A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980: a Sourcebook of Information. New York: Granary Books, 1998.

[2] Mancus, Shannon Davies. “New Wave Science Fiction and the Counterculture.” Chapter. In The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, 338–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

[3] Harter, Christopher. An Author Index to Little Magazines of the Mimeograph Revolution: 1958-1980. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008.

Rich Dana is master’s candidate in the University of Iowa MLIS/Book Arts MFA program. He is a Robert A. Olson Graduate Assistant at UI Special Collections working with the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry and is the former Curatorial Assistant to the Hevelin Science Fiction Collection.

TOWARD A THEORY OF CONCRETE BOOKS // India Johnson

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Aug 2020 07:00:00 GMT

In critical writing about book art, sculptural books tend to surface in introductions and footnotes. For example, in the introduction to The Century of Artists’ Books, Drucker argues that the book as sculpture or installation is “just beyond the zone of artists’ books. I am concentrating here on understanding what a book is when it functions as a book, when it provides a reading or viewing experience sequenced into finite space of text or images.” [1] In a footnote to Bookworks Revisited, Ulises Carrión emphasizes that “I do want to underline the idea of “series of pages” in order to exclude so-called “object books.” These works express a sculptural approach and should be treated as such.” [2] In his analysis of the bookwork Space + Time, Tate Shaw argues that while “each physical opening of such a book is perhaps equal in space . . . books are a time-based art form.” [3]

None of the authors above would claim that space is unimportant to bookworks. However, their critical writing about artist bookwork rests on the assumption that time is perhaps more key – in particular, the linear sense of time that sequencing creates. This isn’t surprising – in fact, it aligns with what the geographer Edward Soja identified as “a persistent epistemological bias” across disciplines, “favoring time over space.” [4] Why does this bias often go unexamined in our best critical writing about artist bookwork? Of all fields, book art should be the first to insist that space is as essential to reading as linear time.

Unfortunately, developing a more robust critical framework for writing about sculptural books is a larger project than one blog post. In the meantime, this post proposes we borrow critical writing about concrete poetry to frame discourse about sculptural books. Exemplifying a critical approach that avoids what Soja calls an ‘anti-spatial bias,’ at least two such manifestos – Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry and Dom Sylvester’s Houédard Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay – articulate space as the text’s “structural agent,” rather than linear time. [5] Although ‘space’ in concrete poetry manifestos often refers to the two-dimensional space of the page, to instead work toward a theory of ‘concrete books,’ we might investigate how three-dimensional volumetric space can structure a book-object as a whole.

The first work I’ll analyze using concrete poetry manifestos is Buzz Spector’s piece Unpacking My Library. The piece is an “installation where he [Spector] lines up his library around the perimeter of a space with the spines organized tallest to shortest.” [6] If a concrete poem is “not a poem about something or other” [7] but rather an object in itself, [8] Unpacking My Library is not an essay of the same title about unpacking one’s library – it is simply the unpacked library itself. Foregrounding books as concrete volumes, rather than representing them with text, is most of what turns Spector’s piece into a clever comment on that essay. Thus, in Unpacking My Library, volume structures what is communicated–much the same way the space of the page structures what is communicated in a concrete poem. Additionally, Unpacking My Library offers a reading experience of curated, found text fragments in the language visible on book spines. In organizing its text fragments by volume alone, Unpacking My Library, like a concrete poem, issues “no orders to reader who has to provide his own mind-gum syntax. Readers not bossed.” [9]

An example of an editioned ‘concrete book’ might be the board book ABSENCE by the architect Jeannie Yoon. Like a concrete poem, the book creates a precise problem [10] (how to make “a portable personal memorial?”) [11], but instead of solving the problem “in terms of sensible language,” it solves the problem in terms of sensible volume: the number of pages in ABSENCE was determined by the number of floors in the world trade center. A scale model of grief, ABSENCE is about as expressive as a blank book can be. Lacking any language besides its title, the book takes “total responsibility before language” [12] to an extreme, creating a site where “poet & reader meet in maximum communication with minimum words.” [13]

One of the benefits of framing the sculptural book as a ‘concrete’ mode is an understanding of volume’s potential for adding meaning to any publishing project. For example, volume can be a literary reference: consider Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (“I ended up making it the exact same size and bulk of the paperbound Harvard edition of The Arcades Project”) [14] or THE SADDEST THING IS THAT I HAVE HAD TO USE WORDS: A Madeline Gins Reader, which mimics the dimensions of Gins’ artist book, WORD RAIN.

Furthermore, an ordinary experience of books is often a concrete one: look no further than the post office or the library. The USPS Domestic Mail Manual defines ‘book’ almost exclusively in terms of weight and volume. Likewise, library stacks are an experience of books as mass, volume, and specific location. Perhaps sculptural books harbor a unique potential to make “a critical comment, implicit or explicit, on books in general”– what Ulises Carrión claimed that “every real, good artist’s book” must do. [15]

----------

Working definition: a ‘concrete book’ is a book, bookwork, book-object, or sculptural book that uses location, weight, or volume structurally.

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[1] Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary, 2004), 14.

[2] Ulises Carrión, “Bookworks Revisited,” in Quant aux livres: On Books, ed. Juan J. Agius (Geneva: Éditions Héros-Limite, 1997), 156.

[3] Tate Shaw, Blurred Library: Essays on Artists’ Books (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2016), 19.

[4] Edward Soja, “Author’s Response: Writing Geography Differently,” Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 6 (2006), 818.

[5] Both manifestos use the exact same phrasing.

[6] Shaw, Blurred Library, 64.

[7] Eugen Gomringer, “From Line to Constellation,” trans. Mike Weaver, in Concrete Poetry: A World View, ed. Mary Ellen Solt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 67.

[8] Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” trans. the authors, in Concrete Poetry: A World View, ed. Mary Ellen Solt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 72.

[9] Dom Sylvester Houédard, “Concrete poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay” in Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter: The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard, ed. Nicola Simpson ([England]: Occasional Papers, 2012), 159.

[10] de Campos, Pignatari, and de Campos, “Pilot Plan,” 72.

[11] “Jeannie Meejin Yoon: Absence” Printed Matter Catalog, Printed Matter, Inc., accessed July 30, 2020, www.printedmatter.org/catalog/16965/.

[12] de Campos, Pignatari, and de Campos, “Pilot Plan,” 72.

[13] Houédard, “Concrete poetry,” 159.

[14] Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 119.

[15] Ulises Carrión, “On Criticism,” in Quant aux livres: On Books, ed. Juan J. Agius (Geneva: Éditions Héros-Limite, 1997), 178.

India Johnson is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Iowa Center for the Book.

STRUCTURE SPEAKS: THE ART OF THE FOLD // KT Hettinga

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 07:00:00 GMT

“What happens when the book is stripped away of centuries of preconceptions and is allowed to reveal something else: playfulness, utility, invention? Expanding the notion of the book is what the structures in [The Art of the Fold] attempt to do. . . . [T]he book as a structural object is celebrated while content is considered in a new and unconventional way" (Hedi Kyle, Preface, The Art of the Fold).

As a long time fan of Hedi Kyle’s folded book structures, I was thrilled when The Art of the Fold, How to Make Innovative Books and Paper Structures by Hedi Kyle and Ulla Warchol was published. Hedi Kyle was born in Berlin, graduated from the Werk-Kunst-Schule in Wiesbaden, Germany with a degree in graphic design, and shortly thereafter emigrated to the United States. The 1970s in New York City were an amazing time of revival and experimentation. In The Art of the Fold’s preface Hedi recalls teaching at the Center for Book Art, where under the direction of founder Richard Minsky the mission was “to push concept, materials, printing and making of artist books in a new direction.” Bridging her training in traditional binding and conservation with innovation, Hedi shaped, folded, manipulated and formed paper, creating new structures. Throughout her 45-year career as Head Conservator at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and as a professor in the MFA Program for Book Arts and Printmaking at the University of the Arts, Hedi has taught and mentored a generation of conservators and book artists. As a pioneer, an inventor, and a generous teacher Hedi has revolutionized the field of books arts.

As a designer I am captivated by the-angle-cut-and-folded, belly-band book jacket with its red text ‘FOLD’ on a powder blue ground, folded over the black on tan text ‘The ART of the FOLD.’ This design element on the book itself demonstrates Hedi’s interest in creative folding that reveals content. In her preface she says, “Expanding the notion of the book . . . [e]xploring its tactile, sculptural form, primarily through folding methods, the book as a structural object is celebrated while content is considered in a new and unconventional way.” At a workshop I took from Hedi, she emphasized that the structure exists to support the art and content of the book. With innovative structures content is possible that would not otherwise be conceivable.

Ulla Warchol, Hedi’s daughter, graduated from the Cooper Union in New York City with a degree in architecture; befittingly she is interested in a multidisciplinary approach to structure, from large scale works—buildings and interiors—to small scale works—books, fabrications and collaborations with artists. Mother and daughter team tell how they created their ground breaking book on folding-based book structures by “going back through 40 years of archives of Hedi’s structures, taking models apart, hundreds of hours of folding, fine tuning proportions and dimensions, and then drawing, first by hand and then in Adobe Illustrator” (artofthefold on Instagram). The result is an admirably clear and inspiring book of unique designs from flag books to blizzards and fishbones to nesting boxes.

Top: Hedi Kyle, Maze, hand drawings, facsimiles of mazes; Mica Flags, Mica Sheets.

Bottom: Ulla Warchol, The Memory Palace, collaborative installation; Stationery Departures, collaboration with Hedi Kyle. Images courtesy of Hedi Kyle and Ulla Warchol.

In her preface, Hedi talks about the beginning of her structures, “I can still remember the thrill I experienced when my first folded book structure emerged from my fingers—how eager I was to explore its possibilities and to share it with whoever was interested. The Flag book . . . I now call it. . . . Little did I know that this simple structure would have legs and be the catalyst for the next forty-plus years of thinking about and making books.” The Flag Book, created by Kyle in 1979, is referred to by the Guild of Book Workers as “the single most influential structure in the world of contemporary bookmaking.”

Shortly after the publication of The Art of the Fold, Alicia Bailey created an international exhibition of artists’ bookworks utilizing structures found in the publication. Many artists created works just for exhibition—I know I did. The well-managed exhibition was shown at multiple venues in the Denver metro area; an online catalog was produced and fully a third of the artists’ bookworks were sold. Alicia Bailey is an artist, publisher with 60 titles under the imprint of Ravenpress, and a gallerist, dealer, and curator for Abecedarian Artists’ Books. Germane to her keen interest in creating The Art of the Fold exhibition, Alicia defines “artists' books as unique, interactive, sculptures realized in the form of the book.”

Top: Alicia Bailey, Anguine, Slotted Zig Zag; R. D. Burton, Verdigris, Panorama.

Bottom: Connie Stricks, Labyrinth, Fishbone Fold; Kathy T. Hettinga, DISPLACEMENT, One-Sheet, Eight-Section Offset Cut. Images courtesy of Alicia Bailey/Abecedarian.

Briefly, I will describe how the Hedi Kyle structure—One-Sheet, Eight-Section Offset Cut—inspired my work for DISPLACEMENT, which received an award at Intersections: Book Arts as Convergence, CBAA Member’s Juried Exhibition, NOLA. The book is about removal from the normal location or position, and shows bleak mid-winter trees with farmhouses perched precariously near highways and dense woods in PA, overtaken by high-voltage lines, power plants and pipelines. The offset cuts, reminiscent of an Advent calendar, conceal and reveal, small creatures and environmental hazards hidden within: an endangered/deceased brilliant, orange-headed, female Western oriole, the Three Mile Island towers, and the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline cutting between suburban homes. Yet, the branches of sycamores create white lines out of the dense woods—tiny pathways of hope in a bleak time.

For information on how each artist used their selected structure to support, reveal, and expand their content in new and unconventional ways please visit the Art of the Fold exhibition on the Abecedarian Artists’ Books website.

KT Hettinga is an award-winning artist in design, artist’s books, digital images/prints, and photography. Twice awarded the Distinguished Professor of Art, she designs for non-profits. Her books are in collections from NMWA to UCLA. Residencies include: Yale Research Fellow, Luce Center for Arts and Religion, Pyramid Atlantic, WSW and VSW.

TEXT AND MATERIALITY — THE INCARNATE WORD // KT Hettinga

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 07:00:00 GMT

During this extended time of ‘sheltering in place’ I have been re-examining artists’ books in my collection. Johanna Drucker’s The Word Made Flesh is a marvel of type play, like an enigmatic, poetic crossword puzzle. I have the facsimile reprint of the original letterpress edition. The inherent quality of the large wood letters and metal type were kept in the offset version, printed on a Heidelberg GTO in 1996. Johanna hand printed the book jacket from polymer letterpress plates at Druckwerk in New Haven; and it was published by Granary Books. She believed the second cover was more sympathetic to the aesthetic tone of the interior pages. Each letter of the title The Word Made Flesh is featured per page, five-inches high in a field of small red type. The background text quotes sacred and secular passages at once both literal and allusive. The spaced, red lettered ground is difficult to read, forcing me to read the way my mother reads—one letter at a time, due to macular degeneration. Indeed, Drucker states, “The typographic format of the Word Made Flesh was meant to trip the eye, return one constantly to the plane of discourse, of material production” (Artists' Books Online).

During my fellowship at Yale, Johanna told me that she was influenced by the 8th century monk, Hrabanus Maurus. His illuminated manuscripts have fields of evenly spaced text from which emerge sacred figures. The format of her book, “invokes a reference to the carmina figurata of the Renaissance—works in which a sacred image was picked out in red letters against a field of black type so that a holy figure could be seen and meditated on in the process of reading” (cover notes). Drucker made the book “out of a complete love of letters…. [an] absolute celebration of the beauty and expressive capability of type” (Artists’ Books Online). The large black letters arranged like figures on a red ground announce their materiality—visceral, earthy, and emotive embodying tongue, breath, and flesh. Language becomes matter/material/image.

Johanna Drucker, The Word Made Flesh, letterpress cover with offset interior page.

Hrabanus Maurus, De Laudibus sanctae crucis, manuscript, 11thc. for the abbey of Saint-Denis, held by Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Her title The Word Made Flesh, points to the first century Biblical book, The Gospel According to John, “the Word became flesh and lived among us, …, full of grace and truth” (1:14). Incarnation Theology is the doctrine that Jesus Christ assumed human form and is completely both God and man. Reinforcing the religious overtone, Drucker states that text and materiality, “the two are intimately bound, in the incarnate word” shown in her artist’s book and that “the black texts are meant to "figure" against the red ground, as the images of Christ, a cross, or other devotional images are called out in carmina figurata” (Artists’ Books Online, editions).

De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis (In Praise of the Holy Cross) is the only poetic work of the prolific scholar Hrabanus Maurus (780-856), one of the greatest teachers of the Carolingian period. As abbot, the Benedictine monastery of Fulda housed around 600 monks and became a preeminent center of scholarship and book production. Maurus’ De Laudibus is comprised of thirty figured poems that draw on the ancient tradition of Greek pattern poetry that we looked at in the last blog. The elaborate work embodies and celebrates the cross with verse forming the grid of letters from which emerges new words, phrases, shapes and figures. Geometric shapes, circles, triangles, squares and more figure prominently in the series often in a cruciform pattern. Composed around 810, the manuscript exists in several exquisite copies: one thought to have been done under the direction of Maurus himself for the abbey of Saint-Denis in France, which is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France seen at the Public Domain Review. Another notable version held by the Vatican features many pages in deep purples with lighter type. And a strikingly brighter, Christ figure lined in black text emerges from a golden field of red letters. The British Library’s 12th-century copy features decorative borders with pristine spaced black lettering (www.publicdomainreview.org).

Left: Hrabanus Maurus, Four red crosses from De Laudibus, 10thc., British Library.

Right: Robbin Ami Silverberg, Memorial, eggshell fragment cross, printed by Beles, 1998.

Robbin Ami Silverberg, Memorial, eggshells, needle threader, handmade papers.

Maurus’ thirteenth figural poem, bordered by foliate roundels, depicts four red crosses arranged in a cross pattern. The intricate texture of white lettering in the equal-armed Greek cross, also known as the square cross or peaceful cross reminded me of another book in my collection, Robbin Ami Silverberg’s Memorial. The book is a deep lament in grays and reds formed from alternating small squares nested in larger squares of deckled handmade papers. An exquisite square cross is formed by broken eggshells, followed in sequence by two squares of brown eggshells. Some pages have eggshell fragments, some painstakingly stippled with black ink. Dark halftone dot textures from photographic images are printed on paper and on film. The colophon states that the book was printed by Beles, Mor Art Residency, Hungary. One graffiti fragment forbodes, “the living are the dead on vacation.” The dark pacing and intricate textures build layer upon layer to create a profound remembrance, similar in this way to the carmina figurata of Hrabanus Maurus. Robbin Ami Silverbergis known for her artist books on anamnesis, the opposite of forgetting. Her thirty-year retrospective at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn Campus show the “two major lines she is following… in her abstract yet poetic work, intersecting time and again within it: the facets of remembering and forgetting, memorial and loss” (Susan Padberg, catalog essay for Read Me, Like a Book). 2020 is the 30th anniversary of Robbin Ami Silverberg, artist and founding director of Dobbin Mill, a hand-papermaking studio, and Dobbin Books, a collaborative artist book studio. View the thoughtful site-specific virtual online tour at Read Me. Like a Book, 30 years of Dobbin Books.

WORDS THAT FORM TORNADOS AND WINGS // KT Hettinga

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Words that form tornados and wings, this is what I have been drawn to and have discovered in my looking and reading. During these last months of sheltering in place, I am recalling a prior time. [Are we sheltering from a tornado? Once here is south central Pennsylvania, my neighbor and her then young daughter came over from their mobile home to shelter in my old farmhouse basement. Over thirty years, we have had warnings and watches, but never actually seen or experienced one. This is the experience of many of us now. We have been sheltering in place, but have not seen or experienced the COVID-19, except through the media.] As a woman who came of age in the 1970s in rural Colorado, this sheltering in place has put me back in touch with a simpler, more focused time, where the days are yours for—being and thinking.

In working on a new book series and thinking about structure, I pulled out from my collection Saturday Nights in Marietta, published by Minnesota Center for Book Arts in 1999. The collection of fifteen poems by Robert Bly provides the conceptual basis for the collaborative visual interpretation by fifteen book artists and printmakers. What caught my eye and my imagination is the red tornado of words, like a red tumbleweed from the desert southwest, created by Steve Miller. His artist statement says, “The first time I read Bly’s poem, Singing Late at Night at Chuck and Phil’s Farm, I saw a thunderous tornado sweeping across the fields, and poem lines swirling from it. No matter how hard I tried to rid myself of the image, it stayed. And so I made the reduction linocut with words swirled in photopolymer types around it. The words all come from several of Bly’s poems in his book Iron John, and one of his translations of Kabir [and of Rilke] in the same book. What I saw in Singing Late at Night… unleashed a riff of Bly words for me.”

Steve Miller, reduction linocut with photopolymer type for Robert Bly’s, “Singing Late at Night at Chuck and Phil’s Farm.”

The tornado formed with type recall the English pattern poet and Anglican priest, George Herbert’s shaped poem, “Easter Wings.” Interestingly, the shape of Miller's words also evokes wings to me. Herbert was influenced by the Renaissance revival of pattern poems, dating back to the Hellenistic era of the 3^rd and 2^nd BCE preserved in Greek Anthology texts. The content expressed by shape in “The Axe” and “The Wings” by the Greek poet Simias of Rhodes deeply informed Herbert’s work.

George Herbert, “Easter Wings,” published in The Temple, 1633.

In Herbert’s set of “Easter Wings,” the lines mimic each other in meaning across the pair of wings. The visual shape recalls angels. The text reveals fallen man who then rises, like Christ on Easter. Herbert exclaims, “O let me rise, As larks, harmoniously, And sing ….” The shape mimics the poem’s sense, and though self-contained opens inner possibilities. Likewise, the allusive Greek poem “The Wings,” describes the winged god of love’s coming to be, by “gentle-persuasion,” “a judge among gods” of “Earth, deep Sea, and brazen Heaven” (translation by J.M. Edmonds, Greek Pattern Poems). Whether the resulting visual poem is termed pattern, material, or concrete poetry—the desire to expand meaning is both old and new, and yet, culturally and aesthetically specific to its many situations.

Simias of Rhodes, “The Axe” and “The Wing,” about 300 BCE. (In “The Axe,” the lines are read alternating from the top to the bottom, working to the middle, following the numbered lines.)

In “Singing Late at Night,” Steve Miller creates a tornado in red words, with the line: “No matter how deeply I go down into myself my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in….” The tornado of words rises like wings—creating a place of emptiness where lament and hope meet. Fittingly, Robert Bly’s poem ends with, “We sing ‘Red Wing’ and ‘If I Had the Wings of an Angel.’” Nowhere does the poem mention a tornado. Maybe it is the green corn smoldering in the hazy summer heat. Maybe it is the irrepressible singing late into the night with friends gathered under dark skies.

Robert Bly’s poem “Singing Late at Night at Chuck and Phil’s Farm”:

“While the green corn smolders in hazy summer,

We stay up singing by tables under trees.

Is this the way it should be?

What should we be doing?

There must be something!

And the one I love is lost among thieves!

Half the night around the table at Chuck’s farm,

We sing “Red Wing” and “If I Had the Wings of an Angel.”

Detail, Steve Miller, for Robert Bly’s, “Singing Late at Night.”

I was struck by Robert Bly’s questions: “Is this the way it should be? What should we be doing? There must be something!” These seem like apt questions for us now.

The discussion of shaped text continues in the next post: Shapes of Words/Eggshells in Fields of Type.

IT STILL SEEMS LIKE A DREAM TO ME: DISASTER AND THE ARTISTIC IMAGINATION // Maureen Cummins

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 07:00:00 GMT

In 1912, after surviving the sinking of the Titanic, Gertrude Jean Hippach was quoted as saying, “Yes, it was terrible, but it still seems like a dream to me.”

For artists, who traffic in dreams and the collective imagination, disaster rarely comes as a surprise, simply because suffering is ever present, even if occurring in some otherplace or othertime. This is not to say that this is a comfortable or even conscious process, especially when the othertime is the future. In my own work I have often had the experience of being drawn to subject matter that I couldn’t explain, which later emerged in the world. My project Titanic, for example, an altered edition of the Wall Street Journal, which explored the relationship between disaster and denial, was completed in 2004, just three years before the collapse of the sub-prime market, another ship considered “too big to sink.”

Often the role of artists is to “see” what others refuse to. In Eric Drooker’s 1992 novel-in-pictures Flood, the artist envisioned—through graphic black and white images—a Manhattan of the future sunk by deluge-like rains. The power of Drooker’s work lay not in his ability to predict rising sea levels—that work had already been done—but to depict it in a way that IPCC reports couldn’t.

Flood, Eric Drooker, image courtesy of the artist

For many artists, seeing means looking to the past and wielding knowledge / information as a weapon. In Sharon Gilbert’s Nuclear Atlas, the pages are dizzying, a visual pile-up of facts, figures, and news clippings relating to nuclear disasters. On one spread, Gilbert makes use of a map of the United States to chart accidents that occurred or could occur across the country. The resulting assemblage is overwhelming, too much to take in, a terrifying cartography of danger. It is telling to note that Gilbert’s book was published in 1982, just four years before the meltdown at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Nuclear Atlas, Sharon Gilbert, image courtesy of Women’s Studio Workshop

Using a similar strategy toward more conceptual ends, Miranda Maher funnels rage into data, listing every war and armed conflict that she could find “After Reasonable Research.” The text describing these events is printed in type that—by necessity, owing to the super-abundance of information—is miniscule, barely legible. A series of floral elements is surprinted over the text, drawing the reader’s attention away. The artist’s research recedes, appears to be yet another pattern, and perhaps it is: the dark backdrop of violence that we all live with.

After Reasonable Research, Miranda Maher, image courtesy of the artist

Frances Jetter’s Cry Uncle is a protest of a different sort. The disaster she was responding to—the tortures at Abu Ghraib—was already a national sensation, the photographs circulated by the media understood to be horrific, pornographic in their sadism. Jetter’s hand-engraved images are equally painful to look at, but they approach the event from the opposite direction, through the inner life of the tortured. Her accompanying text is spare, almost prayer-like in the face of such unspeakable acts. By bearing witness and reaffirming the humanity of her subjects, Jetter plays the role of magician, restoring order to a broken world.

Cry Uncle, Frances Jetter, images courtesty of the artist

For many of us in this era of cyberdivide, disaster is only real when we are the ones in danger. Several times during the COVID crisis, I have heard references to “the last time there was a pandemic this terrible”—only to learn that the allusion was to 1918, not the AIDS pandemic. (I can’t help wondering how things might have been different if AIDS had been met with the kind of action and resources that COVID-19 has.)

Within marginalized communities, which are often abandoned during crises, artists take on unusual roles, becoming activists, educators, spokespeople, leaders. In 1996, Eric Rhein began his project Leaves, a communal tribute to friends and lovers who lost their lives due to the AIDS virus. To quote Rhein: “One by one, I picked up leaves until a host of kinsmen was gathered in my arms. In death, they continue to be the teachers that they were in life, generously sharing with me the gifts of their individual attributes.” The project, which has grown to encompass over 300 “portraits,” is both monumental and heartbreakingly intimate. By honoring the dead and celebrating the beauty of their lives, Rhein took on the role of healer, helping his community—and the world—grow whole again.

Life Altering Spencer (Spencer Cox), Eric Rhein, courtesy of the artist

Maureen Cummins has produced over 40 limited edition artist books on topics as diverse as slave narratives, the Salem witch trials, turn of the century gay love letters, and patient records from McLean Hospital, the oldest mental hospital in the United States. The artist currently lives in upstate New York.

PAPER MEETS BOOK: A LOVE STORY // Beth Sheehan

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 May 2020 07:00:00 GMT

An interdisciplinary mindset is arguably necessary in the art world today. As either a cause or a consequence of this, an increasing number of programs in academia are encouraging cross-pollination, particularly within the arts, but also across adjacent fields of study. Even when programs are less interdisciplinary, a greater number of students seem to be finding value in expanding their abilities by taking more diverse electives on their own. The job market has had a dramatic impact on this shift as well, as more jobs in all career paths are requiring employees to perform a wider variety of tasks.

I find this migration toward an interdisciplinary mindset extremely exciting for book art in particular because books are such perfect conduits for other mediums. By expanding the assumptions of how an artist book is produced and what an artist book is, we can make room for processes and materials to become additional avenues of meaning within the works.

While there are many examples of this being done with all mediums, I have a particular interest in cases where paper becomes a conceptual support for the artist book. Paper feels a little taken for granted in artist books. While it is a consideration when producing a project, the reasons for choosing a paper type are almost always based around the printing or binding structure of the book. This is a valid and excellent way of deciding what paper to use, but I find myself more excited when I see artist books that pass a paper version of the Bechdel test: the paper brings its own value to the book other than being a carrier for the printing.

William Kentridge. Sheets of Evidence, 2009.

One of the more universally recognized ways paper is used to enhance the experience of artist books is by incorporating papermaking techniques in the image making process. Dieu Donné is a non-profit that focuses on creating fine art works using hand papermaking techniques. Over their 40+ years, they have produced many incredible artist book editions that bridge the worlds of papermaking and book art. William Kentridge’s work titled Sheets of Evidence looks like a blank book until the viewer flips the page and the light reveals the watermarked drawings hidden within the sheets. In this way, the papermaking process itself has acted as the conceptual lens to view the artwork through.

Sue Carrie Drummond. A Darning Stitch, 2017.

Women’s Studio Workshop is another notable source for beautiful works intersecting papermaking and book art. The best example that comes to mind being Sue Carrie Drummond’s book A Darning Stitch. In this book, the use of the blow-out technique allows the viewer’s sense of touch to inform the way they are thinking about the work conceptually. The abaca begins to feel like skin, especially where it is only revealed surrounded by cotton.

Robbin Ami Silverberg. Haiku de Nuit, 2015. Image by Dorka Hubner.

Robbin Ami Silverberg’s book titled Haiku de Nuit is one of my favorite examples of handmade paper heightening one’s experience through paper alone. The book includes a poem by Carole Naggar about her mother; while the poem sets the stage for the work, the paper itself gives incredible weight to the piece—the inclusion of hair within some pages and the removal of fibers from others creates the feeling of absence mirroring the poem.

Kyle Holland. Hunted, 2018.

Paper fibers can provide such a unique quality to all senses when interacting with artist books, giving even more support to the case for heightened consideration. Kyle Holland’s work often has hidden layers of meaning within the materials and processes used and his artist book Hunted is no exception. The cotton blow-outs are couched onto abaca paper and as the viewer turns the pages, the sound of the abaca becomes the rustling of leaves in the forest.

Cynthia Nourse Thompson. Grievous Injuries, 2010.

Added meaning can come through in the materiality of the works as well. The paper in Cynthia Nourse Thompson’s girdle book titled Grievous Injuries is made from unblessed purificators and corporals. While the importance of the fiber is not obvious from just looking at the artist book, the piece is still imbued with the history and significance of the material while acting as a kind of Easter egg for the viewers that spend the time reading about how the book was made.

Beth Sheehan is an artist living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her work investigates memory and perception to explore her lack of episodic memory. Sheehan’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in 37 public collections. She has worked as a professional printer and bookbinder and currently workshops around the country.

THE CASE FOR MEMES // Beth Sheehan

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 May 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Memes are often fun, funny and lighthearted, but they can also be insightful critiques of their subjects. They’ve become omnipresent, particularly in our digital lives and are affecting much of our society, even changing socio-linguistics and communication IRL. Meme-culture is so influential, it is being exploited in marketing campaigns for many major corporations.

As memes permeated mainstream culture, the expansion of niche memes followed immediately. Rule 34 has a brother and it is: if it exists, there’s a meme about it. While book-art-focused memes are fairly new, general art memes have been around for a while, exemplified by the use of classical art history works as the basis for some of the earliest meme formats.

This Last Supper parody is one of the earliest examples.

The meme format that I feel paved the way for art memes AND for memes as art criticism is another early one known as Art School Owl.

The image on the left is the original Art School Owl, created by Kendra in 2011 while the image on the right is a slightly later reiteration of the meme format.

Art School Owl gained popularity because of its relatability as well as a way to jokingly critique major topics in the art world, including the lack of non-toxic materials or even what should be considered art.

Since the late 2000s, social media meme accounts have grown exponentially but the book art world has been slower to pick up on the trend. In 2016 @greasylithomemes started the first* Instagram account solely focused on printmaking memes with occasional posts about book art, papermaking, and general art topics. The account has since grown in popularity among the print community with the current number of followers being at 3,876—no small feat for such a niche interest.

This is one of the post popular recent posts from @greasylithomemes.

Even with the blessing of @greasylithomemes supplying us with such excellent print-meme content, they were the only account focusing on the disciplines of printmaking, papermaking, and book art until last year. In February of 2019 @bookbitchmemes popped up as the first* book art-focused Instagram meme account followed closely by a flood of printmaking-, papermaking-, and/or book art-focused meme accounts including, @pvahands in April, @silk.memes.dude in May, @smallcupwilson in June, @mediumrelief in July, @fineartstudent in August, and @shit_print_posting in February of this year.

The image on the left is an original post from @bookbitchmemes exemplifying the feeling of being an insider that comes with understanding niche memes. The image on the right is an example of a post by @pvahands that offers insider information to the reader while poking fun at the specificity of the knowledge.

Memes are an expression of people’s feelings toward topics and this influx of print/paper/book meme accounts mirrors the resurgent interest in those mediums within the art world and academia. They can also act as a window into the print/paper/book community, thereby expanding its audience. Being mostly short text or image formats, memes are easy to consume and often easy to relate to which in turn encourages the reader to feel like an insider, building loyalty to the community.

Reposting another creator’s post that relates to your own audience can be a great way to build relationships and encourage cross-pollination of viewers. Here @metalsmithmemes has reposted and credited @bookbitchmemes for their post.

Additionally, there is an expectation that reposting and cross-posting will occur with memes because of their role in online culture. While this can be seen as a negative thing when credit is not given, it becomes a tool to foster relationships and build a more diverse network when done conscientiously.

On the left, @bookbitchmemes addresses the potential challenges that artistic disciplines face when having to transition to distance learning. On the right, @pvahands draws attention to the elitist nature of bookbinders and book artists when it comes to materials while also reminding us how few bookbinding tutorials are available that use professional materials and tools.

By presenting criticism of a flawed system in the format of succinct, funny text and images, memes can be an avenue to open discussions about ways to improve that system. They also provide insight into widely-held opinions of the larger book/print community. If a new bookbinder sees a popular post that expresses disgust regarding perfect binding, for example, they are likely to choose a different book structure for their next project.

This sweet spot of humor and critique is a powerful tool but there’s a thin line—because of the nature of memes, they can also dismiss any nuanced discussions and act as justification for gate-keeping. Additionally, social media platforms do not encourage respectful debates and the character limits of comment sections make it almost impossible to present a well-rounded viewpoint.

On the left is a post from @fineartstudent of a meme that was anonymously submitted to them. The post received a lot of attention and was reposted with credit by @bookbitchmemes. While the comment section in the original post was fairly tame, the image on the right is a screenshot from the comments section of the repost where much more heated conversations occurred.

On the whole, I think memes are fantastic, funny tools for encouraging a sense of community while occasionally providing light critique, but I also wonder how we can use them to expand and deepen conversations to better our communities?

*Because there is no organized archive or database for this kind of digital information, the assertion that these accounts were the first of their kind is based on my own research.

CONSCIOUS READING // Susan Viguers

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Dennis J Bernstein and Warren Lehrer have had successful collaborations in the past, best known, at least among book artists, for their extraordinary artist book French Fries, which looks and projects itself as public theatrical performance. Most recently, they are the creators of Five Oceans in a Teaspoon, which similarly sits at an intersection of forms—poetry, visual text, and performance—but in this case performance is private.

The poems—informal, elliptical, moving, often having a quirky, humorous undertone—were written by Bernstein, many appearing in various publications; Lehrer, responding to the forms beneath the poems, turned them into what is typically called concrete poetry. His visualizations involve performance as much as visual composition. That in part comes from one’s sense of hearing the voice of the speaker, his intonations, the aural equivalent of punctuation or no punctuation, the rise and fall of cadences. But it is also the result of the reader’s being thrust into a time-based experience (private rather than public), more aware than usual of the act of reading. We are as conscious of that as we were when we first learned how to read. Perhaps that in itself adds to our sense of discovery and pleasure when we finish any one of the poems from this collection. But the very act of conscious reading enacts what is essential to each poem’s emotional and metaphoric center. In, for example, the first poem, “Dyslexia,” letters appear above and below lines, repeated, irregularly placed, in a way that forces the reader to slow down and, like a dog with the proverbial bone, to worry a word.

Lehrer at times includes minimal images—lines, boxes, black spaces, shapes, patterns—which function as part of the graphic vocabulary, but text is the primary image in these poems. There is no grid controlling placement. Lines and words and letters can appear anywhere, in any direction, in any shape. Poems can end in periods, in dashes, or in nothing at all, undercutting the ending itself. And the spaces among and between the elements of the text similarly play meaningful havoc with the page.

The visualizations are a tour de force, but, more important, they enact the poems themselves, revealing their poignance and complex humanity. The subjects cover much of a life, beginning with childhood and ending with death, in particular, that of the writer’s mother and father. They also include poems about other lives, people the writer has connected with—including, but not limited to, people in prison, the front lines of war, poverty, street violence.

At least in the last century, poetry, in particular free verse, has closer ties to the visual arts than other forms of literature in that space and the arrangement of lines can be as important as the words themselves. Poetry also has closer ties to the oral, to music, than other literature in its musicality, in the importance of rhythm, and the way sound molds meaning. Connected to both is a reading process as a private performance. That makes Bernstein and Lehrer’s Five Oceans in a Teaspoon a rather remarkable introduction to poetry itself.

Coda:

I sent the above piece to Warren Lehrer, who suggested that I add a link to an animation of one of the poems. I admitted I had been resistant to looking at the animation and asked him how he would compare the experience of reading/seeing the page and screen versions.

Warren Lehrer's response:

I too am interested in that comparison and space between reading a poem on the page and watching the video, and how the two experiences speak to and inform the other. Normally you’d think that reading on the page is a more active experience, and watching a video or film is more passive. But in making the animations I was interested in splitting the difference between active reading and watching a performance.

For instance, the printed poem Avowel (p. 34) presents itself at first as a puzzle or like a math equation of some kind. It requires “conscious reading” (as you put it) on the part of the reader—to piece together what the words are and think about the meaning and double meaning(s). On the one hand the poem is about the small minority of vowels (in the English language) calling the shots over the consonants. It’s also about the domination of a more powerful group over a population with less power. I believe the animation requires the same kind of active participation/decoding by the reader. The animation also allows me to extend and evoke the metaphor of the vowels in the poem being increasingly pronounced and isolated from the consonants which hang and swing from the vowels as if from ropes or at least like puppets on strings (which, in the U.S. context, could conjure images of the Jim Crow South, or in a global context—any minority segregated and subjugated by a majority). Original soundtracks (composed by Andrew Griffin) also contribute to the experience, as does the possibility of an engaged reader going back and forth between page and screen.

“Avowel,” one of ten animated poems from Five Oceans in a Teaspoon.

Susan Viguers is a book artist, whose books are in numerous public collections. She was Director of the University of the Arts’ MFA Book Arts/Printmaking program for nine years. She has a Ph.D. in English and has published scholarship extensively. Her most recent award was a Rockefeller Bellagio Arts Residency.

ONLINE BOOK ARTS RESOURCES // AB Gorham

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 07:00:00 GMT

This is indeed a strange time.

It seems befitting of our collective isolation to use this blog platform to assist one another with teaching, with art making, and with our (possible) boredom.

Due to the importance of practicing social distancing right now, many of us have been tasked with suddenly transitioning our studio-based book arts classes into online classes. As a result, there have been a plethora of tips and strategies shared over various platforms to help maintain creative making in the absence of equipment and materials. CBAA has created an editable document so that we may come together at this virtual table and share ideas, insight, and encouraging stories.

Introducing this document is CBAA President, Bridget Elmer: “Regarding the creation of a CBAA forum for support and shared resources during this time of uncertainty, I invite you to contribute to and share this Resources for Book Arts Educators Google Doc.”

Maybe this is the internet at its best. Please contribute anything you think may be helpful. I suspect the document will be a good space for official links, and that this blog post could be a nice space to share ideas and stories. Also, if people are posting their book art making on any social media platforms, that could be a great bit of inspiration for the rest of us.

I hope everyone is safe and healthy.

OBJECT LENDS ITSELF TO CONNECTIONS // AB Gorham

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 07:00:00 GMT

As a follow-up to my previous blogpost featuring detailed descriptions of Selected Durations, Flashpoint, vvvvv, and Rain/fall, I want to spend a little more time analyzing the responses from my class “experiment.” Folded into these descriptions and definitions are a few select terms and/or ideas that seem to transcend book art epochs, audience expertise, and materials. To show some of these connections between my (mostly) novice students and book art theory and criticism, I pulled key passages from the following three texts which students read for class: Ellen Brown’s “Beyond Words: Artist’s Books”; Ulises Carrión’s “The New Art of Making Books”; and Dick Higgins’ “A Preface”, and placed them next to some particularly poignant statements made by my students. The result is three sets of bubbling conversations between the two parties.

These Venn diagrams riff off of Dick Higgins’ Intermedia Chart in the way that they visually represent intersections between categories within the [book]art world. The three categories include, books that re-present time, control time (all books?), use time as a subject (Carrión); books that make tangible an intangible subject, or stress the reading/viewing experience (Higgins); and books that are playful in the way they use imagery, structure, or text, or in the way that they encourage the viewer to engage in play (Brown). Within each of the three categories there are intersections between the existing theoretical quotations and the student statements, but the student statements often overlap as well, and all of the bubbles seem to rotate around the phrase “object lends itself to connection.” Of course, none of these statements is mutually exclusive of the other statements and some of the abstract language (by all parties involved) is due to the structure of the dynamic described in each statement: there is the book object and there is the book object’s subject/content and there is a reader/viewer that is trying to make connections between the subject/content and the book object in order to connect themselves to the overall project. I have included a simple Venn diagram to show these intersections.

I would be interested to hear if anyone sees another (4^th) primary aspect within the book art trifecta. What about object and presentation space (gallery, special collections library, classroom, kitchen table at home)? And beyond the individual components (dual, in the case of subject/content and reader/viewer), how can we start to discuss the other levels of interactions, say, between subject, object, and reader/viewer in the way that they affect one another? Perhaps these abstract questions will be better addressed by using concrete book examples that exemplify the diverse interactions that artist books can create.

As a side note, while I like teaching these essays to an introductory class, I am aware of how dated they are and am actively looking for alternatives.

Work Cited

Brown, Ellen. “Beyond Words: Artist’s Books.” Modernism Magazine. Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 2008. http://publishing.yudu.com/Apt5o/MV11N3/resources/56.htm

Carrión, Ulises. “The New Art of Making Books.” Artist’ Books: A critical Anthology and Sourcebook, edited by Joan Lyons, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985, pp 31-44.

Higgins, Dick. “A Preface.” Artist’ Books: A critical Anthology and Sourcebook, edited by Joan Lyons, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985, pp 11-15.

AB Gorham is a book artist and writer from Montana. She is the Director at Black Rock Press where she teaches book arts in the Book and Publication Arts Program. Her artist books have been exhibited and collected nationally.

AN EXPERIENCE BEYOND LANGUAGE // AB Gorham

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 08:00:00 GMT

For the next two blog posts, I’d like to explore how, in the book arts world, we develop definitions of what is and what is not considered an artist book. This first post sets up an experiment (we are talking pseudo-science here) I conducted in my Spring 2020 Introduction to Book Arts class (ART 214), which is part of the Book and Publication Arts Program at Black Rock Press. During this experiment, I presented students with a selection of four artist books on the first day of class (and for many of the students, for the first time ever). I ask the students to record their observations of the objects in detail, share those findings to the class in the form of an informal discussion, and then return to their groups to articulate a “definition” of what an artist book is. The four books in question, Selected Durations, Flashpoint, vvvvv, and Rain/fall, are all described as artist books by the artists and publishers, but each of these has a very different approach to the form.

Students were given ample time to investigate their assigned objects and record their observations according to the following prompts: Describe what the object looks like sitting on the table: colors, materials, structure, etc. Describe what the object feels like in your hands. Describe the object’s content—what is its subject? Describe the way the object moves (or doesn’t) & is moved by the reader/viewer. What is the relationship between the object’s subject matter & the concept? Why does this book object exist? I gathered the notes from each group of students and laid it out as a table [1] in order to better digest the text.

I am sure that many book arts classes start in this way, and so I am not claiming ingenuity for the approach, but I want to use this information as a way to accomplish a couple of things. First of all, I am genuinely curious to hear my students’ observations and eventual definitions of the book objects because this exercise helps me establish the language that I use to talk about book arts, especially in the beginning of the semester. In ART 214, I often teach non-art majors, the majority of which are freshman or sophomores, and so a good number of my students haven’t even taken a college art class yet. So, the definitions they create become the launch pad for the essays we read, the research they conduct, and the artist books they make. Also, they often have fresh ways of describing these objects from a (mostly) non-art perspective. I find merit in the descriptions of the forms that blossom out of the democratic multiple. I am fascinated by the balance between what is accessible and not accessible to both the trained and the untrained eye (à la making art in academia).

The second post in this set will start from the definitions established by my Intro students and work into a larger consideration of the difficulties in creating a definition of artist books, as documented by Ellen Brown, Dick Higgins, and Ulises S. Carrión, Amaranth Borsuk.

[**I should disclose that I am connected to each of these publications as either the artist, or through print and binding production, but I was careful not to lead the students in any direction beyond answering the occasional question about process.]

ON THE THRESHOLD: ENTERTAINING SPECIFICITY (PART 4) // H.R. Buechler

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Feb 2020 08:00:00 GMT

The trouble with breaching the threshold lies in a need to understand the “fixedness” of a term. This is further complicated by the necessity to understand multiple terms which lie within that primary term and, consequently, their fixedness as well, so as to unearth a “flexibility.”

Terms have been established to point us to some sort of (maybe) universally understood “meaning,” or a mutually agreed upon set of qualities that compose the term’s use in an effort to better communicate a set of ideas, etc. based on a shared knowledge of what those terms mean [1]. From this fixed point, or specificity, comes the potential for flexibility and more so, interpretive flexibility. Interpretive flexibility allows us, in either art or theoretical discourse, to stretch and flex certain qualities into a nuanced and multi-faceted space of inquiry. Interpretive flexibility, therefore, is born out of (usually) a practical understanding of the classificatory implications embedded in the language utilized to frame them.

“Publication” is just one term which points to many terms representing a diverse range of objects [2] and activities [3]. All of which we may have yet to grasp with a totality or thoroughness to match our understanding of the holy trinity that has been the descriptive foundation of Book Arts: book, paper, and print. An example that might help clarify this proposition within one branch of Book Arts practicum is letterpress printing.

Within a studio course for letterpress we emphasize using specified terminology when identifying parts of the press, the tools used for the process of printing, type, the layout of a job case, etc. In the process of printing, it is stressed (here: in traditional practice) that one must “master the process of printing” before making such “experimental” leaps that often lead (or have lead to) “products” or “finished works” heralded for their affective qualities, or “artistic expression.” An intimate and shared understanding of the materially, socially, and culturally complex (yet practical) foundation that defines “letterpress” [4] aids our ability to interpret nuances of “expression” (possible intent), leading to possible interpretations (or constructs) of “meaning” unique to theorists or critics in different fields of specialization. This further demonstrates the potential of specificity internally (within one field for “artistic expression”) to externally (in other fields that take interest in one or many of the original term’s functions, or course of operation). Thinking of primary, secondary, and tertiary fixedness in totality is better framed now as a fixed assemblage [5].

A field’s ability to render their evaluations relevant remains tied to the fixed assemblage of meaning embedded in the object of interest, which includes but is not limited to such complex qualities as: materiality, methods of production, final form(at) or type, and its pattern of movement (circulation or distribution). The latter of which is both effected and affected by its initial overall assemblage (the shape or format wherein its meaning is not necessarily contained, but held in some capacity).

It is only when the term, as fixed assemblage, is thoroughly understood that we can exercise interpretive flexibility.

My concern with the present patterns of integrating both new media form(at)s and alternative (or digital) production methods into Book Arts curriculum lies in a negligence in tending to the foundation of these new forms and their place in the larger schema of the fixed assemblage of “publication.” E.g. when considering online publication, we rarely (in curriculum) acknowledge it as a surveilled and privileged space of access that is perhaps no more (if not less) environmentally friendly than a sewn paper pamphlet.

Integration seems to only consider similarities rather than differences. This points to a pattern of isolation, inclination towards homogeneity, and a non-reciprocating relationship to the broader fields of fine arts practicum and liberal arts scholarship. These form(at)s can be located here but must be seen as also distinctively not here.

The materiality of publications vary wildly despite the fact that a .PDF or website or online journal are part of the same technological and communicative lineage as the book. The electronic format remains qualitatively and quantitatively distinct. The materiality embedded in these various published formats is awash with different social, cultural, political, and theoretical concerns and contexts. This begins with the nuances implicit in their fixedness which extends to varying levels or manifestations of flexibility only afforded by the fixed assemblage.

Without saying much more, I would like to narrow this to published documents (where the future of my investigation lies), and make the following statements:

● A book is a document and can be published, thereby a type of publication.

● A document need not be a book to be published, but “document” accounts for multiple types of publication.

● Various types of published documents are produced in unique ways, utilizing different materials and processes, thereby moving, or circulating, by different means, making both their physical manifestation and distribution patterns differ wildly.

● As aesthetic forms, they further complicate these patterns which also impact their overall affective capacity.

● No(thing) is the same.

[It should be noted that I support interpretive flexibility; the merits of poetics to shed light on otherwise darkened spaces of a wor(l)d [6] accounts for some of the most significant theoretical and critical arguments I’ve seen (whether or not we read them that way is dependent on who you talk to). However, the terms utilized ultimately provide clarity and commonality that must go both ways.]

A case for the fixed assemblage, (or specificity?) may seem an isolating phenomenon, a sort of “caging in” that goes against an aesthetic, and thereby artistic, line of critical inquiry. But, it is in fact, a rich place to explore. Why do we resist what is in many ways a democratic modality?

Please consider the following visual exercise:

Example 1: Document in “Common Culture” - Academic Paper

Fig. 1. DOI = Digital Object Identifier; document accessed via library search database. Blanchette, J.-F. (2011). A material history of bits. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 62(6), 1042–1057. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21542

Fig. 2. (digital document) PDF = Portable Document Format; downloaded from online journal and opened on desktop.

Fig. 3. (paper document) printed PDF

Fig. 4. (PDF as paper document) converting PDF as paper document back to PDF as digital document using Scanner Pro.

Fig. 5. (PDF_02; digital document)

Example 2: Document in “Artistic Culture” – Artist Publication

Fig. 6. (web-based digital document) Located in Google Drive as Google Document

Fig. 7. (web-based digital publication) published Google document. H.R. Buechler and Vida Sačić, notes for a conversation on: “Like Some Female Hamlet” (New York: Oxblood Publishing, 2017) https://tinyurl.com/td5h8cq

Fig. 8. (conversion of web-based digital document to PDF-for-print)

Fig. 9. (digital document, PDF-for-print)

Fig. 10. (publication as paper document) H.R. Buechler and Vida Sačić, notes for a conversation on: “Like Some Female Hamlet” (New York: Oxblood Publishing, 2018)

Fig. 11. (publication as paper document) Buechler and Sačić, notes for a conversation (2018)

---

[1] This is akin to the idea of “concreteness,” “structural integrity,” or “specificity” – as discussed in Part 1 and 2, and which exist within particular frames and establish their framework.

[2] noun., formats

[3] verb., function of n. and the cultural and social implications of n. as v.

[4] This aligns with one aspect of documents in Michael Buckland’s Document Theory: An Introduction (Zadar, 2013). Following the phenomenological aspect, is cultural codes. Cultural codes state, “All forms of communicative expression depend on some shared understandings, which can be thought of as language in a broad sense.” At this point, I have not mentioned the document as an object of interest. However, that is ultimately what I am concerned with.

[5] Of course, Delueze and Guattari’s theory of assemblage notably argues against fixedness or stability, and therefore seems in direct opposition to the term with which it is partnered here. Yet, it is in fact, apt. When dissected, we would find the fixed assemblage is not definitively fixed at all, but an oscillating entity. See: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)

[6] Credit for this poetic adaptation of the word for emphasizing two readings should be given to Johanna Drucker, History of the/my Wor(l)d (1995)

H.R. Buechler is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and founder of OXBLOOD publishing. Her work is broadly concerned with historic and contemporary communication technology, classification, and the valorization of aesthetic objects.

AT THE THRESHOLD: ENTERTAINING SPECIFICITY (PART 3) // H.R. Buechler

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 08:00:00 GMT

A year ago exactly, I began writing this, call it, “article” for the College Book Art Association’s Book Art Theory Blog. It was written in two parts, for two posts, and in both cases exceeded the maximum word count and posed multiple problems with regard to its “publishing”—containing embedded images, superscripts, footnotes, and specialized formatting to aid in linguistic emphasis [1]. While I might encourage you to circle back and review Part 1 and Part 2 before moving forward with me here, I will also admit that is not entirely necessary. It is my intent to continue that (this) work, but in such a way that it is ultimately unsuitable for publication in this particular format—a blog.

However, by openly acknowledging a blog is not the appropriate (form)at for a particular type of written work meant for publication [2] is a point which lies at the heart of my article’s argument: specific forms provide specific spaces where various ontological parts (content) are processed (contextualized) and subsequently activated into a state of movement afforded by the specific qualities of the space itself. These forms are unique, their space suited to the material they contain, and their trajectory is in part predetermined by how their material (content) is intended to be mobilized. Thereby the success (or suitable fit) of a given format may be measured first, by its ability to hold its content stable, and second, by the overall range of its mobility once launched into action. These forms are both determinate and indeterminate; they have been born out of the changing needs of their content, and their content is also now constructed to suit them. As a result, both the form and the content build their path, which further allows for a multiplicity of contextualization. Yet still, they must suit one another.

Or: This format does not provide a suitable space to further process the previous content (in common colloquial: unpack), and consequently, the content cannot be successfully mobilized via this format’s predetermined trajectory.

While the above is meant to support the two parts previously written, it is written is such a way so as to position it outside of artistic discourse. Instead, through my use of particular terminology, it may find itself better placed in a conversation regarding the relationship between contemporary communication media and knowledge distribution. Yet, can it not also be applied to the arts? Or more abpt: book arts?

By locating specific terms within the second paragraph, we can easily pull this into another realm of discourse, through the modifican, or adaption of these terms by locating some qualities of flexible semantic nuance. To do this, we first must acknowledge the terms we pull as fixed. This is the term’s foundation, a primary quality which consists of a mutually agreed upon understanding of what “x” means; the qualities (or signifiers) embedded in that term which remain constant across dialogic fields.

Then we identify the term’s flexibility; a secondary quality.This may better be identified, now, as a sort of “keyword” [3]. These are qualities of the term that do not carry across fields, but instead are distinguishable marks that locate it in one field or the other. This flexibility is often the very quality that the arts capitalize on.

As scholars we all utilize the above process (usually subconsciously) in order to make academic, theoretical, or critical arguments.

But the purpose of the above exercise is to make conscious the subconscious function inherent in a term’s fixedness; to entertain specificity, here, in developing a critical dialogue around publication as an artistic object and activity.

Further, not just entertain, but acknowledge it as crucial and real. We have nary been able to develop new theoretical inquiries in the field of book arts, let alone wholly and successfully identify and integrate theory from many (and expanding) sympathetic fields in order to both bolster previous discourse, and participate in (or move forward with) new discourse. To pass that threshold of potentiality into what is actually multiple already articulated and actualized presents [4].

[maximum word count reached—end of Part 3—to be continued in Part 4]

[1] These problems continue here, but after writing the previous posts, this post was written with adaptations integrated.

[2] Here: publication (n.): to make public, or generally known, online, and not for public sale

[3] See: Raymond Williams, Keywords : a Vocabulary of Culture and Society. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). This takes into account the way words, as keywords, are used in discourse, and how their meaning (and use) changes (or adapts) to the present social and cultural climate.

[4] This phrasing is in direct reference to the first post’s use of interpretive poetic flexibility.

RECALLING THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION // Amanda Nelsen

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 08:00:00 GMT

On a cool November Sunday in the Printmaking & Letterpress Studio at Penland School of Craft, a handful of artists gathered around Bryce McCloud, founder and proprietor of Isle of Printing (Nashville, TN), to begin a class he titled, Analog Social Media. Discussions continued late into the evening about the history of communication technologies, the value of materials and community, and the distinction between studio art practice and social art practice. Bryce had proposed the course as a case study for teaching artists the core elements involved in a social art practice. He envisioned a communication station to encourage listening and talking to one another during a historic week and asked us to move forward from that idea. The students embraced and also questioned the base idea, but after a Monday morning planning session a station for human-powered, analog communication was underway.

The communication station consisted of spaces and materials to facilitate conversations, recording, and broadcasting. Once completed, the records of the conversations would be elevated (or released).

Conversations—two talk and listen spaces were outfitted with materials and placed in open area to welcome participants. Chairs were placed at the small tables for individuals who agreed to respectfully talk and listen or listen and talk to one another.

Communication Station, Talk/Listen side

Recording—following the conversations, individuals were asked to write what they heard on a printed postcard and confirm with their conversation partner that the recorded text was an accurate record of their statement(s).

Student broadcasting text message at the Communication Station

Broadcasting—an American flag symbol was painted on cardboard which covered one side of the station’s eight by four foot movable magnetic board. The remaining side could be covered, letter by letter/sort by sort, with short, Twitter-length statements using magnetic strips adhered to alphabet letters and punctuation marks (printed using wood type). The “case” of sorts sat on a small table in front of the board and our staff would “broadcast” the incoming text.

Message attached to balloons, ready for release

Elevations—the postcards were collected and the texts reviewed by those running the station and shared in a cycle of “broadcasting” on the station’s board. The postcard was then attached to a helium-filled balloon, gathered near the station locations, and released over the hills of North Carolina in an effort to elevate the conversations.

Communication Station, Flag side

Members of our team wore white relief-printed “communication station” t-shirts—the first project of the class—as a means of identifying ourselves and creating a clear sense of our purpose. Our team members discussed our respective personalities and determined who would be most adept at the various roles of soliciting participants, conversating with an individual at the talk/listen tables as needed, broadcasting the texts, coordinating supplies, and observing and responding to needs during the sessions.

Following the Voting Tuesday results, we set up the station at the Penland student center during lunch and through dinner at Penland and a local bar in Spruce Pine, North Carolina Wednesday evening.

On Thursday morning, our team of artists contemplated the emotional responses shared by those in the Penland and Spruce Pine communities. We saw a need for additional tools to help individuals talk and listen to one another, particularly given the polarizing election results. One common concern which we heard (and ourselves expressed) was how to get through upcoming holiday events with our families. Our team set to work on creating a dinner guide to inspire civil discourse. We had some 30 hours to design, print, and assemble our guide which we wanted to share with each of the 150 members of the Penland community. Illustrations of progressive meal courses from various culinary traditions were drawn by the expert sign maker, wordsmithing was done to clarify intentions for the guide, and a folded packet designed. The packets were printed by hand on Risograph and letterpress machines and the packets were folded and formed to the card collection.

Civil Dis-course: A Holiday Took Kit

On Friday our team distributed the meal guide, titled Civil Dis-course, to nearly all of the Penland community members and encouraged them to take a copy for a friend, if helpful. In addition to the many hugs and words of gratitude received, I felt as if our work had given individuals a pathway for moving beyond the profound fears and immense frustrations they were experiencing. The onsite station and printed guides were creative, playful ways to support the challenging act of having meaningful dialogue with others, particularly when individual views are divided further by politics or when there has been an ongoing disagreement. The products of the class were handsome tools for healing and progress made valuable when used to nurture conversations.

Civil Dis-course; A Holiday Tool Kit, contents

Bringing members of a community together to talk about and listen to their collective thoughts on an important happening takes a great deal of patience, humility, resolve, and creativity—much like any art process. Sharing the 2016 election with others staying at Penland gave me a powerful sense that Art—creative works that you can hold in your hand—can, and does, heal.

Amanda Nelsen is an artist and educator working in Charlottesville, Virginia.

ANNOUNCING THE CBAA DIVERSIFIED READING LIST FOR THE BOOK ARTS // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 08:00:00 GMT

In these first days of 2020, we ask for your help with a new project: the CBAA Diversified Reading List for the Book Arts. This effort is to recognize important contributions within the field of book arts that may have been previously overlooked. The goal is to make our field more inclusive through providing a wider range of frameworks and historical and contemporary examples, and to ensure that all students and artists have the opportunity to recognize their peers and predecessors in the field.

This crowdsourced list, sponsored by the CBAA Theory & Criticism Subcommittee, is intended to highlight marginalized and under-represented voices in the book arts and to be a resource, collected in one place, for educators, students, artists, and scholars. The idea, inspired by the Feminist Art & Architecture Collaborative’s Space/Race Reading list, is that this reading list will be created by crowdsourcing knowledge from the CBAA membership and the book arts community.

This means you, dear reader. We need your knowledge represented on this sheet!

We are aware that this list is puny and wholly insufficient at the moment. We realize that it will always be inadequate and incomplete. We recognize that your contributions will only improve it. In addition to adding books, articles, websites, etc., please also consider adding or editing keywords and annotations to works you are familiar with to help users locate the resources that will be most helpful to their practice or their classrooms. Our hope is that the list may quickly grow unwieldly. We imagine that once it has more entries, this list may be reorganized and reformatted in order to make it more user-friendly. In the meantime, we hope you agree that “there’s just too much, it is too confusing” would be a good problem to have.

What sorts of contributions are we looking for? Books, articles, websites, videos, chapters, any media resources that both 1) feature the contributions of folks from marginalized groups and 2) address one or more areas of the book arts (printing, binding, typography, the book, printmaking, papermaking, photo books, etc.; you know as well as we do the enormity our field comprises). Primary and secondary sources are both welcome, and eventually may be separated into different categories or separate sheets for ease of use. When in doubt, please go ahead and add the resource. Someone may be looking for that very thing.

There is a second sheet, Diversified Reading Lists in Allied Fields, compiling similarly crowdsourced reading lists from other art and design fields. To get there from the Reading List, look for the second tab at the bottom of the page. We welcome your contributions to this list as well.

Feeling overwhelmed by the vast amount of work ahead of us? Please share this list with your colleagues, students, and friends. May we suggest getting together with your local book arts community and hosting an editing party, akin to an Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon, during which participants update Wikipedia to represent the work of female and nonbinary artists? Suddenly this work could become more interactive and social.

The CBAA Diversified Reading List initiative grew out of the CBAA Board Retreat at the 2019 Annual Meeting at Tucson, and includes the input of H.R. Buechler, Aaron Cohick, Carley Gomez, Emily Larned, April Sheridan, Levi Sherman, Dianna Taylor, and Kathy Walkup. Please email blog@collegebookart.org with any suggestions and, also, if you are interested in joining the team as we continue to develop and improve this new project. Especially welcome would be a librarian or archivist or someone with similar experience who can suggest how to better organize this list as it grows.

We hope you will bookmark this list and return to it often, as both a contributor and a reader. Thank you, in advance, for your help with this important work.

"As a reaction to systemic racism and other forms of discrimination and exclusion in the United States, and the violence they have incited, communities of humanities scholars have been producing crowdsourced, collectively built syllabi and reading lists. These documents use knowledge as a form of action by producing collective scholarship . . . Importantly, these documents can be both written and read by broader publics, unsettling traditional teacher-student hierarchies . . . Digitally created and disseminated syllabi and reading groups have become important responses to the violence waged against vulnerable populations because of their race, class, or gender, but also to the privatization of knowledge sharing."

-- Ana María León, Feminist Art & Architecture Collaborative (FAAC)

Emily Larned initiated this project while serving as Co-Chair of the CBAA Publications Committee from January 2018 - 2020. She is Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut.

ARTIST BOOKS IN THE GREAT OUTDOORS (PART 2) // Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 08:00:00 GMT

This post is the second half of my look into how Hamish Fulton and Richard Long use lists in their art, and how Ian Bogost’s concept of ontography provides a productive new way to engage these works.

In their move towards text, especially lists, both artists have maintained a complicated relationship with photography. This may reflect the tension between the photograph as representation and the photograph as enumeration. As a medium, it straddles the construct of landscape and the reality of the outdoors. As Bogost notes, “on the one hand, it offers a view of the world that is representational, thanks to the photographer's framing and choice of exposure. On the other hand, it offers an automatically encyclopedic rendition of a scene, thanks to the photographic apparatus's ability to record actuality.” However, as a visual medium, photography cannot record all of the actual experience. In “The Blue Mountains are Constantly Walking — On the Art of Hamish Fulton,” Andrew Wilson writes, “For all their brevity — arrangements of small numbers of single words — Fulton's text works do approach the essence of the walk in ways that the specificity of a photograph cannot. . . . These words, taken from his walk diaries are things that were observed by him on his walks — observations that provide a sense of place, season and measurement. However, by bringing seven words together — 'Wind Mist Rain Moss Lava Rock Sand' — he is, for instance, able to suggest something unseen but felt in that particular walk in southern Iceland in 1996 in ways that a photographic image could not.”

It is by turning to the book form that Fulton and Long overcome the limitations of what Wilson calls the “specificity of a photograph.” As a single image, the photograph is the list and the represented objects are the items it contains. In a book, the photographs themselves can become the list items. Bogost calls the list “a group of items loosely joined not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of the comma.” In the artist’s book, the binding itself is the comma. The book form brings together the disparate repleteness of reality through the simple force of connection and sequence. This frees photographs from their encyclopedic, denotative function and introduces a meta layer.

Fulton especially creates photographs that are as much about photography as the representational content. Jan Alber explains this same phenomenon in the context of fiction: “To begin with, the lists...serve a self-reflexive or metafictional function because, due to their stylistic peculiarity, they draw our attention to the linguistic medium.” Likewise, Fulton makes photographs that are unremarkable or even poor by conventional formal standards, but draw attention to the act of photography, to the photograph as one among many in the book (and thus one moment among many in the walk), and of the inadequacy of photography to replicate the photographer’s experience. One salient example is his book 10 Views of Brockman’s Mount, a naturally formed hill near Hythe, Kent, England, which seems to document a walk around the hill. A close look at the light and atmospheric conditions reveals that the images were made on different walks on different days. This revelation not only foregrounds photography as a medium, but also the book as a structure for producing inter-objective meaning, just as a simple comma brings together items in a list.

This change in the part-to-whole relationship of photography, from a photograph as a list to a list made of photographs, is just one way that Fulton draws parallels between the photograph and the word. Just as the repleteness of the photograph is limited by the frame (and the act of framing), so too does Fulton impose limits on text. Anne Moeglin-Delcroix points this out in her discussion of Fulton’s artist’s book, Ajawaan. “Knowing Fulton's work, always composed using what he has observed or encountered, we realize that the inventory is of elements actually seen. However, their choice is obviously constrained by the decision to only use four-letter words.” She further notes that the composition avoids any representational logic and “evokes, rather, an abstract work on language, of the kind found in concrete poetry.” Fulton and Long demonstrate a keen grasp of the stylistic peculiarity of photography and text alike, bringing them together to great effect in their artists’ books.

Fulton and Long are not landscape artists; they are artists of the great outdoors. They use lists to convey the reality of the objects in the world, even as the disruptive formal properties of enumeration show the impossibility of entirely sharing their experiences with viewers. Yet this impossibility does not lead the artists to correlationism — the belief that humans have only indirect access to reality. Rather, the inadequacy of photography and text matters to Fulton and Long precisely because they believe there is a real world that they engage directly on their walks. Their work has challenged viewers and critics for decades, but new materialism and related philosophical movements offer a promising and productive perspective on these important artists and their artists’ books in particular.

Works Cited

Alber, Jan. "Absurd Catalogues: The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction." Style 50, no. 3 (2016): 342-58. doi:10.5325/style.50.3.0342.

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Moeglin-Delcroix, Anne. Ambulo Ergo Sum. Nature as Experience in Artists Books / Lexpérience De La Nature Dans Le Livre Dartiste. Köln: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015.

Wilson, Andrew, et al. Hamish Fulton — Walking Journey: Exhibition: Tate Britain, London, 14 March–4 June 2002: Catalogue. Tate, 2002.

Levi Sherman is an interdisciplinary artist and designer in Columbia, Missouri.

ARTIST BOOKS IN THE GREAT OUTDOORS (PART 1) // Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 21:00:36 GMT

Lists have been a part of literature from the classical epic to the postmodern novel, so it is no surprise that they have also made their way into artists’ books. In the essay “Absurd Catalogues: The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction,” Jan Alber writes that postmodern lists “celebrate variety and plurality by illustrating that individual entities cannot (or should not) be forced into a rigid system of order; the lists...thus invite us to adopt a playful attitude which closely correlates with the capacity of ‘letting things be’ advocated by Zen masters.” The philosopher Ian Bogost ties enumeration to a particular branch of recent philosophy, including New Materialism, Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism. I am lumping these movements together for the sake of simplicity and to provide as many access points as possible to readers, but the important feature they share is a rejection of idealism and correlationism — they assert that there is a real world outside the human mind. Bogost notes that philosopher “Quentin Meillasoux uses the phrase ‘the great outdoors’ to describe the outside reality that correlationism had stolen from philosophy.” I argue that it is no coincidence that Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, two artists whose practices are based literally and figuratively in the great outdoors, use lists prominently in their artists’ books.Though Fulton and Long’s artists’ books precede Bogost’s theory, they provide an excellent example of what he calls ontography. Bogost terrms ontography “a general inscriptive strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity” and writes that “an ontograph is a landfill, not a Japanese garden. It shows how much rather than how little exists simultaneously, suspended in the dense meanwhile of being.”Catalogues and monographs reveal the challenge presented to critics by both artists’ use of text. Many writers can only say what the writing isn’t. Paul Moorhouse’s assessment of Richard Long’s use of text is typical: “Neither poetry nor straightforward prose, the structure of such texts is closer to sculpture than to literature, arising from the connection and inter-relation of words, ideas and experiences.” Ontography gives the reader a positive language to grapple with what text is — or, more accurately, does — in the work of Fulton and Long.

Page 153, Photography © Richard Long, extracted from: Richard Long: Heaven and Earth, 2009, Reproduced by permission of the Tate Trustees.

The role of the human artist is arguably more central to Long’s work. While Fulton seeks to leave nothing but footprints, Long alters the land and uses natural objects as materials for his art. Even so, he complicates the idea of agency in much the same way as new materialist theorists like Bogost. His 1983 work, A Moved Line in Japan, entails “PICKING UP CARRYING PLACING / ONE THING TO ANOTHER / ALONG A 35 MILE WALK / AT THE EDGE OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN.” After this introduction, the piece proceeds in the following manner: SHELL TO CRAB / CRAB TO FEATHER / FEATHER TO FISH / FISH TO BAMBOO / BAMBOO TO CARROT — and so on. Long is acting, but on whose behalf? The emphasis is on the relationships among objects, of which Long is just one. Rather than documenting his actions as an artist, Fulton’s work shows the impossibility of recreating the experience of the walk. Anne Moeglin-Delcroix writes, “He does not seek to overcome the separation between experience and representation, but expresses it through his books. This also explains the increasing presence of words...first a simple caption accompanying the image, they then become a part of it and more recently have sometimes replaced it.” Lists are a particularly effective way to access this tension between presence and absence. Alber observes that “catalogues...frequently begin as assemblages of objects. But then, they gradually evacuate language of presence, leaving only word-lists behind.”

Works of Art © Hamish Fulton, extracted from: Hamish Fulton: Walking Journey, 2002, Reproduced by permission of the Tate Trustees.

Both artists also align themselves with the new materialist approach by rejecting the landscape tradition. Consider Fulton’s sparse piece, A Fourteen Day Wandering Walk Fourteen Nights Camping Southern Iceland September 1996: WIND / MIST / RAIN / MOSS / LAVA / ROCK / SAND. By comparison, Moeglin-Delcroix characterizes landscape as “taking nature as interlocutor, projecting one's sensibility or imagination into it” — a process “by which nature is not considered in itself but for the sake of what it reveals about the artist contemplating it.” Fulton and Long pursue neither representation nor interiority. They flatly present the inadequacy of such attempts to convey the outdoors, in part by using lists, which Bogost shows “are perfect tools to free us from the prison of representation precisely because they are so inexpressive.”In part two of this post, I will further examine the boundary of experience and representation by examining Fulton and Long’s continued use of photography, and how photography can be ontography.

Works Cited

Alber, Jan. "Absurd Catalogues: The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction." Style 50, no. 3 (2016): 342-58. doi:10.5325/style.50.3.0342.

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It's Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Long, Richard, and Clarrie Wallis. Richard Long: Heaven and Earth. Tate Publishing, 2009.

____________ and Paul Moorhouse. Richard Long: a Moving World. Tate St Ives, 2002.

Moeglin-Delcroix, Anne. Ambulo Ergo Sum. Nature as Experience in Artists Books / Lexpérience De La Nature Dans Le Livre Dartiste. Köln: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015.

Wilson, Andrew, et al. Hamish Fulton - Walking Journey: Exhibition: Tate Britain, London, 14 March - 4 June 2002: Catalogue. Tate, 2002.

Levi Sherman is an interdisciplinary artist and designer in Columbia, Missouri.

RESPONDING TO "THE NEW ART OF MAKING BOOKS" // India Johnson

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 08:00:00 GMT

I concluded my last post by quoting Ulises Carrión, a concrete poet and book artist. Carrión is perhaps best known for the manifesto The New Art of Making Books, which he wrote in Spanish in 1975. Because at least two serviceable translations into English already exist [1], my own recent translation of The New Art of Making Books was not prompted by any pressing need for a new one. Rather, I simply wanted to experience this seminal manifesto in its original language.

At the time I was translating The New Art of Making Books, I was also making a series of book-objects. As I worked on them, I often found myself mulling over the question Carrion poses at the beginning of his manifesto: “what is a book?” Some of Carrión’s answers in The New Art of Making Books seem intrinsic to the book as sculpture: “a book is a sequence of spaces,” “a volume in space,” and “an exploration of space.” However, for Carrión, sequence—rather than space—was at the heart of the book. He clarified that “I definitely exclude so-called 'object-books' since they seem to belong rather to the realm of sculpture. My emphasis lies on the notion of sequence and this doesn’t seem applicable to the 'object-book.' [2]

Caption: The Book As a Volume in Space? Installation of soft sculptures in UIowa Main Library.

This is why using the book as sculpture to interpret Carrión’s ideas about space and volume isn’t particularly faithful to his ideas. As seen in the photo above, it may be a fairly reductive interpretation of his vision for books: volumes of book-shaped space are probably not what Carrion meant by “a book is a volume in space.” Yet the more I read of Carrión, the more I’m persuaded that he is right: that his definition of the book, as both space and sequence, may be the most adequate one that we have.

That’s why I don’t describe the sculptures I’ve made in response to The New Art of Making Books as ‘expanding’ the idea of the book. They may, however, expand the idea of bookbinding.

In mulling over bookbinding in the expanded field, I have ultimately found myself back where I began: but not as a translator--this time, as an author. I am currently re-writing The New Art of Making Books, in collaboration with the translator and poet Andrea Bel.Arruti. As Ulises Carrión himself proclaimed, “plagiarism is the point of departure for creative activity in the new art.” By inverting all of Carrión’s claims, we’re generating a new manifesto, The Old Art of Making Books:

“Books, contrary to popular opinion, are not for reading. They are for making.

Making books is a sequence of processes, unfolding into space, whose making happens in time.

The making is a space-time sequence.”

Caption: The Old Art of Making Books, a printable zine

A sequence of links:

The New Art of Making Books: A New Translation (with Annotations) by India Johnson

The Old Art of Making Books by Andrea Bel.Arruti and India Johnson (voluntary collaborators) and Ulises Carrión (involuntary collaborator)

A printable zine of portions of The New Art of Making Books: A New Translation and The Old Art of Making Books

Notable publications of The New Art of Making Books:

Letterpress printed by Imprenta Rescate

With a commentary by Robert Bringhurst

With excellent translation and commentary by Heriberto Yépez

With design by Santiago da Silva

The coveted Taller Ditoria editions of Carrión

To listen to a recording of Ulises Carrión’s poetry on vinyl:

The Poet’s Tongue

Notes:

[1] The two translations I have into English are in Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, edited by Joan Lyons, and Quant aux livres: On Books, edited by Juan J. Agius.

[2] Ulises Carrión, “Bookworks Revisited,” in Quant aux livres: On Books, ed. Juan J. Agius (Geneva: Éditions Héros-Limite, 1997), 166.

[3] Ulises Carrión, “On Criticism,” in Quant aux livres: On Books, ed. Juan J. Agius (Geneva: Éditions Héros-Limite, 1997), 178.

Any other quotes come from my own translation of The New Art of Making Books, based on the text co-published by Tumbona Editions and the Mexican Ministry of Art and Culture in 2016.

India Johnson (@indi.gram): I am a Book Art MFA candidate at the University of Iowa. My training also includes bench work in book conservation, and bookbinding school at the LLOTJA. I make artists’ books and book objects; I also do translation or lexicography projects about bookbinding.

Andrea Bel.Arruti (@belarruti): I am a poet, translator, and editor. I also make letterpress-printed artist’s books, which are about language in an expansive sense. My practice investigates how the handmade artists’ book might dialog with sound art and digital media. I’m also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of El Círculo Cuadrado (@el_circulocuadrado), an independent publisher of artist’s books in Oaxaca, Mexico.

The Book is a Verb // India Johnson

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 07:00:00 GMT

Writing in The Century of Artists’ Books about the codex, Johanna Drucker claims that the most successful artists’ books with codex structures synthesize form and content into a unified whole. They “account for the interrelations of conceptual and formal elements, thematic and material concerns.” [1] Drucker’s approach in Century remains a valuable way of conceptualizing the artist’s book. For example, Susan Viguers reports that she was struck by the continued relevance of Drucker’s approach while curating a survey of artist bookwork whose purpose was “that of defining the artist book.”

Let’s call Drucker’s approach, which defines the artist’s book as the kind of book whose elements cohere into a unified whole, the nominal definition of the artist’s book. For, as Drucker elaborates in her discussion of the codex, “it is important to begin with the obvious but profound realization that a book should be thought of as a whole. A book is an entity, to be reckoned with in its entirety.” [2]

But is the book best understood as whole? Are artists’ books best conceptualized as total works? In contrast to Drucker, the poet and printer Alan Loney suggests a different way to conceptualize the codex. He claims that while the codex may combine a written text and a physical volume, ‘the book’ does not emerge due to their integration. Rather, the book results from the inherent tension between text and volume: a tension which codex structures foreground, according to Loney. He ponders: “The book as the excess of text, text’s supplement ... ‘the book itself as expressive means.’ The book is more than, extra to, the text. It has a history as bodily existence and function that is not that of the text ... but reading a book is excess to the volume. Volume and [written] composition are therefore in excess of each other ... Reading a book and reading a text is an example of indeterminacy. We cannot do both at once. There is instead a sort of shuttling back & forth, however rapid, between the two.” [3]

To define the book as the tension between the composition and the volume, as Loney proposes, does not center the book as a specific kind of object. It centers the reader’s experience of the object. Loney’s writing about the codex suggests a verbal definition of the book⁠—one which defines the book in terms of the experience of reading. Yet a book cannot be read all at once, as the body’s sensory apparatus can only focus on one element of the book at a time. This means the body of the reader may work against, rather than facilitate, the experience of an artist’s book as a total work.

Although he is not writing about the artist’s book specifically, Loney’s ideas about reading resemble those of Ulises Carrión, whose definitional arguments about the artist’s book also focus on reading (although Carrión preferred the term bookwork): “What our definition has failed to take into account is the reading, the actual experience of the bookwork by a viewer. Bookworks must create specific conditions for reading. There must be a coherence between the possible, potential messages of the work (what our fathers called “content”), its visible appearance (our fathers’ “form”), and the manner of reading that these two elements impose, or suggest, or tolerate. This element I call “rhythm.” [4]

In fact, Carrión was so focused on the experience of reading that he goes so far as to trumpet, in The New Art of Making Books, that “reading itself is proof of the reader’s understanding.” [5] It may seem either outrageous, or obvious, to claim that to read is to understand. But if the artist’s book is best understood not as a noun, but as a verb, Carrión was right to center the reader.

Notes

[1] Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 1995), 122.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Alan Loney, "What Book Does My Library Make?" In Threads Talks Series, eds. Steven Clay and Kyle Schlesinger, 3-17 (New York City: Granary Books and Cuneiform Press, 2016), 13-15.

[4] Ulises Carrión, “Bookworks Revisited,” in Quant aux livres: On Books, ed. Juan J. Agius (Geneva: Éditions Héros-Limite, 1997), 163.

[5] This comes from my own translation of The New Art of Making Books, based on the text co-published by Tumbona Editions and the Mexican Ministry of Art and Culture in 2016: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ahIxtopMmTdZY_MeyYnSuAdPaxKWWZ6L2ChSMoskQ3w/edit?usp=sharing

India Johnson: I am a Book Art MFA candidate at the University of Iowa. My training also includes bench work in book conservation and bookbinding school at the LLOTJA. I make artists’ books and book objects; I also do translation or lexicography projects about bookbinding.

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE BOOK// Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 07:00:00 GMT

First, a confession.

In my last post I referred to the castillo/corrales Paraguay Press series The Social Life of the Book (SLOB) with having only once glimpsing an issue belonging to a friend, while staying in her apartment, across the country from mine. Years ago.

After my last post I ordered the complete set of eight issues from the After 8 Books (Paris) online shop. The package just arrived. To my surprise, there is very little on what I had imagined as the social life of the book. The exception is James Hoff’s essay about, among other things, the role of personal anecdotes and “a social working process” in making books. Otherwise, the series description printed on the back of each issue accurately characterizes it as “original texts by writers, artists, publishers, designers, booksellers, etc. – reflecting on reading, designing, publishing, and distributing books, today.” By its very existence the series creates a social life of the book in the form of a conversation from one issue to the next, and each issue and its reader, and certainly the editorial process that led to the creation of the series in the first place. I very much enjoyed it, but it was not what I was expecting.

So what was I expecting?

What did I imagine would constitute “the social life of the book?”

The scenario described in the first paragraph above. The book learned about, accidentally, from a friend. The book as part of sociability.
The loaned book.
The borrowed book.
The recommended book.
The book as gift: to give or receive a book.
Reading aloud, one person to another; one person to a group. Multiple people reading aloud, as a group.
The book group: reading the same book together, discussing it.
The growth in social awareness that comes from reading novels that explore character interiority.
The assigned book / the textbook / the reader, read and discussed in common for a specific purpose.
The reserved book / the desk copy.
The life of a library book, one volume circulating within a place-based community.
The book as hub, as agreement, as rule book, willingly entered into as contract: the Cub Scout Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
The book as agreement not completely freely chosen: an employee handbook, a directory of “must/should” and “do not.”
A violated diary: the reading of a private book.
The book read at night that keeps your partner awake because you are reading it: the begrudged book.
The book as signifier: representing something other than itself, a way of a tribe recognizing its members.
The book launch, the book signing: social events around the book.
The book fair, the art book fair in particular, often organized by other independent artists and art publishers for other artists and art publishers, rather than by institutions or organizations. The New England Art Book Fair (Portland, ME) and the Northampton Print & Book Fair (MA) are both this way, organized by artists and held at artist-run spaces operated by artists other than the fair organizers.
Book trades at art book fairs: perpetuating the relationship beyond the fair, as the received book serves as a stand-in for the person who made it.
The postal trading networks of zine culture: reciprocal exchange, circulating books instead of money, creating relationships instead of transactions.
Collating parties, binding parties, socially producing books together in one place.
All those book-generated friendships that come from being around other book people.

I see I was imagining the social life of the book to be the bonds, engagements, relationships created between people, because of books. And clearly this list is only a beginning, an incomplete inventory of the social life of the book. Reader, what would you add to it? Please comment! The blog is free to be actively social in a different way than the book.

A letterpress printed card by the Virginia Center for the Book, Charlottesville, where I wrote this post. My visit was thanks to Professor Dean Dass, University of Virginia: another enactment of the social life of the book. Thank you, Dean.

Emily Larned has been publishing since 1993, when as a teenager she made her first zine. She is co-founder of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA), a union for reflective creative practice, and founder of Alder & Frankia, an imprint of collaborations and feminist anthologies and reissues. She is currently Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

ART BOOK FAIR AS PUBLISHING / PUBLIC-ING // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 07:00:00 GMT

It is autumn: Art Book Fair season.

Last weekend was the New York Art Book Fair (NYABF); reportedly 40,000 visitors attended in 2018. The Tehran Art Book Fair is happening right now, in Iran, as I type this. This coming Sunday is the Northampton, MA Print & Book Fair. The following weekend is the New England Art Book Fair in Portland, ME; simultaneously there are art book fairs in Montréal, Vienna, Sheffield (UK), and Nampa (Idaho). Detroit, Vancouver, Manchester (UK), Antwerp, Toronto, and Setouchi (Japan) all are hosting Art Book Fairs in October. There are at least 15 more Art Book Fairs happening in November, including fairs in Italy, the Netherlands, France, Argentina, Ireland, and Lithuania. And Leah Mackin’s Internet Art Book Fair is always online.

All of these Art Book Fairs have emerged in the 21st century; many in the past decade, most in the past five years; some are new this year. In fact the “Art Book Fair” named as such is I believe a 21st century invention, coined by Printed Matter’s inaugural New York Art Book Fair in fall 2005. (The New York Art Book Fair was preceded by fine press / book arts fairs such as the Oak Knoll Fair (DE) and the Pyramid Atlantic Book Arts Fair (MD), and numerous Antiquarian / Rare Book Fairs. But the “Art Book Fair” which gathers together zinesters, multi-disciplinary artists, activists, students, book artists, photographers, graphic designers, small press publishers, rare book dealers, collectives, contemporary art galleries, risograph printers, organizations, etc., anis especially popular among young people, appears to be a Twenty-First Century phenomenon: a post-internet turn to publishing as artistic practice.)

While the Art Book fair may be new, the “Book Fair” famously dates back to the earliest days of incunabula. The Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, first held in 1454, is assumed to be the oldest continually operating book fair. Prior to the first Frankfurt Buchmesse, the city was already well-known for its brisk trade in manuscripts. (The Frankfurt Book Fair, by the way, is also held in October.)

I have never been to the Frankfurt Buchmesse. But have you been to the NYABF? It is nuts. Immersive and enormous, being among books among people being among books. Surveying a table with a glance; picking books up, paging through, intermittent reading, fluttering pages; conversing with other publishers; meeting book lovers, artists, collectors, booksellers, librarians, curators, distributors, old friends; being crushed by crowds; waiting in lines; the exhausting heat. Tabling at the NYABF is a very particular expression of the book as a hub of social activity — morphing into a blur of thousands of micro-interactions with hundreds of people, many of whom are bookmakers themselves — demonstrating yet again how the book is deeply socially charged, and always has been. So I’ve been thinking about how the act of tabling at a book fair, of presenting your work to members of a book-buying public, and explaining your ideas over and over again, is itself a type of publishing: or shall we call it public-ing?

Publish : make generally known, make available

Publicus (Latin) > Publicare (make public) > puplier (Old French) / public (English) / publish

From Oxford

Tabling at a book fair is “making [your work] available” through individual interactions one person after another. It is a series of potentially intimate, confessional encounters in a very public space, not unlike reading an anthology of autobiographical essays on a subway. Publishing as an artistic practice is not just the making of a book as an art object, but considering every stage of its creation from inception to amplification and distribution, considering as integral to the whole the systems that sustain the book. Tabling is just one method of distribution, of inserting one’s work into an enormously elaborate network. But tabling and fair-attending is a very particular manifestation of the social life of the book that warrants much closer attention than I am able to give it here, as I am out of time. I need to print for the Art Book Fair happening this Sunday.

Works alluded to:

Stencil.wiki/fairs

Publishing as Artistic Practice, Annette Gilbert, ed.

The Social Life of the Book (SLOB) was a series of commissioned essays published in pamphlet form by castillo/corrales (2007-2015), Paris.

Some Forms of Availability, Simon Cutts.

Emily Larned has been publishing since 1993, when she made her first zine as a teenager. She is co-founder of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA), a union for reflective creative practice. She is currently Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

EXHIBITION TAXONOMY // Susan Viguers

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 07:00:00 GMT

At the time of this posting, I am in the process of overseeing and mounting an exhibition opening September 30 in Philadelphia’s majestic and rather cavernous City Hall, for the Philadelphia Center for the Book, with essential contribution, of course, from the other board members of PCB [1]. This exhibition, displaying work by 56 members of PCB, is titled Variations on the Artist Book. The proposal sent to the office that administers Art in City Hall had an educational focus, that of defining the artist book for people who are familiar with books, but have no concept of an artist book. Personal experience lies behind that idea, one I believe shared by many who will read this post: when I identify myself to people as a book artist, they invariably have absolutely no idea what I am talking about. (The most common assumption they make is that I am an illustrator.) The exhibition space is a hall near the mayor’s office, so most of the audience will be people passing through for purposes other than looking at art. The pieces to be exhibited are the result of a call, resulting in 150 submissions, and what we are focusing on thus is dependent on what happened to come to us. The works are displayed in five large locked cases (72”h x 94”w x 30”d). The text in the books can be pointed to, looked at, but rarely absorbed. And the issue of narrative or, more broadly, sequence as relates to image as well as text — central to my interest in the artist book — must, necessarily, be ignored.

Nonetheless, the exhibition attempts to present the complex amalgam of image making, structure, text, and materials that go into an artist book. The idea was that each exhibition case would focus on a particular aspect of the artist book. That goal immediately offered problems. As a result of the submissions we received and in the service of exposing people to art that is centered in some way on the book, the exhibition that has emerged broadens the idea of the artist book. That said, I was struck by the extent to which the pieces reflected one of Johanna Drucker’s central dictums in defining such books, one that resonates with me: that there is a “dialogue” among the work’s “elements,” that the book is not a container but a medium. [2]

One complication, of course, is working out five different focuses, one for each case. I gave up the idea of their being neatly parallel. The pieces inevitably fit under more than one idea; some could go as well into any of the groupings. Short texts in each case will point to what the viewer is invited to focus on. Cases 4 and 5 will also have brief descriptions of the various processes mentioned (e.g., letterpress, linoleum cut, screen printing, etc.).

This is what I have come up with:

Case 1: The focus is on bindings and kinds of structures, e.g., concertina, codex, pop-up, flag, flexagon, tunnel book, boxes.

Dee Collins Sunset Madelyn Garrett Sekhmet’s Casket

Case 2: The focus is on sculptural pieces and/or structures that have metaphoric or symbolic connotations, e.g., a piano hinge to mimic a compact, a clock case as the container/cover, a structure that evokes nesting, cranes as origami pages (the last two referring to the books imaged below).

Paulette Rosen Nesting Boxes Eriko Takahashi Peace Crane (03.11.2011)

Case 3: Here the focus is on text and image. The case includes wordless books, books in which the text exists primarily or totally as image, in which texts insists on being read as well as being seen, in which imagery is the context for the text, and so forth.

Roberta Lavadour Relative Memory IV Sara Moose-Torres Changeling

Case 4: The focus is on the process of making. This covers printmaking and other processes, including papermaking, eco printing (see the left image below), pulp painting, letterpress, drawing, non-silver photography. But it also includes process separate from specific media: the process of creating an altered book, or (see the right image below) a process that entails cutting lines from letters written by the artist’s mother, collaging them onto panels, then painting and binding them into a book that can be displayed in various ways.

Mary Elizabeth Nelson Mirror Image Karen Viola Just a Few Lines

Case 5. The focus here is on materials, the materials used in processes, e.g., linoleum, type, and plates, and also materials present in the final work, e.g. acrylic, graphite, handmade paper, found objects, plexiglass, stamps, organic material. Below, on the left, the pages are cheese; on the right, the embroidered thread that forms the text is the artist’s hair.

Ben Denzer 20 Slices Sun Young Kang Hair (머리카락)

I realize, with regret, that the text that introduces the viewer to the focus of each case will rarely be read. The visual is much more important and I am interested in seeing what visually emerges when the works are mounted. My hope is that the selection for each case will direct the viewer to the idea(s) behind it. Perhaps an exhibition which, rather than having a pre-determined focus, is based on an open call and mounted in an unfamiliar display space for an unfamiliar audience will actually result in some discoveries.

[1] Kara Petraglia (president), Amanda D’Amico, Karen Lightner, Alina Josan, and Marianne Dages.

[2] See, among other places: Johanna Drucker, “Critical Issues / Exemplary Works,” The Bonefolder: an e-journal for the bookbinder and book artist,” vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 4.

EMBODIED POETICS: THE CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICE OF LETTERPRESS PRINTING // Jade Lascelles

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 07:00:00 GMT

Anyone who has spent time in a letterpress shop can attest to the introspective pull such a space can wield. The shop is a place where time easily blurs, where microcosmic tasks seam together into an intense but sustainable concentration. As with any meditative practice, there can of course be days of frustration, of extreme dissonance between the printer and the equipment, of never being able to shut off the mind’s chatter, of incessant bodily fumbles. But if it is one of those golden days of printing, enough goes right that you can fall into the dance of it—the act and art of creating a print quieting all else.

In the Harry Smith Print Shop at Naropa University, I regularly witness a pedagogical enactment of this dance. Naropa is a Buddhist-inspired school whose curriculum is rooted in incorporating contemplative practices and insights within classroom content. The goal is to provide students with a depth of wisdom and transpersonal growth in addition to an academic education. Contemplative credit hours are required for all students via classes on traditional Eastern arts, including meditation, yoga, contemplative poetics, qi gong, and ikebana. Having students already attuned to contemplative approaches helps heighten the experiential thoughtfulness that seems to naturally arise in print shop settings.

Regardless of the students’ skill levels, it is fascinating to track the moment when a specific, calm focus overtakes the shop. The initial lack of confidence—usually manifested as asking questions before each movement they dare to make—eventually softens into something less anxious. It is not that the students suddenly know what they are doing. Rather, a hinge occurs where you can witness them yielding to the learning process. The voices in the room fall silent, replaced by the sounds of careful fingers placing type into a composing stick. Questions transform from preemptive and cautionary to retrospective. Even if still relatively novice printers, a sense of self-trust and self-confidence begins to take shape in the students. There is a palpable movement from words as they are spoken (floating, invisible, impossible to capture) to words as they exist concretely (physical things that can literally be grasped between their fingers). Even a noticeable shift in breath may happen. The bodies occupying this shared space fall into a rhythm of breathing not dissimilar to the pranayama limb of yoga. It is a breath of intention, of attention, and it quite often arrives inadvertently, organic but simultaneous among the students. Not that our shop becomes monastic per say; we are still proponents of the power that loud music and unabashed humor have in the realm of creation. But there is a quietude that manifests surprisingly, considering we are in a room filled with loud, heavy, mechanical objects.

Admittedly, there are some variables at work that create an atmosphere ripe for these kinds of reactions. As I previously mentioned, these are students already used to contemplative modalities and pedagogy in the classroom. Additionally, most of them are studying writing within the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, meaning there is a predisposition to considering and working with language in experimental or theoretical ways. However, I do not think any of what I’ve witnessed in my students is unique to Naropa. Many physical actions, including athletics, performing arts, and manual tasks, can be catalysts for enhanced or deepened mental concentration. I imagine printers from across history and cultures would identify with the phenomena I describe here—just using a different vocabulary for it.

Within the context of Naropa, I have long been a champion for letterpress classes counting toward contemplative credit requirements. I frequently joke that the shop is a place of embodied poetics within the Kerouac School, as on any given day there is a collection of writers building, shaping, holding language. There is also a deeper intellectual experience accessed by transcending through the (sometimes quite repetitive) physical actions of printing, and because of this, I consider the print shop to be one of the best editorial tools a writer can have. The focus, consideration, and sheer amount of time given to hand-setting a piece will do wonders for truly understanding potency and economy of language. Every punctuation choice must be intentional and important, a deliberate act of dropping the comma or em dash into the stick. When page layout becomes a somatic endeavor, as when locking up a forme in the press, the abstract notion of the page as a field for composition evolves into a tangible concept. The act of printing is a meditation on both the materiality and the meaning of content. It is an evolving practice of sitting in these spaces alongside the words being conjured.

I sometimes wonder what it would look like to bring attention to the contemplative nature of letterpress to the forefront. If we printers approached our art as a consciously meditative act, how would that affect the ideas of what letterpress printing communicates to the world? Would our relationship to our materials and equipment shift in any way? Or would it be a case of retroactive language, of a vernacular at last available to what and who we’ve always been—heads down, eyes sharp, carefully feeding a sheet of paper toward the possibilities contained within its blankness?

Jade Lascelles (she/her/hers) is a poet, editor, and letterpress printer who harbors dreams of someday being a rock n’ roll drummer. Her work has been featured in numerous journals and the anthologies Precipice: Writing at the Edge and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. In addition to an editorial career, she manages the Harry Smith Print Shop at Naropa University.

NOTES TOWARD THE EMERGENT BOOK, PART 3 // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 07:00:00 GMT

16.

In part 1 of this series I wrote about the idea of the book artist having the same freedom to edit and rearrange as the writer. Now I am also thinking about the freedom of drawing—the freedom to not get it right the first time, but to erase, refine, rephrase, layer, to work the whole composition at once and gradually bring it together. To choose to leave incidental marks and/or marks of erasure as part of the whole. To have incidental marks in the first place.

17.

On incidental marks: my particular vision for the emergent book is tied to my approach to printing—lots of layers, manipulation of surfaces, flexible/brush matrices, and variable editions. But that is not necessarily the only way to approach the emergent book, and I don’t want to limit the idea to my aesthetic interests. From cartoonist Chris Ware’s Monograph:

“…I’d abandoned the traditional ‘script first, draw later’ method months earlier in favor of a completely improvisatory approach inspired by the drawings as I put them down on the page, so I had no idea what the story was about or how it would end until I was about three-quarters of the way through. In the end, the strip wrote itself and I simply let it happen. Later, I realized that the pictures were as much a part of my thinking as were my thoughts, the only difference being that I’d set them down in ink and could look at them as I thought about it, but it was up to me to pay attention and let them tell me where they wanted to go. I take this same approach to cartooning with every page I draw and write to this day.”

I bring up Ware in particular because his work is known for being extremely detailed and meticulous. He of course has the advantage of working in a medium that is drawn first and reproduced later. Still, I can imagine an artist trying to tackle the emergent book and working in the frame of “clean” design and printing. The crucial thing is the synthesis of the time of generation with the time of production. “Paying attention” and “letting the work tell you where it wants to go”—this is common advice in creative activity. Do artists that make books get to do that?

18.

While reading Ware’s Monograph I also picked up and re-read the beginning of his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. I was surprised in the re-reading by how surreal and disjointed the first chapters of the story are. It makes sense though—the story was first published in serial form, in the then-newspaper Newcity in Chicago. Ware did not have the story planned before he started. He figured it out as he went along. (He also began working with the Jimmy Corrigan character when he was in graduate school, in pieces separate from what ran in Newcity.) The same kind of gradual finding can be observed in other serial forms, such as narrative television. Serial form? Longer books, working in signatures, volumes, etc.—all strategies embedded in the history and form of the book.

19.

To further enlarge what has been a very personal vision/desire: why does the emergent book need to be printed? Isn’t a one-of-a-kind (not-editioned) book a type of emergent book? The not-editioned, and/or the lo-fi small edition (pochoir, tracing, transfer, etc.) is a vastly under-explored form in the academic/professional book arts world. Are we so afraid of scrapbooking? It seems that the idea(l) of “democratic” artwork should also be applied to access to equipment and studio space. An artist absolutely can make serious book-based work at their kitchen table. Why do so many of us—myself included—endlessly rehearse and repeat the frames in which we’ve been taught? And which processes, and which artists, do those frames exclude?

20.

The emergent book is also about a desire for scale—scale as it relates to time, and time as it relates to multiple readings, each with their own pace and structure. Scale as it relates to the heft or lightness of the book in the reader’s hands. Scale as it relates to the reader’s absorption during reading. Scale as duration. Scale as reading. Reading as being-in-time. Reading as being-in-material.

21.

To return to Nancy Spero, one of the initial models for these posts—in her work you can see the potential scale of the book mapped onto a wall, or onto the space of a room. You can see the value and function of repetition and/or motif within a time structure. You can see readers entering and leaving the book at different points, how they slow down, speed up, how they return and retrace. That kind of reading, the reading that is multiple in form and time, is also a model for writing/printing/making.

22.

Now that these notes are crystallized and this post is written, the real test(s) will happen in the studio and in readers’ hands.

23.

I often have doubts.

[1] Chris Ware, Monograph, (New York: Rizzoli, 2017), 31.

Aaron Cohick is the Printer of The Press at Colorado College and the proprietor of the NewLights Press. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

NOTES TOWARD THE EMERGENT BOOK, PART 2 // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 07:00:00 GMT

0.1

I believe that it is critical for artists to continually interrogate and develop the conventions and assumptions of their medium or field, and/or how art exists in the world as a whole. This includes the conventions of the art/objects themselves, but also the conventions of how we approach our activity in the studio. So while these posts about the “emergent book” deal with technical specifics of how books get made, at the same time they also talk about the frames, conventions, and assumptions around what happens in the studio, how processes are structured, how tools are used, etc. For me, the dis-location/articulation of conventions comes through working with the material.

10.

The emergent book is not the same thing as the collaborative/assemblage book, though it does have similarities. By assemblage books I mean the type of book that is put together from many different sources and/or artists, and that may involve elements of chance in its composition—Dieter Roth’s various books made of found newspapers, etc. are one example. In assemblage books there is something really exciting about the variety and differences articulated from page to page. But those books also usually fail to cohere in a meaningful way. Ideally the emergent book would balance the thrill of chance with thoughtful editing and revision, the kind of re-ordering that sutures a film or novel together as a time-based experience for the reader/viewer. Not strictly narrative, but a unit of coherent and felt time.

11.

Something to read, something that makes reading visible. Dis-location/articulation.

12.

The binding of these “emergent books” immediately presents a technical problem. How to deal with imposition and sequence? How can you add or delete pages? A drum-leaf binding, which uses a single, joined spread as its base unit, seems like an obvious choice. It would be simple to remove or rearrange spreads as necessary. But I probably won’t use it, because I want the recto/verso and the density of a multi-signature book. I am also intrigued by the constraint of having to work ahead and behind at the same time. So for my hypothetical book: short signatures, 2 – 3 folios each, either a coptic stitch or a sewn-boards binding. Flexibility and constraint. I will probably need to figure out a workable way to split and join pages into new folios, and it has to be a process that is both efficient and that achieves a durable result. The thought of having to do something like that across an entire edition makes me want to abandon this whole idea. But that is normal.

13.

The technical: the imposition of pages in most bindings seems to demand that the artist plans ahead, and thus it makes perfect sense to resolve the book in a mock-up form that includes the binding and imposition, and then to go about making the book. The conclusion that then becomes the frame: production separated from generation. Traditional printmaking has a similar frame—you proof until you get the print where you want it, then execute to make a perfect edition. The larger frame of both is a warning: DO NOT FAIL.

14.

I often go back to the essay “Artists’ Books: Production, Production, Production,” by Emily McVarish [1] because it provides a detailed narrative of how a book emerges: not an idea that seems complete and is then executed, but as a series of steps developing from a braid of process, past work, new attentions, and practice, practice, practice. The essay describes the making of the book Flicker,and what McVarish details is in many ways an ideal that I aspire to: the text is thoughtfully composed, emerging from a committed practice of writing, and the same can be said for the visual and physical book. All of the components inform each other through a series of connected loops. But the process is definitely not this “emergent book”—McVarish is still planning and then executing. So if what she describes is an ideal, yet I still (partially) reject it, then I have to keep interrogating myself: what is the desire to attempt this unplanned book? A weird laziness about mock-ups? About craft? A legitimate push into the unknown? A desire to fail? I think—I tell myself in this moment—that it is a desire to be in time in a different way, to pull that time of production into the time of generation, and in that process let go of control.

15.

But also to exert a different kind of control, later. Or to always be in that noise state of no control/control.

Note:

[1] Emily McVarish, “Artists’ Books: Production, Production, Production,” Mimeo Mimeo 2 (Autumn 2008): 2 – 11.

Aaron Cohick is the Printer of The Press at Colorado College and the proprietor of the NewLights Press. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

NOTES TOWARD THE EMERGENT BOOK, PART 1 // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 07:00:00 GMT

These posts are a meditation on process—in fragments, chunks—accumulating the way that ideas do in the studio. Disjointed, awkward, inarticulate, sprawling and retracing. I think that I have to have an idea at least three times before it sticks. I have probably written some of these things before. I am hoping that this is useful as an articulation of the frames in which ideas develop, ranging from practical/structural concerns about process and form, to conjecture about ideas and how they happen. Again and again I return to the question: what am I—what are we—actually doing in the studio?

I am basing the form of these posts on the work of Nancy Spero. The Siglio Press version of her 125’ drawing/scroll, Torture of Women, helped me to realize that Spero’s multi-panel, text-image wall pieces can be seen as books. Beyond that, they provide a possible model of freedom for the artist that makes books—the freedom to edit, rearrange, erase, repeat, remove whole sections, etc. The freedom to not commit until the piece is finished. This is also the freedom of the writer, of the filmmaker. So here I am, writing in chunks, arranging and rearranging. Decomposing and recomposing. Dreaming about books that do the same. The central question: is there a way to make an artist’s book, one that I am actually printing, that stays open and flexible, that is in flux until it’s finished? And maybe longer? And does that provide something better/different than a book that is composed the same way, but is made with a single original and then reproduced later?

I can’t be quite sure when it began, but for maybe 6 years now I’ve been consciously approaching printing in way that is open-ended. That is, I am not executing a design that I’ve already finished (which is how I was taught, and how I approached printing for the first 13 or so years), but setting up a series of possibilities with only a vaguely defined end goal. Just a vision, perhaps. And the challenge is to get to that vision, while the process fights, complicates, alters, improves, and/or ruins it. This generally includes lots of press runs, a willingness to test the limits of legibility, and a willingness to fail and start over. And failures do happen, though my solution is usually just to keep printing.

I can’t resist the pun of the idea that a book that is first designed, then dutifully executed, is meant for the library-as-graveyard, for the reader-as-solemn-mourner. We should be building/producing/creating/synthesizing/elaborating/constructing/birthing/growing/vomiting/singing/etc. our books, not executing them.

I often have doubts.

I am calling the book that isn’t finished until it’s finished “the emergent book.”

The emergent book would not be resolved in a mock-up. The emergent book would be written and printed simultaneously. The emergent book would show its edits, its seams. The emergent book would arrive at the moment of assembly, or at the moment of reading. The emergent book would be editioned, but that edition would most likely be highly variable. The making of the emergent book would be closer to writing, or shooting and editing a film. The emergent book would risk failure all the way to the end. The emergent book would avert failure by not stopping—more press runs, more pages, more layers, a new sequence, pages split and glued together, painted out or stripped away and reprinted, reprinted, reprinted.

I often have doubts.

As of this posting, seven other sections of this text were drafted but were removed—possibly to be used later, possibly to be deleted. The sections that are included were not written in the sequence that they appear. This is obviously pretty normal for writing. Which is exactly the freedom that I want.

In a conversation with Amos Kennedy in January of 2019, when we were talking about this approach to bookmaking, he told me that what I am talking about is essentially the way that Walter Hamady makes his “Gabberjab” series. Hamady writes and prints them signature by signature, building them slowly, always willing to “go back” and add or change things. There must be other artists that work this way. Karen Kunc? Amos certainly approaches his prints this way, and the zine that he recently made at The Press at Colorado College was highly improvisational. Ken Campbell? Henrik Drescher and Wu Wing Yee? Others? I am sure that I am late to the party, and I am curious to hear from more people about how they approach these things.

Aaron Cohick is the Printer of The Press at Colorado College and the proprietor of the NewLights Press. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

STORIES CANNOT TRAVEL WITHOUT OPEN DOORS: ON CHALLENGING THE TERMS "BOOK" IN THE CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP // Gwendolyn Edward

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 07:00:00 GMT

When my advanced nonfiction workshop read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, my students said they didn’t know they “could do that.” What my students meant was that over the course of their academic creative writing careers, they had mostly seen and discussed books that used narrative or thematic threads as their centers, and they thought this was the way to write. But with Citizen,they encountered something new: a book that defied categorization of “essay” or “memoir,” but also a book that showed it was aware it was a book, with deliberate choices about how it would appear and how a reader would interact with it: bright, glossy paper, blank space, color of text, and different typefaces.

I suggested that perhaps our formal education—dictated sometimes, by what our teachers assign to us—prioritize the wrong questions about books. What might happen if instead of asking “what is an essay collection”—a question that prioritizes craft—we asked, “what can be an essay collection,” or more appropriately, “what can be a book?” So much of our experiences in academe imply that books look a certain way, and for creative writers, this implication is doubly stunting. Not only is our writing challenged and critiqued, but the book as a creative object in all of its assembly is almost never talked about, and therefore, a whole realm of meaning-making falls by the wayside.

What if, my class discussed, we conceptualized books that required reader interaction with the book, not just reception of narrative, or braids, or lyric, but also conversation between text and image or text and shape, color, or formatting? What if we decenter our idea of what a book “is” and instead create books that mirror our process, our minds, and reflect design and content choices that embody the whole of who we are as authors—not just leaning on narrative or language or syntax, but thinking of the book as an object that in every way was our project? I brought in books whose presentations required us to rethink what a book could do. We looked at Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, and Davis Schneiderman’s [SIC] (1). One of my students asked if she might borrow Piper Daniels’ Ladies Lazarus, and another asked to borrow Rankine’s Don’t Let Me be Lonely.

In my students’ final projects—query packets which included book descriptions and chapter/essay summaries for the collections they wanted to write—I discovered most of my students had eschewed brainstorming book that looked “normal” (2). Instead, they were conceptualizing projects that challenged their educational histories and the books being published by the big five.

They wanted to author books that acknowledged the acts of creation, production, and reception as equal to, and sometimes more important than, narrative, unifying theme, or execution of craft. One student reproduced and embedded tweets, text messages, and Instagram photos in order to challenge modes of narrative construction, both textually and visually. Another student imagined a digital book that included hyperlinks to playlists the reader would access, turning the experience of reading into one influenced by mood, sound, and subtext created by song lyrics. Another student’s satirical take on the internet age included an essay based on a meme, which he copied and pasted into his query packet, slyly working through eight principles of art, turning what looked like a humorous one-off (the meme) into a deeply conscious critique of how we value digital images.

My students’ prioritization of the book-making process seemed liberating, inspiring, and sometimes disheartening. What had they spent all this time learning about writing for if they had never had the space to think about all the ways writing could find a shape? I take this as a critique of our creative writing programs, but if I’m heartened by anything, it’s that many of my students plan to pursue their projects, to put them out into the world, and I hope by doing so they can be part of a collective seeking to make creative writing more than just about the writing.

(1) The full list of texts we looked at also includes:

Mark Danielewski’s The Familiar series as well as Only Revolutions and The Fifty Year Sword

Shane Jones’ Lightboxes and Crystal Eaters

Judith Kitchen’s Half in Shade

B. J. Hollars’ Dispatches from the Drownings: Reporting the Fiction of Nonfiction

N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain

Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index

Ander Monson’s Neck Deep and Other Predicaments

Matthew McIntosh’s The Mystery.doc

(2) This became the term by which my class distinguished between essay collections that looked more traditional in form and content and those that engaged less common structures, forms, and presentations.

Gwendolyn Edward’s prose and poetry have appeared in Assay, Crab Orchard Review, Fourth River, Booth, and other journals. She retains a MA from the University of North Texas, an MFA from Bennington College, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Missouri, where she is a teaching fellow.

THE MANY FORMS OF "GREAT ROCK AND ROLL PAUSES": TEACHING VISUAL LITERACY AND FORM // Drew Amidei

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 07:00:00 GMT

I want to talk about teaching one of my favorite chapters of a novel: “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. One challenge students face in an introductory literature course is learning how to talk about form. Teaching “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” (GRRP) helps students with that challenge.

The formal features of the novel are often invisible to students when they enter their first literature course. On the first day, ‘novel’ might as well be a fancier word for ‘book.’ The invisibility of the novel’s form is probably a result of the novel’s peculiar ability to incorporate other forms and genres within itself. For Bakhtin, this ability defines the novel. As my colleague Steven Watts says, “a novel can contain a poem; a poem cannot contain a novel.” The absorptive ability of the novel is also why I like teaching GRRP, because it incorporates a writing genre students know, but believe to be unliterary: the slide presentation.

Encountering a 76-slide PowerPoint in the middle of a novel can be disorienting. Each time I have taught GRRP, whether I teach it as a short story or with the whole novel, my students reported that it is one of the most challenging pieces they read – at least it was before we analyzed it. They are generally not used to employing visual literacy when reading a novel, but the form of GRRP demands they read word and image in conjunction. When my class reads GRRP, I always ask them, “what do the slides in this chapter allow for Egan to do?” I have found that this particular framing of form, as structural features that allow (or disallow) the content to do something, is a useful first step in getting students to consider form.

I am not the only person that sees pedagogical potential in GRRP’s form. Kathleen A. Reilly convincingly argues that the chapter’s discussion of disability hinges on its structure. Lincoln, who is neurodivergent and loves pauses in rock songs, serves as GRRP's heart even though Allison is its narrator For Reilly, GRRP’s structure “positions readers to experience this text through an unfamiliar mode, requiring the use of different tools to make meaning.” Reilly also points out that the structure allows Allison to capture rather than merely describe silence. My favorite slide is the one in which Allison captures the pauses by writing “They sound like this:” followed by a white bounded box. In my master’s thesis on novels with embedded photographs, I placed Goon Squad alongside Jesse Ball’s Silence Once Begun as novels whose formal features allow them to incorporate silence even though silence lies beyond the usual limits of a text-based art form.

But the real reason I find teaching GRRP so useful is because the chapter exists in several versions that each alter the reading experience. In her article, Reilly is writing about the online slide show, complete in the garish colors that a twelve year old might employ. Most students, however, read the chapter in a paperback novel which, because the economics of mass-printing paperbacks, renders the slides in grayscale. The difference in color affects how students might understand Allison; the grayscale, appearing more professional, obscures Allison’s tweeness making her seem older than she is. The version I preferred to teach was the slide presentation hosted on Egan’s website, complete not only with color but with auto-playing snippets of the pauses. The inclusion of the actual pauses signals that Allison believes them to be significant enough that they need to be included in her slide-journal, which deepens the sibling relationship. That version is now, unfortunately, beyond my reach. There is also a youtube video posted by Knopf Doubleday that preserves the color and sound, but removes the reader’s ability to click through or jump to a slide by entering its number. Each of these four versions presents the contents of GRRP as fully as their forms allow, but each produces a different reading experience that can affect our understanding of Allison. That is why if I only get one class period to try to teach form, I teach “Great Rock and Roll Pauses.

Amidei, Drew. Seeing Constructed Realities: Images and Law in the Contemporary American Novel. 2017. University of Missouri-Columbia, Master’s Thesis.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M., “Epic and Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981. Pp 3-40.

Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. Anchor Books, 2010.

Reilly, Kathleen A. “Reading the Silence in Jennifer Egan’s ‘Great Rock and Roll Pauses.’” English Journal, vol. 106, no. 6, July 2017, pp. 79–80. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2017872702&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Drew Amidei is a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri-Columbia where he received his Master's Degree. Drew studies contemporary literature and the Capitalocene. He has previously presented at Midwestern Modern Language Association and American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association.

A DIALOGUE ON ARTISTS' BOOKS: REFLECTING ON THE LIBRARIAN'S INFLUENCE ON EXPERIENCING ARTISTS' BOOKS // MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 May 2019 07:00:00 GMT

Cathleen Miller and Marieke Van Der Steenhoven discuss the artist’s book from the perspective of academic special collections librarians who are responsible for artist’s book acquisition and access at their institutions.

Marieke Van Der Steenhoven: I’d love to talk a bit about issues of access and artists’ books. Lately, I’ve been thinking about access in terms of acquisition, description, preservation, and interpretation. I’ve been tethering collection development, limitations of cataloging systems, and issues around closed stacks, reading room, and teaching to these concepts to try to better understand where we are as stewards of artists’ book collections… and where we want to go.

Cathleen Miller: I feel like we’re in this strange moment where so many of us are talking about opening up our collections, dismantling barriers to access, and making our collections more welcoming, and yet, we’re still constrained by centuries of ideas about, and practice of, library and archives staff acting as gatekeepers. It is intimidating for so many people to walk through our doors, so when they get here, I do my best to create an atmosphere of exploration with as many open doors as possible. I try to explain our often-barrier-creating descriptive tools and try to make the experience of using our collections one of joy and discovery.

Bowdoin students at a special collections pop-up event that included unfolding Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip

MV: All of Bowdoin’s artists’ books are represented in the library’s catalog – a shared database with Colby and Bates College. Browsing the catalog can be tricky and is strictly text-based, and depending on when a book was catalogued (and by whom) you can find broad variances in subject headings and key words (is it an artist book? artists books? artist’s book?). In some ways you need to know what you’re looking for – especially since the stacks (where we store the books) are closed to the public. So most often, I serve as an intermediary offering recommendations to patrons (students, faculty, staff, public).

CM: As librarians and curators, of course we impact the experience—certainly, in teaching, I am choosing what books to show because I have an idea about what the students are supposed to be looking at, but I could be completely wrong about what they need. And every class is different; every visitor to the archives is in search of something unique. I try to be a gate opener so that people can have the experience they are seeking out, but I am always the mediator of some part of the experience, which I guess we can’t really get around when we’re not providing open-stacks access.

A glimpse into the closed stacks at Bowdoin College Library’s George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives

MV: Another way we mediate experiences with artists’ books is through collection development and acquisition. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. In the early days of Bowdoin’s collection (1990s) we had a somewhat encyclopedic approach to collecting (like museums did in 19th century and general libraries did in 20th century) and for several years we’ve been transitioning towards a much more strategic collection policy. It’s interesting to see how the parameters of strategic collecting are reflecting the college’s priorities, to include artist’s book acquisition based on issues of diversity and inclusion, changing curriculum (emphasis on interdisciplinary, digital scholarship, etc.), and pedagogy.

Bowdoin College student printmakers examining book forms at a special collection pop-up Zine Fest

CM: Building our artists’ books collection has been so enjoyable. At first, I was buying from mostly artists we already had represented, but as I began to see the potential for using artists’ books as teaching tools that shaped the ways that I looked for books. Knowing that many of our students are going to become health professionals or scientists, I look for books that have some relevance to them. I am always on the lookout for books that represent health and illness experience, environmental themes, marine life—anything that bridges the gap between the arts and sciences. I like experiments with form, as well as really traditional forms for their value in teaching what a book can be.

MV: Yes, I totally agree!
CM: Also, my goodness, it is fun to spend someone else’s money! Of course, I am accountable to my collection development policy, colleagues, and institution, but within those constraints, it’s an incredible thing to be able to buy the first book someone has sold to a collection, or to support the career of a hard-working artist. This is the part that brings a lot of joy to me as a curator—knowing that when I build our collection, I am supporting a community of artists who have nurtured the culture of book-making in Maine. My budget is small, but each year, I buy a few pieces to add to my teaching palette and the collection becomes richer and more representative.

Cathleen Miller serves as curator of the Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England. She holds an MLS from Drexel University and an MA in English with a concentration in Poetry from Temple University. Cathleen’s poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies.

Marieke Van Der Steenhoven is the Special Collections Education and Outreach Librarian at Bowdoin College. Marieke holds a BA in Art History from Smith College and an MA in American and New England Studies with concentration in Public Culture and History from the University of Southern Maine.

A DIALOGUE ON ARTIST'S BOOKS: REFLECTING ON ARTIST'S BOOKS AS SITES OF ENCOUNTER AND PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS // MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 May 2019 07:00:00 GMT

Cathleen Miller and Marieke Van Der Steenhoven discuss the artist’s book from the perspective of academic special collections librarians who teach with artists' books. As a potentially transformative site of encounter, Miller and Van Der Steenhoven share their experiences and articulate the pedagogical power specific to artists' books.

Students from the University of Southern Maine engage with artists' books from the Maine Women Writers Collection

Marieke Van Der Steenhoven: What was your first experience with artists' books? What was that encounter like? How does that inform how you interact with them now?

Cathleen Miller: The first time I encountered an artist’s book was in a graduate poetry seminar. My professor took our class to the library’s special collections to look at some of their fine print books, zines, and artists' books. This was probably my first visit to an archive and it was formative as I developed my own work, and later, my career path. I remember the feeling of handling these new (to me) objects. I felt a sense of excitement, possibility, and maybe a bubbling up of joy because finally, I could see a way in which my art-making and my poetry-writing could come together. When I went back to school, I had chosen writing over art. I believed that I could only do one thing—that I had to choose between the things that made me feel most alive. That class—the two hours I spent enchanted in the archives—changed my course as a writer, and arguably changed my whole life course. I try to think of that impact when I bring artists’ books into the classroom; I try to create the possibility of an opening up into some new understanding.

MV: Similarly, I first encountered artists' books in an academic setting, in an undergraduate art history seminar. I had no idea what an artist’s book was, I had never been in a rare book room before, and I did not know what I was walking into. Week after week I returned to the rare book room to look and respond to books, thinking about form, content, and reader experience; by the end of the semester I had interacted with dozens of examples and experienced something transformative that continues to manifest in how I approach my work today. The contemplative, meditative directive wholly informed my interactions with all sorts of objects moving forward. And the framework for that class wholly influences how I teach with artists' books now. There is power in the tangible, contemplative, and exploratory experience of artists' book, and I think we’d both agree in the reading room and classroom.

Romano Hänni's Typo Bilder Buch (2012) and students from Maine College of Art with Bowdoin's book arts collection

CM: How do you teach with artists' books? How does it differ then how you teach with other materials? If there is a distinction, then why does that distinction exist?

MV: I work at a fairly small liberal arts institution and the instruction program I’ve developed emphasizes active learning for information, archival, and visual literacy. The emphasis on active learning places the student at the center of our instruction design, providing the opportunity to engage in hands-on learning to build transferable skills that directly promote students’ academic growth and development. Artist’s books are incredible teaching tools for active learning: the form demands engagement and when well executed, a work forces students to confront what preconceived notions they have about the book: its form, the act/performance of reading, and the transmission of knowledge. Artists' books inherently encourage students (and all readers) to consider how form influences content and vice versa. When I design instruction sessions around artist’s books there may be a bit of introductory material, a few words about handling, and perhaps some guiding questions – but mostly it is giving students the space and time to engage with the work.

Bowdoin College art history students engage with artists' books in Library's special collections classroom

CM: Because the college where I work is not liberal arts, but has more of a focus on science and health care, artists' books are often the means for me to get students into the archives or get the books into their classrooms. The form of the artist’s book is inherently flexible, and the visual nature of the experience provides an opening to have conversations that might not otherwise happen in an environmental science or narrative medicine class. When I bring artists' books into the classroom, I try to guide students in ways of looking at the books as objects since most of them are unfamiliar with this format. I attempt to give students context for the experience, relating it to the reason they are using objects in the classroom. I think the experience of using artists' books is different from interacting with other materials because students have less preconceived notions about what they are and what they mean. There is room for surprise and inspiration. The texts speak differently than, say, diaries or letters or novels. In my opinion, the form demands a different relationship.

MV: I agree, as a pedagogical tool, artists' books open up dialogue. I work with classes across the humanities and social sciences and use artists' books for instruction in visual arts, history, languages, literature, and sociology classes. The form disrupts or resituates conceptions, perceived narratives, and more. Because of their time-basedness and the performative aspects of reading, artists' books also offer a place to acknowledge a sensory experience that is not always present in academic discourse.

LADIES OF LETTERPRESS . . . AND MEN OF OFFSET? PART TWO // Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 07:00:00 GMT

In my previous blog post, I introduced an ongoing research project about gender and print production in artists' books. In this post, I’ll share the early results – some expected, some surprising, and some that call for additional research. (Before I dive in, let me begin with the caveat that my sample sizes are still very small and I will continue to work through many more data points for a longer analysis.)

I began by questioning whether letterpress was indeed a women-dominated area of book art (in relative terms, since around 75% of book artists are women). Having looked at books from a university collection, a dealer, a journal and a self-reported survey, I can definitively say: yes – but in relative terms, not by a huge degree. 22% of artists’ books by women were letterpress printed compared to 19% by men. Letterpress accounted for 17% of books by non-binary artists (but a sample size of only two artists makes this data inconclusive).

I also wanted to find out if offset printing was dominated by male artists. Again, yes. 11% of books by men were offset printed compared to only 6% by women. The discrepancy here is significantly larger than with letterpress – men were 74% more likely to print offset, whereas women were only 20% more likely to print letterpress than men.

So, what results weren’t expected? It turns out letterpress is overrepresented in collaborations between men and women. Based off the individual numbers, letterpress should account for around 20% of mixed-gender collaborations. Instead, a whopping 62% of collaborative books are letterpress printed. This is even more remarkable given the physical constraints of a letterpress collaboration versus processes that more easily accommodate virtual collaboration online. So what does this mean? Though possible that letterpress is either better suited for executing collaborations, or somehow better at inspiring them, I think this shows that artists choose to collaborate as a means of accessing a press. Are these collaborations the artistic equivalent of helping your friends move because you own a pick-up truck?

Access to offset printing seems to require a different strategy. Offset-printed books were much more likely to be published by an organization than those by other methods. It’s difficult to assess this factor clearly since publishers are also more likely to place books in collections and send them for review, but that only illustrates the importance of these organizations in the field. For example, 80% of the offset-printed “books reviewed” from [my current sample of] The Journal of Artists’ Books (JAB) were published by or at an organization. If the 74% disparity in adoption of offset reflects a disparity in access (as suggested by the preponderance of publishers), then this number is quite problematic.

The outsized influence of relatively few institutions (for publishing, collecting, reviewing, etc.) is an expected feature of such a young, small field. It requires a researcher to approach each question from multiple angles and look for causes and connections in unexpected places. Since I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface, and I hope to encourage others to look at the influence of social factors on the production and reception of artists’ books, I will close by examining some some of these methodological contingencies.

It is critical to understand the interrelation of technologies. I found that the University of Missouri’s collection represents letterpress much more than offset, which seems peculiar since letterpress is not a strength of the art department. However, hand paper-making is particularly strong at MU. By fulfilling their mandate to support the curriculum – in this case emphasizing books with handmade paper – MU special collections has built an impressive showcase of letterpress printing as well.

A related point is the need to understand how organizations’ policies shape the visible tip of the artists’ book iceberg (previously a field, apologies for the mixed metaphor). Collections and dealers show only what is bought, not what is made. JAB focuses on editions, and Printed Matter, for example, requires a minimum edition size of 100. I couldn’t have done the research I’ve presented thus far without catalogues, but the results of the survey I created offer a much richer view of the discipline, including the visibility of non-binary gender, and the inspiring, dizzying numbers of books created (but probably not all sold) by some practitioners. It is clear that artist’s books demand examination from various perspectives all along the communications circuit.

I am still compiling data, so please do fill out my survey if you haven’t already. Thank you to everyone one who has.

Levi Sherman is an interdisciplinary artist and designer in Columbia, Missouri.

LADIES OF LETTERPRESS . . . AND MEN OF OFFSET? // Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 07:00:00 GMT

The organization Ladies of Letterpress has the tongue in cheek tagline, “dedicated to the proposition that a woman’s place is in the print shop.” My involvement in the book arts community has given me the impression (no pun intended) that letterpress is indeed a woman-dominated area. I’ve decided to see if the numbers confirm that perception, and compare the number of artists’ books letterpress and offset printed by gender. My preliminary research at University of Missouri’s library does show that letterpress is more common in artists’ books by women than men. I will discuss those results and methods in greater detail in my next blog post, but the basic approach is simple – counting artists’ books in collections, dealer/retailer websites and reviews, and noting the gender of the artist and the book’s print production method. I also hope you will help me with this research, which I’ll address at the end of this post. First, a few questions.

Why does this matter?

Gendered presumptions could limit women’s access to, or interest in, offset printing, causing artists to miss out on large press runs, low unit cost, and photographic reproduction. After all, the Ladies of Letterpress tagline was aimed at very real and recent pushback that women artists faced in this field. Additionally, if qualities of letterpress, for example, are theorized reductively in gendered terms, we run the risk of missing those qualities in other processes or failing to notice other qualities and potentialities in letterpress. These concerns also affect the reception (criticism, scholarship, collecting, etc.) of both processes. Gender-biased reception comes, sadly, as no surprise, but a more subtle concern brings me to my next question.

Why am I writing about this on the Book Art Theory Blog?

I believe gendered theorizing of print production may lead critics and scholars to attribute aesthetic considerations to aspects of an artist’s book that are the result of pragmatic, economic factors. Take, for example, the association between letterpress and the oft-spoken phrase “the materiality of language.” Presumably the handling of type, the physical formation of words, make letterpress the perfect tool for exploring this concept. But the materiality of language has as much to do with the fact that written language has a visual form; that it is always also a picture. This important idea can be explored as readily through offset as letterpress, so might the appeal of letterpress lay outside aesthetics?

No doubt any medium or process will have unique features, or a combination of features, but I hope the brief example above shows the value of considering what else may be at play (and at stake). Access to studios and residencies, publishers, training, mentorship and, of course, money all play a role. These elements of production may be especially relevant to letterpress and offset, which have made their way to book arts from the male-dominated commercial printing industry. Museums, galleries, dealers, retailers, collectors, critics and scholars also bring with them gender disparities that I believe must be examined along with purely aesthetic interpretations of an artist’s work. Other studies have examined gender in print production more broadly (like the 2013 APA “State of Letterpress Questionnaire,” created by Kseniya Thomas), and I believe an examination of letterpress and offset within artists’ books specifically will reveal instructive similarities and differences.

Why now?

Neither offset nor letterpress are new to the field, and of course artists all along the gender spectrum have made important contributions in both mediums. However, a look at the gendered distribution of print production more broadly is important at a time when Risograph, print on demand and other technologies are reshaping the field. It is important to understand who has access to production technologies and what systems grant that access, explicitly or through market forces. I’ve focused initially on letterpress and offset for two reasons. First, they are commercial processes that retain gender dynamics from their industrial roots. Second, offset is the new letterpress: cheap presses are plentiful as print shops scrap their offset duplicators for photocopiers. Simple computer-to-plate systems eliminate darkroom pre-press just as photopolymer brought letterpress into the digital world. These presses are powerful tools in the hands of an artist, and book arts will benefit if all artists can adopt and evolve offset the way women have letterpress.

How can you help?

If you make artists’ books, please take the time to fill out this anonymous survey. I’ve listed various print production methods so users can simply enter the numbers of books they have created using each. Users will also write in their gender identity. My survey encompasses all manner of print production methods. My initial analysis will focus on letterpress and offset for the reasons I’ve listed above, but I hope that myself and others will return to this data to learn more about trends in other print production methods. Feedback is welcome. My next post will discuss the challenges with my other research methods, primarily quantitative bibliography, so know that your participation is very valuable.

Note: Thanks to India Johnson for bringing the “State of Letterpress Questionnaire” to my attention. The results can be seen here.

Levi Sherman is an interdisciplinary artist and designer in Columbia, Missouri.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! // Suzanne Powney

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 07:00:00 GMT

In the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida shooting, artists looked for a way to make a difference in the conversation taking place across our nation. Ellen Knudson of Crooked Letter Press, Gainesville, FL and Lisa Beth Robinson of Somnambulist Tango Press, Greenville, NC organized the Enough is Enough! print portfolio collaboration to benefit Everytown for Gun Safety. The portfolio is a current example of book art as “an agent of social change,” to quote Johanna Drucker (The Century of Artists’ Books). Everytown is a movement of Americans working together to end gun violence and build safer communities. Gun violence touches every town in America. This group seeks to take common-sense steps that will save lives and make a change as everyday Americans continue plans towards a safer future.

This series of prints works to bring the conversation to the forefront. Examples of prints that are striking and cause heartache include Jessica Peterson’s type only solution outlining a child’s early years in a timeline and how long, in contrast, the shooting took place. The timeline is heartbreaking in its minute details of motherhood, our worries, our fears, our responsibilities, all contrasting to those few seconds of a failed system. We all face risks every day with our children and her piece speaks to the profound loss when a child dies.

A piece printed by Eileen Wallace equates dots on the page to the number of shootings in the United States each year; it also relates the cranks of the press to the number of people killed between January 1, 2013 and February 15, 2018. The visual of the dots and their relationship to the labor required to produce the print leads us to imagine the repetitive motion, almost like a ticking rhythm of a clock.

These complex relationships of image and content are in contrast to the simplicity of other prints in the portfolio. In “HOME GROWN HATE,” Jarred Elrod presents the graphic symbol of a baby in an American flag holding a gun, which points to what we hold as a right from birth, the right to bear arms. The image of this right, placed in the hands of a babe, jars the viewer. Another strong print is by the artist Denise Bookwalter, in which she shows her two young daughters alone in space, at the bottom of which is the call for gun reform: “PROTECT OUR CHILDREN NOT GUNS.” Bookwalter, also in Florida, shared the loss of innocence for the students of Parkland on February 14, 2018. They will never be able to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day again. The pain of this date will be seared in their cultural awareness, as is 9/11 for all Americans. These images challenge our idea of who we are fighting for and how the future will be affected.

The poetic simplicity of the prints by Mary C. Bruno, Jessica Spring, and Dan Elliott are shown below. The target, the color red, and school-lined paper are all symbols we are familiar with and point to the need for change. The colors and minimal elements of these pages and others express a powerful call, “#NOTONEMORE.” The text on the print that begins “You must get an education” suggests a reality that is as true today as in our history. The straightforward “FUCK YOUR G*NS” with a pointed finger speaks of the frustration of nothing changing to prevent these tragedies and to the fact that g*ns are now the dirty word in our divisive culture. All of these pieces speak to the cycle we are in of accepting gun violence as a part of our modern world.

The print by Mare Blocker with an image of Emma Gonzalez below Sister Mary Corita’s quote draws on hope in the darkness for those living through the experience of losing friends and family at the hands of a gunman. Protests and lack of action in the face of devastating loss continue to be a part of the national dialogue. A work by Andrew Huot with a map of guns in the shape of the United States with red dots representing mass shootings in the recent past and a Edna St. Vincent Millay poem points to our becoming desensitized as the number of shootings continues to grow. All of these voices honor the dead and support an organization that works to implement meaningful change.

The creators of the idea for Enough is Enough! print portfolio created a strong call for gun control. Lisa Beth Robinson of Somnambulist Tango Press calls for “BAN THE 2^ND” as a statement we should all consider. The right to bear arms was created in a very different time and place than where we are now as we shoot our fellow citizens. The work by Ellen Knudson of Crooked Letter Press shows the path that has resulted in America’s being compared to a war zone and the sad reality of the loss of the lives of innocents of all ages, from all walks of life. Both raise the question of why we are not doing more to make gun regulations a priority.

The techniques in the print portfolio include classic letterpress with text, linoleum cut, and screen printing. The participating artists are professionals in the field of book arts: printers, binders, educators, and fine artists. This portfolio is our offering to the future of common-sense gun safety and regulation of assault and military-style weapons. The portfolio is introduced by this cogent statement: “As artists and printers, we created this print exchange to visually address the issue of gun violence, the sale of assault weapons in the United States, and the devastation and fear the problem has brought upon the citizens of this country.” All profits from the sale of the portfolio (through Vamp and Tramp) will go to Everytown for Gun Safety.

Participating artists: Hannah Batsel; Mare Blocker — The MKimberly Press; Denise Bookwalter — Small Craft Advisory Press; Brian Borchardt & Jeffrey Morin — Seven Hills Press & Sailor Boy Press; Mary C. Bruno — Bruno Press; Dan Elliott — Pieces of Craft; Bridget Elmer — Flatbed Splendor Press; Jarred Elrod — Jet Pilot Designs; Caren Heft — Arcadian Press; Josh Hockensmith — Blue Bluer Books; Andrew Huot — Big River Bindery; Molly Kempson — Spotty Boy Press; Ellen Knudson — Crooked Letter Press; Craig Malmrose — Trade Union Press; Emily Martin — Naughty Dog Press; Penny McElroy — Five & Dime Press; Jessica Peterson — Paper Souvenir Press; Lisa Beth Robinson — Somnambulist Tango Press; Jessica Spring — Springtide Press; Ashley Taylor; Emily Tipps — High5 Press; Eileen Wallace — Mile Wide Press.

Suzanne Powney is a book artist and letterpress printer, founder of BlackDog Letterpress in 2004. She explores themes of tactility, color, and pattern in her work. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Mississippi State University.

A POST-DIGITAL BOOK ARTS PROGRAM // Bill Hanscom

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 08:00:00 GMT

As the coordinator of a book arts BFA program, I have recently been contemplating the possibilities for a kind of program that focuses primarily on the exploration of “the book” as it is currently situated in our post-digital world. The term “post-digital,” as I am employing it, suggests that digital technology is now so commonplace that it no longer holds the revolutionary position it once did. Consequently, a post-digital book arts program would be one in which print and digital media co-exist, no longer forced into a narrative that pits one against the other. Such a program would, necessarily, acknowledge the traditional practices of the field all the while scrutinizing the roles that they once held (or continue to hold), considering what it means to make books in an ever-shifting “now.” Such a program questions whether the “book arts” of decades past are still — and should remain — those of today. The following is a brief sketch of what some aspects of a post-digital book arts program might entail.

Thinking about this hypothetical program provides the opportunity to consider which long-standing aspects of book arts education are still relevant and which might be de-emphasized. Doing so might allow for the inclusion of some of the activities and theories circulating within adjacent fields (design, literature, publishing, digital art, &c.) that have yet to widely break into the conversation within the greater book arts community.

As much as feasible, I am curious to see a program which attempts to teach “the book” as a subject/framework dispassionate about specific media. Greater emphasis would be placed on exploring and developing a conscious and practical understanding of the fundamental conceptual underpinnings of the book, in particular those that can be observed across multiple media. Students would investigate how to enhance, combine, and otherwise manipulate these concepts to enact an idea in book form, seeking to answer that most elemental question: what do books do and how? Such resources as Keith Smith’s Structure of the Visual Book and Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read (which represent more serviceable inclusions within a less-than-robust selection of literature) could help provide a foundation of theory for such investigations and the development of a pedagogical approach.

No medium, material, or process would be considered implicit in the creation of a book within a post-digital program. Other than the elemental framework of concepts that manifest in books, such a program should take very little as given when drawing upon precedent established by myriad book arts practices and pedagogies. A “media agnostic” approach to book arts education would give latitude for decisions of media and material to arise from the development of concept and content rather than being assumed or assigned. This would require an active effort to avoid prescription and encourage students to explore media of interest outside of the context of a core book arts curriculum (a potential challenge for programs not affiliated with institutions that provide a broader arts curriculum). Additionally, it would be advantageous to advocate for the use of widely accessible media in order to help students maintain continuity in their studio practices after graduation without the need to adapt to losing access to processes with high economic and logistical barriers to entry.

A post-digital book arts program would promote active engagement in the flourishing discourse and activities taking place around the field of publishing (“traditional,” “experimental,” and as “artistic practice”). Students would be asked to think with new depth about what it means to “create a public” through a work — “the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to [works] and their circulation” [1]. They would also be encouraged to develop practices that could nimbly participate in emerging spheres of activity such as “urgent publishing” [2] or “publishing as intervention” [3]. Practitioners and theorists such as Silvio Lorusso, Paul Soulellis, Eva Weinmayr, Temporary Services, and Publication Studio, among others, would provide groundwork from which students could launch new approaches.

In this context, the weight of the concept of the edition might be lightened, making it no longer an exercise in multiplication and the attainment of technical uniformity, but embracing it as a “spatially discontinuous object” [4] shared by a public (a public which, again, is created by its circulation). Along with this, room might also be made for the version, a concept from the digital world, through which an idea can be given the time and freedom to emerge and evolve, and the hybrid or differential work [5], where content exists within a constellation of digital and analog formats with no one format being definitive.

This is by no means an exhaustive consideration of what might be possible should a program adopt a post-digital approach to book arts. Where any of the above is already happening in current programs, I am very much interested to hear how it is being approached in the classroom through exercises and projects and articulated in pedagogical discussions. That said, aspects of this post-digital philosophy have started to be implemented within the book arts program at Montserrat College of Art [6, 7] as we examine our curriculum and our vision for the type of graduate we would like to see emerge from the program.

References

1. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics: Zone Books, 2002, 66.

2. Soulellis, Paul. “Urgency Lab,” https://soulellis.com/teaching/urgencylab/index.html

3. Weinmayr, Eva. “Publishing as Intervention,” https://fk.hfk-bremen.de/eva-weinmayr-publishing-as-intervention/

4. Van Laar, Timothy. “Printmaking: Editions as Artworks.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 14, no. 4 (October 1980): 99.

5. Perloff, Marjorie. “Digital Poetics and the Differential Text,” http://marjorieperloff.com/essays/digital-poetics-and-the-differential-text/

6. Hanscom, Bill. “Approaching the Book” [Course Syllabus] http://bit.ly/2UaJMVQ

7. Hanscom, Bill. “Independent Book Publishing & Production” [Course Syllabus] https://bit.ly/2IzzYDr

Bill Hanscom is an assistant professor at Montserrat College of Art where he serves as coordinator for the BFA book arts program, and a conservation technician for special collections at the Weissman Preservation Center within Harvard Library. He also has meandering and sporadic studio, writing, and research practices.

ON THE THRESHOLD: ENTERTAINING SPECIFICITY (PART 2) // H.R. Buechler

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 08:00:00 GMT

Before the end of my last post, I brought up the example of an artistic (or say: creative) versus scholarly (or say: intellectual) approach to knowing and thinking through a concept. This is because I believe there is an inherent tension between these two approaches. A long time cheerleader for the research-based practice, I have always argued neither approach should be valued more than the other; that both provide the reader, viewer, et cetera, a specific pathway to knowledge. However, as I also mentioned in the last post, there are certain instances or contexts where one’s use may be more appropriate, or better serve a certain purpose. [1]

Context can be understood as conceptually related to frame, or the process of framing. [2] In making such an association, context understood as synonymous to frame may (at least semantically) allude to a structure. Though, as relative terms, I think this requires some tweaking. Rather than align context directly with structure, I would say: the integrity (structural; framework) of a given concept varies depending on the particular context (frame) in which it is encountered.

The reason I make this point is because I associate structural integrity with the previous quality of concreteness as one of foundation. The context dictates the stability of a particular concept’s foundation. This noted, I will situate context as separate from the other qualities in the list I made in Part 1. What is the context then? Or, what is/are the frame/s I am evaluating?

Book and publication are two frameworks, whose frames overlap. This implies a non-mutual exclusivity, and a bit of entanglement. While they do share something, there is also all of that which they do not share. It is not that a book is a type of publication, because it is published. It is a type of publication when it is published. Simply put: not all publications are books, and not all books are publications. Of course, the question is then: why does this matter?

I’ll return to the personal baggage I bring to the table. As of late, I have found myself growing more and more fickle with the increasingly flimsy framework of “publishing” or the “publication” as/in artistic practice. This fickleness is located within myself, and my work, which evokes this nomenclature. It has occurred to me that “publishing as artistic practice,” [3] at least stateside, as a conceptual framework, feels to have been haphazardly slapped onto the already shaky framework of book in an effort to theoretically expand the book. Yet, in this way, it’s a retrofit—and if the previous statement is taken as a given, the framework of book falls within publication and not the other way around. [4]

This retrofit is well-intentioned (from the outset it appears laden with the potential to help define a new contemporary field!), but it has been launched out of a thing of which it already was a part, and to be more of a “catch-all” for whatever else is out there that we want to account for—or bring in to our field. Poetically, the book is increasingly unstable (nod to Aaron Cohick here), but at the end of the day, when it comes down to types, the book and a long list of other material publications (see screenshots taken from Wikipedia below for quick reference) are what they are. What is the context for publishing, for the publication, in/as artists’ books? My belief is that by bracketing things and activities that may best be understood strictly as publication arts under book arts is a considerable misstep.

Is there a point when we have taken too much “poetic license”— when the affective elasticity stretches to a point of simply snapping? I would argue, yes. And especially yes if that which it has stretched to, it is actually a part of? Is it really that horrible to say, this is something else and should be stated as such?

While art may be considered most powerful because or when it challenges established and preconceived notions, ideas, values, etc., within the context of “art practices” and writing about “art practices” the artist’s book, and now publication (which, is not a new phenomena at all!), may be looking like the end of a well-played game of Jenga. The fact is that our understanding of book arts is ultimately tethered to our understanding of the the book. This, however, cannot be applied to the publication. (See Fig. 1 below.)

Fig.1: elaborating on significance of types as formats within the process of contextualization

It is a matter of destabilizing the structural integrity of the object as a concept through non-specificity (or elasticity); frame within a frame ad infinitum. We understand the history of the book, but do we fully grasp the multi-nuanced complexity of the history of the/a publication(s) in such a way to bend it? Especially if we consider the implications of my referring to a pluralized thing—“a/the publication(s)”—it alludes and points to multiple formats, or sub-types, and a multiplicity of histories. (See reference again Fig. 1, and see Fig. 2 below.)

Fig. 2: screenshots from Wikipedia for examples of specific types of publication

This does not discount that some publishable formats are also, of course, direct descendants of the book, or that they too were designed to perform similar tasks and share similar qualities. But the fact is they are different, and have a specific history and materiality that should be accounted for as they become mobilized within our curricula and our practices. To distinguish between doesn’t hurt book arts, but may actually allow a/the publication(s) to offer what it has promised—perhaps even more—and actually provide the book with more robustness afforded by a critical untangling.

I will continue this discussion in my September blog post.

Notes:

[1] Appropriateness should be understood as “more suitable to the given circumstances” and does not necessarily indicate a higher value.

[2] This is specifically in reference to: Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986). Frame analysis or frame theory is a social theory research method much utilized by communication studies. It is particularly apt to consider here, given the media involved in publication share the common purpose of communicating, and are inherently social. Further, if one of the draws of publication as an artistic framework is its quality of social performativity and engagement, it would be useful to use in more critical application. Here it is in reference, but as a more complex method, is not implemented; ‘context’ and ‘frame’ will suffice.

[3] See: Annette Gilbert and Hannes Bajohr, Publishing as Artistic Practice (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016).

[4] An example of this retrofit can be found in comparing the Clive Phillpot’s Artists Books Diagram to its 2013 revision by Kochi Kione (HalfLetterpress).

ON THE THRESHOLD: ENTERTAINING SPECIFICITY (PART 1 OF 2) // H.R. Buechler

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 08:00:00 GMT

There is a door. The door is of worn wood, maybe oak, with a brass handle tarnished from years of turns and turnings and entries and exits. This door is much like many other doors which line a familiar hallway that so many have passed in, out, down, up, through—generally about.

Of note is the location of this handle on what is generally understood by the occupants to be an interior.

It is a doorway.

Of note is the relation of this handle on this door to handles on other doors facing this interior that has seen nothing but a continual growth of occupants, say luminous beings, of which are found amassing around one particular door. Or another door.

There, is another door.

There, is another doorway. A light creeps in from just below the sheet metal mounted upon its base, a metal lined with rubber stripping, which here, seems less tight, perhaps slightly ill-fitting. This light is glimmering, bouncing off another piece of material, call it a composite metal, situated on the floor just beneath the aforementioned strip said to be ill-affixed to the door above.

Strip parallel to strip, ill-fittings, light seeping—qualities of distinction. This secondary metal, the composite, the retrofit, defines (in some way) a here-ness or there-ness, as light crosses the gap—a threshold—between metals, between above and below, now and again, and this light juts wildly into a void of unknown expansiveness.

There is a light crossing the threshold.

There are lights seeking to cross the threshold.

There are lights. Occupants. Beings—

Particles—scattered into this great unknown, that must be somewhat known for them to find themselves nestling in like lights in the sky waiting for a world to be shaped around them or to shape that world as they accumulate. Yet, part of them remain just on the other side, on the interior, perhaps penetrating more well traversed doorways, fully crossing their thresholds of brass, lead, and gold and resting in their well structured exteriors.

But still, for whatever reason, there is an increase in activity at this particular threshold, where we are, in the present-past, forever unable to self-actualize in an always unraveling conceptual future. We should think of this activity as an amassment of luminescence waiting to be heated, rather than water at a dam, as these two phenomena are not synonymous; they are qualitatively distinct.

So, my question is: what is keeping us from fully crossing this threshold? Is it a matter of articulation?

It would seem only appropriate to continue to appropriate the use of interiors (their implicit exteriors) and doorways, passageways, openings, and expansiveness, or well-traversed and well-defined, and fracturing or fractured, and light as devices to begin to, well, open the floor on a subject that I find of acute concern: contemporary artists books [versus/and/or?] publications—what they are and perhaps what they are not, and where the blurring between them actually occurs.

Despite how ill-defined the book may be and consequently equally ill-defined the artists book may be [1], everyone who works with these “objects” (here: this can be as much a physical thing as it can be a conceptual framework) seem to have their own understanding for what it is and how to identify it. And, the writer is no exception. In this foray, exposé, meandering—me/wandering—it may just be better to agree (best we can) that within the realm of artistic activity (or matters of aesthetic production) sometimes we simply do not have the right word (rather, terms). Further, one could suggest that to produce from, within, and outside of the multitude of disciplinary fields that funnel in and out of the artist book honestly may not require any sort of unified concreteness at all. Since, if there is something to be seen as concrete, it will simply be challenged.

As stated, the writer is no exception to carrying a set of predefined notions.

The bulk of my current research activities over the past 3 years has been concerned with (the) publication, and not exclusively as a zone of artistic activity, but by its significance in the history of and current employment in communication media. At present, this work is positioned as a matter of classification [2]. While my artistic practice is crucial to understanding the affective elasticity of any particular concept, I want to acknowledge that this artistic-forward methodology has its limits. At a certain point, some concepts necessitate the restrictions and rigor of traditional scholarship. For the purpose of this series, I will be focusing on and utilizing the artistic (in this case, poetic) method in an effort to highlight its limits so that I may better argue for the unsung potentials of specificity.

So, let us return to the preceding poetic foray. At the same time, keep in mind the previous poetic forays it embodies. In doing so, we can begin to draw out some similarities:

+ an understanding of a space, as constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, imagined, etc.

+ an understanding of a form, as mutually and non-mutually exclusive from a space, constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, imaged, etc.

+ an understanding of parts, as that which construct and are deconstructed through restructuring, structuring, and imagining, etc.

+ an understanding of process, whereby parts, form, and space gain relativity through physical and/or mental handling.

+ an understanding of activity, as a quality of process(ing), but also that which manifests beyond an initial making (or handling), and may better account for the thing-constructed’s actual lifecycle and should be thoroughly considered when…we think of understanding the context where all qualities engage.

I would like to instead return to the supposition that “to produce from, within, and outside of the multitude of disciplinary fields that funnel in and out of the artist’s book may not require any sort of unified concreteness at all.” In this supposition we can highlight the word concreteness as a quality of a foundation. This allows us to first: see them as relatable to one another, and second: relating to the previous qualities of something constructed (form/space) of particular parts by way of specific process that involve a certain activity manifesting in a given environment (context). The tethering of these qualities is significant. The quality of their tethering is contingent on their context.

Context, as we know, is everything.

Note

[1] I encourage anyone to visit the entry for ‘book’ in the appropriate volume of the complete Oxford English Dictionary, and would also encourage one to look at ‘publish’ or ‘publication’ moving forward.

[2] If you ask Google to define classification you’ll get: “the action or process of classifying something according to shared qualities or characteristics.” In my case, I am interested in terms as classification frameworks and the degrees of agency these frameworks afford the qualities they contain.

THE ARTIST BOOK & ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVE: THE CAVE PROTECTION AT OF 2013 // Emily Tipps

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 08:00:00 GMT

On page one, Michelle Ray’s book The Cave Protection Act of 2013 defines the cave as “[a]n empty space, void, receptacle, musty smelling and awaiting deposit of trash or carcass; hiding space for weapons, unsent love letters; glory hole; home to…animals obliged to live underground.” The book concerns the decades-burning underground anthracite coal mine fire in Centralia, PA.While a plethora of popular media have addressed the fire and relocation of most of the borough’s residents (including a This American Life podcast and a feature-length documentary), Ray’s work slips genre to engage the calamity and peculiarity of the Centralia fire via language, form, materiality, production method, and typography.

The book’s simple structural design generates a surprisingly complex object. Four accordions of varying panel width are stacked then sewn through two opposing valleys, creating a layered V-shape in the center flanked by four pages on either side. Each page is successively wider than the next, which adds to the layered effect. The form speaks immediately to its subject; the reader peers into the curious formation of the folded depths as into a miniature cave. Holes in the pages lend additional perspective complexity and affect the movement of light and shadow through the textblock.

Printed on a neutral, machine-made paper, The Cave Protection Act bears some resemblance to a government document. The tiered pages allow for semicircular thumb tabs to indicate sections. Closed, it resembles a pile of papers atop an institutional desk. But the trappings of officialdom are gestures, rather than an overarching conceit—pointing to the role of governmental agencies—broadly with regards to land protection and more specifically to events in Centralia—from the beginnings of the fire in a mine-pit-turned-landfill to the declaration of eminent domain that relocated its residents.

The layout supports two textual modes. The first part, in landscape format, presents the language of the titular “Act,” which might be described as poetic legalese. The Act is broken into numbered sections and lettered subsections. Pale green text in a larger point size floats on two pages, offering speluncean didacticisms: “The cave should pose a question, rather than an answer,” and, “There needs to be room in the cave for contemplation.”

The second part, in portrait format, has a lyrical voice, loose poetic structure, and reduced ironic distance. The alternating orientation requires constant rotation of the book literally to consider the problem from multiple perspectives.The divisions between parts, however, are porous (like the textblock and the ground in Centralia); the intimate voice of part two seeps into the bureaucratic language of part one; for example, from section 2A, “No person shall be held liable for injuries. The older I get, the closer the acts of laughing and crying become.”

Ray’s production methods also engage her concepts. Laser engraving leaves a trace via the removal of material, visually supporting the idea that “there is meaning and identity to be found in natural erasure” (sec. 1A). Laser cutting leaves a signature burn; in this case the laser is both an efficient tool and a reference to the fire burning underground.

The imagery was created using 3D imaging software. Its technical acuity and fineness of detail resemble an architect’s plan. Laser-etched circles and lines radiate as abstract diagrams. Line drawings of identical houses interact—scattered and sparse, then crowded and overlapping. The forms are skeletal, non-specific representations, whose meaning changes based on their relationships to other house forms.

Section 1C reads, “Identity starts with the home. A home will remind you of who you are, ground you in your you-ness. Place is her anchor. In the absence of a physical home, would-be dwellers begin to ask the real questions of their place.” This speaks to the impact of the underground fire on community in the literal quagmire of Centralia. Simply structured and thoughtfully designed and produced, The Cave Protection Act quietly “poses question[s], rather than…answer[s].” It doesn’t explain the origin or the science of the fire; the methods tried and money spent fighting it; nor does it retell the narrative of the political turmoil and conflict among and surrounding the community. It subtly alludes to Centralia and the strangeness of a particular environmental reality precipitated by human land use amid a broader exploration of home, community, absence, and presence.

This blog post is adapted from a paper presented at the twelfth biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.

Photos taken by the author in the Rare Book Department of Special Collections at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library.

Emily Tipps is Program Manager and Assistant Librarian (Lecturer) at the Book Arts Program at the University of Utah, and the proprietor of High5 Press.

THE ARTIST BOOK & ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVE: FRAGMENT BY FRAGMENT // EMILY TIPPS

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 08:00:00 GMT

Where strictly textual books must always grapple with the challenges of conveying meaning through abstract signs, the multi-faceted artist’s book can employ the visual, tactile, and inter-mediated to engage its concepts. Artists’ books—through engagement with materials, structure, production, scale, action, text, texture, color, and image—are well positioned to participate in environmental narratives and dialogs. As (typically) sequential, book forms are ideal to render or interpret environmental change. Lin Charlston’s 2011 book Fragment by Fragment: Signs of the Peat Bog Disperse into the Wind navigates a particular instance of environmental destruction using unique visual-textual methods.

Fragment was shown in an exhibition “in which six artists responded to a damaged peat bog in the Black Mountains of Wales.” The book acknowledges its materiality immediately: “Main book constituents: cellulose, lignin, lipids, dyes. Main peat constituents: cellulose, lignen, humic breakdown substances, lipids.” Here, Charlston effectively asserts that the book and bog are materially analogous. Notably, the book does not wait to deliver concept; this assertion appears in the front matter alongside the standard bibliographic information.

The bulk of Fragment is digitally printed in Peatbog, a font Charlston designed for the project.She describes the process in her artist’s statement: “I made hundreds of drawings of tiny fragments of peat. En masse, the drawings were transformed into a written language, obscure and unfathomable, reminiscent of Xu Bing's Book from the Sky.” Unlike Bing’s unreadable asemic marks, Charlston’s text is obscure but decipherable. Its legibility is challenging enough that the casual reader might give up. (It took me an hour to decipher a paragraph, so I was relieved to find the same text repeated throughout the book—the same landscape marked over time.)

The book is bound as a pamphlet, opening into a 21” x 6” landscape format, upon which the erosion of the literal landscape of the peat bog is enacted. Two tissue end-leaves, in shades of green, overlay the first page of text. The tissue is fragile like the flora blanketing the peat bog.

On the first spread, three lines of text in a clear roman typeface provide the ecological baseline of the peat bog narrative. These lines are printed in green and brown—representing the “coverlet of sphagnum moss, brown moss, grasses, and other specialized damp-loving flora” they describe. Below this are substrata of text, printed in black in the Peatbog font. This visual matter triples as language, micro-image (derived from drawings of peat fragments), and macro-image—an abstracted, representational cutaway of the bog.

The second spread makes a radical visual shift: a photographic image of a landscape horizon and sky, printed in fiery orange and purple, bleeds off the edges of the page. The landscape appears charred and the atmosphere tumultuous. The saturated color, realism, and singularity of this image mark it as an important moment—the damaging fire referred to in the text, an event that precipitates a turn in narrative and ecological momentum.

Ten subsequent spreads depict the systematic erosion of the landscape, with “signs” migrating from the tail to the head and off the page. The strata gradually deteriorate, with the final page being nearly blank. Aesthetically, there is nothing bothersome about this dissolution; on the contrary, as an abstract image the progress is pleasing—the pages well balanced with a predictable, almost meditative pace.

The anxiety of the piece stems from the tension between the work’s aesthetic values and its environmental critique. The peat (the signs, the meaning) is a resource. The difficulty of decipherment implies that attentiveness, research, and patience are key components in negotiating the complex of cultural, economic, and scientific factors affecting this resource. The problem can only be understood through careful study; in the meantime, the resource—wherein lies the very potential for understanding—dwindles.

Though the outlook appears bleak, a reader might encounter the turning of the final page with optimism. Following a solid black end-leaf, two fringes of delicate green emerge. The tabs of the tissue paper blanketing the initial page of the book could be simply a structural necessity, but the meticulousness of the book’s design suggest something more: new growth on the scarred bog. Furthermore, the repetition of the title at the end of the text suggests the book may be read backwards, reversing the erosion.

This blog post is adapted from a paper presented at the twelfth biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.

Photos taken by the author in the Rare Book Department of Special Collections at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library.

Emily Tipps is Program Manager and Assistant Librarian (Lecturer) at the Book Arts Program at the University of Utah, and the proprietor of High5 Press.

MAKING BOOKS BY Hand, Part III: Theory of Practice continued // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Dec 2018 08:00:00 GMT

Nine more thoughts on sewing books, prompted by sewing nine more books:

1. Each punched hole is an opportunity for engagement.

2. Because of this openness to possibility, each hole is vulnerable.

3. But each module of the book must allow itself to be vulnerable in order to bind together. The alternative is that each component retains its integrity and its safety, but is rendered incapable of permanently bonding with other components.

4. 6 holes per signature and cover, 2 covers, 6 folded signatures, 48 holes. 6 folded signatures yield 24 pages each,144 pages. Numerology. No wait, that’s math.

5. I realize that really what I am doing is sewing centers together.

6. Sometimes tugging snugs up the thread just so, correcting a slack hand. Sometimes tugging tears the paper, or breaks the thread, or pulls the back cover up over the last signature.

7. A radical educator friend, Jamie Munkatchy, taught me this binding, 15 years ago, at an informal skillshare at Booklyn. We were all sitting around the table, in the evening, early summer. She had just learned the binding herself, probably from Christopher Wilde, not very long before she taught me. Christopher had no doubt already taught it to at least 200 people, likely more. And someone — Walter Hamady, probably — had taught Christopher maybe a dozen years before that evening. And someone else at some point had taught Walter — who would this have been? do you know? — and so on, and on and on, and onwards back. Linking. And onwards, linking, forwards: so far, I’ve taught this binding to perhaps 50, possibly 100 people. And if some of them have taught someone… the whole lineage starts looking like this chart of cat reproduction.

8. The last thing I do in sewing is hide where I began.

9. All collated copies sewn, now it is time for the guillotine. Each book is stiff with folded paper before it is trimmed. Once its edges have been chopped off, the book becomes soft and yielding, opening easily anywhere.

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993. She is co-founder of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA), and Associate Professor and Chair of Graphic Design at SASD, University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut.

MAKING BOOKS BY HAND, PART II: THEORY OF PRACTICE // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 08:00:00 GMT

In an earlier post, I wrote about the experience of binding a difficult edition. In my struggle, I was in a state of acute attention, but also worry and fuss.

Now the bookbinding task is quite different: 200 copies of a link stitch, 6 signature, 144 page, softcover binding. This is the second printing I have made of this book, which documents 40 years of Bloodroot, a feminist vegetarian restaurant and bookstore in Bridgeport, CT. Years before this, I’ve sewn six or seven hundred zines with this multi-signature binding. With some copy soon I will be binding this style for the thousandth time. Happily, there’s no worry or fuss. But there’s also much less attention.

The task for today is paying attention.

In a recent post, India Johnson wrote: “intensive craft training can provide us with the ability to articulate the workings of embodied cognition. It allows us to assert, from the authority of our own experiences, that how things are made matters—that meaning does not exist separately from the means of production. This is especially relevant for book artists with a foot in [the] contemporary art world, who may need to contextualize their craft practice for an audience in that sphere.”

As an artist, designer, printer, binder, and publisher “with a foot in [the] contemporary art world,” handwork is very important to me, a defining characteristic of my work. It is, in some way, always part of the subject: part of the content. But in this particular instance, handwork is also written into the very book I’m making.

In her essay “On Persistence and Feminism,” Selma Miriam, the founder of Bloodroot, writes:

“For sustenance, for the sacred in today’s world, modern women may be able to find resources in traditional women’s work. These forms of labor use very simple technologies which require patience and a lifetime of study. In our industrialized world there are still a few places for a gatherer of wild herbs to go, and there are still basketmakers. Some women learn to be potters, some tend gardens and there has been a return to spinning and weaving. And women have always been knitters.”

And she also writes:

“We want to lead our lives so that what we make of what we find on earth is magic. The way to find it is in the ritual of patiently doing, over and over, what is required of the work. Frequently a knitter is asked, “How long does it take to do that?” though that question never arises in regard to jogging, movie-going, or mall shopping.”

So here I am: patiently doing, over and over, what is required.

I’m writing during an afternoon of sewing twelve copies: words tangled up in the making.

I stitch in and out of the present. What’s for dinner. Next summer’s plans. As with meditation, I redirect focus: back to my hands, back to this book. Unlike David Pye’s “crafstmanship of risk,” the heightened attention which I feel whenever there’s glue, a non-adhesive sewn binding has an ease and a spaciousness to it. It’s portable; I bind in lots of places that aren’t the studio. In the passenger seat on a long drive, crosslegged in my living room; on a train; at my desk at work during office hours. Now at the dining room table with the laptop open, a cup of tea, the cat sleeping on the tea towel, the late afternoon sun angling in, the day after a holiday. Often when I’m sewing I keep a notebook at hand to jot down what is loosened in my mind by my hands. Sometimes I listen to audiobooks or podcasts or the radio; other times music. This afternoon I’m sitting with the work, typing into the laptop when a thought strikes me.

In this binding, what comes before is foundational for what comes next. The sixth signature is the first to be sewn, and it is supported by a single long stitch through the back softcover. Each signature is hooked into the signature before it, moving from the back of the book forward to the front cover. One long thread, eight times the height of the book, unites it.

The rhythm is inside, outside, inside, outside.

But Inside is always creeping along the gutter. And Outside is a quick dip down, then back up and in.

A finished book has many openings, but in this phase of its development I only visit the center of each signature.

Due to the uncut folded sheets, most openings remain inaccessible until they are chopped free by the guillotine.

I think of:

The hand at the heart of craft

Craft as spiritual practice

Craft as socially engaged art

Craft as performance

And these ideas resonate within as I work.

I am reminded of the enormous linked sewn bindings of Margot Ecke, where the book becomes an impossibly serpentine object. I imagine all 400 of the books from these two printings sewn together. I search for an image of Ecke’s book, fruitlessly, online.

I come back to my own sewing.

A stitching together, a binding, a fastening, a linking:

“Old English bindan ‘to tie up with bonds’ (literally and figuratively), also ‘to make captive; to cover with dressings and bandages’ (class III strong verb; past tense band, past participle bunden), from Proto-Germanic bindanan (source also of Old Saxon bindan, Old Norse and Old Frisian binda, Old High German binten ‘to bind,’ German binden, Gothic bindan), from PIE root bhendh- ‘to bind.’ Of books, from c. 1400. Intransitive sense of ‘stick together, cohere’ is from 1670s.”

-Etymonline

This search also turns up that the root of the word “religion” is also to bind: from the Latin religare.

Small problems:

A knot, which is more often than not the thread doubling up onto itself, and tightening.

The tail tangling up in the sewing thread, the past wanting to be carried into the future.

An errant hole.

A broken strand.

The hands have their haptic knowing, separate from sight. If a signature is too light (a missing folio), or the thread too tight (a snag), the hands realize this is so before the eyes.

Haptic from the Greek haptikós: touching; but also to grasp, to perceive.

Making visible progress:

one signature stacking on top of another; one sewn book stacked upon another.

10.

This binding is as much a part of making the book as any other part, but its context, so entangled with life, becomes invisible in the finished object.

Somehow designing the book while also cooking soup was a more focused task. Perhaps because the eyes are trained always on the screen and the mind on the work. While there may be a secondary simultaneous background activity, the act of writing or designing requires a full intellectual attention that sewing does not.

The binding is so much a part of other things (the cat is hungry, pacing now under my nose, tail lashing) in a way that the computer work (lit screen, focus) and the Riso printing (the Riso does most of the work, but I hover over it, watching expectantly, waiting for the inevitable) never is. Is it because I am not challenged enough to be wholly absorbed by sewing, so my attention wanders? While sewing, I rarely transcend into that state of flow (so aptly described by Csikszentmihalyi) that I experience in writing or designing or printing.

I think of the words of Thomas A. Clark (Moschatel Press) as quoted by Simon Cutts: “Self-publishing can constitute not a vanity, but a freedom. . . the means can become creative. Everything can be exact but also light, since production is a way of life, an activity rather than an occasion.”

I sense that people who handle copies of this book notice the care and attention embedded within, including the time accrued in the binding.

But that doesn’t mean that they see the cat, the dining room table: production as a way of life.

That part, the lived experience of the making, becomes invisible in most anything we make.

Yet to us, the makers, it is essential.

11.

I think of Virgina Woolf, typesetting and binding as a respite from the fatiguing intellectual labor of writing. I think of the entire practice of bookmaking / publishing as an agricultural process: active periods of sustained attention, hard labor, focus, and vigor; the celebration of the harvest (that first completed copy that nearly vibrates with exhilaration). And then: the slower, relaxed, and rather fallow-feeling periods: distributing type, sewing the three-hundred-eighty-sixth copy in the edition, shipping orders: processes necessary to sustain the work, but with rare opportunities for flow. These are activities in a state less alive: that “cotton wool” feeling of non-being Woolf describes. I try to remind myself that all of these parts are integral to the process: you can’t eliminate them and have the rest. I relax into large edition binding, enjoy it.

12.

The timed lights flick on; the tea transubstantiates to wine; the unsewn stack diminishes, the sewn stack grows.

But there’s been too much googling, too much being reminded of what is not here in front of me.

I have loads more to sew, and to notice.

I’ll try again, with Part III coming soon.

Works Cited

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Cutts, Simon. Some Forms of Availability, 66.

Miriam, Selma. “On Persistence and Feminism,” Our daily lives have to be a satisfaction in themselves,107-108.

Pye, David. The Nature and Art of Workmanship, also discussed here.

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. First found here in a New York Times review of the book.

WE'RE ALL WATER, CONTINUED // LEAH MACKIN

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 08:00:00 GMT

Note: This post is in direct response to the theme of Marianne Dages’ last entry on this blog, “We’re All Water.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There’s a rhythm to the blinking cursor, a nagging persistence, goading me to continue.

Waves crash ashore, the tides ebb and flow with parallel reliability.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I often turn to writers’ reflections about the writing process for language and insight into my own artistic processes. While many visual artists are able to articulate their motivations and engagements, I embrace the challenge to run a sort-of real time Find and Replace through these literary-focused pieces. Mentally shifting text to images or words to pictures allows the language to hold its greater definition(s): composition, draft(ing), edit(or), (pulling a) proof, (the mark-making of) mark-up, public(ation).

This exercise is a component of my research on the fluidity between digital and analog modes of production and publishing, as a means to read, see, view, distribute, and handle this nebulous thing called book art. I approach that metaphor of fluidity rather straightforwardly in recent projects originating from digital video captures of paper in/around/through water and in exploring the concept of tidalectics and the work of its originator, poet Kamau Brathwaite. Likening the hierarchical history of landmasses to colonialism, tidalectics considers the interconnectedness of humanity through the viewpoint of oceanic understanding.

To view the world through this Caribbean writer’s lens provides an incredible perspective shift away from a white/Eurocentric convention. A perspective shift is what engaging book art does for me - challenging a preconception in form, structure, or content about what a book is (or can be!) and how a publication does (or can!) function.

Tidalectics co-opts the vocabularies of hydrology and oceanology; Brathwaite embraces the ocean tides as a means to provide rhythm for his poetic delivery. In an anecdote during a poetry reading, Brathwaite explains how his literary education in Barbados limited his ability to express himself. He likens the British military marching he witnessed at a parade to the narrow and unrelatable constraint of iambic pentameter. Whereas later in the same parade, he watched his aunts make their way down the route, far enough away from the military band to hear the drums beat, spinning in circles to their own rhythms. These “circles,” swirling as oceanic waters in tide pools, allow Brathwaite to create his own writing structures and systems outside of the Western canon. As opposed to the ability for a reader to follow the standard structure of poems written in iambic pentameter, Brathwaite’s must deliver the poems himself. The orations swell, undulating in volume, pacing, and melodic range.

Screen captures made by the author from a YouTube channel, which was digitally transferred from a VHS recording evidenced by artifacts of tracking, creating visual waves across Brathwaite’s gesturing arms

Excerpt from Dream Haiti series by Kamau Brathwaite as reproduced in the anthology, Tidalectics

Visually, Brathwaite’s poems utilize an inventive approach to standard early word processing software which he dubbed “Sycorax video style.” Sycorax for the name he gave to his Macintosh computer, and video style as a reference to the way in which his writing input would appear, flowing as a scroll on the video computer screen display. Referring to the Brathwaite 1994 collection Dreamstories, Nicholas Laughlin explains the poems “[deploy] a variety of typefaces and styles, unconventional syntax and punctuation, and sometimes idiosyncratic spellings. ‘Sycorax video style’ cannot properly be quoted; it must be visually reproduced.”

Of course, this notion that a work “must be visually reproduced” is familiar to visual artists, especially book artists, who struggle to accurately represent works via photographic and written documentation. Similarly, the aural experience that Brathwaite provides in his readings is an additional sensory element in which he controls how an audience experiences his work. I use Brathwaite as a case study of an artist, a poet, who demands certain parameters for his work to be understood and framed. How can the book be best represented for promotion? For publication? What if it was designed only to be a viewed on a screen? What if it is a tactile, printed, bound object alongside a digital component? What does it mean to view a physical book work on a screen? I think of the ways that I have accessed Kamau Brathwaite’s works to gain this appreciation: reproduction in print, written description, digital video, online images. These are the very ways book artists benefit from opportunities of a multimodal, fluid approach to digital publishing: sharing, distributing, and studying of book works.

References

Hessler, Stefanie. Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview Through Art and Science. London, England: TBA21-Academy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Change: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.

Laughlin, Nicholas. “Notes on Videolectics.” The Caribbean Review of Books, May 2007. http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/12-may-2007/notes-on-videolectics/.

Cultura América Latina y el Caribe. “Kamau Brathwaite.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 30 July 2015. Web. 7 November 2018.

Leah Mackin is a visual artist and educator, often working collaboratively on performative publishing projects. She is the current Victor Hammer Fellow at the Wells Book Arts Center and founder of the INTERNET ART BOOK FAIR.

WE'RE ALL WATER // Marianne Dages

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 07:00:00 GMT

I had a dream I was fishing for words. Feet in the water, I stood on the shore, cast a line, and pulled up words from the incoming waves. The words took the form of long, unbroken recitations sounded out into the wind. If I kept speaking, the word flow continued. If I stopped, the line went slack. This idea of words in, or as, water lingered with me, as a metaphor for the obscurity of language’s sources.

Artists’ books upend our expectations of narrative and structure. In my opinion, the most interesting artists’ books subvert their own traditions as well. Word Rain by Madeline Gins is one such work; a treatise on the germination and perception of text in the guise of contemporary fiction. Reading Word Rain is like reading a book that has become sentient and is looking at itself. With mathematical grace, Gins blurs the boundary between writer, reader, written, and read. Rain, vapors, and mists are referenced throughout the text to emphasize the fluidity of the book’s modalities and our relationship to its changing states.

The book ends with two sentences, declaring these two concepts to be one and the same.

The body is composed of 98% water.

This page contains every word in the book.

1. “It’s raining in the ocean.”

Reading is a loss of borders, a loss of self. When the reader is reading, they are gazing into a mirroring pond, encircled by an enveloping mist. Two eyes move across the pond’s face, or words on a page, and gather the reflected light. The reader shifts their gaze, right to left, left to right, across the fluctuating words. Thoughts bubble to the surface as they do. The reader is captivated and continues to stare, unaware a soft rain has begun to fall, the mist is strengthening, and the reader’s body has become diffuse. The reader becomes a mirror in an empty room.

This summer I read The Sea Around Us, a book published in 1951 in which Rachel Carson described a then new technology called sonar. Sonar works by emitting sound waves that reflect back when an object is encountered. In its early days, scientists were confounded by readings that seemed to indicate the presence of a “phantom bottom” that rose and fell. The false ocean bottom was in fact millions of swimming fish as yet undiscovered to the human eye. This “living cloud” had created the illusion of solidity where echoing the sonars call (Carson, 40-41). I picture the phantom fish as words yet to be formed, their scales glittering beneath the still reflecting pond.

2. “During the cleaving something becomes apparent and something remains blank.”

As I write, I am reading. I stare into a computer screen; a reflective glass masking fathomless information below. Occasionally, I catch my reflection in its mutable skin but am otherwise detached and removed. I lose track of where I am and how the words got there, yet experience a heightened alertness as I reach for the next word and the next thought. It’s a paradoxical sensation of depth and reflection, tactility and disintegration. Gins employed the verb to cleave to describe the simultaneous feeling of joining and separating, referring to as it the “‘material’ of thought itself” (Helen Keller, 285).

Setting type, I am particularly aware that letters begin and end as slivers of metal held in the hand. That they are gathered from their cases and strewn back in, again and again. It’s in the unseen moment of contact between ink, metal, and paper that these ligatures and lines transcend their physicality to become the vapor of thought. When I write, I use the same letters as you - ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ - yet our work is different, due to the moment of cleaving that binds letters into word bodies and releases them as incorporeal thoughts. I think of the cloud drawing moisture from the ocean, growing heavy, and falling as rain. I think of the rain becoming the ocean, becoming moisture and the cloud that draws it up again. I think of my body, made of 98% water, standing in the water and of our words and their cycles and their endless returns.

3: An Equation for Madeline Gins

(artist’s book) -? = book

book - words = blank book

(blank book) - (thread, glue, fabric, leather) = paper

paper - water = cellulose

cellulose - carbon = H₂0

H-O-H

The sound of an exhale on a cold day.

Writing

in the steam

of breath

on glass

marks = letters = words = thoughts

thoughts = words = letters = marks

NOTES

The title of this essay is quoted from Yoko Ono’s poem “Water Talk,” written in 1967 and the song “We’re All Water” by John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band, 1972.

The cloud and “Dry Tongue” images are scanned and altered from Sverre Petterson, Introduction to Meteorology (New York: McGraw Hill, 1941).

“It’s raining in the ocean” is quoted from the first page of Word Rain.

“During the cleaving....” is quoted from page 13 of Helen Keller or Arakawa.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carson, Rachel L. The Sea Around Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.
Gins, Madeline. Helen Keller or Arakawa. New York: Burning Books, 1994.

____________ Word Rain. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969.

Marianne Dages is an artist who writes and publishes books under the name Huldra Press. She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA and has been thinking a lot about water.

A CENTURY OF CRAFT // India Johnson

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books is one of the best surveys we have of the history of our field. Can a history of artists’ books be considered a rough history of book art? As a form, artists’ books seem to be what unites this ‘book art’ association—when I see an exhibition at a CBAA conference, I mostly expect to encounter artists’ books.

But as Drucker writes in Century, a history of artists’ books is not to be confused with a history of the book. While “outstanding examples of book production” (21) populate preceding centuries, artist bookwork is born in the twentieth. Before that, she does locate a few “genuine precedents for the conceptual practice of artists’ books” (21), including William Blake and William Morris.

Both men are logical ancestors for today’s book art. But in the longer arc of art history, the legacies of these two 19th-century artists diverge. Blake is a seminal figure in the Romantic movement. Romantic ideas about avant-gardism and personal creative genius set a precedent for the emergence of modern art in the 1850s and ’60s. Morris, an avowed anti-modernist, set a century and a half of reactionary craft aesthetics in motion. In the twentieth century, craft and modern art would come to define themselves against each other (Adamson, Thinking, 2)—art as being ‘more than’ just craft, and craft as being ‘more skilled’ than art. This aided craft in nurturing its critiques of modern culture, and art in maintaining an avant-garde edge.

To analyze the artists’ books that come from that 20th-century vanguard, we have plenty of theory. A legacy like Morris’s is more problematic for contemporary book art—but it is not going away. Consider that this organization congregates not just around artists’ books, but around specific craft processes—hand printing, bookbinding and papermaking.

In such trades, Morris did not invent skilled workmanship. But by tying it to ideas of heritage, authenticity, and memory—and situating it in opposition to industrial production—thinkers like Morris and John Ruskin invented craft. Glenn Adamson points out that “before the industrial revolution, and outside its sphere of influence, it was not possible to speak of craft as a separate field of endeavor” (Adamson, Invention, xiii).

In his writing on the arts and crafts movement, Adamson does not discuss Morris’s press. This is probably because, as Drucker reminds us, “books were the least and latest aspect of Morris’s production” (27). Though he designed books only during the last six years of his life, Morris almost single-handedly invented fine press. Compared to the influence of Morris’s work on design history as a whole, the Kelmscott Press approach to book design, and production, exerted an outsized impact on hand bookmaking.

Morris and Ruskin championed craft production as meaningful and autonomous labor because they adhered to the thought of Karl Marx. His thought is also alive and well in Drucker’s definition of artists’ book as those which “integrate the formal means of realization and production with thematic or aesthetic issues” (2). Drucker notes that one might criticize Morris’s romanticization of medieval labor—he writes as though the industrial revolution invented exploitative labor—“but that hardly seems useful” (27).

Adamson, however, finds it to be quite illuminating. It is essential to remember that Ruskin and Morris did not really “revive” skilled manual production, which was alive and well in the industry of their time, as it is today (Invention, 212). They also ignored the fact that no amount of enjoyable, autonomous labor completely severs the craftsperson from larger economic systems—as any book artist who has ever needed healthcare or bought an industrially-made material for a project can confirm. (Has anyone used any book board lately?) What Ruskin and Morris did was to write a new script for craft, attaching anti-capitalist virtues to it, as well as a narrative of loss and revival.

Curiously, we continue to tell this story of loss more than a century later. Although some crafts, such as hand printing and binding, have even gained a foothold in higher education, we still talk of “preserving” them. Adamson marvels, “It is truly amazing that every generation can tell itself ... that it is witnessing the disappearance of craft forever, and therefore has a unique responsibility to save it” (Invention, 183).

But there are good reasons this story has had such enduring appeal for the last century and a half. It serves an important cultural purpose—that of processing the trauma of the industrial revolution, and the trauma of modernity itself. Adamson quotes historian Elizabeth Wilson’s remark that, “while an economic analysis may ultimately explain our society more objectively than any other, the use of the term ‘modernity’ makes possible the exploration of our subjective experience of it” (Invention, xxii). He also reminds us that “trauma” does not refer an initial wound, but the effect it causes as it ruptures through the body (Invention, 185). That rupture continues today as digitization fundamentally alters culture. Marx’s phrase, “all that is solid melts into air” (Invention, xxii), feels as apt in the face of the information revolution as it did during the industrial one. It is no coincidence that we are witnessing a revival of crafts in popular culture, such as the DIY movement and Etsy, in this digital dawn. We are trying to cope.

As we enter a digital age, deep engagement with a craft will not provide one with an accurate picture of labor in the 21st century. As it blinded Morris to the profusion of skilled labor that surrounded him, propelling innovation and production in his time, it may blind us. But intensive craft training can provide us with the ability to articulate the workings of embodied cognition. It allows us to assert, from the authority of our own experiences, that how things are made matters—that meaning does not exist separately from the means of production. This is especially relevant for book artists with a foot in contemporary art world, who may need to contextualize their craft practice for an audience in that sphere. Today, fine artists have license to fabricate little of their own work, and even obscure the true means of its production.

When it comes to book art theory, production is not my sole preoccupation. I come to artists’ books with concerns about the relationship of text and image. I come to them with concerns about multiples, sequencing, and social practice. As I stated at the beginning of this post, I’m drawn to CBAA because its membership rallies around artists’ books as a form. But CBAA is not only a ‘book art’ association—it is concerned with the production of artists’ books in colleges. In practice, this often takes the form of course offerings in crafts like printing, binding, and papermaking. We should own the fact that college book art education is craft-based. When we teach not only thinking through making, but critical thinking about making, we embody that term—in its best sense.

Works Cited

Adamson, Glenn and Julia Bryan-Wilson. Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016.

Adamson, Glenn. The Invention of Craft. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

______________. Thinking Through Craft. Oxford: Berg, 2007.

Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Books, 1995.

India Johnson is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Center for the Book.

BOOK ARTISTS AND ARTISTS WHO MAKE BOOKS // India Johnson

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Artists Who Make Books, edited by Andrew Roth, Philip E. Aarons, and Claire Lehmann, is a landmark survey of artists’ books by non-book artists. It takes only sixteen pages to run headlong into the problem that such artists may not actually know how to make books.

In the book’s first interview, Tauba Auerbach is asked if she uses fabricators to make her books. She defends herself: “at certain stages, yes, but I tried to do everything I could in my studio (16).” Auerbach elaborates that although her studio manager “and all-around amazing assistant” (16) did a lot of the work in-house, eventually a fabricator had to be hired: “I had a very specific way I wanted the book to be bound . . . and I didn’t have the skills or equipment to do that” (16).

So Auerbach hired Daniel Kelm as a fabricator. She describes him as “this extremely talented master bookbinder” (16). Though Auerbach refers to working with Kelm as “a great collaboration” (16), she doesn’t characterize the books made in her studio as a collaboration with her studio assistants. Auerbach is more transparent about hiring fabricators than some artists, but describing your assistant as “amazing” (16) is different than sharing authorship with her. The Auerbach interview concludes by characterizing bookmaking as a discipline that “exists beyond commercial activity . . . it really has to be a labor of love” (26).

Perhaps because I began making books in an industrial bindery at age sixteen, I know that before making books is a labor of love, it is a labor. Auerbach’s comments foreground bookmaking as an artistic pursuit, and mute it as skilled labor. Yet the latter enables the former. No amount of “extensive conversations about paper grain, adhesives, and so forth” (16) with a master bookbinder actually replaces his tacit knowledge. An artist who outsources the fabrication of her bookwork—even with transparency and curiosity—assumes a clear division between thinking and making, concept and form. But as Michael Robbins writes, “the relationship of form and content is more like that of space and time than that of vessel and water” (4-5).

I am not suggesting that employing fabricators denigrates the authenticity or validity of a bookwork off-the-bat. Rather, I argue that it factors into the work’s meaning. “One can outsource with greater or less intelligence,” as Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson point out in Art in the Making (21).

Just as an artist like Auerbach knows the limits of her skills and equipment, many book artists do as well. A printer might employ a master binder like Kelm to bind her artist’s books. So what’s the difference between the books Kelm binds for a postdisciplinary artist, and those he binds for our imaginary printer? The printer has the chance to credit Kelm in her colophon.

It’s probably impossible to include every detail of production in a colophon—but some give it their best stab, exhaustively listing everyone that took part in a project. More concise colophons recap only the most relevant details of making—perhaps those the primary creator feels will factor saliently into making meaning of the book.

The convention of the colophon in our field exposes an assumption that the meaning of an artwork is informed not only by the finished product, but by the specifics of artistic labor. There is substantial difference between art-directing a bookwork, and actually making it. Not only is this because “making is a form of thinking,” inextricably linking “the specificities of creation and the conceptual premise” (Adamson and Bryan-Wilson, 19). It is also because “whenever artists depend on the hands of others to make their work, those hands become part of the meaning of the work, like it or not, as surely as the specific resistances of wood or stone or clay limit the possibility of the carving” (Adamson, 43). Several conventions in the field of book art—extensive instruction in technical bookmaking processes, the ubiquity of handwork, the colophon—suggest that these claims by craft theorist Glenn Adamson are broadly sanctioned by book artists.

In essence, the difference between book artists and artists who make books is craft.

A loaded term, to be sure. Conversations about craft all too easily devolve into stale arguments of definition—where do we draw a line between what is art and what is craft? But given a flowering of recently published craft theory, we have better tools than we’ve ever had to apply “critical theory when it comes to questions of manual skill” (Adamson, xviii). A basic familiarity with current scholarship in this area is essential for a community of 21st century makers tied to methods of skilled hand production—not artists who make books, but book artists.

Works Cited

Adamson, Glenn. The Invention of Craft. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Adamson, Glenn and Julia Bryan-Wilson. Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016.

Robbins, Michael. Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Roth, Andrew, Philip E. Aarons, and Claire Lehmann, eds. Artists Who Make Books.London: Phaidon, 2017.

India Johnson is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Center for the Book.

LIVING WITH ART, PART 4 //Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Sep 2018 07:00:00 GMT

I first encountered Phil Zimmerman’s maxim, “Production NOT Reproduction” in the article “I [heart] DIY CMYK (an homage),” by Pattie Belle Hastings in JAB #25, the offset printing issue, published in the spring of 2009. (Note: I [heart] that whole issue.) Those words made perfect sense to me as an artist working in print media, and they remain a guiding principle—but these days I am wondering if I’ve interpreted the production/reproduction dichotomy too narrowly. Once again, the field of comics can be a useful guide.

In some sense the comics world has already adopted artists’ books. The 2017 edition of the anthology Best American Comics, edited by Ben Katchor (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), includes a piece called Willem de Kooning: Geniuses are nothing if not complicated in their methods, by Deb Sokolow. The book is “a work of fiction about artist Willem de Kooning, inspired by various anecdotes relayed in the 2004 biography de Kooning: An American Master” and is “self-published” in a “unique edition of three, one artist’s proof.” The images are tongue-in-cheek diagrams to help elucidate certain parts of the text. There are no panels. The drawings and text are done with a variety of drawing materials (graphite, paint, collage, etc.) Looking at Sokolow’s website, her work in books seems to be a fundamental part of her larger drawing-based practice.

Looking at contemporary comics—with their high-quality images, paper, and bindings, with their reasonable prices, with their publishers and distribution networks—maybe the longed-for, dreamt of, lamented, and mourned infrastructure for the “democratic multiple” already exists? Maybe we don’t need to convince the museums and gallery world that artists’ books are valid—maybe we need to convince the literary/comic/publishing world that they are.

But let’s face it—we definitely should not, and aren’t going to, wait around for mainstream publishers. There are some other strategies that book artists can deploy, borrowed from those working in comics and other DIY fields.

The serial form, which is traditional for comics, offers really intriguing possibilities for artists’ books. It’s perfectly logical to think of a single book as a complete, unified whole, and that is how most artists’ books are constructed. But what if that need for completion or unity is removed, and the work is allowed to expand, simultaneous with the time of its production, with no pre-determined end? As book artists we are familiar with the concept of construction through sequence: letters to words to sentences to text to pages to book. What if we don’t stop at book? [Note: I had to stop myself from writing a whole post-within-a-post on the serial form—it opens up so many possibilities.]

Seriality leads to other strategies—one of those being subscriptions, which is a tried and true economic model for artist/publishers. Of course now subscriptions are more easily managed through web platforms like Patreon or Drip, or even by creating a monthly automatic payment button with Paypal.

Many comic artists fund publications of their work through crowdsourcing (Indiegogo, Kickstarter). Some book artists have as well, as well as some book arts people making traditional art books, like the Letterform Archive’s W.A. Dwiggins and Jennifer Morla books, or the Bruce Licher book by P22/Richard Kegler. Many of these crowdsourcing campaigns are actually just pre-sales through an accessible and established platform, so all of that publicity work translates directly into readers.

Publication through small presses or literary journals is an option as well. I recently bought the 2018 “Spring Collection” from the small press 2d Cloud, and got four books and four zines/chapbooks for $65. One of the books, Nocturne, by Tara Booth, is a hardcover, full-color reproduction of a book made from hand-painted pages. It is 64 pages, 5.8” x 8”, with a cover price of $14.95. Some of the books published by 2d Cloud would fit right in among a selection of artists’ books. Also: Best American Comics has an open submission policy.

Production or reproduction? Original or facsimile? Institutions or readers? Why this “or?” What about a studio practice that embraces an “and?” As in: limited edition, handmade books and facsimiles of those books funded through Kickstarter and drawings and a robust writing practice that moves between the graphic and traditional text—or some other possible combination. I don’t want to suggest that building a studio practice and making a living is as easy as signing up for Patreon. Growing an audience of readers is a long, incremental process. There are ways to make the work that we want to make, and to get that work into people’s homes and hands.

Aaron Cohick is the Printer of The Press at Colorado College and the proprietor of the NewLights Press. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

LIVING WITH ART, PART 3 //Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Sep 2018 07:00:00 GMT

These posts are an imaginative exercise, coming out of things I’m thinking about in my own work, and in conversations with other artists. (In particular with Bill Hanscom—I owe him a “thank you” for one of the prompts to write these posts.) I want to envision a studio practice, for a book artist, where aesthetic concerns, specific interests in content and concept, ethical/political concerns, and economic concerns can find perhaps not a perfect balance, but at least a stable ground for continued negotiation.

In 2005, while I was in graduate school, I made a 180 page image/text altered book called Art Into Life. It was very much in the spirit of the ur altered book, A Humument—each page hand drawn/painted/collaged, plus some digital printing done with a desktop laser printer. As I reflect on the books that I’ve made, there are two that feel like the most significant: that altered book and the ongoing, iterative The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press. One of those exists as editions of 250 over three iterations, and one of those exists as a single copy that has probably been read through by 35 people. Both books exist perpetually as digital facsimiles, and are theoretically available to be read at any time. Digital facsimiles seem like a good compromise between the logistics of keeping a book in (letterpress) print and/or the problems of attempting a straight facsimile of a unique book, but the “out of sight” availability of the digitally archived object remains very different from the availability of having the book in the home. The process of making that altered book, of composing page-by-page (like writing a book?) was extremely satisfying and the results felt quite different from the usual tightly planned and executed book productions that I’ve otherwise done. How can an artist get to that open-ended process without being stuck having to sell unique books to single collectors or institutions, also usually for less money than a single, large painting? Is a digital facsimile, 3-5 readers, and a day job enough?

It could be useful to think about the relationship(s) between comics and artists’ books. They are essentially the same material: text and image, in relation, in sequence. Yet they seem to exist in (mostly) separate worlds. I think that book artists can learn a great deal from comics—formal/structural things like how to deal with story and structure, timing, rhythm, etc., and also nuts and bolts things like how the work gets made, and how it makes its way out into the world.

The recent graphic novel, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris, is an incredible read, and I highly recommend it. It is also an interesting book to consider in terms of the relationship between artists’ books and comics. One of the conceits of the narrative is that the book itself is the journal/sketchbook of the main character, and as such it reproduces the look of a notebook. There are blue ruled lines on the pages, and the images and text are composed freely—there is little literal use of the panels that usually undergird the language of comics, though the idea of the panel is still very much embedded in the story-telling. It’s an intensely beautiful book—the reader can spend a great deal of time just looking and looking at the incredible drawings. The quality of the reproduction of those drawings is top-notch. It’s a long, dense book too, 386 pages. And it only costs $40.

Is a $40 copy of My Favorite Thing is Monsters a facsimile of an artist’s book? Or an original artist’s book? Or just a book? Where is the production and where is the reproduction? Does it even matter?

I am an artist that makes books by hand, I’ve been doing it for 18 years, and yet I’ve read a lot more comics than I have artists’ books. That could just be my reading habits, but it also probably has to do with the availability of comics. They are out there, published on the web, able to be ordered from the web, on the shelves of libraries, and often even in bookstores. (To be clear I’m not talking about standard “superhero comics” from the big publishers of such things. I’m talking about the weird, experimental, personal, literary, poetic, and/or journalistic comics of which there are many incredible examples.) Comics are labor-intensive to produce, and money-and-labor-intensive to reproduce and distribute—yet they are available, and they do make it into people’s homes, and they are read.

Aaron Cohick is the Printer of The Press at Colorado College and the proprietor of the NewLights Press. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

LIVING WITH ART, PART 2 //Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 07:00:00 GMT

If we accept the idea that artists’ books are most available to be read when they are in someone’s home, several questions come up immediately: whose home? How did the books get there? And once the books are there, are the people that live in that home comfortable storing, reading, and handling them? These are questions of economics and distribution, of privilege and class, of power, of culture and discursive structures.

Some of this line of reasoning sounds familiar: are we talking about the artist’s book as “democratic multiple?” Yes, but also no—our inherited idea of the “democratic multiple” might be limiting our possibilities.

The historical idea of the “democratic multiple” is an artist’s book/publication that is made in a large or unlimited edition, usually with commercial processes and materials and sold at a reasonable price. This approach is often associated with the 1960s and 70s, with the “dematerialized” art practices of Conceptual Art, politically engaged art practices, and/or the desire by artists to circumvent the gallery system and get their work directly to the audience. The democratic multiple is often considered a myth or failure. There are many artists that never got that memo and continue to produce these objects—they might be called zines, comics, poetry, visual books, photo-books, etc. Failures of the historical democratic multiple are usually discussed in terms of three facets: affordability, availability, and accessibility.

Affordability seems straightforward—if you want a large audience to be able to purchase and read the books at home, then they have to be priced in a way so that individuals can buy them (which also often implies fairly large editions). Affordability goes two ways—as Johanna Drucker points out in The Century of Artists’ Books—the books need to be affordable for the buyer and the artist. Affordability for the artist includes materials, of course, but also time and physical demands. For artists that are committed to making books by hand (such as myself) affordability is a thorny problem.

The term availability comes from the poet/printer/publisher Simon Cutts: “The act of publishing is one of making available […].” Availability is the ease (or difficulty) of finding and buying the book, of shipping and moving, and then of storage and reading. Availability is different from accessibility (defined below) in that is has to do with the physical life and presence of the object.

In terms of distribution, the Internet is a huge asset that was not available to the producers of artists’ books in the 1960s and 70s. For an individual artist distribution is so much easier now, at least up to a point. Getting the word out and conducting transactions is easier, but packing and shipping orders is still a considerable amount of labor and expense.

Accessibility is different from availability in that it relates to content. Of our three terms it has the least to do with the physical object—it is more a quality of the artistic or readerly object. Accessibility is cited as one of the major failures of the historical democratic multiple. In her essay “Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books,” the critic Lucy Lippard reflects on that failure: “[…] despite sincere avowals of populist intent, there was little understanding of the fact that the accessibility of the cheap, portable form did not carry over to that of the contents—a basic problem in all of the avant-garde’s tentative moves towards democratization in the sixties and early seventies. The New York art world was so locked into formal concerns (even those of us who spent a lot of time resisting them) that we failed to realize that, however neat the package, when the book was opened by a potential buyer from the ‘broader audience’ and she or he was baffled, it went back on the rack.”

It’s a cliché that the “broader audience” is not interested in art that differs from the received expectations of a form, that deals directly with important social/political issues, and/or has an emotional/aesthetic/spiritual depth. It’s important to note that in the quote above Lippard places the fault with the “art world,” which tended at that time to eschew any emotional content. Are things opening up, both for the “art world” and for the culture at large? I’m thinking here of the graphic novels of Alison Bechdel, of the music of Kendrick Lamar, of Sonic Youth, of Twin Peaks (old and new), of the recent film Sorry to Bother You—this list could go on and on. The “broader audience” is fully capable of grasping complicated formal structures and/or nuanced aesthetic experiences. The reader needs—deserves—some sort of relatable entry point, if they are to dwell in/dwell with the work.

Works Cited

Simon Cutts, Some Forms of Availability (New York and Derbyshire: Granary Books and Research Group for Artists Publications, 2007), 65.

Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 1994), 72.

Lucy Lippard, “Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books,” Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Joan Lyons (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985), 50.

Aaron Cohick is the Printer of The Press at Colorado College and the proprietor of the NewLights Press. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

LIVING WITH ART, PART 1 // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 07:00:00 GMT

When I was in graduate school, one of my colleagues, the artist and designer Melissa McGurgan, had a brilliant idea to teach critical analysis skills to her students: they would each take a piece by one of their classmates home, hang it up, and live with it for a week or two, writing and reflecting on the experience of viewing a piece through time, in their homes. How does an artwork change if you see it everyday, at multiple times? If you look at it every morning while you eat your cereal, or in the periphery as you do the dishes or glimpse it as you rush out the door to meet a friend?

“Living with” an art object spreads the experience of a static thing over a discontinuous time, it weaves the object through the life of an individual. The idea of the artwork in the home and life of a person feels very important, and so I want to write a series of posts thinking through various aspects of and questions about this idea of artwork, specifically what we might call readerly artwork, in the home.

Books and prints are really good at living with people—they are small, light, and can often be very affordable. Living with a book is a bit different than living with a 2D piece that hangs on the wall—viewing tends to be a little less rushed, a little less accidental. The person has to open the book at least. But I know from my experience of reading graphic novels and art books (here I mean books about an artist’s work) that a kind of quick, partially distracted, random reading of books can and does take place. A partially distracted reading is probably easier to fall into with books that rely heavily on visual content, but it can certainly happen with text-based books as well.

In the famous and still relevant essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin writes about the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.” This is toward the end of the essay, section XV, where he is talking about film as an art made for/as “mechanical reproduction”—so in this case something very similar to books or prints. Benjamin writes: “Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. […] In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”

Working from Benjamin’s idea that “distraction and concentration form polar opposites” and from his concept of absorption—perhaps attention is not so much an either/or state (as in you are paying attention or you are not) but a continuum of absorption. At times the reader is absorbed by the art object, at other times they absorb it, and that relationship is changing at different rates throughout the experience. That absorption does not necessarily depend on the reader being in front of the object, actively reading, to take place. The reading (which is also attention) is discontinuous: it starts, stops, picks up again, repeats, skips, is processed from memory, etc., and all along the amount or type or quality of the absorption changes in relation to the reading conditions, to the necessities of the reader and their world. The amount of discontinuity in the reading is also related to the length of the object itself, and/or the reading conditions. Even a short artist’s book that can be read in one sitting (hopefully) continues to be read after the book is put down.

If reading is always discontinuous (and perhaps benefits from discontinuity?) then having the artwork in the home becomes ideal. Reading in galleries/museums is generally not great—too many other pieces to see, too many people, not enough time, etc. Reading in libraries is much better, but a long-term, discontinuous reading doesn’t really happen unless a reader happens to have convenient and consistent access to a library collection. The artwork is at its most available state when it is in the home, meaning that it is much more likely to be read in/as/through multiple states of attention, to be woven in/as/through the rhythms of a life.

Work Cited:

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 239.

Aaron Cohick is the Printer of The Press at Colorado College and the proprietor of the NewLights Press. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO.

SUMMER READING // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 07:00:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking about reading through a seasonal lens, and how its meaning, significance, and potential seem to shift — at least for me, as an academic and lifelong resident of the northeast US.

Fall Reading is studious, serious, or how-to, synonymous with back-to-school. Winter Reading is cozy and provisioned, a warm indoor retreat from the cold. The phrase “Spring Reading” conjures nothing. “Summer Reading” unleashes a torrent of longing for light-filled hours containing nothing but the time and space to read. I think of novels. Loads of them.

Ah, the “Summer Reading List,” distributed toward the end of the school year by optimistic academic institutions at every grade level. How many of us draft lists of our own, at the beginning of each summer, as we imagine (rightly or not) that we’ll have more time to read? In the summer I like to bond with a single author: last year was Doris Lessing (favorites are The Golden Notebook, the gothic horror The Fifth Child, the timely The Good Terrorist). Currently my summer author is Iris Murdoch (so far my favorites are The Nice and the Good and Under the Net).

Then the media outlets descend with their own dubious Summer Reading Lists. The NY Times Book Review 2018 Summer Guide suggests titles in the following categories only: Thrillers, Cooking, True Crime, Movies & TV, Romance, Travel, Music, the Great Outdoors, and Sports. Really? No regular fictional novels?

Is “beach reading” escapist reading, reading that transports? If you are looking for such a book, I recommend Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which time travels you to a terrifyingly not-too-distant future dystopian America, so maybe not so transportive after all. Or is “beach reading” reading for entertainment, lighter fare? Perhaps reading for entertainment is reading texts that don’t make us think. But perhaps that should be worded as texts that don’t insist we think. If we’re not thinking about what we’re reading, that’s on us, isn’t it, not the author or the text? I learned from The Guardian just now that the term “Beach Read” was coined by the publishing industry as recently as 1990, although the casting of novel reading as “sinful” dates back to the mid-19th century (Emma Bovary, anyone?).

Sinful, sinful reading. Reading all day, outside: in a park, in the garden, at the beach, in the yard, under a tree or an umbrella; reading on a blanket on the ground or on a canvas folding chair or on a chaise or in a field; reading on the slow-to-darken porch after dinner, late into the night. In the summer I give myself permission to read indulgently in ways I don’t (or can’t) the rest of the year. While the occupational and familial demands of the fall, winter, and spring are real, the emotional negotiation with the Yankee Puritan within may be eased over the summer months because summer reading can be folded into another activity: being outside. Reading outside is active recreation because now you are outdoors enjoying the fleeting season. It is practically a sport.

Endurance reading: book artist Barbara Tetenbaum’s current public art project The Slow Read invites readers to a summer-long reading of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. The project is accessed online at the rate of six pages a day, offering “a piece of culture in the form of a daily ritual, to be experienced slowly over time.” The Slow Read perversely replicates the dominant practice of reading in short spurts on a screen. At the same time, the fact that the narrative is suspended day after day after day expands the novel into something that engulfs your entire summer. There are nuances to the specificity of this reading experience, as after the installment’s sixth page you are brought back to the first page of that day’s selection. Of this uncanniness, artist and reader Linda Hutchins writes: “The feeling is unlike anything I’ve ever gotten from reading before, and even after I repeated the scenario multiple times today, it still catches my breath. It’s almost a feeling of light-headedness” (The Slow Read News).

Perhaps it is this opportunity for light-headedness, for catching one’s breath, is what summer reading is about.

Emily Larned won the “Book Worm” trophy from her childhood swim team (her mom made her join). She has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993, when as a teenager she made her first zine. Since then her work has been exhibited and collected by over 70 public institutions. She is co-founder of ILSSA and Chair & Associate Professor of Graphic Design at SASD, University of Bridgeport, CT.

LIBRARYWORKS: ABRA ANCLIFFE'S PERSONAL LIBRARIES LIBRARY // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Jul 2018 07:00:00 GMT

How would you describe a book without using words?

In what ways is the meaning and significance of an individual book affected by its provenance?

What do you learn about someone by looking at their extensive library (besides nearly everything)—and how many of these gleanings are your own false conclusions, connections, assumptions, which say more about you than about anyone else? If a personal library is a portrait of its owner, is the reading of that library a self-portrait of the reader?

These are some of the questions that come when perusing the evocative work of artist Abra Ancliffe, creator of the Personal Libraries Library (PLL) in Portland, OR. A collection of collections, or a “librarywork,” the Personal Libraries Library (est. 2009) reassembles the libraries of select public figures and circulates these books among the PLL members. The project began with the recreation of the personal library of the nineteenth century astronomer, librarian, educator, suffragist Maria Mitchell; followed by that of the artist, writer, thinker Robert Smithson; and then the libraries of Italian writer Italo Calvino, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, and African-American poet, activist, and gardener Anne Spencer. Currently, the PLL “is in the process of collecting the personal libraries of Lucy Lippard, Georges Perec, Buckminster Fuller, Hannah Arendt, Lady Bird Johnson, and Yoko Ono” (in that order). And so the Personal Libraries Library reveals not only the predilections of those individuals included, but when considered together suggests the interests and concerns of its founding librarian. It is temptingly easy to speculate about Ancliffe: a bibliophilic artist with naturalist tendencies, certainly. Definitely a feminist; interested in social justice history; intrigued by new forms, and genre experimentation. But which public figures does she consider, and then exclude? Which collections does she prioritize, and why? (While you will not find the answers to these particular questions, to learn more about PLL’s origin and Ancliffe’s method of collecting, check out (haha, library pun) Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly’s article on Art Practical).

In addition to circulating the books of the PLL among its members, Ancliffe activates the collection by publishing via the Personal Libraries Library Press. She describes these publications as “printed matter” that “offers differing investigations of the Collection as well as questions the role of books, libraries, and archives in the production of meaning & understanding.” These equivocal printworks serve as elusive introductions to books; to me, they are enticing invitations to locate and experience the book or collection itself. They offer a portal into how Ancliffe relates to the collection. And as you puzzle over them, you realize they are mirrors that reflect how your own interests intersect with Ancliffe’s, and with those of the books’ famous owners.

The printed matter varies from letterpress printed single panel cards tucked into folded digital printed folios, to digitally printed color posters that reproduce a single image or an entire spread of a book; or on occasion, several books or images at once. Sometimes the source book or collection is identified; other times, it is not. Examining the ephemera in consultation with Ancliffe’s website is a sort of sleuthing, with aha! moments of discovery as the origin of an individual piece is revealed. This experience, of reconstructing how the book may (or may not!) have been significant to its famous owner, reproduces the process of research: the formulation of questions, the peering for clues, the hypothesis and the corroboration. Of course, as with any interpretation, how much of this activity is in one’s own head? The PLL is far from a didactic collection. It is open, exploratory, its meaning unfixed. In a recent conversation, Ancliffe described many of her formal decisions as “gestural work”; she says she is interested in “cultivating the page like a garden.”

And so like a memorial garden it grows. The Personal Libraries Library is both tribute and tool for contemplation. By activating often-forgotten books that are significant in relationship to one another and to our cultural record, the PLL encourages inquiry, discovery, and wonder: an exploratory wandering through the stacks.

Notes

Citations quoted from abraancliffe.com and personallibrarieslibrary.com

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993, when as a teenager she made her first zine. She is co-founder of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA). Her work is exhibited and collected by over 70 public institutions, and has been awarded honors by the Type Directors Club (TDC) and the AIGA. She is Chair & Associate Professor of Graphic Design at SASD, University of Bridgeport, CT.

THE ORIGIN OF A BOOK ARTIST // Nancy Sharon Collins

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Here’s the story of how I, a stationer, grew up thinking like a book artist.

To begin, “stationer” is a trade guild in England dating back to the 1500’s. The stationery trade is at the heart of the history of publishing in general. At its beginning it was akin to fine press printing and to book arts. I make my living as a modern, Americanized version of this.

This may seem an interesting choice for one who, growing up, was uncomfortable reading. Perhaps this was due to an undiagnosed learning disability. Even still, to this day, I love looking at pictures along with feeling printed materials such as ink, paper, various modes of printing, and the mechanics of bound volumes. For me, reading and writing are disciplines quite apart from how I relate to books.

Allow me to explain this seemingly contradictory notion.

My parents’ house had big book shelves in the living room. They were not full but contained several books significant to my book arts development: Imprints from The Heritage Press. These were mass produced, affordable reprints of Limited Editions Club fine illustrated books by the George Macy Companies founded in 1929. They are artfully designed and carefully produced. The typography is classical yet interesting and wonderfully legible. Each is designed in a unique fashion communicating the story the book contains. Many Heritage Press books are illustrated; all are hard cover, most if not all are slip cased. The binding for each is unique as well, and many have faux-tooling and gilding. It was a marvelous experience choosing a Heritage Press book from the shelf, purely by its cover, followed by lifting it off the shelf, sitting (probably on the floor), letting the book out of its decorative sleeve, then flipping through the pages. I learned the names and general stories of many literary classics such as The Wonderful Adventures of Paul Bunyan, Far from the Madding, and The Grapes of Wrath by identifying handsome spines and enjoying looking at well executed pictures.

It is my guess that experiencing The Heritage Press books—without needing to read them—led me to a curiosity about wanting to make them. Throughout grade school, I was fond of crafting bound-volumes commensurate with my understanding of how books function. Luckily, I have many of them still, and they all seem to follow a similar, yet incomplete, pattern:

● A front cover.

● Title page.

● Beginning of a narrative, handwritten.

● Several blank pages completing a signature.

● Back cover.

● Some form of binding holding it all together. Often this was staples and scotch tape.

It appears that making a book was more interesting than caring if it communicated anything or told a story.

Perhaps a love for understanding book structure is the compelling reason we choose to make books. The experience of grabbing, holding, turning pages, interacting with bookish materials (ink, paper, binding) is what brings book artists back, time and again, to create new ones. So maybe an early inability to read allowed me to develop an understanding and appreciation for the book arts, and The Heritage Press books were serendipitous inspirations for this appreciation.

Collins is the country’s leading engraved stationery expert working in her eponymous company, Nancy Sharon Collins, Stationer LLC. She authored The Complete Engraver, has written for PRINT and HOW magazines about design and commercial printing and has appeared in popular Town & Country, VOGUE, Veranda, and The New York Times.

EXPOSING ARTISTS' BOOKS IN PUBLIC SPACE // Sara White

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 07:00:00 GMT

During my first year as a Book Arts graduate student in 2013/14 I took a course called “The Book as Artifact” and wrote a paper about pop-up, community-focused book programs and ways books can thrive in public space. It was framed as a survey of programs like Little Free Library, Occupy Wall Street Library, The Neighborhood Story Project in New Orleans, etc. Recently uncovering this buried paper, I have been thinking about my tendency to romanticize the book as an object — or as living being(s) for that matter. Do we not form relationships with books? One curious thing about the paper is that I did not include any examples of public artists’ book collections or related programs though I was beginning to self-identify as a book artist. This is not to say such programs did not exist at the time, though I was unaware of those that did, but it seemed reasonable that most artists’ books live behind glass and/or locked doors within private and/or Special Collections.

Artists’ books should absolutely be protected, and I am so glad that major institutions collect them, make the books accessible to those who request to handle them, and financially support book artists. (I am now graciously employed by one of these institutions.) However, there’s the romantic in me who wants everyone to be able to stumble upon artists’ books unexpectedly, to revel in the tactile, emotional, and intellectual experiences within their potential. I suppose this explains my deep love for democratic multiples, zines and DIY book fairs in tandem with fine bookbinding and artistry.

Five years after writing that paper, I find myself luckily working with a team of local artists, nonprofit experts, and librarians to help found an openly accessible artists’ book collection in New Orleans, Louisiana. I live in a complex city with a historically robust literary and visual arts community and strong grassroots organizations that work to improve education and advocacy for diverse communities. All these variables have been at work in the formation of ABC@PM, or the Artist Book Collection at Paper Machine, a new print studio and workshop space in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

ABC was the brainchild of Yuka Petz, a book artist and educator who serves on the board of a local nonprofit arts organization that does amazing work supporting interdisciplinary artists bending towards social justice and community organizing. ABC’s growing collection of approximately 100 artists’ books was made possible through nonprofit sponsorship and generous donations of artists who love the idea of their work made accessible within a public teaching collection.

There are no glass cases at ABC@PM — the books are organized upon shelves on the second floor of the building, open to browsing by all who enter. We are taking great care to thoughtfully catalog the collection, and we trust that our patrons will treat it with respect. (Book cradles and hand wipes are readily available!) ABC@PM hosted its opening reception on May 19th. It is an all volunteer-run budding thing and won’t progress without challenges and occasional hiccups, I am sure, but I am so excited to watch it grow, educate and thrill community members who are unfamiliar with artists’ books.

Assuming those reading this are book art professionals of some sort, I wonder how you would feel about having your own work in an open, public teaching collection? What concerns would you have?

Additionally, I would love to hear more about programs with similar operations. I wonder if many of the “Centers for the Book” around the U.S. have exposed, public book art libraries? If so, how does the place you live in and its community shape the collection?

Sara White is a book artist based in New Orleans, LA. She works as a project assistant in Special Collections & Archives at Loyola University and is a cataloger and founding member of ABC@PM. Her artist’s book Riverine won the 2016 Holle Award for Book Arts. Sara earned an MFA at The University of Alabama in 2016.

PHOTOBOOKS AND INTERACTIVITY // Matt Johnston

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 May 2018 07:00:00 GMT

“There is an inherent pleasure in making. We might call this joie de faire… to indicate that there is something important, even urgent, to be said about the sheer enjoyment of making something exist that didn’t exist before, or using one’s on agency, dexterity, feelings and judgment to mold, form, touch, hold and craft physical materials….” (Dissanayake, 1995)

All photobooks require an active reader who is to make, break, and remake connections between images, text, design, and knowledge. What I am interested in here is how this is exaggerated and extended in a particular style of photobook that has become increasingly popular since the turn of the century. These books and their popularity as well as critical reception are able to tell us something about the broader popularity of photobooks in the post-digital. They demonstrate what we might call a “reader as maker” approach to photobooks.

While there are a great many books that fall into this category, we will look at two high profile publications that each, in their own way, employ the reader-as-maker: Anouk Kruithof’s A Head with Wings and Christina de Middel’s Afronauts. They offer useful examples for their embodiment of key characteristics of the reader-as-maker and for their critical acclaim and public reception—these are not isolated and unpopular works.

Kruithof’s A Head with Wings emphasizes the mechanical nature of reader-as-maker. Pages are filled with folded images and pieces of text to corporeally handle, open, outstretch, and refold. In this process the reader is connected not only to the conceptual production of the book but also its relationship to craft and physical production. We might say this is a mere expansion on the everyday act of turning the page but the folding and unfolding presented here is non-linear, sporadic, and revelatory in ways that the regular relationship between verso and recto cannot replicate. In speaking about a previous installation, Kruithof describes her approach as “analogue interactivity” (Moakley and Kruithof, 2012) alluding to the active participation of the viewer with the artwork. This term could well be similarly applied to A Head With Wings; it requires an active and analogue participation of those who engage with it.

The Afronauts could act as a mascot or exemplar of the photobook in the period of my research (2000-15) due not only to the physicality of the object but also its position as figurehead of “independent” or self-publishing. The Afronauts embraces a craft aesthetic from its exterior beginnings—printing on recycled card stock and featuring a large rubber band to keep the book closed. It taps into the warmth of material spoken of by Jean Baudrillard (2005, 38) and the “honesty” articulated by Richard Sennett (2009, 136-7). It embraces its low-fi credentials. When we enter into the book we are presented with a process and production oriented perspective. The page is ever changing from a rustic paper stock to a lighter variety with slight sheen to translucent sheets of graph paper, typewriter stock, and newspaper cuttings. Even the binding presents itself to the reader and brings to the fore the act of production.

These books satisfy one of our post-digital desires: to make and to connect with the physicality of creation. This might be received through the purchase of objects that bear their manufacturing provenance on their sleeve or it might be in allowing us to “make” a book. It might seem a stretch to speak so much of the handling of the book-as-object but it is only an extension to the mental amalgamation of images, spaces, and texts to create narratives and experiences. Both a tactic of engagement and a symptom of the post-digital context in which the photobook resides, it is as if the analogue interactivity of the photobook is seeking to justify the medium’s physical existence in the face of the utilitarianism, ubiquity, and convenience of digital (a sentiment echoed in the review of A Head With Wings in which it is noted that the book is “a great example of what electronic photobooks could never hope to achieve” (Colberg, 2011)).

Strangely, aside from a reactive approach to post-digitality that some of these works exhibit, they also prosper amidst digital networks of makers and readers and furthermore are constructed in such a way that they share a number of similarities with the web. To elaborate: books like those seen above (Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood is another example) offer a cognitive experience closer to that of navigating web pages and their content than the linearity and formal structure of a photobook which “progresses” in the manner of a novel. Redheaded Peckerwood demands of the reader-as-maker a navigation across mediums (photography, text, object-photographs) which are brought together in the space of the photobook in the same manner as a web page is merely the space in which different elements (text, images, video, etc.) are similarly presented to us. It is the job of the reader to investigate (literally so in this example) and contextualize information in hyper textual fashion.

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Radical Thinkers 3. London ; New York: Verso, 2005.

“Conscientious | Review: A Head With Wings by Anouk Kruithof.” Accessed April 16, 2018. http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2011/10/review_a_head_with_wings_by_anouk_kruithof/.

Dissanayake, Ellen. “THE PLEASURE AND MEANING OF MAKING.” American Craft 55(2): 40-45. Accessed April 16, 2018. https://www.academia.edu/8051818/THE_PLEASURE_AND_MEANING_OF_MAKING.

Moakley, Paul, and Anouk Kruithof. “Analog Interactivity and the Photography of Anouk Kruithof.” Time, 2012. http://time.com/3788799/anouk-kruithof/.

Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. London: Penguin Books, 2009.

Matt Johnston is based in the UK where he leads the Photography BA programme at Coventry University. He is the co-founder and editor of The Photobook Club, a global community of photobook readers and is a PhD student at UCA Farnham where he is part of bookRoom research cluster.

THE PHOTO BOOK, LINEAGE AND INTENT // Matt Johnston

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 May 2018 07:00:00 GMT

I have been thinking a great deal about taxonomies, histories and spectrums of the photobook for the last four years — an activity that is essential as part of my PhD investigation into “Connections, made and missed, digital and other, between the contemporary photobook and its reader.” This is in order to define a scope for the research and acts as the pivotal point of a proposal for a new framework of photobook theory. This interrogation of terms, characteristics and exemplars must have real applicability or ‘wield-ability’ for myself and others inside and outside academia.

There are existing proposals for what constitutes a photobook (Sweetman, 187) (Badger and Parr, 7) (Borda, 55), and some thoughtful considerations of how, within these loose definitions, we can better delineate photobooks in reference to specific categories. Jorg Colberg’s “Taxonomy of the Photobook” (2018), Phillip Zimmermann’s “Photo-bookwork Graphic-Continuum Chart” (2016) and Doug Spowart’s “A Spectrum: Photobook to Artists’ Book” (2018) all present to us clear categories and characteristics (ways to assign photobooks) and all operate well in their respective fields and with respective parameters in mind. But I would suggest even combined they don’t quite reach a holistic view of the photobook (though clearly this is not their remit), and, importantly for my research, they locate categorisation and classification in formalist and structuralist approaches to the book.

Colberg is primarily concerned with narrative structure — how the work progresses and the various elements it employs to tell a story. It is clear and it is surprisingly easy to assign my own works to this system not to mention that is captures a number of current trends in photobook production. Spowart’s spectrum eschews narrative structure for an emphasis on material structure and publishing choices. This is perhaps unsurprising given Spowart’s interest in the artists’ book’s influence on the photobook — he approaches the task of categorisation pragmatically with the book as art object, and book as mass produced object in mind. Zimmermann’s beautifully constructed “Photo-bookwork Graphic-Continuum Chart” goes on to articulate the significance of intention and the issue of mis-representation (2016).

Spowart’s interest in the pragmatics of publishing and Zimmermann’s hint at purpose are most interesting to me because building a workable framework for photobook critique is not an archival pursuit but one that seeks to question the photobook and ultimately increase its efficacy. Intention is what offered me a starting point for a new way of considering the photobook, and I began with the interactions of photograph and book. Presented below is my contribution thus far to the discourse. It is a proposal that asks us to think of the purpose of the photograph’s relationship with the book and posits that 4 distinct histories have contributed to the contemporary photobook.

The Photographic album

 a.k.a Family album, Special-interest album

*Intended for consumption by its own maker and those personally connected

*Its semi-private life doesn't warrant the same critique of experience and efficacy that the photobook will

The Photographic book/photobook

a.k.a Photography book, Book of photography, Photographically illustrated book

*A book of photographs

*The photographic book/photobook often appeals to those outside of what we think of as a photographically inclined audience

*Often the primary goal of the photography book is to ‘appeal’ and thus sell

*The photographs have not commonly been made with the intention to be displayed in a book

The Artist’s book/photobook

a.k.a Artist’s photographic book, Photographic artist’s book

*The work contained in the artist's book/photobook generally falls into two categories

Desire, the want of the author to express oneself (often abstract, unspecified)

Curiosity, the personal (author’s) drive to see or explore something

*Due to the above, the location and experience of the reader is often secondary consideration

The Photo essay/photobook

a.k.a Photoessay, Photographically illustrated book

*The photo essay/photobook is concerned with the world in which its authors and readers are situated

*These works are not solely personal musings (though they may have personal aspects)

*The location and experience of the reader is often primary consideration.

As intent is so key to this proposal it is worth returning to the intent for such a proposal in the first place — if we, as makers, readers and critics have a set of tools which allow for a critique of photobooks in relation to their purpose-lineages then we have tools to shape a more positive, less obsessive and increasingly de-centralised and democratised readership. As is evident, this proposal for a series of lineages for the photobook is in need for refinement and questioning — I hope that this space might be an opportunity for that to happen.

Bibliography

Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr. The Photobook: A History Volume I. Book, Whole. London: Phaidon, 2004.

Border, Sylvia Grace. “The Artist’s Photographic Book: Towards a Definition” in Photography and the Artist’s Book. Edited by Theresa Wilkie, Jonathan Carson and Rosie Miller, 28-61. Book, Section. Edinburgh, UK Museums Etc, 2012.

Colberg, Jörg. “Towards a Photobook Taxonomy.” Conscientious Photography Magazine. Accessed April 2, 2018. https://cphmag.com/photobook-taxonomy/

Spowart, Doug. “A Spectrum: Photobook to Artists’ Book.” Wotwedid. Accessed April 14, 2018. https://wotwedid.com/2018/04/13/a-photo-spectrum-photobook-to-artists-book/

Sweetman, Alex. “Photobookworks: The Critical Realist Tradition.” In Artists’ Books : A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, edited by Joan Lyons, 187–207. Book, Section. Rochester, NY: The Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985.

Zimmermann, Philip. “College Book Art Association - PHOTOBOOK TO PHOTO-BOOKWORK, A SPECTRUM” Accessed April 13, 2018. https://www.collegebookart.org/bookarttheory/4109494

Matt Johnston is based in the UK where he leads the Photography BA programme at Coventry University. He is the co-founder and editor of The Photobook Club, a global community of photobook readers and is a PhD student at UCA Farnham where he is part of bookRoom research cluster.

CONTEXT, PERFORMANCE, AND BOOK ART // Andrea Kohashi

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Books are often created to accompany live performances and exhibitions - these often take the form of book art. How does context and knowledge of these performances affect the understanding of these pieces?

A recent visit to the library by a group of sculpture students had me pull a few books meant to accompany or document performance pieces: Margot Lovejoy’s Labyrinth, Alison Knowles’ Journal of the Identical Lunch, and Marcel Broodthaers’ A Voyage on the North Sea.* The three books represent three different approaches to the relationship between performance and books which shade the understanding of each piece as a stand-alone object.

Lovejoy’s Labyrinth recreates an immersive experience. Lovejoy presents a series of spreads with flaps and gatefolds which slow the pace of reading. The book is composed entirely of collaged images, text only appearing on the title and table of contents pages. In the original live installation, Lovejoy had attendees wear masks and follow a rope through a labyrinth to arrive at multiple screens of projected images. Though the book is inspired by and a continuation of the installation by Lovejoy, Labyrinth is able to convey a complete message on its own. The understanding of the book is enhanced by knowledge of a previous event but it is not dependent on that knowledge.

Margot Lovejoy’s Labyrinth

Knowles’ Journal of the Identical Lunch presents documentation of a series of events enacted under the umbrella of one piece — eating (and having others eat) a lunch of a cup of soup, a tunafish [sic] sandwich, and a glass of buttermilk. The spreads present receipts, textual documentation, and other correspondence and ephemera related to the enactment of ordering and eating the identical lunch. While knowledge of the performance is required to understand the book, the book itself provides the context for understanding the performance.

Alison Knowles’ Journal of the Identical Lunch

Broodthaers, in A Voyage on the North Sea book, presents one-half of a whole piece. Originally created as a film and book duo, the book relies on two images (one painted, one a photograph) of ships, presumably in the North Sea. The book features a repetition of blown-up shots focusing on particular parts of the painting. I cannot present an overview of the film as the collection I work with only has the book. The film and book were meant to be experienced as one and it’s impossible to imagine what this experience or reading of the work would have been without the full piece. And yet, here the book exists, actively being presented without its other half. In this case, the meaning of the book is completely lost without the understanding of the performance.

Marcel Broodthaers’ A Voyage on the North Sea

As the students spent time with each piece and began asking questions, I started to doubt my decision to include the Broodthaers book in class. I began to question my responsibilities as a librarian and as an artist — is it irresponsible to share works in a way so far removed from the artists’ original intent, so out of context? Or, as artists do we accept that works continue as living documents beyond our control, themselves enacting a different performativity in reading and reception? Can works which were inspired by or rely on performance and events ever truly stand alone, or should that specific context always be provided?

* All three books are discussed in Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists' Books but this was coincidental.

Bibliography

Broodthaers, M. (1974). A Voyage on the North Sea. London: Petersburg Press.

Doǧu, H. (1992). Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 11(3), 158-159. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27948471

Drucker, J., & Granary Books. (1995). The century of artists' books. New York City: Granary Books.

Knowles, A. (1971). Journal of the Identical Lunch. San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press.

Lovejoy, M. (1991). Labyrinth : A montage book. United States]: M. Lovejoy.

Andrea Kohashi is a book artist and librarian residing in Richmond, Virginia. She is the Teaching and Learning Librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Special Collections and Archives. Kohashi received her MFA in Book Arts and MA in Library and Information Science from the University of Iowa.

BOOK ART DOES NOT EXIST // Richard Minsky

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Apr 2018 07:00:00 GMT

In June, 2016 I wrote a Book Art Theory blog post, WHY BOTHER WITH WIKIPEDIA? 

In January 2017 I started a Wikipedia Book Art entry to replace the current redirect to "Book Arts," which is only a disambiguation page that links to "Artist's Book" and a few other things. Please see what I wrote, which has had a few technical changes by others (View history) but no substantive additions by people knowledgeable about the field of Book Art. Since it doesn't appear on a search for "book art" I doubt anyone knows about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Art

It's considered a "stub," and until it is fleshed out and is more complete, with better footnotes and references, it will not replace the redirect. If you type "book art" into the Wikipedia search field you will see what happens.

I am not fluent in Wikipedia editing, but was able to learn enough to get this started. It's just a beginning. Please help get the ball rolling. If you are a registered Wikipedia contributor, or know someone who is, please take a few minutes to add or change content, correct errors, and clarify references. Every bit will help. If you don't have a Wikipedia account you can create one here.

It could be a significant resource if done properly. Besides the many educational benefits such an entry would bring, there is the impact on funding Book Art programs and departments. When a Trustee or administrator who knows nothing about book art is cutting programs in a budget crunch, you want them to find a robust entry for your field--not that it doesn't exist except as a footnote to a disambiguation.

It is more than an embarrassment that there is no entry specific to the name and purpose of the College Book Art Association or Book Art Theory blog. Although the "artist's book" entry is reasonably well written and organized, it has a distinct point of view that does not represent the larger field of book art of which "artist's books" is a part. Many of our subfields already have entries and are linked from "artist's book" in its "See also" section. This will make our job of creating the Book Art listing easier. Note that this list includes a "List of book arts centers" even though "book arts" remains a disambiguation phrase without its own entry.

Art diary
Altered book
List of book arts centers
Asemic writing
Bookbinding
Fine press
Illuminated manuscript
Letterpress printing
Miniature book
Something Else Press
Visual poetry
Zine

Please help rectify this situation by going to the entry at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_create_a_page;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Directory;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_editing

Richard Minsky is a book artist. In 1974 he founded the Center for Book Arts. The Richard Minsky Archive is at the Yale Arts Library. More at minsky.com.

CONCEPTS OF SEQUENCE // Steven Arenius

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 07:00:00 GMT

I am a small press comics publisher and current MFA student at Visual Studies Workshop, founded in 1969 by Nathan Lyons. Coming into the VSW MFA program with my background in comics, I started to look for connections between my medium of choice and overlapping concepts in artists’ books and photobooks. I looked to Lyons’ concept of sequence and quickly realized it presents a problem when it comes to comics—that the fundamental mechanics of comics, the so-called “sequential art,” often challenges or completely contradicts the ideas of Lyons, a master of photographic sequence in books.

Lyons outlines his distinction between series and sequence in “Display as Discourse:” "Series generally are thematically related or connected, while sequences are based upon disjunctive relationship. The Latin root of each term forms another distinction—series, ‘to join;’ sequence, ‘to follow.’ . . . A sequence is structured by allowing one image to follow another by an order of succession or arrangement, which is not apparently thematic or systematic (6)." A series can be seen as “a system of order” (Drucker, 258), whereas sequence is created through juxtaposition.

Different disciplines necessitate different approaches to sequence and a lack of consistent terms across these disciplines has made for thorny research and problematic discussions. Sequence is often used to describe any arrangement or order (and the dictionary backs this up) yet the understanding of sequence and its relation to seriality, as Lyons defines it, activates myriad possibilities for the creation and interpretation of visual books.

Comics rely heavily upon the concept of closure, which is defined in terms of a co-presence (Beatty, 108): “observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (McCloud, 63). Lyons suggested a similar idea when he quotes Laszlo Moholy-Nagy about photography: “the single picture loses its separate identity and becomes a part of the assembly; it becomes a structural element of the related whole” (Selected Essays, 199). Thus sequence is more than simply an image relationship: it is inherently structural and compositional, “a framework within which each element or page make a contribution and has a place” (Drucker, 258).

With narrative comics, closure allows the reader to close fundamental gaps in time and space, connecting disparate moments and mentally constructing a continuous, unified reality. While this sort of image relationship would be defined as serial rather than sequential, it is of note that we read the space between images as transitional, transformational. In a serial relationship, the transition is often plain to see, but in a sequence, this invisible space becomes charged, made all the more elusive and alluring by the fact that what occurs therein is not readily apparent. This space may well have been what photographer Duane Michals was referring to when he said, “I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.”

Lyons’ idea of sequence is defined in terms of a “disjunctive” relationship, yet the problem of narrative arises time and again in subsequent discourse. Comics scholar Scott McCloud poses the question, “is it possible for any sequence of panels to be totally unrelated to each other” (Carrier, 51)? One school of thought seems to suggest a sort of inherent narrativity, wherein “direct narratives may be formed, or very layered associative ground may be established” (Lyons, Selected Essays, 195) regardless of the apparent unrelatedness of a grouping of images. Johanna Drucker cautions that “sequence and narrative are related, but not redundant, elements of books structures” (258). Meaning is “inscribed in the succession” (Carrier, 51) of images, but meaning and narrative are not to be confused.

The tension between series and sequence, as well as the problem of narrative, is in a sense reconciled in the case of abstract comics, where the subversion of typical depictions of time and space seeks to transcend the serial relationships of narrative and awaken the possibilities of sequence. Andrei Molotiu, editor of Fantagraphics Books’ Abstract Comics anthology, links this to his concept of Sequential Dynamism, the “formal visual energy [that] propels the reader’s eye from panel to panel and from page to page” (89). It is rhythmic, kinetic, and generates sequentiality without the representation of diegetic time. Molotiu’s scholarship invites the reader to take a comics page in as one would an abstract painting: “If these works chronicle anything,” he poses, “it is nothing but the life of the graphic trace” (Tabulo, 31).

“The single photograph, so apparently clear and emphatic . . . is in fact notoriously slippery when it comes to conveying meaning beyond mere depiction,” writes photobook historian Gerry Badger (16). Sequence is what welds the sentence of a single image to into a paragraph, a chapter, “a territory where rational description is relinquished, is held in tension” (Badger, 16). Represented time and space are loosened into an ethereal, associative realm where meaning bleeds and blurs in the space between images, brought to life by succession and juxtaposition. Sequence is at once a structural imperative and a compositional framework, a mechanic of movement and a catalyst for theme, or in the words of Moholy-Nagy, “a potent weapon or a tender poetry” (Lyons, Selected Essays, 199).

Bibliography

Badger, Gerry. “It's All Fiction: Narrative and the Photobook” in Imprint: Visual Narratives in Books and Beyond. ed. Negative: Hans Edberg et al. University of Gothenburg, 2013.

Beatty, Bart. “In Focus: Comics Studies, Fifty Years After Film Studies” in Cinema Journal, 50.3 (Spring 2011).

Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park, The Pennsylvania University Press, 2000.

Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artist's Books. New York: Granary Books, 2004.

Lyons, Nathan. “Display as Discourse” in Journal of Artists' Books, 27 (Spring 2010).

____________. Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews. ed. Jessica S. McDonald. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2012.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1993.

Molotiu, Andrei. “Abstract Form: Sequential Dynamism and Iconostasis in Abstract Comics and Steve Ditko's Amazing Spider-Man” in Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods. ed. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Tabulo, Kym. “Abstract Sequential Art” in Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics. 5.1 (2009).

Steven Arenius is based in Rochester, New York, where he runs The Panoptic Press, a small press publisher of comics and limited-run print. He studied literature and art history at SUNY New Paltz and is currently pursuing an MFA at the Visual Studies Workshop.

HALF THE FIELD: WRITING AND THE ARTIST'S BOOK // Carley Gomez

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 08:00:00 GMT

At the 2018 CBAA conference, I presented alongside AB Gorham, Woody Leslie, and Levi Sherman. Our panel, “Half the Field: Writing and the Artist’s Book,” addressed writing from historical, pedagogical, personal, and practical perspectives.

We addressed how art world institutions like exhibitions, submissions, websites, and critique can better serve the writing produced in our field. Critique epitomizes many of the problematic dynamics and brings to the fore interesting theoretical implications of these tensions. Books that must be read by one person at a time pose obvious challenges to a typical critique format, especially if they contain written content. In contrast, writing students come to class having already read the piece or pieces that will be workshopped. I believe book art classes can adapt the workshop approach to critique, especially to develop artists’ writing practices. The difficulties posed by this translation reveal fascinating fault lines in the theoretical terrain – the inextricable integration of the artists’ book, the material presence of language, and so on.

Writing has much to offer book arts education beyond critique, or more accurately, before critique. We must begin by questioning our prioritization of the visual. Not only will stronger writing create a stronger book, but writing can offer a reader a familiar access point into a piece. Certainly novels are more familiar than artists’ books to most viewers. People broadly have an understanding of how books work: of chapters, paragraphs, sentences. Sadly, that is not always the case for visual art. As an instructor, I work to improve my students’ visual literacy, but in the meantime, as a writer, I can demonstrate why an understanding of narrative technique improves artists’ books.

Tension and conflict drive a book. Linguistic play can delight a reader, but a reader craves momentum. We will read until there is equilibrium, we will read until we find an answer. In a narrative piece, this is as simple as ensuring a character or narrator wants something as soon as they’re introduced. A conflict need not be violent or dramatic. People create their own internal conflicts simply through their desires. These conflicts and tension are amplified by obstacles.

Without a traditional narrative, an artist no longer asks, what does the character want. The question is: what is preventing an equilibrium? The tension here may be the very relationship between the reader and the book. The book may be ergodic—resisting the reader—but such occurrences should be intentional and controlled. Unnecessary resistance becomes merely tedious. The tension propelling the book may also be in relationship between the visual and written components. Whether narrative or not, a book, as a time-based experience, requires propulsion. This may mean resisting the satisfaction of a perfectly resolved spread, since it is the quest for resolution that will drive the reader to turn the page.

Considering narrative transformation will also help create, or workshop, an artist’s book. In a traditional narrative, a character goes through a transformation. If they do not, a larger point is made, which in itself is a transformation of an idea. These types of changes are satisfying to a reader. However, there are many types of transformation that both satisfy and provide revelations to a viewer. Depicting one perspective and then engaging with another is a change that provides a revelation to the reader. Breaking boundaries is another way to create this effect. In novels, the boundaries are metaphorical or situational: a castaway escapes an island, someone escapes a small town. In an artist’s book, these boundaries can be both written and physical, strengthening this element. Images and writing can bleed off the page, pages can be unfolded, they can be ripped. When done with intention and ordered for emphasis, these moves can satisfy the viewer.

These literary lessons highlight the shared vocabulary of visual and written art. Consider overlapping terms like ‘tone,’ ‘organic,’ or even ‘depth’ with different meanings in each context. It’s easy to forget that flat characters or the weight of a line are metaphors. This can make critique and discussion confusing for some students, but this act of translation can also lead to important discoveries in the messy overlap of connotations and meanings.

Carley Gomez is a PhD candidate in Fiction and a Gus T. Ridgel Fellow at the University of Missouri. She has an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her fiction has been published in Passages North and Euphony Journal.

POETICS OF DEFAULT // AB Gorham

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 08:00:00 GMT

During the 2018 CBAA Conference in Philadelphia, I took part in a panel comprised of myself, Carley Gomez, Woody Leslie, and organized by contributor Levi Sherman. This panel explored, among many other things, how book art can benefit from adopting methods from the creative writing field and discussed ways to improve institutions and systems that unwittingly de-emphasize writing within book arts.

As a tangent of my talk titled “Rebus Read Plainly,” I’d like to propose expanding the notion of writing, specifically in the context of incorporating text into artists’ books. Even more, how can we (educators) get students to produce text for or within artists’ books that doesn’t fall into the trappings of the often-clichéd language that tends to be a default for nascent writers?

In the long stretching shadow of Mallarmé exists a collection of books that contain fragmented poems, poetic utterances, or short, quippy phrases—while these are wonderful books, this seems to be the default mode of writing within many artists’ books. Perhaps writing in this manner is due to the shared space comprised of text and imagery (not to mention a book’s structural concerns), or, maybe there is a subconscious impulse to keep the language brief or mainly visual in order to appeal to a more visually-oriented audience. Of course, there are many different categories of books, and books that slip in between those categories, so I want to avoid over-generalizing and explore some tendencies I see with “new” book artists. I know that book artists agonize over the text that they incorporate into their books, so this isn’t to imply otherwise. Rather, I’m curious about the textual trend I see with so many artists’ books containing what looks like and acts like poetic language = Poems.

Writing should not be an afterthought within an artist’s book. Visual elements that work primarily in service of the text are referred to as illustrative, a word that denotes a level of dependency between text and image and, often, places the visual elements into a category of work that historically is defined by an intent other than artistic expression. What about text that works primarily in service of the visual elements of the book? Shouldn’t we call this text descriptive, stripping it of some of its independence as a written artistic form? In order to begin a discussion about the relationship between text and imagery in artists’ books, we have to be willing to prescribe levels of effectiveness not only with imagery and structure, but with the accompanying text. Don’t we already have enough to consider when making books and book objects? Sure, but what’s one more thing?

The book arts workshop isn’t always a conducive environment for reading/viewing books which contain text that takes time to digest. How can we get students to respond to the text as they respond to the imagery, structure, and material choices? I suggest recommending to students (and ourselves) that alternative writing, including text messages, grocery lists, and step-by-step processes (to name a few) can provide ample fodder for exploring book forms, as well as creating dynamic reading/viewing experiences. Employing these familiar, certainly mundane forms of writing has the companion effect of providing a remedy for that pressure to write Poems into books. Perhaps incorporating text with familiar forms (the texts, lists, and processes that I suggest above) is one way to begin that training. Ultimately, regardless of form, how is the text working within the book space? Using these forms to shape text, we can still ask students to avoid illustrations and descriptive language with the aim of creating more conceptual books, and, just maybe, they’ll begin to see the possibilities for text that doesn’t have to be a Poem.

AB Gorham is a book artist and writer, originally hailing from Montana. She holds MFAs in Book Arts and Poetry from The University of Alabama. She is the Manager of Black Rock Press and lives in Reno, Nevada with her husband, their daughter, and their three beasts.

RESEARCHING BOOK ART AND ARTISTS' STATEMENTS // Andrea Kohashi

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 08:00:00 GMT

“I’m looking for books about mirages,” said one researcher.

“I’m looking for a book with wooden covers that slam shut on the reader,” said another.

These are examples of research requests I field on a daily basis in reference to the book arts collection I work with. I love these types of requests because they provide opportunity for me to seek and find new pieces of work that I wouldn’t necessarily come across otherwise. Additionally, these types of requests are relatively easy for me to search in the library catalog and database (or, even with online search engines) because often artists’ books are cataloged with terms focusing on content or structure. I’ve noticed the questions above exemplify two trends in the way people typically request materials in book arts collections: They either choose to focus on topical content or they choose to focus on physical structure. Considering the way books are more typically conceived of as textual information carriers, it’s not surprising that most researchers either use the tools of topic and genre or physical structure, but not both, to search.

It is my greatest hope, and even assumption, that whichever tool is used to search, the book art piece delivered to the researcher illuminates some relationship between topic and structure. This relationship, though, is more intangible and decidedly more difficult to search for and connect researchers to. In general, the textual and paratextual elements of book art participate equally in the understanding of the whole. Book artists, I think, come to creating work with either an innate or learned sense of looking at the whole. Through exposure to other artists’ work and critical dialogue amongst practitioners, it’s hard to ignore the decisions made and elements present which come together to make a whole. I tend to make the assumption that researchers outside the field of book arts make the connection between the text, image, and physical composition naturally, but I’m not sure if this is the case, nor am I sure where the responsibility of understanding falls.

Artists’ statements introducing specific books are tools that I have found invaluable as a librarian assisting people in finding book art. As an artist, I am guilty of pushing work off into the world without an accompanying statement. This is partially because I believe the work should be able to convey all meaning and understanding without the aid of a statement, but it’s also partially and frankly because I don’t enjoy writing statements. They, though, do provide the reader something to pull and push against and they often, sometimes in conjunction with a colophon, provide conceptual context in relationship to the physical means of making. In the most practical sense, they also provide readily available terms and phrases by which the item can be cataloged and consequently searched.

Curiously, I didn’t start writing this post with the intention of shining a light on what an artist says about a work, but I’ve now convinced myself that they are integral to building understanding and research around the art we make. Within the field, I think artists’ statements are generally encouraged, but I’m curious how people perceive their use by future readers and how their perceived use shapes what is provided in a statement.

BLANK? A QUESTION OF CONTENT // David Nees

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 08:00:00 GMT

“What is content?” Some might argue that content is simply the use of text and/or images to tell a story in a book. Perhaps. This past fall, I talked a lot about the idea of “structural content” in relationship to book making. The form of a book is the first place to see how we can give and possibly derive meaning beyond the story inside. The need is straightforward. A binding structure should protect the pages within, so that someone can read the story and then preserve it for others to read as well. The formula for such a book is quite simple. 1. Stick pages together. 2. Put a protective cover around pages. That is the way machines think about book making. Yet, when making a book by hand, we have so many things to consider. Choices have to be made. By making those choices, you begin to add meaning to the work, for me, that is content. Possibly at its most basic, but content nonetheless.

Content can be quite ordinary. In the 17th Century, artists turned their brushes to the ordinary elements of daily life. Still life paintings, or Genre paintings, are credited with bringing the viewer’s eye to the meaning/beauty/spirituality of the everyday. Just by painting a subject, the artist made the subject meaningful. I think this reverberates through the art practice of the last 400 years. For me this allows one to see the beauty of the object as content in and of itself. It is meaningful to make a beautiful book. Its content is beauty, skill, process, and materials.

Journals, diaries and sketchbooks, beautifully made books, can be quite meaningful before a pen ever fills their pages with the stories and dreams of their owners. Content as it is defined here is the result of all the choices, structural and material, visual and tactile, that have gone into the creation of the such a book. The exterior of a book might be written off as decoration; however, the cover surely is not merely decoration or protection—it reveals something about the artist who made it and to an extent the person who ultimately uses the book. The best analogy, for me, is from the musical Oklahoma! There is a boxed lunch auction in the story that has the ladies making picnic lunches and dressing the baskets in finery and bows. The men are to bid on the “anonymous” lunches and as a bonus the ladies are obliged to have lunch with the winning bidder. Of course, cheating goes on, intrigues fly, and there is a bit of drama. Laurie doesn’t fare too well and has to have lunch with Jud instead of Curly. But I digress. The moral of that story is that through all that finery, frills, and bows, the hand of the maker can distinctly shine through. And likewise, all the finery that might be used in the creation of a book is not simply pretty decoration, but meaningful choices that fill the blankest of books with content.

David Nees is an adjunct, book artist, and book designer. He is currently working at the University of Alabama Press, and teaching at Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa, where he lives with his fiancé, and their dog Henley. A selection of his portfolio can be seen here: http://davenbookart.tumblr.com/.

BEING A BOOK ARTIST // David Nees

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 Jan 2018 08:00:00 GMT

I was inspired to write about the difference between being a book arts student and a book artist after reading some of the previous blog posts. Having graduated with my MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama this past summer, I have little time under my belt not being a student in Book Arts. Also, I am very fortunate that my current job as a Book Designer includes an education benefit that afforded me the opportunity to take a Binding class/workshop this past Fall semester. So technically, I have continued to work and learn, refine and practice, right up the present. But has it ended? No. I have a bag full of books to put together, a book project to print and bind, and a myriad of ideas. It feels far from over. I think, to be honest, it has just begun.

I recently said to a group of new MFA Book Arts students that I didn’t really see myself as a book artist until I was knee-deep in my Thesis/Creative Project and I did something during binding that in the recent past I would have labored and worried about. Now I just did it. It happened easily. It was, now, natural to me. I remember thinking almost out loud that now I am a book artist. Becoming a book artist isn’t easy. Continuing to be a book artist certainly will be harder. Success even harder still. And of course, there will be classes, workshops, and techniques to learn and master; however, if you truly are a book artist, you can describe yourself as one. Perhaps you never make another book after completing your degree. You will still be a book artist. You may not be a good one, a great one, or even a practicing one, but you are still a book artist.

Until…

You may become something else. Anyone, of any advanced age, at least over the age of 2 or so, has been a lot of things. Identity is not formed of cement. It is fluid. For instance, I have been a son and a brother. I have been a student, a retail clerk, a hairdresser (well, a student in cosmetology school). I have been a Classics major and an art historian. I have been an adjunct, an artist, a graphic designer, a Book Arts student, and now a book designer and a book artist. I am all of these things. I also know that all of these versions of myself inform the current version of myself. So often, I have found, we debate and argue over whether what we make is book art; however, maybe we should spend a little more time talking about ourselves as book artists. I echo the call for us to talk about ourselves and talk about how we make/survive the transition past student into life outside. Like Plato’s freed prisoner, there are challenges.

And the challenges are not inconsequential. I have to begin to think of how I am going to do my work. I have to think outside of the glamorous, yes glamorous, world of the studios that, as it were, I have grown up in. I am looking at different ways to incorporate content into books, and finding ways to make books that are nearly as successful as those that I have made before. I have to make books in the way that I can make them now, not mourn for the loss of the studio space, lack of storage, or the lack of a board shear or access to printing presses. And I have to work toward creating that ideal space as it is allowed and afforded. Moreover, I have to maintain my community of fellow book artists that are now scattered, but always close at hand.

David Nees is an adjunct, book artist, and book designer. He is currently working at the University of Alabama Press, working as a printer and binder, and teaching at Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa, where he lives with his fiancé, and their dog Henley. A selection of his portfolio can be seen here: http://davenbookart.tumblr.com/.

COMPULSORY END-OF-YEAR NAVEL-GAZING // Andrea Kohashi

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 08:00:00 GMT

As the end of the calendar year quickly approaches, I have been participating in some self-reflection: It has been approximately two and a half years since I completed my thesis project for my MFA in Book Arts. I have not, during that time, completed any unfinished editions or endeavored on new book art projects. I have, on the other hand, created 4’ by 6’ screen prints, taken on some job printing, and constructed a couple of sculptural costumes out of milkshake straws, fabric, and foil. Recently, knee deep in straws and silver lamé, I began to question if I could still consider myself a book artist, why (or if) I was avoiding creating book art, and if it was important to continue to self-identify as a book artist or as an artist who works in book form.

 Even considering the many ways “book art” can be defined, I can still say with certainty I have not made any book art in the past few years. In my day job as a librarian, I work with a collection of over 4,000 book art objects. Daily, I witness the breadth and range of contemporary book art and it’s hard not to compare my own identity, practice, and production to those whose work surrounds me. My book artist identity questioning has led me in multiple directions and I’ve consequently had conversations with many peers about the obstacles and opportunities faced in building a book artist identity. I present the questions below as common threads pulled from hours of discussion and introspection - they are expansive and meant to provoke. I imagine many book artists have considered these questions, and I’m eager to hear the opinions and thoughts of the CBAA (and beyond) community.

Are tools, equipment, and technical processes integral to the conceptual basis for your work? What happens when the tools and equipment you consider integral to your work are no longer readily available?

How have you sought and found community for book arts in your current life? Additionally, how do you seek feedback and critique on in-progress work and ideas?

How is the field of book art perceived by artists in other fields and institutions? Have you seen this perception shift over time?

How does gender identity affect your experience of the field and yourself as a book artist?

If you spent time in a formal program studying book art, what, if any, were the ways you prepared for life as a book artist after graduation?

Andrea Kohashi is a [book?] artist and librarian residing in Richmond, Virginia. She is the Teaching and Learning Librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Special Collections and Archives. Kohashi received her MFA in Book Arts and MA in Library and Information Science from the University of Iowa.

PLEASE [DO NOT] TOUCH THE ART // Andrea Kohashi

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 08:00:00 GMT

Having just returned from a book fair, a friend told me he slightly altered the design of one of his editions to accommodate a multitude of similar requests from collectors (both individual and institutional) for a more readily storable object. In this particular case, the design change did not greatly impact the reading of the piece and made it easier to store and access, rendering it more marketable. Additionally, the artist controlled the alteration in design and implemented it himself. At the 2017 CBAA Annual Meeting in Tallahassee, the Florida State University Strozier Library Special Collections facilitated a discussion about the potential discord between preservation desires and artists’ intentions. My friend’s design change reignited my thinking about the tensions between preservation, access, and artist intention. As both a book artist and a special collections librarian, I often struggle to define the “right” way to handle and provide access to artists’ books.

Most artists’ books require the user alter or change the book, whether intentional or not. In the collection I currently work with, we have two extreme examples on two ends of the spectrum. The first, a completely white trade editioned book, has greyed on the fore-edge due to repeated handling (yes, even with washed hands). The greying of the pages is not, as far as I can tell, part of the conceptual aim of the piece. The second, a piece composed of thin laser engraved sheets of wood which, according to the artist, are meant to disintegrate with time and use.

In order to provide as much access as possible to fragile or changeable artists’ books, I’ve heard suggestions of videos or photos to document moments of change. I can’t help but think, though, by documenting the change rather than allowing people to experience it first-hand, we’re missing the point of the whole endeavor. The act of reading is performative, active, and engaging. The act of observing someone reading is less active and more voyeuristic. Access to the laser engraved book mentioned above is similar to a video because it is generally restricted to classes where the book can be handled by a single person and be shown to multiple people at one time - we’re not avoiding disintegration, we’re slowing it as much as we can. When one person handles a book and many observe, only one person is able to access the full experience and the others are left to imagine what the full experience would be like.

Another approach to providing access to artists’ books is buying multiples. This practice can be reasonable with trade editioned books. With the above white book changing color, one begins to ask oneself if the book is merely dirty, or intentionally meant to discolor over time. Meanings and perceptions begin to shift based on information relayed through the physical changing of the book. Would an additional pristine copy, unable to be be touched, next to the discolored book provide better insight or does it highlight a change not meant to be highlighted? Additionally, if the book is supposed to change over time and use, does the juxtaposition of a clean version and a used version lead the user to imagine rather than experience the book just as videos and photos can do.

As a book artist creating work, I always have an imagined audience in mind, but, perhaps near sightedly, I’m not thinking about the potential spaces my work may land in the future and how those spaces may change the way the work is understood. It feels natural to compartmentalize my artist self from my librarian self when creating work in my studio or when handling work in a public space, though it is impossible to keep either completely at bay. To refer to the laser engraved book again, my artist self says let as many people handle it as it takes to make the whole thing fall apart. My librarian self wants people to handle the book and let it fall apart...but gently...and slowly...and actually, maybe not at all.

I’m curious, how does future collection and use affect the creation and production of work? Would a change in design for future collection and use degrade the work (and if so, where is the line)? Are some artists’ books, by their nature, at odds with ideas of collecting?

MAKING SPACE: COLLECTIVE INTERVENTIONS // Bridget Elmer

Fri, 17 Nov 2017 03:23:37 GMT

In my most recent post, I argue that we have a responsibility, as artists and educators in the field of book art, to ensure access to the work that we believe is critically important. I recognize that it can be challenging to make this kind of space, particularly in an academic context. Institutions move slowly, politics are embedded but opaque, and resources are (usually) scarce. Add to this the fact that the field of book art encompasses a constantly evolving continuum of creative activity, which is not easily defined or conveyed, nor predictably valued at any given institution. Advocating for the work while facing these difficulties can be a daunting task.

As I previously acknowledged, partnerships and collaboration are essential, but a critical question remains–where and how do we locate our allies? With this post, I offer up several possibilities, based on the outreach events that I previously profiled, as well as my recent experiences with a collaborative project, Freedom of the Presses, a multi-site exhibition focused on the creative and democratic processes of 21st century independent artist's publishing, which is currently in full swing at my institutional home.

Academic libraries are, of course, natural partners. In all three of the collaborative interventions that serve as case studies for this post, the academic library plays a central, if not primary role in project development and implementation. At UCLA, the Activating the Archive project was made possible by the Center for Primary Research and Training, created by the UCLA Library “to integrate special collections materials more fully into the teaching and research mission of the university.” At Swarthmore, the libraries partnered with the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, which focuses on “Engaged Scholarship,” to enact their Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary project. At Ringling, the Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center participated in the co-curation , exhibition design, and installation of the Freedom of the Presses exhibition. In addition, the Alfred R. Goldstein Library served as the primary site for an associated book fair.

Campus galleries can also serve as ideal sites for collaborative interventions. Exhibitions organized in partnership with galleries provide space–literally–for critically important work in our field. These collaborative shows can also greatly expand outreach efforts. In the case of Freedom of the Presses, the Ringling College Galleries were able to directly reach ten times the number of potential visitors to the exhibition and associated programming than the Letterpress and Book Arts Center could engage on its own.

Non-academic organizational partners are also essential allies. They bring critical focus, alternative strategies, creative solutions, swift action, and meaningful engagement to our efforts to activate artists’ books. In the case of Swarthmore’s Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary project, the Philadelphia-based Nationalities Service Center plays a central role. With their mission to “prepare and empower immigrants and refugees in the Philadelphia region to transcend challenging circumstances,” the Nationalities Service Center facilitates meaningful, client-centered experiences for the Iraqi and Syrian refugees involved in the project, empowering both the organizers and participants to engage artists’ books as sites for activism. The Freedom of the Presses project at Ringling would not have been possible without Booklyn, Inc. The entire project was collaboratively developed with Booklyn's Collection Development Curator, Marshall Weber, from concept, to curation, to installation and programming, in an effort to stay true to the work–all of the artists and organizations featured in the exhibition approach artist’s publishing as a socially engaged practice. In addition to this integral collaboration with Booklyn, several other non-academic partners participated in the programming for the show, including EXILE Books, I Wish To Say, Bluebird Books Bus, NOMAD Art Bus, and SEA Change, a regional group of artists and curators dedicated to building awareness and support for socially engaged art practices. These organizations deepened understanding, engaged directly with the public, and provided a variety of accessible entry points to the exhibition.

As I continue to forge ahead with the goal to make space for critically important artists’ publications, I hope to locate additional allies within and beyond my community and current institution. For instance, where are our allies within self-organized student groups and among faculty on campus? How can I support the meaningful programming and outreach that is already taking place within and beyond our campus through departments such as student volunteerism and service learning, international student affairs, and student health services? Who are the non-academic partners I have yet to engage?

I invite our membership to consider questions such as these, and to share successful collaborations, emerging strategies, and possible sites for intervention in the comments section below.

Bridget Elmer is an artist living in Saint Petersburg, Florida. She is the co-operator of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA) and founding member of Print St. Pete Community Letterpress. Bridget works as the Coordinator of the Letterpress and Book Arts Center at Ringling College of Art and Design and serves on the CBAA Board as Chair of the Publications Committee. She received an MFA and MLIS from the University of Alabama and her work is collected internationally.

ACTIVATING ARTISTS' BOOKS: ACCESS AND ADVOCACY // Bridget Elmer

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 07:00:00 GMT

In his most recent post, Tate Shaw urgently concludes, “We need more books like Come to Selfhood. We need to support more artists like McFadden. You need to see and hear what is present in the quiet of this critically important work.”

Reading Shaw’s post, I am drawn back into one of the critical questions, originally posed by Susan Viguers, which I published in a previous post:

“To what extent does the intended audience have access to the work (more particularly, to the intended experience of it)?”

A new question simultaneously emerges:

What is my responsibility, as an artist and educator in this field, to ensure access to the work that I consider to be critically important?

After viewing Dr. Omi Sun Joni L. Jones’ "6 Rules for Allies," as referenced by Shaw, yet another question comes to the fore:

What “alternative academic strategies” can I pursue in an effort to advocate for this critically important work?

I am beginning to realize that it is not enough to simply make the work, appreciate the work, or even write about the work. We need to make space for the work–literally. We need to locate and activate the critically important artists’ books that sit on the shelves of our homes, our studios, our classrooms, and our libraries. We need to advocate for the creation, acquisition, and activation of artists’ publications that should be on those shelves, but are instead significantly absent. We have to locate the allies within and beyond our communities and institutions, do the hard work that collaboration necessitates, and dream up alternative, radical strategies for providing access to what we all “need to hear and see.” We have to “step up.”

As an example of how we can take such steps, I offer up an archive outreach event recently facilitated by the Center for Primary Research and Training at UCLA Library Special Collections, Activating the Archive, which “aimed to create a space for creative engagement with the collections” and highlighted “materials focusing on social justice initiatives, activist groups, and human rights.” The event was a part of a series organized in response to the 2016 U.S. election, which recognized “the vast number of groups on campus being directly targeted by the new administration” and opened up the archive as a “creative outlet to make their voices heard.” The program drew students and staff from a variety of departments on campus and invited them to make buttons and zines using materials from the collection.

Poster featuring buttons from UCLA Library Special Collections that were recreated during the event.

An additional, visionary example can be found in the Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary project at Swarthmore College, which recently received a Pew Center Grant “to create and exhibit artists’ books that amplify personal narratives of displacement, immigration, and sanctuary.” Marshall Weber, Curator at Booklyn, Inc., brought to my attention this exemplary project, which is a collaboration between Swarthmore College Libraries, the Lang Center for Civic & Social Responsibility, and the immigrant and refugee service organization, Nationalities Service Center. The project invites Iraqi and Syrian refugees in Philadelphia to explore Swarthmore’s library collections and create artists’ books via multi-day workshops facilitated by book artists. The project will culminate with an exhibition and documentary catalogue, the publication of which I eagerly anticipate.

Projects such as these serve as a beacon, modeling the alternative possibilities that can be activated in our field when allies organize, share resources, advocate, and step up.

CAUGHT BY JOSHUA RASHAAD MCFADDEN'S COME TO SELFHOOD // Tate Shaw

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Oct 2017 07:00:00 GMT

Unless you meditate you probably haven’t spent much quiet time just being with yourself, lately. But if you have, then you’ll know that quiet isn’t an absence but reveals the presence of the sounds you’re not listening for. If you’re like me, you don’t often hear the hum of household machines while cicadas chirp outside and the cat licks its fur because whatever media you absorb—New York Times and Washington Post apps refreshed every fifteen minutes— in order to try to keep up with what’s happening—or entertainment you subsequently take in—Spotify, Netflix, HBOGO, YouTube—in order to dam the overflow of bad news—whatever you choose to engage with is also incorporating your life within this larger, noisy entity we call Media and Entertainment (ME). When incorporated, the self gets blotted out and loses its identity in order for it to be en masse, as one, with the all.

This incorporation into the public is of course one way we get to the point of thinking of groups of people in monolithic terms. For example, ME has determined African American protest is loud and wild, crazy and passionate to the extreme. Take Colin Kaepernick, the now out of work NFL quarterback who peacefully, silently protested the treatment of African Americans by sitting and then kneeling during the national anthem. Trump and now Pence call names, taunt, threaten, and stage antics making this quiet, simple protest seem a radical, threatening gesture when Kaepernick and those who have since followed his lead make a simple sign that they will not be incorporated, they will not have their selves be uncritically absorbed in the wash of patriotism performed for the sake of making us silent.

I’ve been thinking about Kaepernick, quietness, and selfhood a lot because I recently had the good fortune of hearing Dr. Michelle S. Hite lecture at The College at Brockport, SUNY. Hite’s talk was on the denial of African American quietness, interiority, and dreaming. She cited Kevin Quashie’s Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture that uses, amongst other examples, Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s fist-raising protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as evidence of the racist denial of black selfhood. As Quashie rightly notes, in the iconic image of the athletes on the podium, both Smith and Carlos have their heads bowed and eyes closed, a sign of quietude and interiority, a selfhood, that the public, that ME deny the existence of in African Americans. Photographs are far from facts and definitely mute but it is impossible to avoid what this oft-repeated image says about the interior minds of Smith and Carlos: that they are theirs and theirs alone. We don’t know what they were thinking but they are creating a quiet place in a loud and broad public to be with themselves.

A stunning space to reflect on quietness, interiority, and self against the odds of its development is the photo artist’s book Come to Selfhood by Joshua Rashaad McFadden. For this remarkable book, McFadden made formal portraits of African American men including himself, paired them across the gutter with a vernacular image of their fathers, and between the two images, printed on soft, lightweight laid paper, answers to survey questions written in the hand of those photographed. When you see the stillness and strength of each man, see the brightness of their eyes, see the differences in their posture and features, see the likenesses with their fathers, you empathetically feel these men, individually. You question how people could ever be seen monolithically in terms of race or gender. But then you read the personal responses to the survey questions like “What are some common perceptions of men of color in America? Then, explain how these perceptions had and impact on you?” where one man, Keith Goins, responds:

“—we’re violent

—we’re ignorant

—we’re criminals

—we’re loud

—we’re aggressive…

These perceptions impact me everyday as a black male because of my skin as opposed to my character. I am constantly judged due to the media’s perception.”

And if you’re a white, regular ME ingesting man like me who is reading McFadden’s book, you might have a flash of observation that Goins’s father in the vernacular photo shows him to be particularly young. As opposed to it being a photo Goins selected because it represents his father to him personally, your instant interpretation of the image is that Goins’ father died young. He was probably shot and killed, you might think.

McFadden’s quiet book reveals what is present. I got caught, my own racism and gender biases exposed. But as Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones has stated, getting caught is a good thing. “Exposure is a step toward freedom.” We need more books like Come to Selfhood. We need to support more artists like McFadden. You need to see and hear what is present in the quiet of this critically important book.

Tate Shaw is an artist and writer living in Rochester, NY. He is the Director of Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) and directs the College at Brockport, SUNY MFA in Visual Studies at VSW. Cuneiform Press published a collection of Shaw’s essays on artists' books, Blurred Library, earlier in 2017.

PROVOKING THE ARTIST'S BOOK, PART 3: RADICAL MATERIALITY // Anne Royston

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 07:00:00 GMT

This third post finds me stepping on shaky ground. While the other posts have a clear and defined point, a telos (in its Greek sense, a post towards which we confidently stride), consider this post a tentative exploration or a furtive, still-developing movement. An outlier, an out-post, venturing into the foreign territory of outer space.

I mean that last quite literally. Almost two decades ago now, Canadian experimental poet Christian Bök undertook the creation of a poem that would be, after much careful encoding and countless funding dollars, transferred directly into a bacterium, meant to outlast the human race and survive the vacuum of outer space. As of this writing the project isn’t quite complete—one wonders if it will, in fact, ever be complete, not due to any specific scientific constraint (admittedly the current hangup) but due to its consistently evolving nature.

After all, the Xenotext takes the shape of a complex transmedial multiplicity. Poem written, enciphered, translated into a sequence of genetic nucleotides, and implanted into the E. coli bacterium: this is the Xenotext. E. coli’s reading and response to the poem, a poem that then becomes what Bök calls an “archive”: this is the Xenotext. The future poem, not E. coli but a specific bacterium meant to outlast the reader, incomplete & possibly impossible: this is the Xenotext.

On the human scale, at exhibitions there is a colorful polymer model of Protein 13. More graspable for us, here, there is also a print book (The Xenotext: Book 1), published in 2015 by Coach House. Somewhat surprisingly, it sidesteps the scientific-creative discussion in favor of anthropocene-motivated poems, recognizable poems with line breaks and figurative language and epic, elegiac tones. And, as an object, the book is beautiful, with a full-color section in the middle, and other sections akin to concrete poems mimicking molecules:

Nucleotides, “Cytosine”

Bök’s work has always expressed a delicate awareness of the book as form (see the transparent pages in Crystallography). Yet I can’t help thinking that the book is a successful book but not a successful work of book art. Instead, I am drawn again and again to the Xenotext bacterium, which uncannily wants to fulfil the maxim that artists’ books manifest a self-reflexivity about their form. What is more self-reflexive than a poem created of itself? And yet unmistakably we lose what is, for us humans, the exact definition of a book—that which we can read.

The Xenotext obsesses me as a bookmaker and thinker because it goes beyond the conventional book—a goal artists’ books tend to embrace—to the extent that it loses sight of the book altogether. (And yet there is that print text, too, a stake on Earth.) Is this the logical conclusion of arguing for a radical, ever-expanding view of materiality? The Xenotext takes the idea of transmedial work such as Abra, which I touched on last week, or perhaps the work of digital author J.R. Carpenter, or—even closer to the macrolevel writing under discussion here—book artist Jen Bervin (the Silk Poems), and blows it up from trans-medial to trans-mondial.

Not a book—but, still, writing. At the same time the Xenotext takes me to task for desiring new & strange poetries; it commands my awe. It reminds me that perhaps the thing I love most about artists’ books can be rephrased not in terms of self-reflexivity, but in terms that suggest an odd aliveness. What I love most, it seems, is material that speaks. Even if we cannot always hear it.

Anne M. Royston is a Visiting Assistant Professor in English at Rochester Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in Literature, as well as a Book Arts Certificate, from the University of Utah. She is a founding member of the Salt Lake City-based independent book arts group, Halophyte Collective.

PROVOKING THE ARTIST'S BOOK, PART 2: ANALOG AND DIGITAL (OR THE RAW AND THE COOKED) // Anne Royston

Susan Viguers — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 07:00:00 GMT

At the Center for Book and Paper in Chicago, an initiative devoted to creating “expanded artists’ books” presents transmedial works that bridge what we would consider a traditional artist’s book—the concrete, physical, haptic art object—and the digital, like an iPad/iPhone application (Abra by Amaranth Borsuk and Kate Durbin with Ian Hatcher). In these projects, old and new media deliberately link arms to declare their shared investments, investments I think of as key to artists’ books in any guise: material and formal considerations embedded into materiality and form; reading as a vibrant and immersive experience; writing that develops in tandem with its medium, shaping and being shaped by it.

For digital and new media scholars, reading this kind of writing begins with N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of “media-specific analysis.” In her now-classic essay “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep,” Hayles argues that we must read the materiality of texts, hypertexts both digital and print, as well as their semantic content. She characterizes materiality as “the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies”—such medial self-awareness, she acknowledges, hardly limited to digital examples (72). Many of these examples, in fact, reference “reverse remediation” in digital hypertexts, moments where the digital mimics the analog: the appearance of dog-eared pages in print codices transferred to a screen; the illusion of something like Scotch tape at the edges of ersatz photographs; the moments which, as Emily Larned wrote in an earlier post for this blog, often create an “aesthetics of interference,” where such interference is constructed for the comfort or delight of the reader. This is not a new reaction, of course: we could cast much further back to recall the moment where moveable type, as blackletter, mimicked the script to which readers had been accustomed.

Digital and new media scholars, both Hayles and those who follow, are far from allergic to more traditional artist book examples (see Hayles’s Writing Machines, which references Tom Phillips’s classic A Humument, or Manuel Portela’s Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and The Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines, which has a chapter on Johanna Drucker’s letterpress work). Yet those with an interest in artists’ books often overlook the digital. At the Electronic Literature Organization conference in Portugal this summer, I heard about projects ranging from Taiwanese artist Hsia Yu’s book of digital remix poetry printed on Mylar, Pink Noise; to Rote Bete, a book made entirely on the copier by Portuguese artist César Figueiredo; to Eugenio Tisselli’s “Degenerative,” a web-based project which was corrupted bit-by-bit every time it was visited.

Page from Rote Bete

Yu’s book might easily be assimilated into the genre of artists’ books, perhaps Figueiredo’s work as well. What about Tisselli? Does it change our view to know the degenerative process was captured at various stages of decay before fading away completely, again suggesting, to an artist’s book reader, strange parallels with flux that might have intrigued Tom Phillips?

Day 1 and Day 44 of “Degenerative”

The truth is, of course, that both print and code are equally deep (or equally flat—take your pick). After all, both digital and analog are material. As Matt Kirschenbaum argues in his fantastic 2008 book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, it’s a convenient illusion that the digital is “hopelessly ephemeral...infinitely fungible or self-identical, and that it is fluid or infinitely malleable” (50). Instead, Kirschenbaum reminds us, “Every contact leaves a trace” (ibid). Why should we not extend our consideration from artists’ books to the digital, then, especially given their shared concerns about media specificity, self-reflectiveness, and reading?

In its digital guise, Abra, which I mentioned at the beginning, encourages the user to create new poems through casting “spells” on the screen, which can shift and mutate words, graft the user’s words into the evolving poem, erase words from the lexicon, all in a shimmering set of rainbow hues. There is a paperback version, as well, that does not attempt to replicate the app but instead extends its concerns to another form. And linking the two is a letterpress-printed, small-edition handmade codex. At the back of this book there is a space left for an iPad, inviting the user to make the connection.

Abra, from the Center for Book and Paper Arts’s website

Works Cited

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep.” Poetics Today 25, no. 1 (2004). pp 67-90. doi: 10.1215/03335372-25-1-67.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007.

PROVOKING THE ARTIST'S BOOK, PART 1: THEORETICAL ARTISTS' BOOKS/MATERIAL ARGUMENT // Anne Royston

Susan Viguers — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 07:00:00 GMT

Unlike many of the authors who have blogged here before, my primary work is in English literature—well, according to the language on my degree, at least. More specifically, I work at the intersection of theory or philosophy and artists’ books. Along these lines, my dissertation considered a small but critically significant section of arguments that enact their arguments through their material form: the Encyclopedia Da Costa of Georges Bataille, Marcel Duchamp, and others; Jacques Derrida’s two-columned Glas; Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book, which meanders in and out of legibility; Mark C. Taylor’s wildly colorful and typographically innovative Hiding and its accompanying forward-thinking 1998 digital literature work The Réal: Las Vegas, NV; and Johanna Drucker’s Stochastic Poetics and Susan Howe’s Tom Tit Tot, two artists’ books commonly recognized as such that nevertheless extend the threads set out by material arguments. Taken together, these works blur notions of how the argument genre operates.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that often a description of my work is met with a furrowed brow from other English scholars. But how is it English? Well, it is, and it isn’t: true, it moves against a conventional sense of English as a field of set and stable genres; nevertheless, it emphasizes careful consideration of the stakes of a text and reflects back onto how we read. Insisting on fluidity, this kind of work argues for the necessary incorporation of other elements, gathered from critical theory, from media studies and communication theory, from what Jonathan Rose, in a speech for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, calls “book studies.” What I term in the dissertation material arguments, or theoretical artists’ books, are critical of the usual jobs of criticism, relentlessly seeking to provoke the reader rather than engage them in counterargument or as adversary. (“You can’t wrestle with a man who won’t wrestle back,” as Jack Miles characterizes Taylor in the introduction.)

Moreover, the readerly provocations of theoretical artists’ books are located firmly in the material forms of the work, expressed through typography and design and media: for example, the blurred letterforms that visually replicate deafness in The Telephone Book; the juxtaposition of text and image in the Encyclopedia Da Costa that conveys absurdity and comedy; or the translucent paper that allows photos in Hiding to “bleed” through the text on the other side of the page during a discussion of skin. It becomes impossible to separate form from content, material from argument—theoretical artists’ books are irreducible to a bottom-line argument, requiring a multisensory, haptic experience.

Theoretical artists’ books is a strong term, and subject to pushback of its own. But it is always worth reconsidering the assumed delineations of the artists’ books genre, which readily accepts fiction, poetry, and essay. Why not argument? In 1981, in the New York Times, Geoffrey Hartmann makes a case for expanding the scope of argumentative texts to include a “literature of criticism.” Theory or criticism, Hartmann argues, has as much a claim to hybridization of genres as literature does: “[I]f there is no reason to deny the critical essay a dignity and even a creative touch of its own, then criticism, too, will have to be read closely. It should not be fobbed off as a secondary activity, as a handmaiden to more ‘creative’ modes of thinking like poems or novels.” Theoretical artists’ books reference their own bookishness; their material provocations are essential, not ornamental; they interrupt and recreate reading.

Questioning the boundaries of genre, we begin to also note that any field is always already subject to rifts and fractures and outgrowths. Artists’ books are hardly an exception, and these shifting contexts are beneficial: they allow for multiple perspectives. Stochastic Poetics will be familiar to many readers of this blog, but what about the work of poet Susan Howe? Like Stochastic Poetics, Howe’s Tom Tit Tot is highly citational, poses challenges to reading, and incorporates self-reflexivity about its production into its (handmade, letterpress-printed) presentation. Nor is it an anomaly in Howe’s oeuvre, which famously incorporates marginalia and collage, emphasizing the materiality of text. (In interviews, Howe has acknowledged her origins as a creator of what she considers visual art, textworks, before turning to poetry.)

Johanna Drucker, Stochastic Poetics

Susan Howe. Tom Tit Tot

At the University of Buffalo, both Stochastic and Tom can be accessed in the rare books room. But they come from different areas, I am told: Stochastic is classified as an art object, and Tom is an artist’s book. Pressing for further information, I am met with a shrug and an acknowledgement. It’s likely, the librarian notes, they will be reclassified soon.

Works Cited

Hartmann, Geoffrey. “How Creative Should Literary Criticism Be?” New York Times, 5 April 1981, www.nytimes.com/1981/04/05/books/how-creative-should-literary-criticism-be.html. Accessed 3 April 2017.

Miles, Jack. “How To Read This Book: A Note to the Reader from a Concerned Friend.” Introduction to Hiding, by Mark C. Taylor, U of Chicago P, 1997.

Rose, Jonathan. “From Book History to Book Studies.” American Printing History Association, printinghistory.org/awards/page/8. Accessed 3 April 2017.

READER, READ YOUR READING, PART 4 // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 07:00:00 GMT

What does seamfulness look like, and how does it function? How does it read? How can it encourage the reader to “look hard?” How does that attention place them back into the world?

It seems best to try to answer these questions by writing about a specific artwork. Divya Victor’s 2014 book, Natural Subjects, [1] is an excellent case study for this particular context: it is a book (poetry, but it deploys text and image), it is conceptually and formally sophisticated but still accessible (in other words, it’s really good), and it deals with identity, speech, language, migration, and immigration. I’m not interested in trying to parse whether Natural Subjects is or is not an artists’ book. The category is not important. What is important is that it is an approach to writing (rigorous in craft and concept, shaped as a whole, conscious of the materiality of the text, the shape of the page, and the form of the book) that those of us engaged in the book arts can look to as a model.

Natural Subjects is a book about power, about the languages and documents that power constructs, and about how that language and power affects real people in their real lives. The abstraction of text can be used to define, limit, and trap the actual body:

Or it can be used to dissect and examine an indeterminate body—perhaps an animal, perhaps a human treated as an animal, perhaps a human treated as only a body or a problem:

The activity of writing naturally hides its seams. The writer can easily insert text from another source, and the reader only recognizes it as such if that text is given its appropriate markings—quotation marks, separation as a block quote, a footnote, italics, etc. The writing in Natural Subjects uses these conventions in certain instances, but they are not applied consistently and “properly.” Even when the conventions of marking quoted text are not used, the seams in Natural Subjects remain legible—they become legible in the reading. The legibility of the seams leads to other legibilities: of the source texts, of the experience of encountering those texts in lived situations, of the structures that generate and control such texts, and/or of the mythologies that permeate the interpretations of such texts. One such moment occurs on page 24:

Is this a checklist? Is this an oath? Who is “I,” and why is “I” separated from the expected flow of speech? The seams, those moments of disruption and collage do two related things for the reader: first, they defamiliarize the “official” language of the U.S. government and reveal (though it is always in plain sight) its function as an instrument of control. Second, they place the reader in the position of being subject to, the subject of, the text and the functions of power/control that it exerts. That list is followed, after two blank pages, with a more extreme moment of collage/disruption:

The blank pages are a seam. The shift in size is a seam. The all caps is a seam. The use of italics is a seam. The cutting off of the word “happiness” is a seam. The repetition of the last line is a seam. There are more seams on that page than “straight” content, and the reading is the reader tracing those seams.

Natural Subjects is an extended act of “looking hard” at various texts, systems, and experiences that continue to actively shape (or distort?) the world. Natural Subjects gives us a picture, but also the frame, and shows the seams where the two parts connect.

“As I write this, I can’t help but think that ‘aesthetic of interference’ also has metaphorical resonance in our contemporary age of resistance… perhaps that’s a whole other blog post.”

Tracing the seams leads the reader to an awareness of structure. The book arts are about structure. This means book structures in the literal sense, as well as in the spatial, temporal, metaphorical, and conceptual sense. Books are a series of overlapping, intersecting, and interconnected spaces that the reader moves within and through. Books mirror our experience of time and the world. Books actively shape our experience of time and the world. That reflection/shaping of our experience of time is one of the most important ways that artists’ books can bring our attention to the world, and allow us to “look hard,” be present in it, be present with others, reground, and regroup. An “aesthetics of interference” must also be an aesthetics of attention to the world and to others, and by extension of those relationships—an aesthetics of compassion.

NOTES

1. Divya Victor, Natural Subjects (New Orleans: Trembling Pillow Press, 2014). The first image is part of page 29. The second image is part of page 92. The third image is part of page 24. Images four and five are pages 24 – 27. All images are scans made/assembled by Aaron Cohick.

READER, READ YOUR READING, PART 3 // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 07:00:00 GMT

Noise is one tool that can generate multiple legibilities within an image or text. For example, this image fragment from the last post contains multiple legibilities:

• It can be read as what it shows.

• It can be read as a printed, mass-produced image of what it shows.

• It can be read as a printed, mass-produced image taken from one context and placed into another.

• It can be read as a printed, mass-produced image reprinted through another process.

• It can be read as a printed, mass-produced image, taken from one context and repeated using collage.

• It can be read as a printed, mass-produced image taken from one context, placed into another, and then placed into another.

and

• There may be more legibilities not listed here.

• Different points of reality vs. reproduction, and different contexts will have different legibilities.

• Legibilities are dependent upon material.

• Not all legibilities are available to every reader, all of the time. Which legibilities are available will vary with the reader’s contexts, and a single reader may find different legibilities at different points in time.

• Each legibility is translucent, partially revealing and partially obscuring the others at any moment of reading.

• A legibility is not the same thing as a meaning, but they are not mutually exclusive.

• A legibility is an entrance and a path.

Multiple legibilities within an artwork can generate multiple, intersecting readings, potentially even from the same reader. An aesthetics of interference, of noise, takes the multi-, the poly-, the many, and the potential as a value to be explored. In the above instance, noise and its multiple legibilities are also a function of collage. Collage of images/objects/texts transforms art into matter, into the world, and then mixes them back into the artwork.

“As I write this, I can’t help but think that ‘aesthetic of interference’ also has metaphorical resonance in our contemporary age of resistance… perhaps that’s a whole other blog post.” [1]

In this “contemporary age of resistance” it is important to be clear about what “resistance” means, and here my own subject position becomes an issue. I, personally, am not interested in the spectacle of viciously inept leaders—I am interested in working against the structures that makes such “leadership” possible. These are also the structures that define our contemporary world: white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, mass incarceration, and environmental destruction. Oppression in its many forms. These are not new things. I have benefitted from these structures. The predominantly white organization that these blog posts are for has benefitted from these structures. Resistance cannot just be metaphorical—it has to involve real work. Art can do that by opening up questions of representation, structural signification, education, economics, etc. Can art affect political change? Only insofar as it can ground us in the world, show us the world, and show us ourselves.

It would seem that collage, noise, and their related devices and techniques (montage, appropriation, the graphic marks of photo/mechanical reproduction, hiss, interference) are, at a structural level, antithetical to the idea of purity. Purity as a value is easily extrapolated to justify white supremacy. [2]

I would agree with AD Jameson’s assertion (in the essay referred to in Part 1) that “art has no favorite way of being made, and there are no experimental devices. One can only experiment with devices.” I would extend that to say that there are no inherently ethical devices in art. Noise and collage can also be used to support white supremacy, and they certainly are and have been. In those uses, though, they tend to be used to obscure, cover, and falsify—to hide their seams and the legibility of those seams. White supremacy requires invisibility to function. It cannot show its seams. To extend Lori Emerson’s argument about the ideology of interfaces in her book Reading Writing Interfaces—above all, white supremacy must be user-friendly. [3]

So we are seeking a collage, a noise, a work that allows us to show its seams, and the seams of the structures that bind us. To name those structures. Our resistance will not be seamless, but seam-full. A seamfulness to help us see.

NOTES

1. This is the passage that inspired this series of posts. It is from Emily Larned’s post on this same blog, “Aesthetics of Interference.”

2. In addition to the linked article on color in classical sculpture, I would also recommend David Batchelor’s book Chromophobia for a far-ranging look at the conflation of whiteness, purity, and an “ideal” aesthetic. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).

3. Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Emerson’s analysis of interfaces, ideology, media poetics, and media archaeology is very relevant to the field of Book Arts. I highly recommend her book.

READER READ YOUR READING, PART 2 // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Jul 2017 07:00:00 GMT

An artwork is never alone. Interference can come from the actual material, like in a half-toned image, or the hiss of a recording made on a scavenged x-ray. Interference can also come from the deliberate play or disruption of the reader/viewer’s expectations of a medium/genre, and/or the “bleeding-in” of other pieces, of the discourses surrounding and running through a given work.

“As I write this, I can’t help but think that ‘aesthetic of interference’ also has metaphorical resonance in our contemporary age of resistance . . . perhaps that’s a whole other blog post.”

In my previous post I talked about the quote above, from another post on this blog by Emily Larned. I connected it to the work of Viktor Shklovsky, and a particular essay about Shklovsky. My reading of Emily’s text (and my future writing) was already woven through with, or emerging out of, other readings of other texts. Those outside texts—that interference, that noise, that heap, that murmur—can be used as, transformed into, a matrix.

“[Bertolt] Brecht had always attacked the myth of the transparency of language that had governed the practice of theater since Aristotle; the self-reflective, anti-illusionistic montagelike devices that interrupted the flow of his plays aimed at aborting the identification of the spectator with any character and, as he phrased it, at producing an effect of ‘distanciation’ or ‘estrangement.’

The first example Barthes commented on in his 1971-2 seminar was a text in which the German writer patiently analyzed the 1934 Christmas speeches of two Nazi leaders (Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess). What struck Barthes was Brecht’s extreme attention to the form of the Nazi texts, which he had followed word for word in order to elaborate his counterdiscourse. Brecht pinpointed the efficacy of these speeches in the seamless flow of their rhetoric: the smokescreen with which Goering and Hess masked their faulty logic and heap of lies was the mellifluous continuity of their language, which functioned like a robust, gooey adhesive.” [1]

“In communication theory, noise is that which distorts the signal on its way from transmitter to recipient. There will always be an element of distortion, either externally or internally, coming from the medium itself. In music noise is often originally a malfunction in the instruments or electronics (a disturbance of the clear signal), which is then reversed into a positive effect. . . . When you reverse a disturbance into a part of the music itself, it is not smoothly integrated but infuses the music with a tension. There is still a play on the formerly negative relation between noise and signal when a noise is legitimated. This tension is an important part of the musical power of noise.” [2]

“I identify these interfaces that obscure ever more from the user in the name of ‘invisibility’ and the ‘user-friendly’ with what’s fast becoming an ideology. I use ideology not merely in the sense of the adamant belief in making the computer more approachable but more in the sense that user-friendly is used quite deliberately to distort reality by convincing users that this very particular notion of a user-friendly device—one that depends on and then celebrates the device as entirely closed off both to the user and to any understanding of it via a glossy interface—is the only possible version of the user-friendly, one that claims to successfully bridge the gap between human and computer. In reality, the glossy surface of the interface further alienates the user from having access to the underlying workings of the device.” [3]

The “aesthetics of interference” is an aesthetics of noise. Noise is the world—seething, stewing, clamoring, singing, generating—outside of the artwork. Noise is material, which is where the artwork becomes part of the world, and where the world pierces the artwork. Noise is the pixel, the half-tone, the smear, the seam, the suture, the footnote, the epigraph, the frayed edge of a sound. Noise is that which we did not expect from the artwork, in the artwork, driving the core tension of the artwork. Noise feeds our attention. Noise catalyzes our sight. Noise is necessary when power continually lies and obscures.

“With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion.” [4]

NOTES

1. Yve Alain-Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, eds. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve Alain-Bois, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 33.

2. Torben Sangild, “The Aesthetics of Noise,” 2002. Available online at http://www.ubu.com/papers/noise.html.

3. Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xi.

4. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 6.

Image: details of Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962, acrylic on canvas.

READER READ YOUR READING, PART 1 // Aaron Cohick

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Jul 2017 07:00:00 GMT

In her Book Art Theory blog post called “Aesthetics of Interference,” artist Emily Larned writes about sounds and images that display their medium, specifically recordings on vinyl, and half-toned or pixilated images. She starts to unpack how and why the “low quality” of the images/sounds becomes aestheticized (or fetishized). In that post she wrote the following (parenthetical) statement:

“As I write this, I can’t help but think that 'aesthetic of interference' also has metaphorical resonance in our contemporary age of resistance . . . perhaps that’s a whole other blog post.”

With Emily’s permission, I’d like to make an attempt at that post (or posts).

-----------------

In the summers I teach an intro level book arts course called “Book Arts & Letterpress.” It ranges from the very small (close looking at individual typeforms) to the very large (what does it mean to publish handmade books in this contemporary world?). We start with an assignment adapted from Ellen Lupton’s Thinking With Type, where the students draw, to scale at 100 point size, an exact copy of several letters (a, t, A, a) of a typeface of their choosing. At the same time they read the first chapter of Lupton’s book, and an essay by A.D. Jameson about the work of the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky. That essay talks about some of the most famous and important principles from Shklovsky’s work: the related concepts of “seeing” vs. “recognition,” and the device of “defamiliarization/enstrangement/making strange.”

In Shklovsky’s formulation (as explained by Jameson) “recognition” is that routine, automatic, disengaged perception of the world that is our default state. We see enough to get by. “Seeing” is an active, engaged looking, where the world can suddenly become a strange, wondrous, and infinitely complex thing. My first lucid encounter with this engaged seeing came to me through intense observational drawing and painting exercises when I was a student. We were ordered to “look hard” and draw the same still-life set-up over several six-hour studio classes. That phrase seems nonsensical at first: seeing is effortless, so how can I “look hard”? Through practice it becomes the first and most critical piece of being an artist and human. That phrase sticks with me to this day. The typeform drawing assignment is my attempt to get at the same practice (look hard) within the context of type and books. One assignment is never enough, of course, and we come back to the concept again and again.

The seed of the course’s expansion is also planted within that first reading. To quote Shklovsky directly:

“And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives [sic], and at our fear of war.”

Our automatic, disengaged perception, aided by the constant assault of spectacle-as-news/news-as-spectacle, is an insidious form of social control. Our “fear of war” is dulled and flattened. We draw inward. We forget about the humanity of those around us. It seems inevitable, natural. We are all, always and forever, susceptible and mostly complicit.

Shklovsky offers art as one tool to use in the never-ending-reconstruction-of-our-humanity:

“If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s as if this life had never been. . . . And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious.’”

That first reading becomes a challenge and focal point for the entire course (and hopefully beyond). It starts to get at the question, that all-important, impossible question that every student artist has to answer in their own way (and that all of us “professionals” are always answering too): what does art do, and why is it important?

NOTE

Both Shklovsky quotes are from the chapter “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Illinois State University, Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 5–6.

SILENT DISTRIBUTION / UNMONITORED DISSEMINATION IN A "MODERN" AGE // H.R. BUECHLER

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 07:00:00 GMT

Recently, I was thinking about reading, not only as the powerful privilege and action, but the interfaces in which we engage with this action. In his essay, Social Book Building, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., discusses an imminent future where we are “read to.” Kennedy refers specifically to the internet superhighway, alludes to the now-realized prevalence of “smart” devices seamlessly integrated into the fabric of our everyday lives, and discusses the potential threat those technologies present to literacy among the general public.

Literacy, for Kennedy, appears tied to the continued propagation and dissemination of physically tangible, textual objects — books or publications. His concerns for digital space, and its potential threat to society, lead me to reconsider Miller-Fusco’s Publish/Public and other related essays on the notion of “creating a public” through the action of publishing. These texts present a discussion negotiating the digital as an (invisible) public vs. the physical as a (visible) public: how they are created, what they represent, how they function in society, and how they can be or are effectively utilized given advancement in communication technologies.

As a new independent publisher interested in publishing as a critical artistic practice, two main sets of questions emerged:

1) How do we, can we, as publishers, conquer a/o harness the power of the “invisible” public? What problems exist within these new means that culture has so easily embraced?

2) What is a “visible” public? How is this unique today when held up against the “invisible”? And how can we better harness this public with our publication methodologies?

Moreover: What is it to publish for a digital (invisible) public? What does it mean to intentionally not publish for that public? Are there problems that exist in the invisible public that could be circumnavigated in the visible public? And who are these publics, really?

The initial public generated by independent publishers working analogue is small. Access to that public often requires great effort (and resources) at an imprint’s outset. The physical labor of creating and penetrating the visible as physical public is daunting, and often success hinges on the integration of tools offered by the digital in order to also access the invisible. In contrast, the digital offers ease of accessibility (read: download anywhere) to a potentially larger public with seemingly less physical labor; a publication has the potential to swiftly reach a larger audience. This open ease of accessibility is at the heart of the invisible, but what are the caveats, the drawbacks to being out there in this invisible space, or potential risks?

Is it a matter of surveillance? With the invisible comes complicit participation in contemporary means of gross data collection; every action is archived in a constantly refining digital algorithm. In the process is loss of anonymity as these very useful, effective, online platforms and interfaces get to know you, our invisible public, and us, as distributor. Such surveillance has been and remains under critical examination, constantly questioned, by a skeptical greater body public. So, while the digital platform presents as incredibly powerful and successful — esp. in terms of cultural urgency to disseminate — it also remains very visible and traceable despite its seemingly invisible means of operability. This is in direct opposition to my initial assertion of the digital as invisible. So we must reconsider “invisible” vs. “visible” when describing these modes of dissemination, for as terms, they possess contentious connotations.

Instead, it is a matter of volume — loudness vs. silence.

The digital as invisible is loud — very loud and very effective as it is very visible and accessible; facts that are both a blessing and a potential curse.

Given the state of our contemporary political climate, we could entertain a "doomsday" scenario (history being cyclical — why else are so many rereading 1984?): What role can/does an analogue means of publishing and distribution play in an age of gross data collection and surveillance? History, would answer resoundingly: “as the underground,” “the alternative,” a silent revolution.

While analogue publishing is loud in its own right primarily by way of its visible physicality, it is also comparatively much more silent. There is a time associated with its production that is inseparable from its action but in this time remains its potential power. This echoes personal tensions I have balancing urgency of content, time required for production, and a need for timely distribution.

This analogous mode of publishing is presented here as “silent distribution,” or a “silent platform of dissemination”— a tool wherein the information being disseminated is produced having never found or interacted with the WWW, a computer, or any other digital media (provided that the publisher has access to the proper obsolete technologies). Viable? Perhaps, but also radical despite it being historically old-hat. It is, in many ways, a return to independent publishing’s genesis.

This analogue mode of publishing and distribution could be — given our access to more effective, far-reaching, and efficient means — a powerful and radical consideration in this age of digital surveillance. What seems to be missing however, in order for it to be a truly successful endeavor or method of production as I have somewhat outlined here, is the ability to distribute the content wildly and widely without the assistance of previously noted contemporary digital media platforms.

The (analogue) has fallen out of mainstream fashion, and with it, postal distribution (think of the disappearance and significance of print journals and magazines, the costs associated with mail-order distribution, the threat to defund the USPS, etc.). But the postal service remains a potential ally, providing a sympathetic means of distribution, a silent distribution. It is a pre-existing, underutilized, not quite obsolete, but not in vogue infrastructure.

The challenge then is how do we, or could we, disseminate timely critical content, and do so quickly in this vein? How do you revive an analogous distribution network? Is it worth investigating? Is it madness, delusional, or simply paranoid to think of this analogous action of silent distribution as a viable activity and action?

I do not know, but certainly believe it is worth further consideration in our modern age.

Kennedy, Amos Paul, Jr., “Social Book Building,” Talking the Boundless Book: Art, Language, and Book Arts, ed. Charles Alexander (Minnesota: Minnesota Center for Book Arts, 1995), 49-50.

Miller, John and Maria Fusco, “Publish/Public,” Put About: A Critical Anthology on Independent Publishing, ed. Maria Fusco and Ian Hunt (London: Book Works, 2004), 149-154.

BOOK REVIEW: UNSHELFMARKED: RECONCEIVING THE ARTISTS' BOOK // Levi Sherman

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 07:00:00 GMT

Michael Hampton’s 2015 book, Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the Artists’ Book, is as revolutionary as it is useful. Unshelfmarked is a manifesto, a defense of the artists’ book as digestible and democratic, and one that traces that lineage far beyond the alternative impulses of the 1960s.

Between compelling introductory and concluding writings is a collection of what could be entries in the catalogue for a fantasy exhibition, curated to explode the contextual pigeonhole where conversations about artists’ books have been jammed for decades. As the title implies, this expansive bibliography dispenses with the typical organizational trappings of the library and leaves it to alphabetical order (and the will of the reader) to draw connections between its fifty entries, which span thirteen centuries. Hampton also includes an “exposé” in the midst of these entries, which follows a number of conceptual threads in a loosely chronological fashion so as to challenge the conventional history of artists’ books without proposing an equally rigid alternative. This new history demonstrates that the artists’ book was latent within cultural production for centuries, not a strange new form wholly reliant on reference to, and distinction from, literature and bibliography.

Having swept the historical rug out from under our feet, it is perhaps no surprise that Unshelfmarked has a complicated relationship with the past. While discussing Vorticism, Hampton references “the artists’ book form, which is according Johanna Drucker an ultra 20th century phenomenon (like oil, information and atonal music), yet one whose paroxysmal phase has now levelled out, normalised even.” Though somewhat dismissive, Hampton does not preclude the possibility that artists’ books could have these long roots, yet nevertheless epitomize the Twentieth Century. Hampton’s positive descriptions of the field at present are more clear: “the era distinguished by promiscuous signalling and play between disciplines . . . has explicitly metamorphosed wholesale into one that is now omnipresent, digitally hypermediated and wise to its own gimmicks; meaning the artists’ book has blithely surpassed its own definition route.”

In reconsidering the past, the future of artists’ books also changes. Hampton writes that “to speak of the artists’ book as if solely a quirky Cinderella-like branch of the six hundred year-old history of the book as codex, or even a late-capitalist symptom, would be to ignore the impact of the digital revolution upon it too, a seismic event that has coincided with its structural renewal and expansion, revealing a fluid, highly adaptable and above all democratic format in the process.” Unshelfmarked verges on teleology, positing artists’ books as the most evolved form of the book. Though the digital revolution facilitates this progress, it is not required; most of the artists’ books catalogued in Unshelfmarked have achieved this perfection of the book even without the democratic potential of digital media.

Since Unshelfmarked spurns conventional organization, Hampton makes his case through the force and enthusiasm with which he situates each entry in the expanded field of artists’ books. He does not waste words defending these assertions. Each book is allotted roughly one recto and verso, though they are by no means cookie cutter reviews. The reader might find description, contextualization, criticism or meta-critique. Hampton has a knack for distilling the salient aspects of a book, though perhaps always with a mind towards his larger argument.

Thus, these sensitive readings are at times pressed into the service of polemics beyond the confines of the bookshelf, including magnificent anti-capitalist criticism and playful, generative leaps between intellectual disciplines. In raising the stakes through these broader connections, Unshelfmarked does not seek to hijack the politics of any given work. Indeed, Hampton includes ample quotes from the artists themselves as well as other commentators. The overarching assertion is more that, to some degree, the meaning of each book is contingent upon the cultural-historical position of the book.

This is argued most clearly in the book’s appendix, “On Recent Tendencies in Bibliotecture: Memorials, Chutes and Shelving.” The appendix rounds up recent works which engage with book culture, and diagnoses a conundrum which haunts artists’ books today: a tension between institutional critique and a nostalgic defense of liberal humanism, two impulses for which books have been indispensable tools. Unshelfmarked is a welcome guide to this moment.

Hampton, Michael, Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the Artists’ Book (Axminster, UK: Uniformbooks, 2015)

MAKING BOOKS BY HAND: STRUGGLE AND GRACE // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Mon, 15 May 2017 07:00:00 GMT

Last summer, for the first time in years, I published a large edition of handmade hardcover books.

Through the struggle of making each book the best I could, I became acutely aware that each editioned book was in fact unique. One-of-a-kind. A hand-printed book, a hand-bound one: each sheet cut by hand, sent through the Risograph and the Vandercook multiple times, folded by hand, hand collated; text blocks glued by hand, trimmed by hand; boards cut by hand; covers wrapped by hand; spine pieces cut by hand, foil-stamped by hand. So many opportunities for difference.

This process, this practice, is of repetition: a study. One hundred opportunities to get it right, this time, finally: but never. Always a different book. At first I was acutely, achingly aware of my failures. In early summer, I lay awake at night, poring over them. But then, gradually, I began to realize that these imperfections were embedded in the process of a part-time publisher producing an edition by hand by herself: as designer, typesetter, printer, self-taught binder, publisher: so many opportunities, I began to think, not for error but for difference, for learning, for engagement of the hand and the mind.

In his book The Unknown Craftsman, Soetsu Yanagi writes that the “art of imperfection” is a natural result of the craft process. He wrote that the completely precise “carries no overtones” — “everything is apparent from the start.” But, like any other handcraft, making books by hand is a process with many steps: “there is always a little something unaccounted for.” “Slight irregularities come by chance, and not by any deliberation.”

Of course Ruskin cited printing as the first industrial process: printing was not a handcraft but an industrial one, with “copies” instead of one-offs, one right after another. Books produced by master printers and binders also are testaments to the attainment of apparent perfection — whether they also feel the same as I, all too aware of the inconsistencies, I do not know. Perhaps they do, too. Or perhaps those most practiced and committed to their craft take the stance of David Pye in The Nature and Art of Workmanship: the craftsmanship of risk. In each moment, an opportunity to ruin all the work that came before. But with this mindset, how do you think of the finished piece? Is it the inevitable culmination of the process? Is it a struggle for unobtainable perfection? Is it both these things at the same time?

Each process has developed its own relationship to the idea of perfection, as each maker must. While traditional letterpress printers cultivate and revere consistency and strive to pull each print exactly the same, in Riso printing the opposite is embraced. Risograph printers proclaim that prints will have wheel track marks, registration will be imperfect, the ink will never truly dry and will always smudge: and these are all to be embraced as defining characteristics of the medium. So you could say it is embedded in the processes that made them that no two of my 100 books, with Riso as well as letterpress printed pages, will be exactly alike.

What I came to realize, for me, in making the books one after another over the course of a very hot summer: absolute uniformity was not my goal. It could not be. It was a miserable goal, chasing after an impossible future instead of being in the present moment, each moment, allowing the hands to coax the materials into a book, the mind both here and freed by the hands to ponder other possibilities. It was this strange double-mind I maintained while editioning: making the book the best I could, one at a time, one right after another, adapting steps, changing tactics, trying new strategies: but simultaneously letting go of the slight variations that were inevitable. My goal had to be the immersion in process, in each step, of letting the hands learn and remember, creating their own knowledge separate from the mind: living the freedom and richness. “All that there is, is the Eternal Now” Yanagi wrote. That is what making books by hand is for me.

This is not to say that I did not have certain standards of workmanship: a threshold of acceptability. I combed over all of the prints to select the best ones for the book. I ripped the spine off some covers, remade them. I threw out spine pieces cut off square, or poorly foil stamped. I took care in making each book, this book, and this one, and this one, the best that I could, in the moment. And after the moment, I stopped fixating on the gap between my best and perfection.

So far, number 14 is still my favorite. I clipped the corner of the cover paper too close to the back-cover’s board, the miter exposing some bookboard beneath. I cut a tiny triangle off the clipped-off corner and pasted it down on the board to conceal my mistake. But during steps where other copies commonly gave me trouble, this book slipped by with grace. It is the copy I am keeping for myself.

AESTHETICS OF INTERFERENCE: OR, SOME THOUGHTS ON THE PRINTED IMAGE IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCTION // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Mon, 01 May 2017 07:00:00 GMT

Often you’ll hear folks saying they prefer LPs to CDs (please don’t even ask such people about MP3s). It isn’t that the LP has greater fidelity to the original recording. It doesn’t. Instead, these listeners prefer an aesthetic of interference. They like the sonic limitations inherent to the process of recording for vinyl, and perhaps they also appreciate the homey crackles of the surface noise.

Apparently many of us like this aesthetic of interference — emphasizing the medium of the message — in our images, too. The halftone image was developed for printing to replicate continuous tones. Now, a plethora of online tutorials offer instruction on how to create halftones for digital images created and circulated exclusively electronically. (Not to mention: Instagram’s filters which replicate film prints.) The aesthetic of interference is ubiquitous.

What does the halftone image signify today? Historically, gritty half-tone images typically meant mass media images, the cheap printing on cheap paper of a newspaper or comic book. “Halftone” meant news or pop culture: a public, printed image. Now, the most widely circulated news images are digitally born, and digitally circulated. Many may never be printed.

So in 2017:

Is a halftone image a nostalgic image?

Is a halftone image a historical mass media image?

Or: is a halftone image just an aestheticized image?

In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin wrote that a widely disseminated (read: mechanically printed) copy of an artwork diminished the aura of the original. But now in the digital age: print has its own aura.

Of course digital images have their own particular composition, which creates their own medium-native artifacts: pixels. Early bitmapped image were quickly aestheticized. The Digital Primitives (April Greiman, Emigre Fonts, etc.) eagerly exploited the look of the new technology. Now, thirty-something years later, the aesthetic of early computing and video games (think Super Mario Brothers Lego landscapes) is replicated using digital tools capable of creating images with much greater detail (i.e., higher fidelity). Bitmapped images and typefaces also embody an aesthetic of interference. (As I write this, I can’t help but think that “aesthetic of interference” also has metaphorical resonance in our contemporary age of resistance… perhaps that’s a whole other blog post.)

But what has yet to be aestheticized is the more run-of-the-mill pixelated image: for example, what you get when you print out a 72 dpi image. These images still look bad to us. How long until they are aestheticized? Until the specificity of this format is appreciated for its own unique characteristics? Similarly with the MP3: will its lossy compression be appreciated in the future in a way we just can’t fathom today? History suggests: yes.

Will it be when once high-res images replace low-res ones that we will appreciate the visible structure of digital images? Or: will it only be when a different medium (virtual reality?) replaces digital photographs that we will find appealing those images that reveal their illusion of simulated reality? (As Marshall McLuhan wrote: when a technology becomes obsolete, it becomes an art form.) Is this appreciation even about an “aesthetic of interference” at all, or is it actually a Baudrillard-like revelation of the undergirding of all visual culture, society at large, seeing how the sausage is made? The reminder that our reality is constructed, representations, simulations?

WHY DO COLLEGE STUDENTS LIKE HANDS-ON BOOK-RELATED ACTIVITY? // Katherine M. Ruffin

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 07:00:00 GMT

As a teacher of the book arts, I have repeatedly observed students responding excitedly to making paper, printing letterpress, and binding books by hand. Contemporary college students seem to consistently respond enthusiastically to the haptic experiences they have in library-based learning laboratories as part of class visits, semester-long courses, and student employment. I did wonder, however, about why the students got excited, so I conducted a pilot study to investigate why students liked engaging with the book hands-on in the context of a liberal arts college.

The primary research questions I developed is:

• How do undergraduate college students characterize their experience with hands-on book-related inquiry?

In addition to my primary research question, I wanted to explore these additional questions:

• In the twenty-first century, what about the book engages these students?

• Why does book history, presented to them in highly interactive, in-person formats, engage and excite students?

• How do students relate their experiences in these book-oriented environments to other aspects of their educational experience?

•How can knowing more about these phenomena inform the institutional context in which collections, facilities, and expertise combine in order to steward cultural heritage resources for future generations?

I based my pilot study at Wellesley College, which has an active interdisciplinary Book Studies program that incorporates the book arts (including hand papermaking, letterpress printing, and bookbinding), conservation, special collections and archives. With my research questions in mind, I did participant observation in the Book Arts Lab, the Conservation Facility, and Archives and Special Collections. I used the themes I discovered through observation to generate interview questions. I conducted and transcribed interviews with current and former students and select library colleagues. I then developed a series of codes that helped me to identify themes in the transcriptions. I coded my transcriptions and analyzed the results.

Preliminary findings indicated that students were engaged with the book as an object, the opportunity to do hands-on work, the social aspects of their learning experiences, the library-based context of the work, and the career opportunities associated with the book. In addition, students were intrigued by the various ways in which space and time were reflected in books themselves.

I hope to be able to repeat this study on a larger scale and I welcome feedback from others. Why do you think the students you teach get excited about hands-on book-related activity?

TEACHING A FIRST-YEAR WRITING SEMINAR IN THE BOOK ARTS LAB // Katherine Ruffin

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 07:00:00 GMT

In my role as Book Studies and Book Arts Program Director at Wellesley College, I seek ways to integrate the book arts into the liberal arts curriculum. In addition to teaching special sessions in letterpress printing, bookbinding, and hand papermaking for classes offered by many different departments, I regularly teach ARTS 222 Introductory Print Methods: Typography/Book Arts, which is a 200-level Studio Art class. This semester I am teaching a first-year writing seminar, ARTS/WRIT 115 Word and Image Studio, for the first time.

The class fulfills the first-year writing seminar requirement and is also a 100-level studio art class that may be counted toward a major in Studio Art, Art History, or Media Arts and Sciences. As I developed the iteration of the course that I am currently teaching, I embraced the design challenge of meeting the expectations of the Writing Program and the Art Department while adapting the class to be taught with an emphasis on the book arts. The class has 15 students and is based in the Book Arts Lab, a teaching studio in Clapp Library. I hope that this class will serve as a useful example for combining the teaching of writing and the book arts.

Word and Image Studio was taught previously by Phyllis McGibbon of the Art Department at Wellesley College. When I was developing the iteration of the class that I am teaching now, I did not revise the course description, which reads in part, “Our studio activities and discussions will explore fundamental visual concepts while cultivating an increased awareness of visual rhetoric and typographic design. Throughout the semester, considerable attention will be placed on developing more effective written commentary, critical thinking, and oral presentation skills relevant to visual investigation.” I did, however, craft my own learning outcomes for my students, which I labeled “Class Goals for the Semester” on the syllabus:

• Continue to develop your writing practice at a college level

• Practice giving and receiving feedback on your work

• Reflect critically on readings and on your reading habits

• Explore book studies: the past, present & future of the book in any of its forms

• Learn basics of bookbinding, letterpress printing, and hand papermaking

• Learn and practice safe studio practices

• Investigate the creative possibilities of text, image, structure, sequence, interactivity, and collaboration in artists’ books

• Gain an appreciation for the art and history of the book

• Study the history and principles of typography and page design

• Reflect on your trajectory as a writer and set goals for the future

• Develop research & project management skills with respect to writing and creative projects

The Writing Program guidelines recommend that a first-year writing seminar include four units and that each unit have a substantial writing assignment associated with it. The four units I developed are Artist’s Books, Books and Their Histories, Typography, and Reflection (with Poetry & Papermaking). This final unit will take place in April, which is National Poetry Month. I will also introduce students to papermaking in the college’s newly renovated Papermaking and Screenprint Studio. In addition to writing assignments, each unit has a studio art project. For instance, in the typography unit, students are writing research papers and are printing an edition of broadsides from wood type for a class exchange.

In addition to writing and creating, the students are reading. These are the textbooks for the course:

• They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, 2014.

• A Pocket Style Manual, Seventh Edition, by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers, 2015.

• Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students, by Ellen Lupton, 2010.

These books were used when the class was last taught. The first two books were recommended by the Writing Program. I have been pleased with how well the three textbooks work together. I am also assigning articles and chapters of books that address specific topics that the class addresses and are good examples of academic writing.

Throughout the semester, I have encouraged the students to engage in a variety of activities that will help them improve their writing and creative practices. During the Artist’s Books unit, I encouraged the students to post a comment on the Book Art Theory blog. This dovetailed nicely with a Writing Program initiative to get students engaged in public writing. In the next few weeks, the students will design and propose their own final project for the semester that will include both written and creative work. The students are working towards submitting a portfolio, which will include final revisions of their written assignments, at the end of the semester.

PERCEPTION OF VALUE: THE POWER OF "HAVING A GO" IN THE WORKSHOP ENVIRONMENT // Elizabeth Kealy-Morris

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 07:00:00 GMT

In the UK most of the book arts programmes have disappeared and the skill amalgamated into broader degrees in graphic design, illustration, photography and craft. At the University of Chester, where I am a senior lecturer across a few art and design disciplines, we have no formal tradition of book arts curriculum. A few lecturers are introducing the skill in various ways which in turn is having an impact on final year students’ embracing of the method as a way of communicating their intended ideas.

This blog will consider the way in which across five years I have invested my personal time and emergent skills base to introduce students to basic binding structures in a collective and social workshop environment away from the studios where their “official marked work” is developed. Here I will discuss the impact the workshops had on me as an educator and practitioner, and on the students as self-selected participants.

These workshops developed directly from my practice-based PhD inquiry The Artist Book: making as embodied knowledge of practice & the self which emerged from my curiosity of whether new knowledge of practice, creativity, expression and the self might emerge from the embodied practice of making with one’s hands. I was inspired by the research of Reid and Solomonides (2007) who suggest that for creative students to engage successfully in their studies they must have the opportunity to “develop a robust Sense of Being [sic]”(p.37). The most valuable pedagogic conditions, according to Reid and Solomonides, will be those that create learning opportunities that encourage this embodiment of the creative self.

The bookbinding workshop developed from my desire to seek ways to engage with and alongside students in my practice and research to ground my own making within my pedagogic practice. In this way students were not being ‘instructed’ by a skilled specialist but rather collaborating with a committed enthusiast and researcher learning from their practice and experience.

I sought to explore how the workshop experience and setting, situated away from the studios where assessed work is produced, might influence students’ creative confidence through what Merleau-Ponty (2002) suggests is the body ‘understanding’ a new habit, ritual, skill, “to understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and the body is our anchorage in a world” (p. 167). Within these workshops I asked students to use their bodies and minds in new ways, explicitly to use new tools (and familiar tools innovatively) to construct meaning which the body cannot perform itself (Merleau-Ponty, 2002): with ruler, paper, bone folder, folded signatures, sewing guide, awl, thread, beeswax block, needle, set square, glue, glue brush, book cloth and cover board.

An important aspect of the discourse produced in students’ handmade books is that these artefacts are wholly valued for the learned process and embodied skills they represent; these artefacts were not assessed. I was clear from the outset: students would not be fully skilled book artists after eighteen hours of workshop engagement. The value of their bound books is in the exploring and testing out new skills and methods they represent rather than their sale, or even, use value. These workshops are extracurricular and students voluntarily attend. The artefacts they produce in the course of the workshop series are signifiers of their newly acquired handcraft skills; the only expected learning outcome is that they ‘have a go’ (American: ‘try it out’).

Crucial to students’ gaining confidence in their making skills is my leadership on questions of quality, namely, that the artefacts they produced in the workshops are of ‘production quality standard’ rather than ‘absolute quality standard’ as termed by Sennett (2008, p. 79). Through working to the standard of production quality, students are encouraged to view their work as ‘work-in-progress’, as functional books that work like books, that signify ‘bookness’. Here we work to Sennett’s standard of “what might be possible, just good enough” (p. 45). My intention here is to lead students over six weeks of three-hour workshops from the folded book to the hardbound encased stitched book so that they are building upon their skills from the previous week and gaining confidence as they tackle a new structure. Were we to focus on Sennett’s (2008) ‘absolute quality standard’ students wouldn’t have moved beyond learning how to fold at exactly 90o with the bone folder. With this experience students learn enough structures with enough experience of folding, gluing and stitching that they are then able to learn other structures, stitches and bindings, proof of which is in their stitched artefacts displayed at their degree show.

In anonymous questionnaires I distributed across the years, students have responded positively to the experience. One graphic design student was interested in how making books has helped her understand the user’s experience: “It has enabled me to think outside the box a bit more in terms of design pieces that the audience are able to handle and manipulate”. A photography student felt more confident in finding new ways to display photographic work: “Confidence levels in my practical design abilities have increased and will enable me to present my photographic work in more creative ways without compromising on professionalism”.

Lawrie (2008) ponders whether design educators could encourage in our students a deeper understanding of their subject beyond skills leading to employability and entrepreneurship. She suggests, “…an answer may lie in the intersection of embodiment, meaning and signification” (p.205). I propose here that the elective extracurricular skills development workshop may be a pedagogic method that brings embodiment, meaning and signification of practice together in one experience.

University of Chester students from a variety of disciplines (Fine Art, Graphic Design, Photography) participating in the bookbinding workshop series

Lawrie, S. (2008). “Graphic Design: can it be more? Report on Research in Progress.” Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, (6)3, 201-7.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of perception. New York, NY and London, United Kingdom: Routledge.

Reid, A. & Solomonides, I. (2007). “Design students’ experience of engagement and creativity.” Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, (6)1, 27-39.

Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. London, United Kingdom: Penguin.

FOREGROUNDING PROCESS: BOOKMAKING AS PRACTICE-BOUND RESEARCH // Elizabeth Kealy-Morris

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 08:00:00 GMT

This blog-post will discuss and celebrate the original contribution to knowledge that practice-based research circulates through considering my own journey of practice-based doctoral study, successfully completed in December 2016. Inspired by Barrett (2007) this blog-post will shift the critical focus away from the evaluation of ‘the work’ as a product towards an understanding of both studio enquiry and its outcomes as process.

The initial research question for my practice-based doctoral research project was to ask, “Is it possible to develop a more confident, self-conscious creative voice able to articulate one’s identity more clearly through the making of handmade artefacts?”. My original contribution to knowledge through this enquiry is the identification of the ways in which the exploration of identity through autoethnographic, creative and pedagogic methods encourages an expanded field of self-knowledge, self-confidence and sense of creative self.

Central to this study was my development of embodied, theoretical and material knowledge through learning the craft-based skill of hand bookbinding, and my emergent confidence to encase my visual practice in handbound artist’s books. The visual element of this practice-based PhD is a series of handmade artist’s books which contain collaged digital photographs of walks I took in my home town. The thesis evidenced that through learning these skills I have developed greater self-knowledge as an artist/designer/maker. Through the critical analysis of empirical and practice-based methods engaged in during this study, I argued that the artist’s book, as performative autoethnographic practice, evidences embodied knowledge of one’s identity and creativity by encasing the self within the book.

This blog-post seeks to open up a discussion to explore possible answers to the question Barrett and Bolt (2007) asked creatives, “What new knowledge/understandings [do]…studio enquiry and methodology generate that may not have been revealed through other research approaches?” (p. 1).

The term ‘process’ is of particular importance: my meaning here is that I will foreground in my discussion of the visual and embodied methods which I employed to create my artefacts what I have learned about myself, my identity, the culture of the place examined. In doing so I will argue that through being mindful of the process and performance of creativity I have found ways to support alternative views of myself, my past, my memories and the contested space of my youth. I suggest that the various visual and embodied methods I employed to create the books (photography; walking/movement through space; collage; bookbinding; and personal linguistic narrative) all add meaning to the artefacts themselves.

Barrett and Bolt (2007) argue that “knowledge is derived from doing and from the senses” (p. 1). They further state that this type of research is epistemologically, ontologically and pedagogically productive due to the necessity for the creative researcher to draw on “subjective, interdisciplinary and emergent methodologies that have the potential to extend the frontiers of research” (p. 1). They note that creative arts research, because of its potential to generate subjective and personal knowledge, has the ability to further an understanding of the experiential, problem-solving nature of learning and the variety of intelligences that are involved in the process of producing and acknowledging the acquisition of knowledge (p. 2). Sullivan (2009) suggests that research within the arts produces distinctive forms of enquiry (p. 55) and outcomes (p. 75) which are represented in various non-traditional forms and media. As artists are not social scientists, so, according to Sullivan (2009), the situatedness of visual arts research calls for an “acceptance of a diversity of approaches to research” (p. 75). It is Barrett’s (2007b) discussion of the importance of valuing ‘process’ in the creative research project that best reflects the focus of this thesis. She encourages creative researchers to shift critical focus away from evaluating creative work as product of a research enterprise, but rather to consider both the studio-based investigation and the outcomes as process (p. 135).

Like Sullivan (2009), Barrett (2007a) is concerned by the limitations on knowledge development and production when the outcomes of artistic enquiry are judged by social scientific standards of objectivity and factual evidence. Such expectations of outcomes ignore the features of dwelled experience from which situated knowledge emerges (Barratt, 2007b).

Elizabeth Kealy-Morris, A Walk of Twenty Steps, 2016. Hardbound concertina book containing full-colour inkjet printed digital photographs on 140gsm cartridge paper, 9cm x 14cm

Barrett, E. (2007a). "Experiential learning as practice in research: context, method, knowledge." Journal of Visual Art Practice, 6 (2), 115-124.

Barrett, E. (2007b). "Foucault’s ‘What is an Author’: Towards a critical discourse of practice as research. " In Barrett, E., & B. Bolt, eds. Practice as research: Approaches to creative arts enquiry. London, United Kingdom and New York, NY: IB Tauris. 135-146.

Barrett, E. & B. Bolt, eds. (2007). Practice as research: Approaches to creative arts enquiry. London, United Kingdom and New York, NY: IB Tauris.

Sullivan, G. (2009). Art practice as research: Inquiry in the visual arts. (2nd ed.). London, United Kingdom: SAGE.

CLOUD/CLOD // Rebecca Childers

Susan Viguers — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 08:00:00 GMT

Today is a fine day to talk etymology. You were expecting politics? Let’s go with something more rooted for now: the slip and slide of words across tongues and time. Take, for instance, the word “cloud.” Imagine you’re an Angle, Jute, or Saxon circa 1100 AD. Look up into the Old English sky, heavy-laden with rain. What do you see, etymologically speaking? A clud (mass of rock or dirt) but this one formed of evaporated water heaped on high. Later, in Middle English, skie became a lexical stunt double for “cloud.”

Cloud Study, John Constable, 1830, Tate Britain

The rhizomatic wriggliness of words illustrates our core nature as metaphoric beings. Everything reminds us of everything because—according to particle physicists and Object-oriented Ontologists—everything is everything. Consider a “book.” The term derives from Old English bōk, a document or charter; Dutch, boek; German Buch; and English beech, a wood on which runes were written. Contents may vary, but most consist at minimum of: paper, ink, thread. This means your average book might harbor traces of: forest (root systems, understory, wind in canopies, shade and shadow, snowfall, nightfall, and nurse logs); fields of cotton or flax (sunshine, seedpod, and, according to Emily D, at least one bee); and for ink, soot or bone (ribcage, femur, fire). Viewed in this light, books are compressed remediated habitats. Maybe that’s why I’m charmed by images of books reclaimed by insects or left in rain, the pages’ raw materials reshuffled in the natural order.

Some artists embrace such vibrant dis/order, collaborating with rivers, silkworms, or other “actants,” to borrow a term from Object-oriented Ontology, in order to create new “assemblages.” For River Avon Book, Richard Long dipped each page into the river’s mud, as if allowing it self-representation. In 1990, he published a series called Papers of River Mud, with cotton paper handmade with sediment from the Umpqua River in Oregon, the Rhine, Nile, Mississippi, and Amazon, among others. In today’s political climate, with the EPA under fire and the world flirting with another extinction event, we could use more artwork that accommodates the fundamental creativity of dirt.

River Avon Book, Richard Long, 1979

We think of soil as inert, as “dumb as dirt,” yet as any garden-variety farmer knows, it teems with life. Geoscientists dub soil the “skin” of the earth, and like skin it’s a living membrane that can be damaged and even destroyed. To raise awareness of this essential biome, the United Nations declared 2015 the International Year of the Soil. The University of Puget Sound’s Collins Memorial Library marked the occasion with an exhibit of artist books. Among notable exhibitors were Mare Blocker, Catherine Michaelis, Alex Borgen, Clarissa Sligh, and Jenifer Wightman.

Wightman’s project, Gowanus Canal, explores “the underbelly of NYC.” She collected mud from the canal, a Superfund site, and used “a 19th century microbiology technique to induce bacteria to synthesize pigment.” Exposed to light, the bacteria yielded “transforming colorfields from a variety of ecosystems,” which the artist documented using time-lapse photography. The resulting images evidence that “the underbelly…is alive and thriving, metabolizing wastes to make a beautiful livelihood."

Gowanus Canal, Jenifer Wightman, 2012

It’s encouraging to think that even in the most forsaken of places, a Superfund site, Earth refuses to play dead. All around us—under our feet, over our heads—small miracles are gathering mass and momentum, if only we’d slow down to notice. As Ilya and Emilia Kabakov point out, “It’s only when you are lying flat on the earth…that you begin to look at the sky.” Looking Up. Reading the Words, a project they made for Sculpture Projects Münster invites viewers to do exactly that. You encounter what looks at first like a transmission tower in a grassy field; then, from directly below, you see it is a love letter written in German addressed to anyone who pauses to look skyward. “My Dear One!” it begins. “When you are lying in the grass, with your head thrown back…there, up above, is the blue sky and clouds floating by—perhaps this is the very best thing you have ever done or seen in your life.” In other words, cloud/clod: everything is everything.

Looking Up. Reading the Words, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, 1997

EXTRA MEDIUM // Rebecca Childers

Susan Viguers — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 08:00:00 GMT

I sat down recently with Christopher Michlig, a colleague at the University of Oregon who serves as Graduate Director and Core faculty. Christopher’s artwork spans media, but he has a special interest in outmoded print technologies such as letterpress and Risograph. He co-edited In the Good Name of the Company, a book about Colby Poster Printing Company in LA. We talked about a large-scale poster project he has underway.

Chistopher Michlig

RC: Can you describe the project?

CM: I’m interested in interpreting one medium through another, in this case, a re-presentation of The Medium Is the Message as a series of 64 posters in wood type. The long essays aren’t included, just moments made typographically noticeable by Quentin Fiori’s design. I like re-presenting McLuhan’s ideas in a format that preceded his criticism. There’s a kind of time travel.

RC: What happens in that disjunction?

CM: When a page becomes a broadside, the anecdotal phrase takes on an event quality. It announces itself singularly, without context. As for the time travel, I like how it acknowledges the trajectory of printed media. The press that printed the posters, Tribune Showprint in Indiana, is the oldest operating letterpress company in the US.

RC: What was it like working with them?

CM: They refused to work with me for about three months. They thought the project was too big. I said it was fine if it took 6 or 7 months, which it did. The only thing I asked was that one person work on it so I’d have a contact. I had approached them previously about doing a type specimen book, but they absolutely couldn’t. Everything had been moved around; typefaces weren’t complete or identifiable. I used their interest in a specimen book as a hook. From one poster to the next we cycled through as much type as possible. Eventually the printer was working with typefaces she hadn’t used for as long as she’d worked there.

RC: How much direction did you give?

CM: I laid out basic formatting, but I wanted the printer to use her own methods and have creative latitude. Some posters were too long to set in one typeface, so she came up with exciting mixtures. I wasn’t there in person. We were playing telephone or she was texting me photographs of proofs. We fixed typos by text or email.

RC: Why was it important to forfeit control?

CM: To allow efficiencies and expertise to happen. That’s the magic of letterpress job printers. Setting type across a page, it makes sense to use a condensed or expanded letter in the same size to avoid wasting time with furniture. That economy results in a specific visual language I like. I wanted to open up opportunities for miscommunication to happen. That’s very much in the spirit of The Medium is the Message, how communication mutates or warps from one medium to the next.

RC: So having someone set the type also introduced space for communication.

CM: Tribune works this way for one-off posters, but a longer project revealed the potentials of the interaction. I like printing—the paper, ink, and experience—but the back and forth was essential. Tribune had no interest in the project’s artistic merit or in authorship. Their name is on every broadside so they acknowledge their creative labor within an economic structure. But for them it’s not a matter of whether they want to do a project, but if it’s possible. In this case, yes, the book can be re-typeset.

RC: What was their reaction to the posters?

CM: Matter of fact. They wrapped them as though they were circus posters and sent them to me. I wanted an interaction like that.

RC: They focused on the medium, not the message. In this case, maybe the medium is the medium.

CM: The medium conveys how they’re thinking. When a poster came back with five typefaces, then that told me something about how they’d responded. It said it was read; there was a tuning to the voice of the text.

Chistopher Michlig

WILD SCRIPTS // Rebecca Childers

Susan Viguers — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 08:00:00 GMT

Cangjie, c. 2650 BCE

Legend has it that a man with four eyes who may or may not have lived in a mossy cave invented the Chinese writing system. Cangjie was record keeper for the Yellow Emperor, circa 2700 BCE, and times had become too complex to continue archiving with sequences of knots in rope. He needed a more robust mnemonic device. So Cangjie rolled up his sleeves and got busy: staring at clouds, following bird tracks, mulling over veins in turtles’ shells. By observing natural patterns, he realized how forms and experiences could be translated into pictographs. The invention of script was said to be so astounding that grain rained from the sky and ghosts cried in the night, lamenting the living’s forthcoming tell-alls. And the poor turtles—their shells were used as substrates for divination.

Centuries after this new technology hit the streets, we’ve become blasé about the transubstantiation that occurs when spoken word morphs into mark. “Speech is unique among systems of animal communication,” writes Michael Studdert-Kennedy in The Handbook of Speech Perception, “in being amenable to transduction into an alternative percetuomotor modality.” Alphabetic writing, in particular, is a synesthetic experience: drawings of sounds that when seen (read) effervesce back into sound. This is no small feat. Studdert-Kennedy notes: “We can understand language through the artificial medium of print as quickly and efficiently as through the natural medium of speech.” Yet: “Alphabetic writing and reading have no independent biological base; they are, at least in origin, parasitic on spoken language.” This parasitism is at the core of culture. Think, for example, Renaissance. Or Saussure’s semiotics. Or closed-captioned Britcoms.

Imagine a medieval scriptorium with monks hunched over lambskins copying words that many of them couldn’t read. The blush was not entirely off the rose of writing; it seemed a potency best kept chained to a lectern. Silent reading hadn’t been conceived yet, and there must have been some uneasiness about where the human voice went when it slipped into form as ink staining animal skin. In a 1322 manuscript about the preaching of Ramon Llull, strings of rubricated dialogue float free from their speaker, not unlike how novelist Jeanette Winterson imagines utterances thickening the skies in Sexing the Cherry. But unlike in Winterson’s scenario, the Breviculum Codex’s buoyant wordiness doesn’t need scrubbing from the parchment’s skies.

Electorium Parvum seu Breviculum, 1322, Baden Memorial Library, Karlsruhe, Germany

In 1947 R.K. Potter, Director of Transmission Research at Bell Telephone Laboratories, published a book called Visible Speech. During WWII the US military funded research into directly rendering speech legible, in part to root out voiceprints of spies. In 1945 Potter patented the sound spectrograph, which Bell Labs touted after the war as a visionary device. Potter boasted in Visible Speech, “If it comes into general use as a voice-written language for the deaf it could even start a trend toward modernized writing and printing.”

Spectrogram of “Science Unravels Speech,” Bell Telephone Laboratories

Alas, there was no Grain Rain (谷雨) and no ghosts howled in the night, but the spectrograph was instrumental in many discoveries, including that some birds can voice two sounds simultaneously, not unlike Tuvan throat singers. Four-eyed Cangjie may have invented a new way of seeing—one set of eyes for sight, the other for “hearing”—but the spectrograph allowed us to see the wild blip and blur of our “noise bursts” as they actually occur, with no neat mapping of phoneme onto grapheme.

SPEED NOW, BOOK // Rebecca Childers

Susan Viguers — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 08:00:00 GMT

“Speed now, Book…A thousand hands will grasp you with warm desire…” —from the publisher’s note distributed with The Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493

Books are threshold objects. Even with their backs turned on us, spines out, they seem to beckon. Like unearthed artifacts, their appearance is charged with incipience, their small heft suggesting pockets of space and time a reader might re/enter through the conduit of her body (eyes peering, hands grasping, the theater of the mind set into motion). Both as symbolic objects and as experiences, books possess the allure of the real and expansiveness of the immaterial, marking a dilation of presence in absence.

The codex serves as metaphor for both embodiment and ensoulment. In her plaster casts of the negative space around shelved books, Rachel Whiteread evokes the ghost in the machine of the book, so to speak. In her room-sized Untitled (Paperbacks), we find hollows where the library’s volumes once were, the impress of fore-edges in the plaster like the postures of witnesses at Pompeii. Here the book represents a palpable break in the skin of the known.

Gaps (books 1), Loris Cecchini, 2005

Loris Cecchini, in his Extruding Bodies series, also uses the book as a symbol for threshold states. Gaps (books 1), like Whiteread’s Untitled (Paperbacks), employs an all-white palette to lay bare what Cecchini calls “poetical distance”—a murky space of emergence into material being. Jumbled spines press against a skin of polyester, as if straining to tell their stories. There is a fragility yet stubborn insistence to this gesture, the bodies of the books limning a gap between the graspable and the ineffable. This urge to become, to emerge and persist, is one that all living things share; for us humans that urge extends to the persistence of memory, for which books are both medium and metaphor.

Alchemist's Handbook, Alexis Arnold, 2013

It could be argued a book only “becomes” in the mind, its contents crystalizing moment by moment in the imagination. But what if a book lies fallow, unread? Alexis Arnold addresses the transience and vulnerability of the physical book in her artwork. She collects discarded paperbacks, transforming them into colonies of borax crystals. She speaks of this almost as an intervention, an attempt to immortalize the body of the book by replacing inert text with living crystals. “The books,” she writes, “become artifacts or geologic specimens imbued with the history of time, use, and nostalgia.”

Books themselves may be time capsules of personal and cultural memory, intended to extend knowledge beyond one lifetime, but in the artwork discussed here, it’s the very bookness of the book that matters most, not its contents. The suggestion of its form is enough to provoke reverie or something bittersweet, a pang of loss. Even when closed, a book offers a kind of window, a glimpse beyond, as well as silent witness. Saskia Hamilton captures this threshold quality in her beautiful poem from 2014.

Zwijgen
I slept before a wall of books and they
calmed everything in the room, even
their contents, even me, woken
by the cold and thrill, and still
they said, like the Dutch verb for falling
silent that English has no accommodation for
in the attics and rafters of its intimacies.

THE ZINE AS A MEANS // Alexander Mouton

Susan Viguers — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 08:00:00 GMT

The jumping off point for this post comes from two previous posts. The first from Richard Minsky’s comments to Susan Viguers’s “The Artist Book and the Sailor Suit,” in which he wrote that in the 1970s the term ”artists’ books” generally referred to inexpensive books produced offset, photocopy, etc., often labeled “democratic multiples,” also called “visual literature.” The second, from Tate Shaw’s “Seeking Pluralism in Books-As-Art,” in which he writes about the importance of creating work out of an authentic, personal experience as opposed to using secondary sources (even when these secondary sources are used out of a desire to empathize).

For me, these two seemingly disparate thought lines come together around a questioning of the “precious” in artists' book activities. Specifically, I wonder if it is possible that the tendency towards the highly aesthetic in artists’ book production might interfere with or inhibit the creation of work based in authentic, personal experience?

I am not interested in denouncing highly aesthetic artists’ books; rather, I am wondering about how we as artists’ book makers interact with our own materials, how the value we place on the materials of production might influence what we are willing to communicate through them. My teenage daughter has repeatedly implored me not to buy her beautifully bound blank books in which to write or draw in because their “specialness” puts her under pressure to create work of like quality, thus interrupting her natural creative expression. Might fine art materials, printing, binding, etc. be more appropriate for certain kinds of expression than others?

I believe unequivocally that works incorporating secondary source texts are important and that they should continue to be used because they can reveal deeply important aspects of human experience. I also think that each of us has the opportunity to speak directly to our own personal experience and make work which is relevant and deeply moving, but that often it is not made for one reason or another. Certainly, it takes courage to create autobiographical work. And it requires respecting one’s own voice in a most personal way. Is there a specific time for autobiographic work in an artists’ creative arc (e.g., when one is “young”) which comes to an end (e.g., when one is “mature”)? Or is speaking out of authentic, personal experience less valued than more formal, “objective” (read: secondary sources) strategies?

Bringing together the threads of these conceptual and formal questions, I look to the zine as a means with a low overhead in terms of preciousness. I believe in the form for its democratic potential (one only needs to use a xerox machine, cut, fold, and staple/sew), but also for the incredible potential to harness the creative power of the book (extended meaning through sequence, time, intimacy, interactivity, portability, etc.). It is almost like a book without the book. And the historical link with Fluxus and in general the European conceptual book work, not to mention the punk rock fanzine, is certainly to be embraced. Let us not be seduced by aesthetics (exclusively). Also, let this fall not into narrowly prescriptive identity politics, but instead open up possibilities for all.

CO-CREATE/CURATE // Alexander Mouton

Susan Viguers — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 08:00:00 GMT

In 2008, Denison University hosted the traveling exhibition Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, curated by Dr. Nada Shabout, a native of Iraq and Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas. Isis Nusair, a colleague of mine at Denison at the time and a friend of Nada's had arranged for the exhibition and because of my interest in books invited me to speak as part of the related programming. Having recently read Dard Hunter's Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, I was aware that what is now Bagdad had been the epicenter of paper-making in the 8th Century and was the home of the first paper mill (papermaking later spread to Damascus, Egypt, and Morocco and eventually to Europe, albeit 500 years later). Needless to say, I was excited to be part of the programming and especially excited to see the work of the sixteen artists whose books made up the exhibition.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. The books were unbelievably contemporary in terms of their aesthetics and simultaneously were frequently intensely powerful in their radical content, commenting on the Iraq war and the subsequent fallout. So many different formats were represented, from rough painted boards to sumptuous gold lettered paper. Not all of the books were as innovative as the ones I remember most. However, the quantity of work that was superlative was incredibly high and the quality far from the decorative Arabic arts that saturates much of Western consciousnesses.

In speaking with Isis of my enthusiasm and awe for the work, she mentioned that she was a close acquaintance of Rafa al-Nasir, one of the more interesting artists represented in Dafatir, and she asked me if I would be interested in visiting him in Jordan and speaking with some of the other artists represented. I jumped at the occasion and the following summer I landed in the Middle East to visit Palestine and to meet with Iraqi artists, many of whom were living in Jordan.

What I discovered was that a single individual (Dia al-Azzawi) had elicited many of these book works from the Iraqi artists he knew or had even mentored. This raises the question for me, can curation be considered a form of authorship? If one person prompts original creations from ten bookmakers addressing a political system, a moment in time, or an aspect of the book itself, mightn't that person not in a sense be their author? I don't want to stretch things particularly thin, but certainly there is something going on here that goes beyond curation—rather, the curator brings the work out of the artists and into being. Not to over-dramatize, but don't each of you who teach have examples of work that you consider to be robust and important from students that would never have made the work without your instigation and critical support?

Where am I going here? During this trip, I visited Damascus for a week and it reminded me of Berkeley California in the 1960's with people selling books on the streets and kids serving tea in the parks (I also spoke to people who explained how everything was not as it seemed and that the price of dissent was prison). Now Damascus and much of Syria has been destroyed. The change came suddenly. I never would have expected that the places I walked and the people whose homes I visited then would be transformed only a couple of years later. And we have just invited a force for change into the white house that has as much potential to destroy as any we've elected into office in our history.

In Bridget's September Post, What Is Critical Now?, she quotes Booklyn: “In the 21st Century, where taking an activist stance involves preventing the possible destruction of the entire planet’s ecosystem, discussing the use of art and bookmaking as a tool for human and ecological rights and actions becomes urgent and unavoidable.”

Could we have possibly foreseen a Donald Trump Presidency from the optimism of Arab Spring 8 years ago? Now more than perhaps ever before do Booklyn's words ring true. So my question is, can we from our positions facilitate a national production of books, an outpouring that speaks to the political agency that we must take in this time? Can we come together to co-create/curate a traveling exhibition of books and book initiatives with the guidance of the excellent criteria Bridget has posted which together speaks to this political moment and to the voices this regime does not represent?

THE HAPTIC IN ARTISTS' BOOKS // Alexander Mouton

Susan Viguers — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 07:00:00 GMT

A salient characteristic of artists' books is the way in which the physical elements—binding, paper, type, image-are creatively united within a conceptual framework. This distinguishes artists' books from non-artists' books—either standard books, on the one hand, or the livre d'artiste on the other. Innovation within the area of artists' books can be physical (new material usages, new binding techniques, etc.) or conceptual (new ways of thinking about a book).

The more the emphasis on conceptual innovation, the looser the adherence must be to traditional forms: books have become sculptural, they have become mass produced, they have become unbound. They usually remain haptic, though, so performance, film, and musical composition are not commonly conceived of as conceptual extensions of the artists' book, but as distinct forms unto themselves.

How vital is the haptic aspect of a book to the artists' book enterprise? Can the conceptual innovation extend out so far that a book might lose its form entirely and become an idea rather than an object? Or perhaps more pertinent, what role might digital technologies play in extending the boundaries of what we understand to be artists' books?

I am drawn to this question for a couple of reasons: 1) code can bring together text, images, and interactivity in a way that is more book-like than any other non-haptic medium. 2) with the rise of tablets and ebooks which function as containers resembling standard books, mightn't we as a community subvert this technology for artistic ends?

In 2013 I gave a CBAA talk at Mill's College entitled, "What is a Digital Artists' Book, Anyway?" (subsequently published in JAB 32) in which I encouraged familiarity with the Electronic Literature Organization because such rich developments involving text, image, and interactivity are coming from this quarter. More recently, the 2016 CBAA members exhibit in Nashville, TN featured a work by Ian Hatcher and Amaranth Borsuk that was tablet-based and other CBAA members have been involved in hybrid projects as well, so I am not suggesting this as entirely new ground. Rather, I am interested in widening the discussion.

I recognize that for many in the CBAA community, leaving behind the tactile quality of the book for a cold electronic device which so many of us associate with attention draining social media might be a hard sell. Luckily, I'm not a salesman though. Rather, I am interested in this nascent technology for its parallel with the development of the book as a communication device which we artists then adapted for our own ends: the artists' book. Clearly, a different set of tools is required to develop an app than creating an artists' book. However, just as an artists' book can be a powerful tool for creative expression and formal experimentation, so too can this new technology be. And many of the conceptual concerns that go into creating an artists' book are inherent to generating creative work in this new technology as well. As an interesting note relating to what is haptic, despite the virtual quality of web-based media (eg, intangible), touch screen devices, interactive screen-based media now have a strangely tactile quality—but are they haptic?

As food for thought, I am posting three links that exemplify how artists' book-like this screen-based form lends itself towards. These web-based examples span from the late nineties to the early 2000's, since much of this type of work now is app-based due to the technology shift from desktop to mobile devices. The first project, oooxxxooo by Juliet Martin (1997)*, I specifically selected because it is low-tech (rather than having an intimidatingly slick interface), because of the way that the browser we are all familiar with has been approached creatively in a way very different from commerce/information-based web sites, and because of the innovative formal experimentation using text and native code-based imagery. The second piece, Peter Horvath's Life Is Like Water (2002), is not interactive as in Juliet Martin's piece, but rather is an innovative example of how the web-based form can be usurped for artistic purposes. Lastly, Alan Bigelow's This Is Not a Poem (2010) is a very successful conceptual work using text, image, sound, and interactivity.

*Juliet's piece is no longer on her website; however, because it is purely HTML based, I have it on my website for teaching purposes.

I welcome your thoughts, comments, insights….

BOOK ART THEORY BLOG MISSION STATEMENT // Richard Minsky

Susan Viguers — Sat, 15 Oct 2016 07:00:00 GMT

After much discussion the CBAA Book Art Theory Blog Committee has modified the Mission Statement that appears at the top of this blog’s home page. Here is the original version:

Capitalizing on the interdisciplinary nature of the field, this blog calls attention to current criticism and theory about the artist’s book and seeks to encourage dialogue, solicit comments, and create a generative space for new ideas from critics and theorists of various fields.

After her March 15 blog post “IT’S 2016,” Julie Leonard questioned the absence of "book art" in the statement. Susan Viguers, Committee Chair, polled the Committee to see if adding “and book art” after “artist’s book” was a matter that needed discussion.

I observed that

a. Susan’s February 15 post, “THE ARTIST BOOK AND THE SAILOR SUIT,” which addressed the term "artist's book," discussed dropping the 's from artist and adding the s to books (artist books) when the plural is indicated.

b. "Artist books" is a subgenre (subfield?) of Book Art, along with "fine press," "sculptural bookworks," "bookbinding," etc. If not mentioning many, why single one out?

c. Book Art Theory is a critical analysis of the features that distinguish an artifact as "Book Art" and its functioning in the world.

This responds to Tate Shaw’s June 1 post, "WHAT DOES THEORY WANT?" We see it in Bridget Elmer’s August 1 post, “BOOK ART AND SOCIAL PRACTICE” and Emily Larned’s September 15 post “PUBLISHING AS (SOCIALLY ENGAGED) ARTISTIC PRACTICE.”

Susan suggested we keep "artist book" in the blog's mission statement because "book art" is so general, so encompassing, that it doesn't give sufficient focus. She saw book art as a Venn diagram with the artist book having a central position. I noted that the term "artist book(s)" is undefined: some people (myself included) apply it exclusively to visual literature, some apply it to sculptural bookworks, altered books, or any book-like object made by an artist.

The Committee tweaked the statement and voted to adopt the following version:

Capitalizing on the interdisciplinary nature of the field, this blog calls attention to criticism and theory about the book as a medium and/or subject in works of art and, more generally, about book art. It seeks to encourage dialogue, solicit comments, and create a generative space for new ideas from critics and theorists of various fields regarding the aesthetic, semiotic, haptic, cognitive, historical, and other features that distinguish these works and their function in ethical, political, and social matters.

Comments on this statement are encouraged. Click “Add comment” at the bottom of this post.

If you would like to write a post addressing any of these notions, please email blog@collegebookart.org.

At the 2017 CBAA Annual Meeting in Tallahassee January 13-14 I will be moderating an audience participation session titled Book Art Theory Roundtable: A Live Extension of a Virtual Collaboration featuring Openings Editor Inge Bruggeman, Book Art Theory Blog Editor Susan Viguers and book art theorist Gary Frost.

ConTEXT // Buzz Spector

Susan Viguers — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 07:00:00 GMT

There’s a popular misconception about the relationship of artworks and texts. Every so often I am engaged in conversation with someone holding the view that language and its components, paragraphs, sentences, words, and letters, are entirely separate entities from pictures or sculptures. The argument runs something like this: “When I look at a picture I recognize its subjects (or elements, or spaces behind, in front, and between things), but in the real world I never see words as things.” The variation of this line of thought, accommodating sculpture, would offer me: “Sculptures resemble things in the world, but sculptures of words only add a third dimension to something I prefer to read (on the apparently two-dimensional plane of a page, say).” In each of these cases the premise is that what we do when we look at artworks in two-, three-, or four-dimensions is scan them for things we recognize, as if naming those things was the purpose for our looking in the first place.

It’s worth reminding everyone that the history of art includes a long tradition of artworks incorporating language, including Pharaonic hieroglyphs, painted initials of illuminated manuscripts, sacred lettering in altarpieces, or inscriptions carved in stone. In Modern art history we encounter the scraps of newspaper in the earliest Cubist collages, the exploding letterforms in Futurist paintings, and the bits of signage in Pop. Of course, since the rise of Conceptual Art in the 1960s, we’re invited to view artworks whose medium is language itself.

 The notion that artworks operate without language is itself a conceit of a modernist art theory that proposes the responsibility of all the arts is to aspire toward their essential and unique characteristics. Such proscriptions endorse a kind of categorizing as itself a condition for artistic quality, as if any art is in the world in order merely to clarify its difference from the cluttered overlapping experiences of daily life.

Think about two kinds of looking that we reserve for esthetic experience: scanning and reading. The look we bestow on surfaces is a scanning gaze; the rest of what we do is reading, which surrounds us as page, screen, signage, and inscription. The experience of reading text on an art work requires only a momentary shift of consciousness from our scanning of its other affects. We can be equally absorbed in a visually compelling artwork or a really good book, but the duration of this interest is apt to be strikingly different, since the absorption of reading arises within the duration of pages, whose successive turnings are slices of time through text.

Other sites of language, such as signage, invite varying degrees of consideration of the materiality within which we read a given sign’s necessary words. I say “necessary” here because signs are also warnings or alerts capable of effecting the direction of our movement through the day. “Coffee” in neon makes a statement about flavor; “RR XING” on painted metal calls attention to our general welfare. Still other artworks offer us words in books or booklike objects, adding the segmentation of pages to such work’s other material properties. The page is the basic module of reading, but it only rarely holds the entirety of a text. One page starts a narrative, another concludes it. In between, so many parcels of language, each interrupted by the bottom of the page.

What every book as art, whether as object or as pages, has as common property is the attachment of both scanning and reading to memory. Our memory of reading is invoked by the presence of language, just as our recognition of forms is an operation of memory. What can be profound here is how the situation of the book, its interplay of forms and materials, can momentarily interrupt both our habits of recognition and of reading. The strangeness of something not already known is, in this context, opportunity to experience an essence that is within all the arts; of another’s mind at work, another’s passions made sharable.

PUBLISHING AS (SOCIALLY ENGAGED) ARTISTIC PRACTICE // Emily Larned

Susan Viguers — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 07:00:00 GMT

Now is the time of the network—whether digital, social, or global trade. Increasingly we’re aware of how individual artifacts are a product of, and function in, highly complex and interconnected systems. These contextual systems—rather than the artifacts themselves—seem increasingly worthy of our attention.

I suggest that at this cultural moment, rather than discussing the book as a work of art, we turn our focus to publishing as an artistic practice, analyzing the contextual systems of processes and networks, rather than a sole resulting object.

This is not a new idea. It’s been 30 years since Simon Cutts organized The Artist Publisher: A Survey exhibition at the Crafts Council Gallery (London), and his collected snippets of writing on the subject were published by Granary Press as Some Forms of Availability: Critical Passages on the Book and Publication in 2007. (This delightful book was favorably reviewed by Brad Freeman in JAB 23 [spring 2008], and I too highly recommend it.) In various passages throughout, Cutts suggests that the emphasis on the “artist’s book” has eclipsed that of artists’ publishing, the more interesting of the two. Publishing, Cutts writes, is a much more thorough activity, as it offers a way of life.

Certainly artists have been publishing for centuries. William Blake; the Pre-Raphaelites and The Germ; the Arts & Crafts periodicals The Hobby Horse and The Studio in addition to the books of William Morris; the Vienna Secession and Ver Sacrum, the many publications of Futurism, Constructivism, Vorticism, Dada, Surrealism, and the Situationists; little magazines; Fluxus; the books of Conceptualism; zines; digital books: artists’ publishing has always been more varied than simply the artist’s book. Many modern and contemporary art movements focused on ephemera and the periodical rather than the book. I think of Sarah Bodman’s diagram, depicting “Artists’ Publishing” as the umbrella term, with “artists’ books” on a tree branch underneath.

But when we’re parsing “artist’s book” vs. “artists’ periodicals,” we’re still focusing on artifacts. What about critically considering all of the surrounding processes and practices of publishing as artistic practice?

There’s a brand-new book that examines the tremendous popularity of artist publishing in the 21st century, edited by Annette Gilbert and published by the always timely Sternberg Press (Berlin-New York). (Whenever I become interested in a subject, I find that Sternberg has recently published a book on it.) Publishing as Artistic Practice (2016) collects contributions by different contemporary artist-publishers. In the introduction, Gilbert summarizes some recent research in this area of publishing as artistic practice, including Delphine Bedel, Antoine Lefebvre, Bernhard Cella, Eva Weinmayer, Nick Thurston, Hannes Bajohar, and Alessandro Ludovico, among others. (Already the introduction provides a helpful bibliography for further reading.)

The first chapter, by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, discusses the 1960-1970 historical precedents of Simon Cutts / Coracle Press, Dick Higgins / Something Else Press, Dieter Rot, Ed Ruscha, etc., but Gilbert’s introduction situates the recent resurgence of publishing as part of the larger “practice turn” of contemporary art in the past decade. Publishing as artistic practice is a “complex field of practices marked by countless patterns, interdependencies, and nested hierarchies” (12). Gilbert reminds us that “publishing still remains untheorized,” (9) whether in studies of the book (in which we would locate the book arts as well as artists’ books), or in the study of literature. She cites Michael Bhaskar as someone who has offered some insights on the subject, stating that publishers are “not just producers of books but filters for content and constructors of amplificatory frames” (11).

Certainly, considering publishing as the artistic activity at hand—rather than the making of books-as-objects—offers a stronger connection to social engagement, a recent theme of this blog. Social engagement is not essential to the production of the book as an art object; many book artists do not consider it. But: social engagement is integral to publishing. Publishing, the making of a public, is necessarily social.

As Craig Mod suggests, “we need to start thinking differently about what books are and how they are produced. […] we need to reconsider the whole approach to the process of making a book into the thing it is: the creation, the consumption, and everything that happens around and in between” (12).

Often, the interdisciplinary nature of the book is heralded as essential to its understanding. Whether one considers oneself “an artist who makes books” or “a practitioner of the book arts,” is not that identity just one component of the larger framework of publishing?

How essential to one’s book arts / artist’s book / artistic publishing practice are the inter-related processes of

selecting?

research?

writing?

editing?

typography?

image-making?

mark-making?

composition?

appropriation?

graphic design?

communication?

correspondence?

collaboration?

determining edition size?

sourcing materials?

making materials?

identifying vendors?

printing?

binding?

shipping?

pricing?

warehousing?

marketing?

determining an audience?

promotion?

distribution?

circulation?

appearances at fairs, bookshops, zine shops, etc?

exhibition?

curatorial concerns?

building relationships?

reception?

determining impact?

sequentiality: how each book informs the next?

Aren’t all of these areas worthy of attention/consideration as part of the praxis surrounding the “art of the book?” Wouldn’t the work of the field be exponentially enriched if each of these aspects were as carefully considered as the paper, binding, or printing?

WHAT IS CRITICAL NOW? // Bridget Elmer

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 07:00:00 GMT

While contemplating this question, I discovered a timely reflection by journalist and critic Megan Voeller in the August 25-31, 2016 issue of Creative Loafing: Tampa Bay, our local independent weekly.

I learned that you haven’t really seen something until you have written about it, and that such deep looking is a practice of empathy. (17)

The article’s title, “Goodbye. Hello. A few words on the way out of town,” which references her unfortunate (for us) departure from this region, also struck a chord.

Over ten years have passed since Johanna Drucker suggested “three basic questions that can be used to assess any artist’s book” in her oft-referenced and much-debated article, "Critical Issues / Exemplary Works," in The Bonefolder 1, no. 2 (Spring 2005).

What was the project set by the artist?
How did the work transform, develop, or present that project?
How does this project work as a book? (4)

Drucker immediately asserts a fourth, “even more fundamental question” that should be asked first.

Who is the initiator of this project? (5)

In our evolving list of critical questions for evaluating book art, which has been generated over the past two weeks by readers of this blog, I see contemporary echoes of these concerns, which clearly remain fundamental despite the passage of over a decade. Similarly, we see the re-emergence of a critical concern with “the haptic,” most recently in Tim Mosely’s article, “The Haptic and the Emerging Critical Discourse on Artists Books” in the Journal of Artists’ Books, no. 39 (Spring 2016). Interestingly, this concern was first raised by Gary Frost, in response to Drucker, with his article “Reading by Hand: The haptic evaluation of artists’ books,” in The Bonefolder, 2, no. 1 (Fall 2005). Goodbye. Hello.

Instead of presenting a compiled list of our questions, as I originally intended to do with this post, I would like to focus on just a few of these critical concerns and offer several more, which have recently emerged (or re-emerged) with immediacy.

Let us first consider Elizabeth Kealy-Morris’s questions.

Why this book, in this way, to communicate this now? Why did this story need to be told this way? With all the storytelling methods available, why was the handmade artist's book the chosen visual and material form of representation?

These questions invite us to consider both the specificity of the artist’s book as a form, and the potential for expansion within and beyond it. In terms of critical questions, I believe that we have specificity covered. As for expansion, in his 2015 book, Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artist’s book (London: Uniform Books, 2015), Michael Hampton presents us with fifty works, “showcasing the artists’ book not as a by-product of the book per se, but both its antecedent and post-digital flowering… the manifold traits and studio processes inherent to the artists’ book bursting from their stitched sheath, cheerfully pollinating the whole gamut of reading impedimenta and spaces” (17). I agree with Tate Shaw in his review of Hampton’s book for Afterimage 43, no. 5 (March 2016) that “the spirit of wanting the artist's book to be in communication with disciplines other than itself… provides a rush of vitality” (29). In that spirit, I’d like to add the following critical question to our list, integrating Hampton’s concerns, and honoring the echo of Dick Higgins that I hear in his words.

Does the work engage the transdisciplinary nature of the book and its potential as an area of intermedia?

I continue to hear the echo of Higgins in Booklyn’s recent and urgent call for us “to incorporate social engagement into art and bookmaking” (“Print Media and Social Practice”). Booklyn asserts, “In the 21st Century, where taking an activist stance involves preventing the possible destruction of the entire planet’s ecosystem, discussing the use of art and bookmaking as a tool for human and ecological rights and actions becomes urgent and unavoidable.” I agree that a contemporary integration of book art and social practice is imperative and I offer their words, in the form of a question, to add to our evolving list.

Does the work provide an intellectual and aesthetic experience that will inspire the reader to profoundly engage with the subject matter and perhaps catalyze action?

Because I agree with Voeller and Shaw that empathy is an essential practice and often a pre-cursor to profound engagement, I offer the following mash-up of their thoughts regarding empathy as a follow-up question.

Does the work invite deep looking and/or reading–a practice of empathy that reveals another way of thinking?

And finally, I would like to conclude with Susan Viguers's question regarding access.

To what extent does the intended audience have access to the work (more particularly, to the intended experience of it)?

As Mary Tasillo, co-founder of Book Bombs, so adeptly observed in 2011, when I initially asked her to consider the evaluative questions posed by Temporary Services, “As book artists, [these] evaluative questions must not only be applied to the book work itself, but to the context of the work, the models of distribution. We cannot separate work and context and at the same time answer the proposed questions honestly.”

I consider these questions, addressing transdisciplinarity, social engagement, empathy, and access, to be critical, contemporary, and complementary to the fundamental and time-tested concerns of authorship, intention, content/form, sequence, pacing, reveal, craft, and the haptic. I hope that our list will continue to evolve, and I look forward to answering all of these questions, honestly, together.

CRITICAL QUESTIONS // Bridget Elmer

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 07:00:00 GMT

In his post to the Book Art Theory blog on June 1st of this year, Tate Shaw asked us the question, "What does theory want?" I agree with Barb Tetenbaum's comment that this is a "chewy question," and I'd like to speak to Dean Dass's comment regarding the need for "close reading of key books," which Shaw proposes as one of several potential answers. Dass stresses the problem of choosing these key books, "Always a good idea! But wait, no one agrees on what those are…" I would assert that we do not need, nor should we want, to agree.

At this point in our field, we are certainly not at a loss for book art that invites close reading. As Julie Leonard reminded us in her March 15th post, "It's 2016," and "the 'canon of artists' is here to be studied and mined." We also now have at our fingertips a variety of resources for the "critical terminology" and "descriptive vocabulary" that Johanna Drucker called for in 2005. Artists' Books Online and the Artists' Books Thesaurus are two such resources.

I agree with Leonard that we need an "accounting" of these resources, and CBAA is well-positioned to be the host venue for such an effort. A variety of Resource Lists are already in place on our website, including chronologies of prominent works from which we can build. We also host a growing collection of Book Art Links, to which we could add online resources for critical terminology and descriptive vocabulary. This is all within our reach.

With generations of book art to mine, and a shared vocabulary defined, I think it's time for us to chew on this: What are the critical questions that we should be asking?

I am inspired by the constant dialogue around this issue within the field of socially engaged art, which, as I asserted with my last post, seems to be experiencing a parallel and intersecting evolution with ours. Returning to one of the projects that I believe successfully inhabits that intersection, I'd like to share a set of questions proposed by Temporary Services in the Art and Social Practices Workbook "to help in evaluating an artistic project that includes other people who are not the artists, or in some way relies on its meaning being generated from the production of social experience."

Does the work empower more people than just the authors of the work?
Does the work foster egalitarian relationships, access to resources, a shift in thinking, or surplus for a larger group of people?
Does the work abate competition, abusive power and class structures, or other barriers typically found in gallery or museum settings?
Does the work seek broader audiences than just those educated about and familiar with contemporary art?
Does the work trigger a collective imagination that can dream of other possible worlds while it understands the current one with eyes wide open?

I admire this brief and brave list, and I return to it often as I continue to pursue my interest in the relationship between book art and social practice. For Temporary Services, these questions get to the heart of the matter and offer "an in-depth way of assessing art works" in their porous field. It seems to me that these questions avoid the pitfalls of asserting key works or continuing to debate terminology. They are straightforward and complex. They invite critique and spark meaningful debate. Most importantly, they are not presented as the questions to be asked, but some questions to be asked.

I'd like to follow suit. Over the next two weeks, I will generate a list of some critical questions that I believe to be helpful in evaluating book art. I encourage other CBAA members and readers of this blog to do the same, and I invite them to share their questions by posting to the comments section below. For my next post on September 1st, I will present the compiled results of this exercise. My hope is that this list of questions will serve as a jumping off point for close readings of artists’ books, and that those close readings will inevitably generate additional critical questions–all of which I believe that theory most definitely wants.

BOOK ART AND SOCIAL PRACTICE // Bridget Elmer

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 07:00:00 GMT

With this post, I would like to revisit a conversation that began over five years ago at the 2011 CBAA Conference in Bloomington, Indiana. At that conference, in a presentation entitled Relational Continuum: The Book as "Lasting Encounter," I departed from Nicolas Bourriaud's theory of Relational Aesthetics and asserted the critical importance of considering book art through a relational lens. At this moment, with the American presidential election looming and with potent evidence of collective discontent erupting across the globe, I find myself returning to that assertion.

This time around, I'd like to free us from Bourriaud's oft-contested jargon. As Daniel Grant explains in his recent New York Times article, "defining social practice is no easy thing." For the sake of reigniting this conversation, I will ground us in the following definition, offered up by the Art and Social Practice MFA program at Portland State University, in a blog post about their weekly Likewise Fridays events.

"Art and Social Practice is an artistic approach that emphasizes collaboration, shared authorship, public participation, site-specificity, and interdisciplinarity. It is often presented in non-art locations, and has no media or formal boundaries."

Since my original inquiry in 2011, I have been interested in how our field intersects with this artistic approach, as many of these emphases are so often relevant when considering the book as an art form. As such, I am driven to compile examples of book art that can also be considered as social practice.

With the intention of building a bibliography to continue this inquiry, I will share a few projects that exemplify my understanding of book art as social practice. Beneath each project, I provide excerpts quoted directly from the artist(s) describing their work. The sources for these excerpts can be visited by clicking on the title links included for each project. I invite comments, including those that interrogate my choices and those that suggest additions to this growing list.

Books by Sheryl Oring
"Sheryl Oring examines critical social issues through projects that incorporate old and new media to tell stories, examine public opinion and foster open exchange. Using tools typically employed by journalists (the camera, the typewriter, the pen, the interview and the archive) she builds on experience in her former profession to create installations, performances, artist books and internet-based works."

Book Bombs by Mary Tasillo and Michelle Wilson
"BOOK BOMBS re-contextualizes public spaces, particularly park benches, empty lots, and abandoned buildings, drawing on the history of guerrilla art, graffiti traditions, and the artist multiple. Our site-based interventions highlight the social and environmental issues of a location, such as homelessness and endangered and invasive plants ecologies, through explorations of handmade paper, wheat pasted prints, and zines."

Combat Paper
"Transforming military uniforms into handmade paper since 2007. . . Through papermaking workshops, veterans use their uniforms worn in service to create works of art. The uniforms are cut up, beaten into a pulp and formed into sheets of paper. Participants use the transformative process of papermaking to reclaim their uniforms as art and express their experiences with the military."

Publications by Temporary Services
"Publishing has been a regular part of our practice since we began in 1998. We have provided a large number of our booklets, books, poster-booklets, newspapers and other publications for free during exhibitions, in public situations, and below as PDFs for you to download. In 2008 we took steps to make our publishing economically viable and to be able to provide greater support for artists, groups, and their work. To this end, we started Half Letter Press a publishing imprint and online store."

Streetopia by various artists, published by Booklyn
"Streetopia (the book) is an assemblage of works by twenty-four current and former San Francisco artists tentatively associated with the San Francisco Bay Area "Mission School" or "New Mission School" Art movements. It serves as a stand-alone extension of the Streetopia exhibition at the Luggage Store Gallery in SF in May and June of 2012."

Unbound by Jessica Peterson
"Unbound is a limited edition artists’ book which honors the veterans of Prince Edward County’s 1959 school lock out. All 100 copies of the book were letterpress-printed on handmade paper in a single month, produced collaboratively by community members in Farmville and faculty and students at Longwood University. The book was conceived and designed by artist Jessica Peterson and recounts the closing of the public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, from 1959 to 1964. Unbound tells this story of these events with timelines, archival evidence, and collected narratives from the veterans of the closings. Gold stars flow through each page, one star for each person whose life was permanently altered by the school closings."

COLD COMFORT // Tate Shaw

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 07:00:00 GMT

Like a lot of people I’m struggling to find ways to process the shootings starting last month in Orlando through Dallas over the past weekend. Personally, I go to my bookshelves looking for signs of humanity to buoy me up in these times.

Adrian Octavius Walker’s My Lens Our Ferguson is a simple photo-bookwork about the protests following the shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. It is a brief but more intimate look at the protests and the events than mass media reported. One image in the middle of the book depicts a parade-like march at near twilight so the people are virtually backlit and made more stark in flat black shapes with animated shadows on the asphalt. One of the African Americans marching raises a sign that reads, “I am an American.”

In the opening of Clarissa Sligh’s photo-bookwork Voyage(r): Tourist Map to Japan on the flight, still uncertain about her desire to travel to Japan, she writes, “As African American/I know nothing about it/Care even less.” Toward the end of the book in a section called The Supper she tells a story about a host who “could hardly wait to tell me how happy he was to have me as a guest in his house and that he had seen the movie Roots which he had thoroughly enjoyed and had found educational. Having grown up a Southern black girl, I smiled and told him graciously that I had seen Shogun and had experienced it in the same way. He laughed and said, ‘Of course that was totally fictionalized.’ ‘Then of course you must understand that Roots was created the same way,’ I replied. We all laughed together as it sank in that Hollywood had provided us with our understanding of each other’s history. But even still it couldn’t prevent Roots and Shogun sitting down to dinner with us.”

The imagery in Voyage(r) is all printed duotone in a range from black, dark purple, indigos and a light blue. It includes Sligh’s travel journal writings, drawings, and found material montaged together with photographs made on the trip. Many are of subjects stereotypical of the Japanese tourist experience—temples, school children, architecture, and sites including a visually violent climax at Hiroshima, which Sligh didn’t want to see but her partner insisted since his was the WWII generation that dropped the bomb. In one spread she uses typographically wavy text overlapping a photo of water assembled together with brush drawings of a Japanese temple to point at a portrait of herself: “There I am with the camera around my neck. How much of what I shoot is to confirm what National Geographic taught me to see?” she asks.

At the near end of Voyage(r) the statement “Stereotypes make it hard to see who you are” is typeset over a close up of Sligh’s closed eyes.

The term stereotype comes from printing, a metal printing plate cast from a mold in another material like plaster or papier-mâché.

It’s the ubiquity and repetition of what is made from a mold cast that creates the blindness.

PHOTOBOOK TO PHOTO-BOOKWORK, A SPECTRUM // Tate Shaw

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 07:00:00 GMT

For this post I asked permission from Phil Zimmermann to publish a brief excerpt of his presentation at the 2016 Photo-Bookworks Symposium June 23-25 that I organized for Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY. The following excerpt includes the core of Zimmermann’s position and the graphic component here is a kind of visual essay unto itself. It should also be mentioned that Zimmermann’s creation of the graphic essay was inspired in part by the re-organization of his personal book collection into categories of photobook, photo-bookwork, artists’ book, etc.

--Tate Shaw

“The term artists’ books has been much bandied about in the photo community in recent years and is, I think, used perhaps a little too loosely. What makes a photo-based book an artists’ book? To step back a little, the term artists’ book, even outside the photobook world, is a term that is still contested, and there are many camps that argue about what characteristics determine what makes an artists’ book an artists’ book. I think that most practitioners would agree that an artists’ book is a book that is not merely a reproduction of images or texts that exist in another form, but a new time-based medium unto itself, with a unified conceptual content. The ‘book artist’ is the author and in control of the creation of the entire book. In almost all cases this would eliminate the use of a book designer or even possibly a pushy publisher who ‘knows what will sell.’

Unless the designer is under the close supervision of the artist, the artist him or herself must have the overall creative vision with an artists’ book. Collaborations do exist, like Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage, and there, all contributors are given credit as the creators. This idea of what an artists’ book should be requires that the artist-photographer must educate themselves on book structure, history of visual books, methods of production, typography, and, on a more meta level: how to think and work in terms of a time based-medium, using sequence, rhythm, narrative arc and so on.

So I went through my artists’ book collection and carefully pulled out any photobook that I thought was either by artists who self-identified as ‘photographer,’ or where I felt that photography was the primary subject and medium that was used. Many of these books were ones where the photos were not used in the standard ubiquitous monograph form that so many photographers love, nor were they coffee-table-type publications that galleries supported by subvention, and used as a form of publicity to raise the profile of their stable of artists. Those above-mentioned books were already segregated out and in my photography book section, they clearly did not belong in the artists’ book section. Of course there is nothing wrong with the photographic monograph book.

The question is: ‘What is it that you want to use the book for?;’ the photographer must ask themselves that. The monograph does the job of promoting single photographs or bodies of work, if that is what one needs and wants to do.

But books are capable of much more.

I have given out a chart which is a graphic expression of what I see as a linear continuum that follows the standard photographic book on one end, onward to the other end, where the photo-bookwork book is situated, the photo world’s version of the artists’ book.”

--Philip Zimmermann, at the VSW Photo-Bookworks Symposium, June 24, Rochester, NY

WHY BOTHER WITH WIKIPEDIA? // Richard Minsky

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 07:00:00 GMT

The first time I saw the Wikipedia “Artist’s book” entry was May 15, after reading this post by Philip Zimmermann to the “Book Arts Collective” Facebook group. Please read Phil’s statement.

What does this have to do with Book Art Theory? Nomenclature, language, words, semiotics: syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, are fundamental to any attempt at understanding. Cognition is influenced by political, social and economic factors. In Wikipedia there is no entry for “Book art.” It redirects to “Artist’s book.”

Public perception of “Book art” is influenced by eliminating its name as a field. This has practical consequences, influencing funding sources, college administrations, the collector market, the development of critical theory, and more. It constrains the opportunity set. People who are not in the field of Book Art, or are just entering the field, are likely to query Wikipedia, and will find that the field does not exist.

We are the College Book Art Association. Our field exists. CBAA can and should provide leadership on this. It’s time for an intervention.

For at least four decades "Artist's book" has been a subfield of "Book art," not the other way around. It took very few people to commandeer the Wikipedia entry, as Phil pointed out. Click the View history tab to see.

There are ways to correct Wikipedia. I am beginning to learn, just signed up with an account, and have not yet made any contributions or edits. There are procedures for speedy renaming and a Categories for discussion page. The first step will be to create and populate a “Book Art” entry that defines what “Book art” is, and identifies the subfields, with descriptions, images, links, etc. These would include "fine press," "sculptural bookworks," “installations,” “performances”, “artist books,” “altered books,” “designer bookbindings”, etc. Your help in defining “Book art” and naming all the subfields is important. Many works of book art involve several subfields, such as a fine press book in a designer binding, an altered book that is a sculptural bookwork, or an installation performance. Please comment below.

Similarly, Wikipedia has a problem with Book arts, now a disambiguation page. That also should be a category, separate from "Book art," with subfields of bookbinding, typography, papermaking, printing, calligraphy, illustration, etc. linked from it. Many writers incorrectly use "Book Arts" to identify the field of individual made objects, rather than reserving it for the craft disciplines used to produce them.

I have self-identified as a “Book Artist” since the early 1970s. A search for "Book artist" in Wikipedia results in "Artist's book."

This will not be instant. It will grow and evolve. Whether or not you have experience creating or editing Wikipedia entries, please participate. The input of book artists, book art curators, critics, dealers and collectors in essential. Should we try to organize a collaborative Wikipedia Intervention at the next annual meeting in Tallahassee? The theme of the meeting is “Conspire.”

WHAT DOES THEORY WANT? // Tate Shaw

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 07:00:00 GMT

The title of this post is inspired from the title of W.J.T. Mitchell’s work, What do Pictures Want: the lives and loves of images, which upon first read might seem absurd since inanimate pictures can’t want anything. But it becomes more meaningful after reading Mitchell’s theory that speculates in part upon an analogy of images as being alive, living organisms, separate from the physical apparatus that binds an image to a picture in object form.

Because this is the Book Art Theory blog of the College Book Art Association I’ll make a connection here from Mitchell’s theory to book art generally and the teaching of book art. For instance, personally, when I teach book art classes, I require students to make physical dummies at every stage of a book’s development in order for the book to get out of the students’ heads and so it can “talk back to them.” Of course I understand the book drafts aren’t alive yet the analogy is apt and I will often speak of my own work or that of others as being alive, not yet alive, or dead.

There too is an analogy to be made between art theory and living organisms since theories are ideas, suppositions, beliefs, best guesses. The good ones expand the limits of what was believed to be the boundary of possibilities. Theories are tests of possibilities meant for other theorists to scrutinize, further test, and challenge. They have a habitat and relationship, ecologically, with other organisms. And like Mitchell’s notion—centuries of thought, really—that images live somehow separate, double lives from the object that consciously reveals them, art theory comes alive from and proceeds to exist independently of what made it.

Take an example from critic Lucy Lippard, one of a handful of writers who have theorized, however limiting, about book art. Before her brief but key essay “The Artist’s Book Goes Public” published in Art in America in 1977 (later collected in Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook edited by Joan Lyons), Lippard made a significant theory and contribution out of the conceptual art environment growing around her contemporaneously in the latter half of the 1960s and early 1970s. Her theory was published as a kind of annotated reference book in 1972 called Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966-1972. It revealed the boundaries of a conceptual practice that came into being (just not always materially) during the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation Movements, Vietnam, and counter culture “free-for-all,” as she described the period. Lippard, an active part of that environment, responded to artworks also existing in that habitat, aptly posited about art’s dematerialization at the time, and then went about collecting all the possible evidence of this work’s existence as pointers for further study and theorizing.

Perhaps conceptual art of that period was so far flung and such a free-for-all it wanted a theory and needed the larger process-based moniker of dematerialization to fulfill its lack of cohesiveness as an all-out movement. Or Lippard and others wanted to draw all the disparate work together to make more sense of the works since they were, after all, challenging to the status quo and certainly audiences must have needed assistance understanding these pieces. Perhaps the artists didn’t understand what was happening yet, either; I’ve heard it said—a little condescendingly, if you ask me—that artists need help from theorists in understanding their work.

The point, in the end, is theory wants, needs, lacks the art work and the art work wants, needs, lacks the theory. Ecological problems seem to present themselves when one or the other doesn’t reside in the same habitat. But then maybe the requirement of this balance isn’t accurate. Perhaps I incorrectly understand the relationships between these two organisms of theory and book art. And since this is supposed to be a place for discussion—maybe a comment or two, at least—I ask then, what does book art want? What is needed, lacking, left wanting for book art, currently? Close reading of key books? If not close reading then recognition of key historical circumstances? Narratives that connect contemporary activities in the field at large? To be more readily considered by non-artists from outside the field? To be more widely understood or appreciated?

MUSEUM MEERMANNO // Ruth Bardenstein

Sun, 15 May 2016 07:00:00 GMT

A visit to the Netherlands gave me the chance to see the Museum Meermanno in The Hague, said to be the oldest book museum in the world. The original Museum of the Book, founded as a bequest of the Baron van Westreenen in 1852, contains over 20,000 items including a significant collection of medieval manuscripts and incunabula. In 1960, it became part of the Museum Meermanno, which brought together other significant collections of fine bindings, Dutch book design, calligraphy, Czech avant-garde books, Ex Libris (book plates), archives of designers and typographers, and other collections relating to the art and design of the book. The museum continues to collect artist’s books (Ode to a grand staircase by Julie Chen and Barb Tetenbaum is one that is showcased in the catalog) and presents exhibits which reveal different parts of the collection.

Besides being in a charming building which was the grand home of the Baron, the museum contains many surprises (a notable collection of Egyptian, Greek and Roman objects) and too many highlights to cover in this post. The current exhibit, The Book Inside, provides a veritable history of the book in six large rooms, from clay tablet and papyrus through modern printing and digital media. All items are selections from their extensive collections and the displays provide an opportunity for close inspection of binding models, stunning illuminated manuscripts, early bindings, and fine printings and modern artist’s books.

Models made by Janos Szirmai, on display as part of The Book Inside exhibit.

Bindings from the 12th and 15th century on display as part of The Book Inside exhibit.

Love is Enough, written and designed by William Morris, printed by the Kelmscott Press on display as part of The Book Inside exhibit.

The Book Room is a dream 18th century library with wall and floor cabinets filled with van Westreenan’s extensive book collection. This includes a custom cabinet of the complete set Kelmscott Press books (53 publications in 66 volumes, all in the original vellum or half-cloth bindings). There are showcases containing many very large format books which include the Blaeu atlases and art books and portfolios. There are some gems displayed in this room, but one may contact Erik Geleigns, the Conservator Oude Collectie, about viewing other items in the collection that are in the Book Room cabinets or in storage.

The Book Room in Museum Meermanno.

The miniature book displays were an absolute highlight: the Meermanno has a collection of over 600 miniature books, including more than 50 from the 17th and 18th centuries. A sampling from this collection along with printed sheets and materials for making some of these books were on display (see image below) along with the stunning miniature library “Biblioteca Thurkowiana Minor.” Given to the Meermanno in 2012 by Guus and Luce Thurkow, it contains beautifully crafted globes, desks and chairs, a book staircase and miniature wood cabinets housing and over 1500 miniature books. These books were purchased or handmade by The Catharijne Press (owned and run by the Thurkows) and there is a video showing the making of some of the books and background on this marvel. (See http://petitpunt.blogspot.com/2012/04/bibliotheca-thurkowiana-minor.html for more information.)

Miniature book display at the Meermanno museum.

The Bibliotheca Thurkowiana Minor miniature library at the Meermanno museum.

Pages of The Young Stork’s Baedeker, a miniature printed by The Catharijne Press.

(All photos by the author, courtesy of Museum Meermanno, The Hague, NL)

The current exhibition The Book Inside runs until May 29, 2016. Further information on exhibits, events, and museum collections can be found on their website: www.meermanno.nl. This is a must-see museum for anyone involved with the art of the book, and I would strongly recommend contacting the museum before visiting so that special holdings can be viewed!

THE ERIC CARLE MUSEUM OF PICTURE BOOK ART // Ruth Bardenstein

Sun, 01 May 2016 07:00:00 GMT

For my blog posts in May, I will be featuring two unusual museums which focus on different aspects of the art of the book. The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is an intimate, light filled space located across from the Hampshire College campus in Amherst, MA whose mission is to inspire a love of art and reading through picture books.

It is a museum that invites interaction and exploration of the elements of picture book art with energy, engagement and excitement. This is achieved by including much more than just the final polished, framed artwork which are reproduced in the books. The visitor’s experience is more of an immersion into the artist’s creative process and a window into their practice in shaping the book experience.

Over the last few years, I have seen some very inspiring exhibits of picture book artists, including Leo Lionni, Eric Carle, Uri Shulevitz, Leonard Weisgard and William Pene du Bois. Besides featuring the original artwork used for their picture books, the exhibits also may include storyboards, sketches and different versions of pages by the artist revealing aspects of the development of the book as a whole. One is able to gain some insight into how the artist worked through the flow of images, the composition and interaction of text and image, and the building of page spreads for some of the books. I have also seen color separations (acetate layers), color testing and revisions, and sheets with printing instructions which shed light on the complexities of the process of developing and finalizing the art of the picture book. Some examples from the current exhibitions are shown below.

Final illustrations for “WHAM! The dogcatcher’s wagon upset a wheelbarrow where two men were building a house.” And “SMASH! The dogcatcher’s wagon ran into a junk dealer’s cart.”
Down Huckleberry Hill by Leonard Weisgard.

Final illustration for “Father played his recorder for her.”
The Sick Day by Patricia MacLachlan. Illustration by William Pène du Bois.

Final illustration for “What big teeth you have…”
Little Red Riding Hood by William Pène du Bois.

(All photos by the author, courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA.)

One of the galleries usually has an in-depth exhibit on Eric Carle’s early work and the development of his signature style and mixed media/collage techniques that are now so familiar from The Hungry Caterpillar and his many other works.

The Carle museum offers educational programs that provide a foundation for arts integration and literacy. It houses an art studio (which has a full shelf of resources for book art related projects for all ages), a theater, picture book and scholarly libraries (with a full collection of Caldecott winners), and educational programs for families, scholars, educators, and schoolchildren. They also offer professional training for educators around the country and four onsite graduate programs in Children's Literature in collaboration with Simmons College (see http://www.carlemuseum.org/content/mission for more information.)

Exhibitions in May include:

A Taste for Adventure: The Art of William Pène du Bois ends May 1, 2016

Magician of the Modern: The Art of Leonard Weisgard exhibit continues through June 5, 2016.

The Art of Eric Carle: Hide and Seek exhibit continues through August 28, 2016.

Louis Darling: Drawing the Words of Beverley Cleary is showing from May 17- June 5, 2016.

Additional information on the exhibitions, programs, events and educational workshops can be found at the museum website www.carlemuseum.org.

ANSELM KIEFER AND SCULPTURAL BOOK ART // Ruth Bardenstein

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 07:00:00 GMT

I have long been familiar with the work of German artist Anselm Kiefer in terms of his large scale paintings and mixed media work with themes rooted in German history, myth and culture, including confronting the cultural impact of the Third Reich. But I was surprised to see his sculptural work which directly centers on the form of the book and its expansive terrain of symbolism, which I experienced at The Margulies Collection in Florida. A bit of internet research quickly yielded a significant body of work focused on the book which has an important place in the book arts domain.

As opposed to William Kentridge, whose artist’s books leverage the intimacy and the potential for personal interaction of the book, Kiefer works with the book form on a monumental and more abstracted level. “Derived from his interest in mythology, history, and knowledge, Kiefer often uses books as subject matter representing knowledge and civilization. Similarly, he frequently incorporates text into his paintings, including excerpts from poems, novels, and nationalist slogans as well as names of seminal figures, written in a scrawling script.” (http://www.theartstory.org/artist-kiefer-anselm.htm)

His creation of monumental books with pages of lead, an element noted for both its toxicity and for its alchemical purposes, are central elements for a number of large scale works, including two at the Margulies Collection, shown below. “The ideology of alchemy is the hastening of time, as in the lead-silver-gold cycle which needed only time in order to transform lead into gold. In the past the alchemist sped up this process with magical means. That was called magic. As an artist I don’t do anything differently, I only accelerate the transformation that is already present in things. That is magic as I understand it.” (Anselm Kiefer, quoted in the Margulies Collection exhibit.)

Sprache du Vogel (or Language of the Birds) has a stack of large book forms made of lead as the central body attached to enormous, expansive wings. The book as the symbol of transformational knowledge, enlightenment and an internal freedom emanates from the presence of this work.

Die Erdzeitalter (or Ages of the World) is another monumental work with a stack of Kiefer’s abandoned canvases interspersed with sunflower stalk sculptural pieces and large books made entirely of lead. The book form here appears to relate more to processes of learning and understanding: books as repositories of knowledge and touchstones for greater personal development, as catalysts of transformation.

Sprache du Vogel (The Language of Birds) (image by the author)

Die Erzeitalter (image from theartnewspaper.com)

Die Erzeitalter (The Ages of the World) (image by the author)

Other major works which incorporate large scale sculptural books include Breaking of the Vessels (see http://www.theartstory.org/artist-kiefer-anselm.htm); The High Priestess/Zwiestromland (see http://www.theartstory.org/artist-kiefer-anselm-artworks.htm#pnt_5); Buch (The Secret Life of Plants) (see http://arttattler.com/archivekiefer.html).

BOOK ARTS AND WILLIAM KENTRIDGE // Ruth Bardenstein

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 07:00:00 GMT

For my two blog posts this month, I want to present information, comment and images on two artists who are well known for their work in other media but have also produced significant work in book arts domain.

William Kentridge is a South African artist best known for his static and animated drawing (stop motion films), sculpture, printmaking, and the use of all these in his stunning Metropolitan Opera productions (including sets and costumes) of Stravinsky’s The Nose and Berg’s Lulu. He has also produced a number of artist’s books including Lexicon, No It Is, Trace (discussed below) as well as Second Hand Reading and The Refusal of Time.

Lexicon is virtually a facsimile of an 1825 Latin-Greek Lexicon apparently used by his father during college (we see his father’s name penciled onto the title page). The page spreads are the background for rough charcoal sketching which transforms from a coffee pot into a cat and more. This rigorous, academic reference book becomes a rough, playful and conceptual flip book. The intimate space and interaction possibilities characteristic of the book form are employed here to connect thought processes and concepts across distant points in time.

Lexicon by William Kentridge, Photo by Ruth Bardenstein

No It Is also incorporates antiquarian books, but in this case Kentridge selects pages from a variety of technical books and places them in thought provoking pairings on each page spread. The drawings on top of these pages range from static to animated, abstract geometric to playful figurative, black and white to color, and text to image. Again, the book form is critical in allowing intimate interaction/exploration of the background print and the drawing on each page and page spread. It also allows a flip book dynamic, oppositional page spread dynamic, and the creation of perception and meaning from absorbing the book as a whole.

No It Is by William Kentridge, Photos by Ruth Bardenstein

Trace is actually an exhibition catalog of prints at the MOMA which Kentridge directly responds to by drawing, printing and writing on translucent pages which serve as overlays to both recto and verso sides of a number of the pages. The book format allows for this conversation between past work and present thought and for participation by the viewer in creating different layering of the translucent and opaque pages. The result is an engaging and dynamic layering of meaning and response; one feels a part of Kentridge’s dialogue with his own work and his mind at play.

Trace by William Kentridge, Photos by Ruth Bardenstein

Other links that provide more in-depth information on Kentridge, his studio practice and work:

Kentridge gave the 2012 Norton Lectures at Harvard where he very personally and brilliantly discusses (and shows in various video pieces) studio practice and the development of his art and themes. http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/william-kentridge-drawing-lesson-one-praise-shadows; http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/william-kentridge-drawing-lesson-two-brief-history-colonial-revolts; http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/william-kentridge-drawing-lesson-four-practical-epistemology-life-studio; http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/william-kentridge-drawing-lesson-five-praise-mistranslation;

For a probing discussion with Kentridge of his underlying themes and concept development, see “that which is not drawn” by William Kentridge and Rosalind Morris. (http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/T/bo16862889.html).

IT'S 2016 // Julie Leonard

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 07:00:00 GMT

In Spring 2005, Johanna Drucker published an article entitled “Critical Issues/Exemplary Works” in the journal The Bone Folder. In The Journal of Artists’ Books, Fall 2007, Matthew Brown wrote “Book Arts and the Desire for Theory” (JAB22) for a review of the conference “Action/Interaction” held at Columbia College Chicago. CBAA was founded in 2008 in part to promote scholarship and criticism in the field. Levi Sherman recently posted in this blog promoting what he calls ‘Book Thinking’ (“artists’ books as discourse…considering formal qualities like structure and sequence within social contexts like literacy and book culture”) within the field and as a means for considering other disciplines (giving back). A stated goal for this blog is to “call attention to current criticism and theory about the artist’s book.”

“We don’t have a canon of artists, we don’t have a critical terminology for book arts aesthetics with a historical perspective, and we don’t have a good, specific, descriptive vocabulary on which to form our assessment of book works,” Johanna Drucker wrote in 2005. In this context, she described her proposal for a meta-data base to serve as a resource for descriptive and critical data on artists’ book work. Soon after, Drucker launched Artists' Books Online based on developed descriptors and critical terminology. Matthew Brown wrote, “In the arts and humanities over the last thirty years, theory has done the work of challenging conceptions of aesthetic value, artistic production, and meaning-making…[T]heory has also had a salient institutional role: its vocabulary has given humanists a set of principles that help them speak across disciplinary divides. It is hardly a voice of unanimity. Instead, it is a shared language to maintain a conversation, enrich the debate, and deepen one’s learning.” Drucker and Brown are both asking for a part of a framework in which to do critical work on book art.

Levi Sherman suggests that the book arts have built both criticism and scholarship that could be framed through what he is calling Book Thinking. What has evolved over the last ten years that allows for the optimism Sherman projects, suggesting that what both Brown and Drucker sought has gained a foothold?

Crawling, with trepidation, out on that limb, I’ll suggest that the field is maturing. It is defining itself with greater clarity and expanding its range. It interacts more fluidly with other disciplines particularly as discipline specific art making continues to break down. This is evident in work being shown in both gallery settings and book fairs. The ‘zones of activity’ Drucker defines are discernable but with a merging, a talking to each other. For example, fine press work of imagination and visual acuity has expanded radically the work we see coming from that medium. This is evident in the interviews and writing that saturate our small dot of activity on the Internet (also oozing beyond our borders here and there). The ‘canon of artists’ is also here to be studied and mined; book art is becoming generations, not a generation.

What is still lacking is some kind of accounting, a pulling together…the work that has been and is being done to build that ‘critical terminology’ and ‘descriptive vocabulary’ with ‘conceptions of aesthetic value, artistic production, and meaning-making’ in the book arts. Perhaps this is a time to take advantage of an accessible (practically), collaborative, and also challenging (“enriching the debate”) venue in which to rejuvenate (dig up) and solidify (document) this ongoing concern.

ERASURES: ABSENCE AND PRESENCE // Julie Leonard

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 08:00:00 GMT

“The poetry of erasure is taking place all around us. Underneath the pavement, behind newspaper headlines, on paste-layered billboards and graffiti-laden walls… continuously peeling away and papering over itself. Its very surface is a living thing in flux between the dueling processes of decay and renewal…This world demands of its denizens a constant and vigilant revision of form.” Travis MacDonald

Erasure crosses and mixes disciplines; emerges from impulses ranging from conceptual systematic experimentation to political inquiry to a destructive act to a conversation between an original work and its ‘renewal.’ Created by painters, prose writers, poets, book artists, and those artists who defy disciplinary labels, erasure can harmonize with an original or create a dissonance. As with any artistic genre or endeavor there are both successful works that resonate and burrow deep, and those that flounder, never penetrating the surface. Scraping or painting or cutting, a palimpsest is formed for the reader to decipher, to search through layers for meaning.

In the last decade, erasure as a poetic form has rapidly gained momentum. The intersection with an aspect of the book arts—the object (or not object) and materials that make up that object—manifests in a consideration of material and form taking on greater significance. It gets more interesting in light of the wide range of production methods being employed as well as conceptual motives: one-of-kind, serials, digitally produced, originals reproduced and reconfigured before erasure, born and raised digitally, to name a few. Poetic and visual considerations are found in erasures by artists as distinct as Robert Rauschenberg, Amelia Bird, Jen Bervin, and Tom Phillips.

Criticism that addresses this form from the varied perspectives of painting, writing and the book arts offers a rich means for assessing the work both historically and in this contemporary moment. Travis MacDonald in A Brief History of Erasure Poets provides a context that places erasures in a lineage including Oulipo, Language Poetry, book artists and current practice. He uses specific artists to elucidate varied approaches to the relationship the ‘eraser’ creates with the original work.

On Erasure by Mary Ruefle, provides a personal perspective on the rigor involved and how erasure can be approached. She creates both one-of-a-kind and digitally reproduced editions. Andrew David King interviews six contemporary poets: Srikanth Reddy, Matthea Harvey, Janet Holmes, M. NourbeSe Philip, David Dodd Lee, and Travis MacDonald, “questioning practical and theoretical concerns surrounding erasure as a technique.”

Poets Genevieve Kaplan and Mary Hickman both situate erasure poetry within a book art framework, contrasting the perspective MacDonald takes in allying it primarily with conceptual poetry of the 1960s. “While poetic appropriated books may not always be artists' books per se, it is helpful to use the contemporary artists' book as a lens to better understand these new texts,” Genevieve Kaplan writes. She digs into contrasting methods that address the physical form and means of erasing in the work of Jen Bervin, Mary Ruefle, and Erica Baum.

Mary Hickman also uses Jen Bervin and Mary Ruefle’s works to situate the work within the context of book art. “I suggest we also view erasure poetics in the context of the material substrate of the book as object, a view which allows for a richer understanding of both compositional process and conceptual or creative effect.”

Two last bits to offer up from a broader perspective encompassing painting and photographic manipulations are The Eloquence of Absence and Brian Dillon’s The Revelation of Erasure. The two essays consider erasure from perspectives such as censorship and deceit and include photography, painting, and text-based works.

When we take a step sideways, address materials, ideas, critical approaches and theories that intersect our own activities and practices, but are often positioned in a sister discipline, it opens our thinking, poses new questions, asks us to move outside our own discipline in considering the book and why it is compelling to us as an artistic form. It can illuminate where we close our minds to other modes of thinking about the book, and what it means and represents when we move away from our own canon to consider it with our heads cocked to another side.

THE ARTIST BOOK AND THE SAILOR SUIT // Susan Viguers

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 08:00:00 GMT

Two recent book art theory blog posts use the phrase “the artists’ book.” This may be awkward, but it has precedence. Stephan Klima in his Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature notes, “A most confusing aspect of the debate is the spelling of the term artists books. Its first appearance, in 1973, omitted the apostrophe. Thereafter, it appeared with the apostrophe, and sometimes without. Typographical error may explain certain cases; but there are unexplained mysteries” (10). Johanna Drucker speaks variously of “an artists’ book,” “artists’ books,” and “artists book.”

The history of the possessive apostrophe is somewhat murky. It is “a grammatical anomaly, a vestigial case marker . . . in a noun system [modern English] that has otherwise dispensed with cases,” writes Elizabeth S. Sklar. Its origins clearly go back to the case sensitive Old English, but there isn’t full agreement on its history and well into the 18th century most grammarians ignored the genitive plural, even claiming there was no such thing (177-80).

In the instance of the artist’ book, I wonder if the apostrophe inconsistency stems from confusion inherent in the concept of the artist’s book itself. That the artist is the originator, the owner, if you will, of his or her artist’s book, is as significant as any other characteristic, if not more. Also, as Ulises Carrión’s “The New Art of Making Books” suggests, this is a new genre, unchartered territory with attendant lack of terminology.

Ted Gachot, presently copyediting CBAA’s journal Openings, queried the use of the apostrophe in this context in an email to CBAA’s president Julie Chen. The real ambiguity, he explained, is whether the word “artist” refers to a person or persons responsible for the book, or simply describes a type of book. Here are excepts from his email:

[T]he terms “artists’ books” and “artist’s book” create grammatical ambiguity because they are not formed in the way such terms are usually formed.

A good example is “sailor suit.” The plural is “sailor suits.” “Sailor” in this case is an attributive (descriptive) noun. It remains the same no matter how many suits are being discussed.

In “artists’ books” and “the artist’s book,” “artist” is still attributive (probably) but it is in the genitive case. When terms like this are formed in the genitive, the plural is normally formed the same way as with “sailor suit.” The plural of “farmers’ market” is “farmers’ markets.” “Artists’ books” is not the plural of “artist’s book.” They (when used in this sense) are . . . two ways of saying the same thing, of describing a type of book.

But “artist” can also refer to an artist, and “artist’s book” to a book made by that artist. One can talk about a particular artist’s book (her book) or that artist’s books (her books), or if two artists have collaborated on a single book, the artists’ book (their book). If they’ve made more than one, they are the artists’ books (their books). “Book” or “books” in these kinds of clauses serves the same function as, and could be replaced with, “artist book” or “artist books.” You could even say an artist’s artists’ books (though it would be better not to).

Unfortunately, neither “artists’ books” nor “artist’s book” has the internal logic that “farmers’ market” has. It seems a little funny to say “an artists’ book” if discussing one person’s book. It also seems a bit odd to say “an artist’s book” if the project is collaborative. That’s because the reader does not know whether to read the terms as referring to the artist or the book. [R]eplacing these terms with one formed with an attributive noun, like “sailor suit,” would clear up all these complications. There . . .[would be] none of the haziness that gets in with “artists’ books” and “artist’s books,” where it’s unclear whether they are descriptive or possessive or how to form the plural.

Resistance to this may simply be the result of the field’s newness, of not being around long enough — certainly not as long as sailor suits, dog food, pig pens, and cat whiskers.

Note: Works cited are easily found with the exception of the following, which can be accessed in JSTOR: Elizabeth S. Sklar, “The Possessive Apostrophe: the Development and Decline of a Crooked Mark,” College English (38.2) 1976.

WHAT FIXED BOOK PRICES MEAN FOR THE ARTISTS' BOOK // Levi Sherman

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 08:00:00 GMT

As an American artist, I never considered what France’s Lang Law, or other fixed book price agreements (FBPAs), might mean for artists’ books. While the US adheres to its mythical free market, many countries fix book prices by law or agreement. In an interview for JAB37, Leszek Brogowski states, “In one of my definitions of the artist’s book, there’s the specific question of de-territorializing the practice of art in book culture which remains . . . a protected domain, with the fixed price of a book (a radical anti-free market policy) . . . that stands in contrast to art in its traditional forms.”

FBPAs have many interesting implications for artists’ books, but I will focus on two. The first is a matter of context: the meaning of any artists’ book is affected by its location (and that of its creator and reader) within a free market or a fixed market. Brogowski argues, “We must fight for the definition of a book, to make it understood that a book doesn’t simply boil down to a form. It’s much more than a form: it’s a usage and culture.” Not only can a book acquire new meanings in different contexts, these various meanings impact the formal and conceptual concerns of artists in countries with and without FBPAs, resulting in divergent artists’ book outputs.

The second implication of FBPAs has less to do with a book’s meaning, but much to say about its categorization. FBPAs increase diversity among books and booksellers by preventing big distributors from discounting best-sellers to undercut more challenging or specialized books. Increased diversity would seem an obvious aid to artists’ books, yet only artists’ books competing within the book market (rather than the art market) stand to benefit. This distinction bolsters the argument that these artists’ books are truly books, since they are valued and produced according to the book market, whether fixed or free.

Contrast this to limited edition works with the formal characteristics of a book, yet belong to the art market. Circulating outside the book market, the influence such rarified works can exert on the publishing world is limited. Artists and distributors who engage the book market directly can challenge and steer the broader definition of literacy and the book. Separating works impacted by the book market from those beyond its reach, FBPAs make an interesting (though reductive) thought experiment, a litmus test of book-ness.

My intention is not to lump artists’ book into two camps, but to help clarify the meaning of what Brogowski calls “making art according to the customs of book culture.” He asks: “why should a work of art be materially unique when it can be multiple, like a literary work? . . . Why should the originality of a plastic work be judged against its non-reproducibility, while a literary work is judged by its intellectual and artistic values?” FBPAs should remind book artists that they can participate in and shape a cultural arena that many governments deem too important to be left to the free market.

READING THAT WITH A SUBTLE VOICE // Alex Borgen

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 08:00:00 GMT

As book artists, we understand that books are more than just vessels for information. We read the books’ form, materials, texture, structure, interactivity, as well as written and visual information in search for concept, and not all communication is verbal. I am interested in ways of reading—contemplative reading of our sensory experience, our bodies, and our landscape—those things subtle and direct to achieve a better understanding of our surroundings. Books have the potential to directly communicate information, yet everything around us can be read, though it may take more time, patience, and contemplation. I want to bring attention to the quiet voices or even to the voiceless.

By Alex Borgen, Photo by Kellen Walker

How do we read paper? I want to bring attention to reading paper, as one might read a landscape or body, as we read artist books. Paper is not just a substrate—how do we demonstrate paper’s potential to tell stories, reveal concepts, and perform on a level of interactivity? How do we observe, read, and translate those landscapes with a much quieter, subtle voice? Answering these two questions is pivotal in my conceptual work as it relates to our experiences.

By Alex Borgen, Photo by Penelope Hearne

BOOK THINKING // Levi Sherman

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 05:00:00 GMT

Artists’ books are a slippery, interdisciplinary medium. Attempted definitions seem to fall into two general categories: genealogies and zones of intersection. The latter acknowledges how artists’ books can be understood by applying analytical tools from myriad disciplines including film, design, poetry, and so on. Though this may leave some purists, determined to define precisely what is and is not an artists’ book, dissatisfied, these related fields provide the theoretical and critical framework for artists’ books as a mature discipline. In turn, artists’ books today are capable of lending an analytical lens to other areas of study and practice.

I wish to advocate for the idea of artists’ books as a way of thinking: Book Thinking. This is an easy leap for me, as someone who studied graphic design at a time when Design Thinking was already a pervasive cultural buzzword. Another design analogy is Katherine McCoy's influential essay, “Typography as Discourse,” which, following Foucault, understands discourse as a “[way] of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations....” What can we gain from artists’ books as discourse, from considering formal qualities like structure and sequence within social contexts like literacy and book culture?

I believe acknowledging Book Thinking would avoid two frequent and unproductive conversations within the artists’ book field. On one hand, purists rejecting a work: “But it’s not an artists’ book.” On the other hand, enthusiasts adopting everything: “Cave paintings are artists’ books” and “Facebook is an artists’ book.” The purists and enthusiasts make such claims until the definition of an artists’ book is either squashed or stretched to the point of meaninglessness. By acknowledging Book Thinking, enthusiasts can bring the analytical power of artists’ books to new frontiers without watering down the field, and purists can engage related works without knee-jerk defensiveness.

The biggest benefits of Book Thinking lie beyond our own discipline. Philosopher Gary Tedman argues that Marx’s 1844 Paris Manuscripts is an artists’ book (though I would amend that it be understood through Book Thinking). Tedman cites Margaret Fay, who asserted that understanding the visual and structural eccentricities of Marx’s original hand-bound manuscript leads to a fundamentally different interpretation of Marx’s critiques of Adam Smith and G.W.F. Hegel. The manuscript embodies and clarifies the challenging concepts of immanent critique and dialectical thinking. In JAB38, Anne Royston similarly applies Book Thinking to Derrida's Glas in her intriguing essay, “The Fibrous Text.” Like Tedman, Royston helps readers access a difficult and unusual text. Such insights are no small feat for Book Thinking. Imagine if those of us with expertise in artists’ books pursued such studies more frequently.

Having borrowed from so many influences, the artists’ books field is ready to give back. By embracing Book Thinking, we can move beyond unproductive self-definition and collaborate with other scholars and practitioners, whether to study cave painting or social media. In today's climate of budget cuts and lip service interdisciplinarity, it can hardly hurt to demonstrate what we have to offer.

Works Cited

Fay, Margaret. “The Influence of Adam Smith on Marx's Theory of Alienation” Science & Society: An Independent Journal of Marxism, Vol. XLVII, number 2, Summer 1983.

Tedman, Gary. “Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts as a Work of Art; A Hypertextual Reinterpretation” Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 16, issue 4, Routledge, 2004.

Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

SEEKING PLURALISM IN BOOKS-AS-ART // Tate Shaw

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 05:00:00 GMT

Two literary books I read in 2015 that were both formally and lyrically inspiring yet challenging to my own status quo were Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine and The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Citizen blurs poetry and criticism and includes images. As a window into what it might feel like to be black and American today, its many assorted panes are variously clear, murky, refracting, cracked, and broken. Similarly, The Argonauts is both life writing and criticism about the author becoming a mother while her partner, an artist who technically identifies as neither female nor male, gets breast removal surgery and begins taking testosterone.

Two equally inspiring book artworks by emerging artists connect to Citizen and The Argonauts: Dark Archives (2015) by Andre Bradley and How to Transition on $0.63 a Day (2013) by Lee Krist. Both are autobiographical with the artists’ personal stories revealed in fragments. Dark Archives exists as a gray folder that holds different sized booklets and printed photographs from yearbooks, family albums, and photographs made by Bradley. With exquisite combinations of images and texts that span from his childhood to today, Bradley enables deep empathy for what it means to grow up and be a young black man in this country. Krist’s bookwork is an epistolary of unbound ephemera and postcards written from the author in Portland, Oregon who sends messages and updates on his transition from female to male to his perhaps disapproving mother back in New York City. Housed in a metal 8mm film case, the postcards with their dislocated, bygone imagery and letterpress printed messages on the reverse, feel current and yet like a farewell to a supposedly simpler time of home movies and family vacations.

It was my great privilege to hear Bradley read from Dark Archives at the Image Text Ithaca (ITI) Symposium in July 2015. Rankine, also at ITI, read #2 from her Situations series of video essays in collaboration with John Lucas. The video imagery of Situation 2 is of people asleep on airplanes while the text is loosely about the “raw material” of the body. I connect Rankine and Lucas’ piece to Robert Gober’s divisive “Hanging Man/Sleeping Man” wallpaper work where a lynched black body is disturbingly patterned with a white body asleep in bed. Hearing both readings may have been the cultural highlight of the year for me because their words and images felt like what it feels like to be alive right now.

It was also my privilege to be a juror with Susan Lowdermilk of the upcoming CBAA Members’ Exhibition at the Nashville conference, Telling the Story, January 7-9, 2016. Krist’s How to Transition on $.63 a Day was one of what seemed like just a few books submitted where the author/artists’ voice was authentically his or hers; in fact a good many of the submissions appeared to incorporate secondary source texts as materials. That being said, I observed the artists who used secondary sources might have done so out of a desire to empathize with victims of what was often a tragic transgression of humanity in some form or another. Yet they were still secondary works of witness. And while all the jurying was blind, it also seemed to me that even fewer than those who were creating work out of an authentic, personal experience were those books by people of color or LGBTQ artists.

Earlier this year Rankine, along with her co-editors Beth Loffreda and Max King Cap also published The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. This compendium basically addresses the question of whether or not a white or straight author has a “right of access” through his or her imagination to give voice to a person of color or who is LGBTQ. An example might be The Book of Dolores by author William T. Vollman, a kind of mass-produced book artwork from drawings, photographs, and writings produced while he cross-dressed as research for a transgender sexworker protagonist in his next novel, what an actual cross-dressing reviewer called “Mansplaining Cross-dressing.” Or as Nelson quips at one point in The Argonauts about a white, heterosexual artist male (such as myself), “Do you have to own everything?”

Finally, the question is how do we get more pluralistic ownership in the field of books-as-art? Does CBAA need official equal opportunity programs for publishing, residencies, and exhibitions?

THE LIST MAKER AS CRITIC // Tate Shaw

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 05:00:00 GMT

It’s the year-end when critics compile best of lists that take stock of the passage of time while reflecting upon genuine artistry where one found it. Photobooks have this down pat, see photo-eye’s blog, for one example. We need these pointers and filters now more than ever. I don’t think year-end lists of book artworks exist. If you know of any, please comment or post your own for 2015.

While reading the reports on the events in Paris two weeks ago, I wondered where are the critics connected to book artworks who will provide me a list of titles to help me feel better right this moment? Childishly, I think I wanted something like this scene in the movie version of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity. What I sought was a way to empathize while simultaneously justifying my life’s orientation. Otherwise, why am I thinking about books all the time when awful stuff like this is going on in Beirut, Paris, Syria, etc.? Alas, I didn’t know of such a community so I visited my own shelves and took some solace in Josely Carvalho’s book version of Diary of Images: There is Still Time to Mourn and Anders Nielsen’s The End. What is your list of book artworks that offer some solace for grief?

“So what is it about the list,” asks Michael Hampton in his recently published Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the Artists’ Book? “In short, the list is often the first line of organizational defense in the battle with the incomprehensibility and furor of daily life in 2015; an unbeatable memory device.” Hampton’s own list book is a welcome approach that expands critical inquiry by using the notion of family resemblance for things with “genuine authorship” as book artworks. This is how Hampton can include The Lindisfarne Gospels circa 700CE, a mobile app of Tom Phillips’ A Humument, and a video of Guy Begbie turning circles while holding an ornately perforated book that emits orange smoke as rumba music romps in the background.

Hampton’s list book recalled for me other great list book resources like The Book on Books on Artists Books organized by Arnaud Desjardin and The Perverse Library by Craig Dworkin. Tell us about other list books you know about.

Hampton also points to the great and thankless work Sarah Bodman does consistently editing and disseminating the Book Arts Newsletter (BAN). Two hundred years from now, what are historians going to gain from more: BAN’s intense lists, which are the real time-capsule of the activities of the whole field, or any one person’s idea of a canon or history of current activity?

Another great new title, The Dynamic Library: Organizing Knowledge at the Sitterwerk—Precedents and Possibilities, published in English this fall by Soberscove Press, also has a list maker, Daniel Rohner, at its core. Rohner compiled a remarkable but curious library of about 25,000 volumes on art, architecture, design, and photography that is now the majority of the Sitterwerk Kunstibibliothek. When the library was made public it was classified such that every volume has a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag so users can document their research via a table that senses what rests upon it. Images, and even a magazine printout, can quickly be made of this fluid analog research, all captured via digital tools. It’s thrilling to know more about this pioneering, interdisciplinary work making a collection accessible and unique to each user, individually. How do you document your research in book art collections? Or tell us how you have your private library organized. By genre? Concepts? Autobiographically?

THE ARTIST BOOK AS AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE & PERFORMANCE // Elizabeth Kealy-Morris

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 05:00:00 GMT

Johanna Drucker in her text The Century of Artists’ Books states that the development of the artist’s book as an idea, form and field did not exist before the 20th century and in its current form developed only since 1945 as a field of artistic practice. Drucker defines the artist’s book as,

… a book created as an original work of art, rather than a reproduction of a preexisting work and […] a book which integrates the formal means of its realization and production with its thematic or aesthetic issues. (p. 2)

Drucker argues that there is a concept of ‘bookness’ — a shared conventional form (two covers and a spine) and “the idea that through thematic unity a book may establish its identity” (p. 327). For example, the way in which sequence is expressed gives each book its distinctive identity: A flipbook is an example of sequence meant to move very quickly and meaning is expressed through the speed in which the pages are ‘flipped’. The materials used to create the book such as paper, board and binding, notes Drucker, can “work against or in favor of sequence design” (p. 259). Books with flaps, envelopes, pop ups and moveable objects built as architecture within the binding encourage readers to engage slowly with the narrative. Graphic novels with small frames encourage a faster pace at filmic speed.

With the embodied performance bound in the making of artists’ books, we inscribe our identities into our books. The practices of autoethnography are supported by a long history in performance through storytelling, giving testimony, witnessing, going ‘in-between’, staging encounters, and creating disturbances. Stacy Holman Jones describes autoethnography as “performance that asks how our personal accounts count” (p. 764). Tami Spry suggests that key to the praxis of performative autoethnography is “the ontological tension between its epistemological potential and its aesthetic imperative” (p. 508): the expression of a sense of being through the knowledge developed within the artefact.

Susan Stewart writes about the attraction to the Victorian miniature book by both makers and consumers and notes that,

The social space of the miniature book might be seen as the social space, in miniature, of all books: the book as talisman to the body and emblem of the self; the book as microcosm and macrocosm; the book as commodity and knowledge, fact and fiction. (p. 41)

She describes the ties between the souvenir, the past, the present and nostalgia where the souvenir makes memory material. The souvenir, then, has a dual role: to make the past authentic and discredit the present because the nostalgia bound within the souvenir, and for which it is a referent, challenges the banalities of the everyday. I suggest that the artist’s book utilises performative sequence to tell a story through autoethnographic visual and linguistic narrative.

Drucker, Johanna (2004) The Century of Artists’ Books, New York: Granary Books.

Holman Jones, Stacy (2005) “Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political” in Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, Third Edition, London: Sage Publications, pp.763-791.

Meskimmon, Marsha (2003) Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics, London: Routledge.

Spry, Tami (2011)”Performative Autoethnography: Critical Embodiments and Possibilities” in Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, Fourth Edition, London: Sage Publications, pp.497-511.

Stewart, Susan (1993) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

A DIGITAL STORYTELLING CLASS FINDS ENLIGHTENMENT THROUGH ARTISTS’ BOOKS // Ruth Rogers

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 04:00:00 GMT

In my continuing efforts to engage students and faculty with the research and expository writing possibilities of artists’ books, I had a recent teaching experience of matchless opportunity for inculcation. To put it another way, if success can be judged by students not checking their phones, a reluctance to leave when class was finished, and an urgent text message to a visiting parent to get right over to the library, we scored.

A faculty member in the Anthropology department had contacted me about whether Special Collections had any books that offer “a critique of media saturation, or perhaps examine the notion of archiving culture?” (Haven’t books been archiving culture from the beginning?)

Off the top of my head, I could think of a few books that directly address digital culture as the central theme (Peter Malutski’s Lucy in the Sky, Emily Larned’s Search Results, and Emily McVarish’s The Square) but I had to probe deeper to understand the context for his course. He explained: “As a larger theme, the reimagining of the book as something more than a simple document would be a good jumping-off point.” Aha! Sounds suspiciously like an artist’s book….

Teaching newcomers about artists’ books is a lot like teaching a foreign language. One has to start with the basic principles and then build on them to recognize nuance, texture, and meaning. The biggest challenge is to slow the students down so they don’t just flip randomly through the pages, often the collateral damage of screen reading. I find that if I present groups of books with related study questions, it forces them to read more closely. So I enlisted my best student assistant, Meredith, who, along with a prodigious memory for artists and press names, is a proto-curator, and a critical and emotional reader. Better still, she knows well the world of her fellow Wellesley students, who grew up reading and interacting with a screen. We put our heads together and came up with an approach that would ask students to analyze how they read differently with the books in front of them and how they would absorb the content if delivered digitally instead of physically. Yes, to the initiated, the answer is obvious, but to first-year students who have never seen artists’ books, it is an entry point and a hook for critical thinking. My Mini-Me curator was great. She stood in front of the class after I gave my lofty academic introduction to artists’ books, and summed it up with a two word exhortation: “ASK WHY!”

They did, and it worked beautifully. The comments I heard were insightful and original. It worked so well in fact, that they will be coming back for a second class with artists’ books in the spring semester. Nothing like real hard copy books to give meaning to a course on the virtual.

Following are the thematic groupings of books we selected and the study questions for each. For a complete list of artists and titles, please contact me at rrogers@wellesley.edu.

Random Access Reading

Does it need to be linear to be understood? How does the book mimic digital access? Does the physical form aid your interpretation of the content?

Linear Reading

Could any of these be read as digital texts? What elements would or would not transfer well?

Haptic Reading

What is obvious to you about these? How do you read them? Could they be mimicked on a screen?

Reading without Reading

How are these books? Could these have the same effect digitally?

Data Made Physical

The data presented in these books is available online. How does the artist change the reading experience?

Artists Comment on the Virtual World

What point is the artist/author making? Do you relate?

HOW ABOUT SOME ADVENTUROUS READING? // Kathleen Walkup

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 04:00:00 GMT

Ulises Carrión wrote, “Among languages, literary language . . . is not the best fitted to the nature of books,” in the late 70s. He was manifesting about ‘old books’ (books that didn’t consider their own materiality) and ‘new books’ (an early iteration of what Jerome McGann among others would call the page as a spatial field). Around the same time, the critic Lucy Lippard wrote that one of her favorite aspects of artists’ books was that she could skim them; she didn’t differentiate between various iterations of artists’ books such as photobooks and the self-inflicted wounds of one-off journals. All of them, evidently, could be treated as flip books.

Lippard’s quantitative methodology seems to have struck a chord with curators of book art exhibitions; since the 1980s many curators have tended to stuff their exhibitions with examples, as if to convince viewers that we should love artists’ books simply because there are so darn many of them. Given that, for many of us, our first encounter with artists’ books and book art is in these exhibitions, the packed cases, often filled with one-of-each book structures which of course defy reading in that setting, leave an implicit suggestion that the textual content of these books is not the point. That in turn seems to promote a form of bookmaking that treats text as afterthought, or something to pour into a structure.

Why, then, given the challenges, bother to read—really read—artists’ books at all? We read because, when text is woven into the conceptual fabric of the book, the whole can become far greater than the sum of its parts. Isn’t that the idea of artists’ books? Books that understand their own operation, their iconicity, their materials and their content as an interwoven whole will bring on an experience for the reader that quick perusal and even appreciation of an interesting structure will not do. But we need to practice what Betsy Davids calls adventurous reading; I often borrow the analogy of close reading from literary studies to suggest an approach to artists’ books that will yield their complexity with time, study and curiosity.

Can this all go wrong? Of course. Take the recent phenomenon, Jonathan Safron Foer’s, Tree of Codes, an adaptation of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles. Foer excised major amounts of text from a translation of Schulz’s work; laser cutter technology allowed New Directions to publish the results in a relatively inexpensive trade edition. While the resultant text that Foer created considers Schulz’s words in a sympathetic way, the book can’t really be read without a paper intervention underneath each page, which defeats the original intention of the book. I’m guessing that Foer never actually tried making this book; he marked off the text he wanted to save and sent it off to be dealt with by the publisher. Artists engaged with the materiality of their books would not have made this mistake.

T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, that most traditional of makers, demanded no less of his books than we should demand of artists’ books, and lamented what happened when his Books Beautiful did not stand up to scrutiny: “. . .each contributory craft may usurp the functions of the rest and of the whole and growing beautiful beyond all bounds ruin for its own the common cause.” The best artists’ books reveal their contents in the whole. It is our job to take the time to see what they are offering.

DOES TEXT-TO-BE-READ BELONG IN THE ARTIST'S BOOK? // Susan Viguers

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 04:00:00 GMT

Much of the critical literature on artists’ books focuses on the materiality of the text and frequently, at least by implication, on there being little necessity to absorb the text fully. In discussing Johanna Drucker’s From A to Z in “Embodying Bookness: Reading as a Material Act,” Manuel Portela asserts that “the reader” never “entirely leave[s] the surface of the page.” This is an important potential of artists’ books and characterizes many of the most prominent in the past few decades. Over and over again, I have heard it said about various artists’ books, sometimes by the artist him or herself, that one doesn’t need to read all the text—which leads to my query: is there a problematic relation of text “packaged for its semantic content” (to use a phrase from Thomas Vogler’s “When a Book is Not a Book”) and the book as art?

William Blake, the patron saint of the artist’s book—master of poetry, artmaking, design, and printing—offers a complex example of the possible problem of text in an artist’s book. I first encountered Blake’s poetry many years ago as text printed readably in the old kind of book, as container. In No Longer Innocent, Betty Bright speaks of “the wall of words that don’t invite reading” as characterizing at least some of his works. Have or do people ever access his poetry in his artist’s books? At present his books are readily available in facsimile form. Blake was not generally appreciated as a poet for at least several decades after his death and until after the 1862 publication of Alexander Gilchrist’s two-volume Life of William Blake, in which many of his poems were typeset. Was his reputation as a poet dependent on taking his poetry out of his books? For me the role of the text in his books is visual only and as such evokes a context for the book’s images and design. It is to be looked at rather than looked through.

There are, of course, artists’ books that meld image and text in ways that keep text as semantic experience in the forefront and many remarkable fine press books in which the text as semantic meaning and visual form coexist in a way that intrinsically informs the other. But at least for those books for which tactility and handcraft are important for content (and hence are expensive), the audience is miniscule in number. And books with considerable text to be read are generally even less accessible — harder to display — in a gallery than the primarily visual artist’s book. That may or may not have anything to do with the frequent reluctance on the part of viewers to actually read an artist’s book, indeed the disbelief that one needs to, and the frequent overlooking, even acceptance of, the weak writing in many artists’ books. “I generally don’t like artists’ books,” an unusual visitor at a book fair said to me recently, “because I don’t like the writing.”