MORE DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLES

On this mind-blowing tumblr.

THE eBOOK USER'S BILL OF RIGHTS

The following was brought to my attention via See Also, a library blog authored by my colleague Steve Lawson, as part of a response to Harper Collins placing a limit of 26 library checkouts on its ebooks. "The eBook User's Bill of Rights" comes from a blog called Librarian in Black. This is a big issue, and I hope that I will be able to post more about it soon. Anyways. here's the Bill:

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights is a statement of the basic freedoms that should be granted to all eBook users.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

• the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
• the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
• the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
• the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work

THE RETURN OF THE “DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLE?” (8)

There is a good post on Printeresting about the use of screenprinted signs, made by Nicolas Lampert and Colin Matthes of Justseeds, during the recent protests in Wisconsin. The signs are great—graphically and textually effective. The post provides some links, some background info, and it specifically mentions that in this case we really see the “democratic multiple” in action, helping to make democracy happen. The “democratic” may not be just about accessibility (Is it cheap? Is it multiple? Is it easily understood?) but may also be about functionality (Can I use it and how and why?)

THE RETURN OF THE “DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLE?” (7)

Let’s try to leave the sources to the side for a bit, outline some questions, see if we can open up something new. One question/problem that comes up when thinking about and working with the “democratic” multiple is the idea, accepted as common truth, that the “general public” is not interested in, or not capable of understanding, art that is “intelligent” or “sophisticated.” I really struggle with that idea, and I’m not sure it should be accepted as always 100% true—large generalizations about large groups of people often aren’t. Reality will always be more complicated than our methods of understanding it.

And that idea, that art for the public can’t be smart, is implicit in the discussions of the artists’ book as democratic multiple outlined earlier—the artists’ book fails as a democratic form not because of its affordability, but because the content is not geared towards a general audience.

[This is a difficult problem, one that runs through and influences our culture everyday. There is probably no solution, and I have no idea if we’ll even be able to get close to one in these posts. But maybe we can open some windows.]

In the last post we looked at the idea of “the failure” of the artists’ book as a democratic multiple. The question of failure remains an important one: what defines the “failure?” Are we equating the success of an art form with its success in the marketplace? Are there other ways to measure success? Who or what set the deadline that this “failure” is judged against? Can there ever be a complete “failure” in the world of discourse?

Does it make sense to separate artists’ books out from longer histories of independent publishing? From art and literature in general?

What demographics make up this “general audience?” How do we define this audience? People who are not book artists? People who are not artists? People who ordinarily aren’t a part of the art world at all? [What makes one part of the art world? How does one get in?] Is this general audience diverse, or are they implicitly homogenous, defined in terms of the dominant class/race?

What kinds of content are normally considered “appropriate” for a general audience? What kinds of formal structure are normally considered “appropriate” for a general audience? [What’s with the word “appropriate” here? It makes it sound like the general audience needs to be treated like a child.]

Who is responsible for the quality of cultural production—the culture industry or the culture market?

One thing we can agree on: the amount of people buying experimental literature/artists’ books is small, when compared to the amount of people buying movie tickets, watching certain television shows, or buying and reading copies of genre fiction. The actual audience is actually small. Is that bad? How big is the potential audience, and does that matter?

THE RETURN OF THE “DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLE?” (6)

Thinking about the title of this series of posts: what, exactly, does the word “return” mean here? If the “democratic multiple” is back, where did it go? Or was it never really gone at all? Somewhere implicit in this discussion, at least the one-sided one that I am enacting, there is the implicit idea of a “failure” of the democratic multiple—that at some point the idea was officially declared dead and the concept was abandoned, both in theory and practice. That at that point the idea became a historical curiosity, a “theme” to be discussed in art schools, but never practiced anymore by “serious” artists.

What is/was this “failure, and where did it come from?

Looking into my sources (Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, and The Century of Artists’ Books) I wonder if the failure is there, implicit in those discussions, or if I injected it in. Here is the slightly elegaic, slightly hopeful, author’s note preceding Lucy Lippard’s two essays in Artists’ Books:

The following two articles were written in late 1976 and in summer, 1983. The first is drenched in the enthusiasm that engendered Printed Matter that same year. The second reflects a certain disillusionment with the direction artists’ books took in the interim. The process continues, and were I writing yet another piece today (the end of 1984), I might produce yet another view, affected by the fact that I’m now making collaborative artists’ books myself.
The production of and market for artists’ books continue to grow and this is a good indication of the form’s ongoing vitality. As the second article suggests. I am still more interested in those books that sidestep internal vicissitudes in favor of fantasies and realities that reach further out. These are still plentiful and some of my favorites have emerged since both these articles were written. I could add an equally impressive new list of works with social and/or political content. Printed Matter and its colleagues struggle on against economic adversity and artworld trends. The audience grows as libraries become more receptive. We await some distribution genius, or godmother, to inflame the hearts of a broader public with the burning desire to own artists’ books. Until then, harsher criticism and deeper knowledge of the genre will have to suffice. [1]

All in all that note is pretty hopeful. Looking into her second essay, the “disillusioned” one, we see the first paragraph:

The artists’ book is/was a great idea whose time has either not come, or come and gone. As a longtime supporter of and proselytizer for the genre (and co-founder of Printed Matter, the major nonprofit distributor), it pains me to say this. But all is not lost, just misplaced. [2]

Critical, but still hopeful. On the next page though, there are two quotes from “practitioner” Mike Glier:

the next step for artists’ book was “to become politically effective and to communicate to a diverse audience.” A few years and no giant step later, Glier is saying, “We’re past the careful nurturing stage and into do or die competition with mass culture. If artists’ books remain a novelty in the art world, they are a failure.” [3]

Obviously, in those terms, the artists’ book (and I assume he’s talking about the democratic (mass-produced, affordable) artists’ book as the entire genre) did fail. But things like art (not democracy) are never “do or die.” There can always be a “return.” In fact, one might say that these “returns” continuously fuel the discourse/practice. The failure doesn’t really exist—not in actual events, not explicitly or implicitly within the main thrust of the discourse—and we can see that the “return” here is a re-examination of an idea that has never gone away:

Despite their general lack of visible effectiveness, [artists’ books] are part of a significant subcurrent beneath the artworld mainstream that threatens to introduce blood, sweat, and tears to the flow of liquitex, bronze, and bubbly. [4]

1. Lucy Lippard, “Author’s Note,” Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Joan Lyons (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985), 44.

2. Lucy Lippard, “Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books,” Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Joan Lyons (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985), 49.

3. Ibid., 50.

4. Ibid., 56.

THE RETURN OF THE “DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLE?” (5)

But what about the accessibility of content? Is affordability enough to make an artwork “democratic?” Or does it need to be, as both Lippard and Drucker imply, also “accessible” in the sense of “easily understood or appreciated?” This is a difficult question—political, aesthetic, social, economic. But it is a question worth asking, and, of course, at least trying to answer. The following is from Craig Dworkin’s Reading the Illegible:

[…] The politics of literature, accordingly, is no less fraught. In the narrow sense of “politics,” poems are quite simply not efficacious. At best, they may present models from which readers can extrapolate modes of thought or behavior which can be translated into other contexts and systems. To the degree that poems affect a reader’s understanding of language, they have the potential to alter all of those extraliterary relationships that also involve language; but they do not directly influence electoral politics, or feed the hungry, or soften blows. […]
The very importance of political issues, in fact, demands a more sophisticated reading practice. Both Jed Rasula and Bruce Andrews have suggested the requirements for such readings […]. Following Rasula’s terminology […] one might differentiate between the politics through, the politics in, and the politics of the poem. The politics through the poem would, accordingly, be politics in the narrow sense [described above]: essentially false leads, though perhaps occasionally and collaterally achieved by certain rallying songs or the poetic ornaments accompanying speeches. The politics in the poem would indicate Pound’s discussion of Mussolini, say, or Adrienne Rich’s feminist thematics. […] the politics of the poem: what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, implicit in its philosophy of language, how it positions its reader, and a range of questions relating to the poem as a material object—how it was produced, distributed, exchanged. Or in Bruce Andrews’s terms: “writing as politics, not writing about politics.” […] To extend one’s reading to the politics of the poem is a prerequisite for a more significantly and fully political or ethical reading, and to that end I want to insist throughout this book on a radical formalism. I adapt the term from Andrews’s definition of a “radical praxis,” which “involves the rigors of formal celebration, a playful infidelity, a certain illegibility within the legible: an infinitizing, a wide-open exuberance, a perpetual motion machine, a transgression.” A sufficiently radical formalism pursues the closest of close readings in the service of political questions, rather than to their exclusion. At the same time, it refuses to consider the poem as a realm separate from politics, even as it focuses on “the poem itself.” It is a matter, quite simply, of being true to form. As a ‘pataphysical investigation of minute particulars, radical formalisms hew to the concrete. Where “concrete” is what the street is made of. […] [1]

That idea, of a “radical formalism” frames where I want to begin with this question of content and accessibility, or of form and accessibility, as the case may be. I feel like this can be a productive discussion—more soon.


1. Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 4-5.

THE RETURN OF THE “DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLE?” (4)

In the quotes used in the post below, both Johanna Drucker and Lucy Lippard point out that artists’ books “failed” as a democratic multiple not because they weren’t affordable, but because they weren’t accessible in terms of content. The “general public” could not understand the books. So then there are two kinds of accessibility we’re talking about here, and we need to be clear. We will call economic accessibility “affordability,” and we will call content accessibility just “accessibility.”

Affordability is definitely an issue, and though it can often be dealt with in concrete economic terms (this book cost this much money to make, so therefore the price is this much) those terms, strict as they are, don’t always give a result acceptable to the artist and/or the market. The books might end up costing more to make than people will pay for them, so the price has to be dropped in order to sell them. Or they might cost more to make than the artist/publisher wants to sell them for, and so the prices get lowered, oftentimes resulting in a non-existent or very low compensation for the time involved in making the book.

The NewLights low prices are a result of both those things. The books often circulate within a “literary” market, where small, handmade books are generally cheaper than trade books. Most people won’t buy them if they’re too expensive. So in order to get them to be bought by people (not just by collecting institutions) the price needs to be at a place that is easy to accept, that matches up with the audience’s idea of how much the books should cost. This is why I maintain a commitment to making books that will sell for $20 or less (not all the NewLights books, but most).

So if the artist/publisher wants to keep their work affordable they have two basic options: 1) figure out how to make making the work cheaper and less time-consuming. Depending on the kind of work this could compromise it considerably. 2) Subsidize production by having another job. This can compromise the work by placing serious drains on the artist’s time & energy. Having a second job (which one is the “real” job?) is probably the most common solution, the one that I have used since I finished my BFA. It is fairly effective—as long as one has lots of energy, determination, and focus. Most working artists do, because if they did not, the work just wouldn’t get made, whether they can afford it or not.

The trick is, I think, to make sure that the production-pricing-selling process doesn’t lock the artist into a cycle of diminishing returns, where each piece becomes more difficult to make than the last. Not only will that slowly bankrupt the artist, but it will also eat away at their spirit, causing them to burn out, pack it in, and sometimes stop making work period. That needs to be avoided, at all costs.

THE RETURN OF THE “DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLE?” (3)

Success in art usually comes through tenacity. I will try not to flinch.

From the post 2 days ago:

[…] I wonder about the idea of “reception,” about democratic multiples, un-democratic multiples, and un-multiplied multiples. I wonder about accessibility, both economic and aesthetic/conceptual. What kind of accessibility, economic or aesthetic/conceptual, or both, qualifies a piece as “democratic?” I wonder about legibility, and if that is different from accessibility. […]

Of course everything is related, and the current re-evaluation of the NewLights Press is meshed with larger theoretical-aesthetic-social concerns about books and bookmaking in general. So we are back to the “democratic multiple,” we are back to the form-content-production-reception model. The articulation of “reception,” and how it is addressed, embodied, and activated through the work remains one of the most difficult (productive) problems. We will start by pulling at this term “democratic,” the words pulled along in its wake (“accessible” and “legible”) and some discussion from some of the canonical literature.

democracy n. a form of government in which the people have a voice in the exercise of power, typically through elected representatives. A state governed in such a way. Control of a group by the majority of its members.
ORIGIN C16: from Fr. democratie, via late L. from Gk demokratia, from demos ‘the people’ + -kratia ‘power, rule’.

democratic adj. of, relating to, or supporting democracy. Egalitarian. [1]


[…] Artists’ books have existed since early in the century but as a named phenomenon they surfaced with conceptual art in the sixties, part of a broad, if naïve, quasi-political resistance to the extreme commodification of artwork and artists. Accessibility and some sort of function were an assumed part of their raison d’etre. Still, 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 he or she was baffled, it went back on the rack. […] [2]


[…] Undeniably true as both the historical facts and critical conceptions expressed in these lines may be, they have given rise […] to certain misconceptions or myths about artists’ books. The first of these is that it is necessary for artists’ books to be inexpensive works in unnumbered or unlimited editions. The second is that they should be produced in a small format, through commercial means. The third is that this produces a democratic artform—one whose democracy resides in its affordability rather than in the accessibility of its content. […] [3]


access n. 1 the means or opportunity to approach or enter a place. The right or opportunity to use something or see someone. 2 retrieval of information stored in a computer’s memory. 3 an attack or outburst of an emotion: an access of rage. v. 1 gain access to; make accessible. Computing: obtain, examine, or retrieve (data). 2 approach or enter.
ORIGIN ME: from L. accessus, from accedere (see accede).

accessible adj. 1 able to be accessed. 2 friendly and easy to talk to; approachable. 3 easily understood or appreciated.

legible adj. (of handwriting or print) clear enough to read.
ORIGIN ME: from late L. legibilis, from legere ‘to read’. [4]

1. All definitions are from: Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 10th Edition, revised, ed. Judy Pearsall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

2. Lucy Lippard, “Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books,” Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Joan Lyons (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985), 50.

3. Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, (New York: Granary Books, 1994), 72.

4. See footnote 1.

THE RETURN OF THE “DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLE?” (2)

A statement: Right now there are more artists’ book publishers/makers and small presses than ever before.

That may be true—the form has had many years to take root in the culture, there are far more academic programs today (than in the 60s), there are various “Center[s] for the Book” around the country, and letterpress printing and other “obsolete” technologies are enjoying a commercial comeback as specialty services.

That may also not be true. There might be fewer small presses, etc. now (there was a great deal of activity, especially in small press publishing, in the 60s on through the 80s), but it might just seem like more, because now, it’s much, much easier for us to know about them.

In the 60s, when the artists’ book (as an idea of its own) was coming into being, and when the Mimeo Revolution was in full swing, getting the word out about what a press/publisher/artist was up to was much more difficult than it is today. There were a few options: word-of-mouth (Hey, look at this thing I got/Hey, look at this thing I made), random distribution (place a stack at a gallery/coffeeshop/bookstore, droplifting), mail distribution (which requires building a list of addresses, and postage for every piece of every mailing), advertising (in other books, magazines, and businesses), and/or through a distributor (Printed Matter, Small Press Distribution, etc.).

But now we have an Internet. An artist/press/publisher can have a website, cheaply (or free, like this one) and easily. (Of course the more sophisticated sites take a great deal of time, money, and knowledge, but one can get pretty far with little of any of those.) And once that site exists, anyone with an Internet connection can find it, read about the press, see the work, and purchase it. When this kind of artwork was developing, that process of finding/reading-viewing/purchasing could have taken weeks, depending on how far away the publisher and reader were from each other (the finding part, well that could take years—we’re still finding little known presses from those days). And that immediacy makes the other distribution methods above that much more effective. Word-of-mouth: a new book or project can go viral through email and blogs. Random Distribution: this strange little publication/sticker/button/object I found has this web address…. Mail distribution: one announcement goes out to many recipients simultaneously at no cost. Advertising: when a reader sees the ad, they don’t have to just rely on that, they can go see the work, and get a much better idea of it.

The idea of, or role of, the distributor becomes problematic.

I don’t think any of the above comes as news to readers of this blog. You are, after all, reading a blog. We all know how much more convenient email is than real mail. And I don’t want to blow the trumpet of technological utopianism. But the communication infrastructure that is now embedded in our daily lives radically changes the relationship of the small press/publisher/artist to their audience. Now, we can actually get the work directly into people’s hands. And that direct relationship has become the most common method of distribution. I can say with confidence that the following is true:

Right now, the multiples made by small presses/publishers/artists are more accessible than ever before.

But are they more “democratic?”

THE RETURN OF THE “DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLE?” (1)

“One day I’d like to see artists’ books ensconced in supermarkets, drugstores, and airports and, not incidentally, to see artists able to profit economically from broad communication rather than from the lack of it.” –Lucy Lippard [1]

An introductory post here, for a new thread, linked to the “Reception Is Production” posts…

Emily Larned’s presentation at the College Book Art Association conference, called “Splits, Trades, Reviews, & Distros: Zine Culture as Model” talked about the distribution network for zines in a pre-networked world. Zinesters got their work out, to each other, to new audiences, and they did it by helping each other and sharing resources. It was from that presentation that I learned about the Temporary Services store/distro called Half Letter Press (posted earlier). That presentation and some other conversations (with Emily and others) have helped to open up some new thoughts (or the desire for some “new” thoughts anyway) about the “democratic multiple” and how that idea fits into the form-content-production-reception field. This is about reception. This is about how all of those things are linked.

The idea of the “democratic multiple” is an idea that still often shows up in discussions in artists’ books, despite the fact that we’re supposed to consider it a dead idea; dead at least in terms of artists’ books, which have not, and most likely will not, obtain a cultural ubiquity that makes them “democratic.” (see quote above) But this idea of the “democratic multiple” came into currency during a very different time (1960s), both in the art world and in the larger world, and maybe now it’s time to reconsider, to see what’s changed, and to see if the idea can be adapted for current and future use.

Book artists have struggled to gain access to the gallery world for a long time. They have struggled to be seen as “real” artists by the larger art world. Books should be seen as a form equal to painting, sculpture, photography, (even though a single book can contain all of those things) and installation (the connections/interplay between books & installation are many and there’s a lot of material to work with there (more on that later)). And I respect that struggle for legitimation. But “legitimation” comes at a price, and do we need or want it from the gallery/market system?

One of the most exciting (and probably, in retrospect, heartbreaking) things about the artists’ book in the 1960s is that it offered a way to get the work out directly to people, to bypass the gallery system. Artists tried. Distros like Printed Matter started up, books were made, cheaply, and sold, cheaply. But no one made a living off of book production alone, and distribution never came anywhere close to the scale of commercial publishing. The democratic wave retreated. But now, particularly now, as the technology of the Internet is embedded thoroughly in our lives, and new technologies of textual distribution are clamoring for space, we need to look again. Things have changed. The fact that I, the proprietor of a small, small press can write this and that (hopefully at least a few) people will read it, and that those people could be anywhere in the world, is a big deal. This simple act was impossible in the 60s. Sure, one could write, but how were you going to get it out, easily, quickly, and affordably?

But here we are, or here we were. Let’s continue soon.


1. Lucy Lippard, “The Artist’s Book Goes Public,” Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Joan Lyons (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985), 48.