ARE WE GETTING OLD?

Probably not. But perhaps just enough. A New Year beckons. Year 10 is drawing to a close, and it has been much, much different than I expected at the outset. One year ago, I was not where I am now, spatially, temporally, creatively. This is the 300th post on this blog. I guess it's existed for more than two years now. It's 5 degrees outside. It's gorgeous outside. There is a great, thoughtful interview with NewLights author and the proprietor of Cuneiform Press, Kyle Schlesinger, at Rob McLennan's Blog. Excellent reading to take us into another fantastic year.

GOIN' TO ACAPULCO

Or perhaps just the Pennsylvania, which is close, which is just as good. But I will be away from the Internet, so there will be no posts next week. We will resume our discussion(s) in the New Year. Here's to another one, another try, an even better one. See you on the other side.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (14): (DE)COLLAGE (2)

All of the new text for (De)Collage is being drawn in with stencils, along the bottom edge of each page. The drawings will be the guide lines for the delamination. As I am writing the text, the use of the stencils and the particular way that I am applying them (no margins, with the text passing right through the gutter and wrapping around the fore-edge) makes the extent (the spatial length of the text) hard to predict with any degree of accuracy. So, as I go, I am putting all of the text into a newsprint mock-up first, so that I can see exactly how long it is.





This is what I have been doing on the Tuesday & Thursday & weekend mornings when I’m not writing posts for this blog.

Lately I have been thinking about the altered books in relation to scribal activity. They are, more or less, illuminated manuscripts. Monkish business.

SOMETIMES I’M A LITTLE SLOW

Open publication - Free publishing - More poetry

I just recently found out about the above exciting thing. What I want to draw your attention to is not the text (Flight Test by Lewis Warsh), or even the book (published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2006), represented above, but the device of representation itself. It’s a little program that comes through this site:

http://issuu.com

This could actually be extremely useful for publishers and book artists. Small edition books that have gone out-of-print could have a second (if somewhat weird and ghostly) life on the web. Or maybe not out-of-print, but brand new, and readers can actually get a sense of the interior, of the “total object, complete with missing parts” before they buy the thing. Obviously not as good as the actual book (because you lose the materiality, the wonderful physical-ness that determines a reader’s relationship to the object through its functionality) but I think more representative than a flat PDF. Of course you can print a PDF, which has its own advantages. (But you need a real website to post PDFs. I can’t seem to do it from this silly little blog.)

What I’m wondering about particularly is the capacity of Issuu to handle the altered books. Could it do a 200+ page book, of which every page is an image? The specs on the site (of the “professional” version) make me think it could. You could finally read those damn things.

There’s also something significant in the fact that I just reposted someone’s complete book. It adds new possibilities for sharing and distributing texts/books. It will help us get the words out, which is, of course, what we do.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (13): DECOLLAGE (1)

I've been writing the text for a new(ish) altered book. The book itself is subtractively constructed by a systematic removal of all the text and images through delamination. So the new text (laid in with stencils and also delaminated) is also written subtractively, by crossing out words from the text of the source book (Collage: The Making of Modern Art, by Brandon Taylor). What follows is the first draft, which may or may not be quite enough text. I can't be sure until I finish stenciling the mock-up. But here it is:


The method of constructing from parts. It is the synthesis of colourless, white or grey-black areas of colour, or the arrangement of unexpected proportions. Written in the graphics of a powerful weapon aware of the very different demands of concluding that the system of montage is dialectic. It is a statement, after all, that neither Klutsis or Lissitzky could have made; nor Heartfield or Hoch, “Lyricism is the crown of life: Constructivism is its already existing soft-porn surfaces, even, on occasion, a castrating machine. Yet the most persistent motif is one that only collage as a device could generate: the softness of parts not only indexically presented but eroticized as a purely photographic contrast of textures: grass, gravel or wood, inside barbed-wire, in the midst of dry leaves, or, in one case, inverted on the body and placed against the austere brick superstructure.

Such works not attempted hitherto: the minutest visible variations in photographic color and tone, magnified by the tell-tale curves of the paper’s scissored edges. By systematically excising one and placing it against a subtly contrastive one, an interval, a gap, which is in itself stimulating. ‘It is sight’, he had suggested, proposing desublimation of the senses: ‘The optical environment in which ‘the development of a bland, large, balanced, Apollonian art…in which an intense detachment this detachment that enabled him to see a Cubist collage by Picasso or Braque in a radically anti-illusionistic way: ‘the Cubists always emphasized the identity of the picture as a flat and more or less abstract pattern rather than a representation’. To choose between them is preferable to ambiguity: collage had now attained to the full and declared three-dimensionality we automatically attribute to the notion “object”, and was being transformed, in the course of a strictly coherent process with a logic all its own, into a new kind of houses we live in and furniture we use’. rectangles littered with small pictures rectangles are references to technology, the industrial process, heavy machinery. Thirdly, as a physical object it occupies a kind of middle ground between the single, exhibitable object and the flickering succession of a moving film. Turning its pages is a one-person affair, addressed to relatively private experience as opposed to the collectivity of a show. Yet politics was never far away. To that extent it may be mourning the flowering of quiet defiance: she knew such works could not be exhibited. But she was increasingly vulnerable. She was being watched and possibly denounced, she managed to escape attention.

text written in opposition to works of ‘degenerate’ modernism is positioned close by. The art historian T. J. Clark has studied the problem: the work to annihilate the negation of the negation’. she boldly mangled several works to produce collage of her own. The background to this benevolent act of ‘completion’ is inevitably complicated by Krasner’s relationship to Pollock. ‘”Waste not, want not”, open it out and let space back in, it turns out that Krasner had her own adventure tumbling, thinking that Krasner soon became disenchanted with the work.

My studio was hung with a series of black and white drawings I had done. I hated them and started to pull them off the wall and tear them and throw them on the floor…. Then another morning began picking up torn pieces of my drawings and re-glueing them. Then I started. I got something going I started

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (8a)

A Quick Study: Order, Number, Repetition, Standardization, Variation (in the malleability of the computer)

QQQQQQQQQQQQQ
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ
WWWWWWWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWWWWWWW
EEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEE
RRRRRRRRRRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRRR
TTTTTTTTTTTTT
TTTTTTTTTTTTT
YYYYYYYYYYYYY
YYYYYYYYYYYYY
UUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUU
IIIIIIIIIIIII
IIIIIIIIIIIII
OOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOO
PPPPPPPPPPPPP
PPPPPPPPPPPPP
AAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAA
SSSSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSSSS
DDDDDDDDDDDDD
DDDDDDDDDDDDD
FFFFFFFFFFFFF
FFFFFFFFFFFFF
GGGGGGGGGGGGG
GGGGGGGGGGGGG
HHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHH
JJJJJJJJJJJJJ
JJJJJJJJJJJJJ
KKKKKKKKKKKKK
KKKKKKKKKKKKK
LLLLLLLLLLLLL
LLLLLLLLLLLLL
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
XXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXX
CCCCCCCCCCCCC
CCCCCCCCCCCCC
VVVVVVVVVVVVV
VVVVVVVVVVVVV
BBBBBBBBBBBBB
BBBBBBBBBBBBB
NNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNN
MMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMM

[or maybe]

1111111111
2222222222
2222222222
3333333333
3333333333
3333333333
4444444444
4444444444
4444444444
4444444444
5555555555
5555555555
5555555555
5555555555
5555555555
6666666666
6666666666
6666666666
6666666666
6666666666
6666666666
7777777777
7777777777
7777777777
7777777777
7777777777
7777777777
7777777777
8888888888
8888888888
8888888888
8888888888
8888888888
8888888888
8888888888
8888888888
9999999999
9999999999
9999999999
9999999999
9999999999
9999999999
9999999999
9999999999
9999999999

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (12): WHAT YOU WILL (11)

A nice weekend with some long hours in the studio. Below are some shots of the first stages of printing the black plates on What You Will. It's satisfying, after all this time, to see that pages start taking shape (and this book is all about its pages taking, having, shape).






And a Cautionary Tale
I've discovered one minor drawback to the plastic-backed photopolymer plates: they warp like crazy, if you don't store them properly. If you do store them properly (in a sealed plastic bag, flat, and in the dark) then they will be fine.


These plates were so warped and hardened from gradual light exposure that they wouldn't stick flat to the base, even under pressure from the press. That's a lot of wasted time & money, unnecessary delays, etc., so let this be a lesson. Store your plates properly!

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (7b)

When I first read the passage transcribed in the last post, from Darren Wershler’s The Iron Whim, I was, I admit, a bit confused. The idea that “no one is ever alone at a typewriter” didn’t quite make sense to me. Here I am typing, in the dark of the morning, and I feel pretty alone (even though these words address you, Reader, but you are just a piece of my imagination, or a memory, & that is another story). Obviously, when transcribing a passage from a book, one is taking a sort of dictation. But when one is writing, “generative typing” as it’s called in the book, where is the dictator? Am I not writing this?

And then I saw it. My body is not doing what my mind is doing. My mind is making up words. My body is transcribing them into/onto this electronic surface. This is not my inner voice, projected pure and clean and forcefully through the electronic channels. This is a transcription, an abstracted representation, of that voice. The technology of writing (of the written alphabet itself) and the technology of the computer force a separation between myself and “my” words. The alien, borrowed, learned, cultural nature of language (all that Other stuff, that comes from you, Readers) becomes apparent. Aaron Cohick wrote, or typed, this, but I did not say it.

So the writer, sitting at his/her computer/typewriter/notebook, is a part of a larger machine. So the artist, sitting/standing in his/her studio in front of whatever it is that he/she does or makes, is part of a larger machine. So the act of construction is always dictator + “writing machine” + amanuensis. Or matrix + printing machine + printer. Or supervisor + office/factory machine + worker. We are always a terrifying mirror of our own inventions.

I’ll be your mirror.

I want to be a machine.

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Where are we?

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (7)

In which we discreetly make it happen

[…]

Typewriting always begins with something telling someone what to write.

“Follow these instructions as though they were being dictated,” commands the first sentence on Ruth Ben’Ary’s famous textbook Touch Typing in Ten Lessons, written in 1945 but still in common use today. Ben’Ary’s command spells out one of the secret rules of typewriting: at some point, even a lone “generative” typist has to learn to type by following someone else’s dictation, without question. Sometimes a book or an instructional audiotape or a piece of software or even a half-assed personal notion of how to hunt-and-peck one’s way across a keyboard substitute for the stern voice of the high-school typing teacher. All of these possibilities amount to the same thing: someone or something, even if it’s just another part of ourselves, dictates to us, tells us what to write until we internalize and forget about it. Even then, the dictatorial voice that makes typewriting possible very often comes back to haunt the typist, after being split, stretched, twisted, and transmogrified into something uncanny and alien by the typist’s imagination. In other words, no one is ever alone at a typewriter.

What actually produces typewriting turns out to be a surprisingly variable assemblage of people and machines. From the relative beginnings of typewriting, this assemblage has consisted of three positions. There is a space for a dictator—the source of the words that are being typed. There is a space for a typewriter—that is, an actual writing machine. And there is a space for the person who is actually operating the machine—an amanuensis (“One who copies or writes from the dictation of another,” from the Latin for “hand servant” + “belonging to”). The problem is, it can be very difficult to determine who—or what—is occupying any of those positions at any given time.

[…]

In some cases, dictator and amanuensis can and do change positions, or a new dictator or amanuensis can take up where the previous one has left off, all without leaving any clues as to this occurrence in the typescript. The amanuensis can also change the dictator’s words, deliberately or accidentally. In any event, “I” and “you” create a typewritten document together, and from reading that document, it’s usually impossible to tell whose words ended up on the paper. Typewriting confuses you and I. In his analysis of Franz Kafka’s first typewritten letter, Friedrich Kittler spots twelve typos, over a third of which involved the German equivalents of “I” or “you,” leading Kittler to observe that it’s “as if the typing hand could inscribe everything except the two bodies on either end of the…channel.”

[…]

The above passages are from:

Darren Wershler [-Henry], The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 74-75.

IT IS 6:14 AM ON DECEMBER 6, 2010. I AM SITTING AT MY COMPUTER. I CAN TELL ALREADY, BLINKING SLOWLY, THAT I WILL WEAR MY HEAVY JACKET TODAY

Going to take a break from the hand-mechanical, at least writing about it, at least for a day, and try to put something up here that’s a little more human(e) perhaps. But what’s more human than being connected to a machine? What’s more humane than a simple, quiet task to accomplish? But no, not today, and at any rate, there are books, always & infinitely.

I have been reading Alan Loney’s The books to come, hot off the Cuneiform Press. Alan Loney is a writer-printer-bookmaker from New Zealand, who now lives in Australia. His new book is a collection of essays on the Book, the book, books. Right now all I will say about it as a whole is that it is an interesting read (I am preparing to write an actual review of it, hence this post, this blog acting as a thinking and reading space). It is not a hard, linear, straight-through kind of a book, but is divided into small sections, and the pace wavers, doubles back, accumulates slowly (festina lente) and deeply, somewhere out there, somewhere in here, in a quiet domestic space, in an infinite literary space. What shabby portals we are. From the book, the Book, the books to come:

[…]

my library does not belong to me, or, I can own a volume but not a composition, own a book, but not a text, not even a text of my own composing. Could we say: no border crossing between books and texts is possible, for if this were not so, one would have to deny that the principle of indeterminacy operates here. And yet there is a plethora of claims thruout the world of the book about blurring boundaries, extending borders, hybridization, category transgressions and so on every day. Do not these claims rely upon a fixity of category formation that was actually never true. The supposed edges of the categories always were straw edges, and the language of their apparent violent demolition was always a straw victory

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 (loom-shuttle, weaving, textura) however rapid, between the two. Even in the case of the books of William Blake. It is simply that human attention is monocular, and our stereoscopic vision merely gives us a depth of field. And wouldn’t being able to see both sides at once imply that our experience is atemporal, permitting us to transcend the detail, the particular, the contingent that would pin us down. But in any articulation of any experience we speak or write as anyone does, one word after the other, one word or element or object at a time. Unless one’s understanding of time & succession is all wrong, and that ‘one word at a time’ is an inaccurate way of talking about how we talk and how we write. For at this point I remember that the writing of the ancient Greeks prior to the 5th century BC knew no word spaces. But looking at one word renders all other words in its vicinity almost invisible. Looking at an image renders the environmental context of that image invisible. Foreground/background, reading/viewing, focus/panorama, detail/overall impression, indeterminacy everywhere

what single written composition does one’s own library, one’s own collection of volumes, make. What sort of a book is one’s library. What book does the accumulated libraries of all of us amount to. Louis Zukofsky famously avowed that all one’s life one only wrote one poem. It allows the nice possibility that all poems from a certain context, all L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems for example (let’s allow for the moment that such things do exist), are a single poem, parts of which are distributed about various, diverse, even conflictual writers. It reminds me of a Terry Riley composition in “Cadenza on the Night Plain” where a Dream Collector has a specific and finite number of dreams to distribute and redistribute thruout the populace after collecting them from the dreamers in the morning. So the library at large, that collection of books scattered yet gathered over the planet, is itself a single book, containing a unitary text, the variety and complexity of which is unencompassable by any individual, any tribe, any nation, any book, even the entire populace, those millions who every day die and are born, dropping as a species, as it were, into & out of the text

[…]

Those three passages actually do fall in that order, in tandem, in the fourth chapter of the book, “What book does my library make.” Full Citation! Alan Loney, The books to come (Victoria: Cuneiform Press, 2010), 88 – 90!

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (6c)

From 6a
[…] Every piece in the edition is supposed to look exactly the same. Any copies that are noticeably different from the others are excluded. The amount of variation tolerated in an edition varies from artist to artist, from piece to piece, from context to context. There is no “perfect” edition—every edition contains the very thing (variation, difference) that cancels its mode of being, that activates its mode of becoming. […]


Where does the value of a hand printed object come from? Does that value result from the scarcity of the handmade object? Or does it come from the amount of labor and the quality of the raw materials invested in the object? Almost certainly some combination of all these things, with, perhaps, the desire of “the market” always reigning supreme. But let’s take a look at this labor, this work, that supposedly inheres in the hand-printed object.

The labor of the artist/printer is valued, and so it seems safe to say that the presence of the artist/printer in the process of making is valued. But if every copy in an edition is supposed to look exactly the same, how is that labor-presence being real-ized? Generally speaking, we do not want to see our printers in our printed objects. The printer must become a machine, or a part of the machine, or a machine-like absence. The self dissolves, becoming a dispersed, motivating energy for the process. The printer is not there. Any sign of the printer, of the made-ness of the thing, is considered a flaw.

From 6b
[…] It can be said that the matrix is actually these two things: the object containing the information that re-produces the object-in-multiple, and the manner in which that information is actually used to carry out the production. Every matrix is information plus action. […]

But we are supposed to see the artist, through their “style,” in the image. The artist’s presence is allowed in the construction of the information-matrix. The artist’s presence, and that guaranteeing authority, is necessary for the object to exist in an art context. The gathering and construction of the information-matrix requires an artist. The use of the action-matrix requires a printer. There is a separation of labor (and power) here, and that separation allows a physical separation of artist and printer—the artist does not have to be the one printing her own art. (This is one of the oldest outsourcing arrangements in the art world. Actually, workshop-oriented, dispersed production was the norm before the advent of “modern” art.) But the printmaker (the artist/printer) is split in her own process, always there, but there and not there, flickering between a human presence and a machine absence.

Is the printer, essentially, just another part of the assemblage of the matrix? What kinds of meanings can the manipulation of that assemblage produce?

[The] process of [the stripe paintings was] simple-minded…. But it was a lot more intense; just doing those things, painting those stripes one after another is quite enervating and numbing. It’s physically fairly exacting…I couldn’t keep it up. The physical concentration…it was just a different kind of way of being a different kind of process. But the process was everything then, as it is now.

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (6b)

From 6a
[…] Every piece in the edition is supposed to look exactly the same. Any copies that are noticeably different from the others are excluded. The amount of variation tolerated in an edition varies from artist to artist, from piece to piece, from context to context. There is no “perfect” edition—every edition contains the very thing (variation, difference) that cancels its mode of being, that activates its mode of becoming. […]

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\


I have, for some time now, been exploring the concept of the “variable” or “variant” edition. This is another one of those paradoxical ideas—an edition that foregrounds difference. I’m not sure where the idea of the variable edition comes from originally—I learned about it in one of my first printmaking classes, so it’s a thing that’s been “out there” for awhile. It’s not a new idea, but it is a powerful one, because it is an idea that by its very nature questions its own core concepts (the edition, repeatability, the multiple) and the discourse in which it exists (the limited edition, the restricted economy). The variable edition is the edition “under erasure.”

[Brief aside: Does the variable edition produce an object-in-multiple that questions the limited edition/restricted economy? Or does it produce an object-in-multiple that is perfect for the restricted economy because every copy is unique? Is the variable edition the ultimate limited edition? Is context/distribution relevant here?]

There are many different ways to physically produce a variable edition, but we can identify two main approaches, and those approaches are determined by the construction and use of the matrix or matrices that produce the edition. It can be said that the matrix is actually these two things: the object containing the information that re-produces the object-in-multiple, and the manner in which that information is actually used to carry out the production. Every matrix is information plus action.

[“Re-produces?” I love how slippery, muddy, and opaque the language gets out here. Like the grease and dirt caught under your fingernails after you’ve been working on a machine.]

The closed matrix: The closed matrix is a matrix that contains information corresponding to every single mark or feature that will appear on/in the finished object. Everything is there already. And, importantly, the matrix is used in such a way that all of that information is automatically present in the finished object. The etched copper plate, the litho stone, the polymer plate, lead type, the photographic negative, the mold—all of these “normal” matrices are closed matrices, when used in their “normal” way—to physically and directly make an object. But it is also important to note that a digital file, interpreted through “normal” reproductive software, is also a closed matrix, because it will produce (barring the unavoidable physical peculiarities of the “interpreting” interface, generally, the screen and/or printer) almost exactly the same object over and over again. All of the information is embedded in that file. Digital printmaking, technically speaking, is no more or less radical than “traditional” printmaking.

The open matrix: The open matrix is a matrix that contains just enough information to begin the action of making, and the relationship between the matrix and what is produced is often abstracted or removed. (A line on an etched copper plate physically and directly produces a line in that same shape. Instructions on how to draw a line will still produce a line, but the information is abstracted and only represents or describes the mode of production.) The action component of the matrix has chaotic or variant elements built right in. For example, an open matrix could be a set of instructions (the abstracted information), and those instructions could guide the re-production of a drawing (variation built in to the process). Or the information part of the matrix itself could be literal and closed (like a linoleum block) and the action component of the matrix could be open and chaotic (pouring or spraying solvent on the linoleum block after it has been inked).

Both kinds of matrices, open and closed, can be used to produce a variable edition, and the “two main approaches” to making a variable edition mentioned above stem from these types of matrices.

The first approach is the use of a closed matrix in a variety of ways within a single edition; for example, the same copper plate can be used to print a single edition in several different colors. This approach is, more or less, grouping different prints into the same edition because of the use of a common matrix.

The second approach is, simply, to utilize an open matrix, which, because of its active, chaotic elements, always produces a variable edition.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Every edition ever is variable to a certain degree. Any set of information translated or transposed to a new physical form inevitably incorporates a certain amount of variation. Such is the nature, the chaos, of the world. What matters though, is the threshold of perceptibility of that variation. If there are two prints on the table, and no one can see the differences between them, are they different at all?



These images are from the Wikipedia article on the Difference Engine, an early mechanical computer.