HITTING THE ROAD

& heading back East in pursuit of time. Posting will be sporadic for the next few days.

MATCHBOOK STORIES

This looks like a good, fun challenge, and an interesting project:

http://www.matchbookstory.com

THE WHAT YOU WILL PROSPECTICARD

Prospectus/Postcard for What You Will
Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates
4” x 6”
600 or so were printed
2010


It may not look like it on your screen, but there are actually three colors printed on this card: black, transparent gray, and opaque white. The white is really difficult to see on these scans, and you’ll never get to read the text sleeping inside it unless you sign up for the NewLights Press Analog Mailing List by emailing me (newlightspressATgmailDOTcom) your mailing address.

& a note about the books themselves: I will not be putting them on pre-sale, but I am currently taking “reservations.” So if you would like me to hold a copy for you (they will cost $20 by the way) send me an email at the address above.

RECEPTION IS PRODUCTION (1)

Richard Artschwager. Book. 1987. Multiple of formica and wood. object: 5 1/8 x 20 1/8 x 12 1/16" (13 x 51.1 x 30.7 cm).

A tremendous amount of thought/energy/force/potential goes into the production of books. An activated book is like a channel through which that force passes, and that force builds, becomes more productive, with every reader that it lodges in, passes through. If a book cannot be read, then its energy, its potential, expires in its pages.

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Last week a call went out to various book artists inviting them to submit work to an open call (non-juried) gallery show. One of the lines describing what they wanted for the show and how it would work caught my eye—it said, essentially, that all work in the show was going to be available to be handled, and that artists should take that fact into consideration when submitting. A day or two later a second email went out, noting that due to a large amount of complaints about that policy, they were now giving artists the option to choose whether their work should be handled.

A few years ago I decided that whenever I show NewLights Press books, that they would be shown so that they can be handled. Even the unique books. Even the really fragile, really labor-intensive, really expensive, unique books. I would rather have them completely destroyed through use than preserved, untouched and unread, in a perpetual, pristine, vulgar state of undeath in a glass case or in a vault somewhere.

Many years ago I saw a lecture by the artist Richard Artschwager. During that lecture he stated one of his guiding principles: “painting is art that you look at like this:” (mimes standing in place and staring) and “sculpture is art that you look at like this:” (mimes walking around and looking at an object). Neither of those mimes, of those modes of looking/reading, works for books. Books are different from other forms of art because they function differently in the world.

I understand why the gallery went back on their initial impulse to have all the work available for perusal, and I don’t fault them for giving the artists the option to choose how their work is shown. But I do wish they held that line as a curatorial principle.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (8): WHAT YOU WILL (8)

In both of my teaching lives (the Academy of Art University and the San Francisco Center for the Book) last week my classes and I discussed “how to plan a book.” In both of those discussions I used the actual examples from the current NewLights project What You Will. I also made a new handout (based on one from my previous professor, John Risseeuw) that lists and explains the different stages/mock-ups that go into planning a book. So what follows, in this extra-pedagogical “Production is Reception” post, is based on that handout and these discussions with my classes.

SKETCH:
General sketches of ideas for the layout of the book. Can by physical or digital, often both.


STORYBOARD:
A series of small drawings showing the individual page spreads, either with sketches or text labels to show which content goes where. Used to determine the sequence of the pages and the amount of pages necessary. Done in pencil for flexibility.


ROUGH MOCK-UP:
A simple, 3D sketch version of the book, usually on newsprint or bond paper. The content of the pages is indicated with sketches or labels. This mock-up follows the binding structure of the final book (same number of pages grouped into same number of signatures) but is not actually bound. This mock-up can later be used as a guide for composing your final pages.




WORKING MOCK-UP:
A fairly precise mock-up showing the actual compositions of individual page spreads to scale. This may take the form of a working digital file, or could be done on flat or folded sheets of paper that are the actual size of the book. This mock-up is to get a sense of the actual composition of the pages and how they function in sequence. There can sometimes be several working mock-ups (or one that is changed many times) as the book develops.






BINDING MOCK-UP:
A mock-up of the book at actual size with the actual materials that you are planning on using. This mock-up goes through all of the steps of the actual binding, from the initial cutting of the paper to the final trimming of the book. It is used to test the materials and to check measurements. If something is wrong or is not functioning properly, this mock-up is adjusted and redone until everything is right.






Three important notes about these stages: 1) they do not necessarily proceed one right after the other—there is often some back and forth (say between the storyboard and the rough mock-up) and sometimes several steps are done simultaneously. It’s important to let the book grow and change through the process, instead of locking it all in when still in the early, abstract plotting stages. 2) There may (and will probably be) other steps and mock-ups between these. 3) This is a condensation of my own practice; other artists have other processes that work better for them. So the best thing to do is to be attentive, both to what others do and what you need, and adapt & synthesize your own processes.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (7): WHAT YOU WILL (7):

I had some trouble figuring out the design for the jacket of What You Will. I knew what size it was (roughly), I knew what color the paper was, and I knew, basically, how the design on the inside worked. But the cover wasn’t quite coming together.


I put it down. I digressed. I came back to it. I put it down again. I picked up another book, The Pink, a book of Kyle Schlesinger’s poems that was released in 2008 by Kenning Editions. The Pink has a striking cover, designed by Jeff Clark/Quemadura, a poet and graphic designer that lives in Michigan, that designs some of the nicest looking books out there.


While I was inspecting The Pink, looking closely at the printing (screenprinted, I think, with a glossy ink at such density that it becomes three-dimensional, the type coming up from the surface of the chipboard cover) and flipping it over and over again in my hands—


I came to a realization, probably a similar realization to what Jeff Clark had a while ago—the book does not need to have the title and author’s name on the front cover/jacket. That was the problem I was having with the design—getting all that info displayed appropriately and interestingly. But I just kept moving the type around, never questioning its necessity, never questioning the “rule” that was governing my actions. I flipped The Pink over and over, opening and closing it, feeling the paper and the ink. I re-realized the objecthood of books—it’s funny but not surprising that I would have to “remember” one my primary artistic concerns. I thought that if I could make an interesting cover, interesting enough to turn a viewer into a reader, seeking the information not there, getting them to investigate and realize the book as an object, then the design was successful.

And now I was free to follow and work through the design ideas already set forth in the pages. And the book begins to function as a total object, complete with missing parts. And its made-ness becomes part of the experience of the text-book-object.

INCOMING, OUTGOING

If you would like to join the NewLights Press analog mailing list you should electronically mail your analog address to me at my electronic address: newlightspress[at]gmail[dot]com.

Why would you want to join the NewLights analog mailing list? Because you will get strange, wonderful ephemera in the mail—things having to do with larger NewLights publications and events, and things that are pieces in their own right.

I am going to start printing the prospectipostcard for What You Will tonight, and I would love to send you one.

ANOTHER FIRST DAY

Today is the first day of my Book Arts 1 class. I’ve been working on the syllabus for the past week, tweaking and refining. The current version is a strange patchwork of old and new, of professors and colleagues past, present, and future. It’s interesting, from a teaching theory perspective, to see which parts of the syllabus change and which remain the same, to observe how my approach as an educator, the goals of the class, its context in the overall curriculum, and the needs/concerns/culture of the institution affect the way that the thing is structured. Here’s the opening section, the “Course Description:”

This class is an introduction to books as an art form—both in concept and structure/design. The class is structured around learning a series of binding styles of increasing complexity and expressive possibilities. We will cover all of the foundational skills and concepts for bookmaking (folding, sewing, pros and cons of different types of adhesives, and paper and board grain) as well as some low-tech printing and image generation techniques. Class discussions will include the history of the book, and the unique conceptual problems presented by the form. Individual class periods will be made up of demos, hands-on exercises, discussions, critiques, and some work time for the homework assignments. Field trips and guest speakers (if arranged) are TBA.

This is an informal, experienced-based course. How much you get out of it depends on how much you put into it. Ideally the class will function like an “art laboratory” where everyone involved is working, sharing ideas and learning together. Beyond the concepts and skills essential to a committed bookmaking practice, it is hoped that this course will open a window towards self-expression and awareness.

NEXT BRILLIANT WEEK

Kyle Schlesinger, the author of the forthcoming NewLights book What You Will, will be in the Bay Area next week, and there will be some readings. The first, on Tuesday the 9th, is a reading by Kyle at Mills College. You can view the event details here.


The second event, on Wednesday Feb. 10th is the release reading for the new issue of ON: Contemporary Practice. The details for that:

ON: Contemporary Practice 2
edited by Michael Cross, Thom Donovan and Kyle Schlesinger
Wednesday February 10 at 7:30
Moe's Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704-2392


Both events should be great. Hope to see you there.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (6): WHAT YOU WILL (6)

Figures 01.10.08-01.10.17
Various stages of designing the main page layout(s) for What You Will. An arrangement, an objectification, an accumulation. An attempt at multiple legibilities.

RECEPTION IS PRODUCTION (INTRODUCTION)

Last night there was a broadcast of a talk by Wendell Berry, the author of The Unsettling of America. The talk (actually a “conversation” with Michael Pollan) was mostly about farming and food, but it was also about labor and community, and the economy of interactions between all of these.

Berry talked a lot about the idea of the local—particularly of “local adaptability” and of small, local economies rooted in the particular strengths and abilities of the land. These small economies would be adaptable to the needs of the land and of the community, as opposed to giant, “universal” modes of production and distribution that impress upon the land & community a destructive sameness to all other lands and communities. Same in the sense of “one size fits all,” destructive in the sense of a gradual annihilation of the resources available there, leaving wasted and empty spaces.

What are the relations between labor, community, and economy, in the arts and particularly in the book(ish) arts? How do the modes of production and reception of books differ from the modes of production and reception of more conventional or dominant forms of art? How do those modes offer alternatives to established channels of distribution? How have those alternatives changed in the last 40 years? (I’m thinking in the context of the “democratic multiple” debate in artists’ books, and the subsequent rise of the Internet, print-on-demand, and the art fair.) Is economic sustainability an issue in the arts? How can a young artist bring their practice, their finances, and their overall happiness into alignment? Is it always about money? (Those last two are pressing, personal questions for me, but I think that they are also pressing, personal questions for many people.)

And with this post and these questions begins another line of inquiry, a new series, RECEPTION IS PRODUCTION, where we will try to expand upon these notions of reception (what path does the artwork take in the world?) community (in what part of the world are those paths traced?) and economy (what forces determine these paths?). And ultimately, can those paths begin to constitute a world?

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (5): WHAT YOU WILL (5)

The lucid design and construction of books requires more than choosing an “appropriate” typeface in an “appropriate” size/leading combination. The key is to motivate the design [design = methodology of construction] of the book through a principle that shares a common structural route with the text, but is also different enough (from the text) to reposition both the text and the design to begin new, multiple, unpredictable, and (hopefully) productive chains of oscillation between signification and non-signification. To wobble between the symbol and the thing, to shiver, shimmer.

While working out the design of What You Will I sent the author, Kyle Schlesinger, a group of observations and questions about the poems. My goal was to allow me to see the poems differently, and to understand how Kyle sees them. What follows are the questions and answers, slightly edited, mostly for grammar and brevity.


NewLights Press: So, the first thing I noticed was the shape of the poems. Which makes sense, as that naturally is the first thing that a reader sees. But I dwell on it, as I’m reading them to think about how to design and print them. It brings to mind William Everson’s “poem as icon” idea, or the concrete poetry “constellations.” How much does the overall visuality of the poem play a role in the composition? Is that something you consciously decide or think about as you write, or are there other factors that influence it? Do you see a relationship between the internal structure of the poem and its visual shape? Not so much in a shaped poem, “Calligramme” sort of way but more of in an abstract correspondence sort of way, like Frank Stella’s stripe paintings. Is the shape an after-the-fact consequence of the internal structuring, or does shape play an active role, influencing the structure?

Kyle Schlesinger: Everson’s “Poem as Icon” is a provocative lecture; he claims that Olson ruined poetry because he thought that the typewriter allowed him to become his own typographer. Of course, the era that we now call the “mimeo revolution” was the direct result of the empowerment and aesthetic consequences that came with the domestication of publishing, i.e. there was no longer a need to bring one’s work to a printer possessing specialized machinery or a trained commercial designer; “having a press” and “being a publisher” were synonyms in everyday speech. Some poets, like Robert Grenier and of course all of the “typewriter” poems of the day, embraced the monospacing of the machine, which makes it difficult to replicate using the sophisticated software we use today. Craig Dworkin’s Eclipse web archive is very much concerned with preserving these publications as facsimiles, suggesting that the materiality is in fact part of the composition, if not reader reception.

My writing certainly comes out of a Black Mountain tradition (three of my most influential teachers were graduates) and Olson was one of my first real affinities as a mature reader. My first book, Hello Helicopter, possesses a number of poems that deliberately use the page as a score (a field of composition if you will) but lately I’ve had a hard time reading poems that make such abstract use of the page. At times I find the poetics that address the “space of the page” a little too mystical or flimsy for my taste. Perhaps this is part of the curse of being a poet and a typographer? The title of the book sort of nods to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or What You Will insofar as it invites humor, lets readers “do what they will” with words by getting away from the paradoxical rigidity of “free verse.” The other side of the slice refers to the elite who do what they will, the hegemonic control over what we see, how we read and think.

NLP: The individual lines of the poems are very spare, which causes me to pay a great deal of attention to the individual words, but even more so to the line breaks, what determines them, and how the lines of the poems accumulate.

Some of the poems seem to read straight through, like “Lost Wall.” While others, like “Groove With” defy the line breaks, stretching over the gap and breaking (partly) in the middle of the line. And still others, like “Panchronic Pantries” seem to accumulate, to build line by disconnected line (I mean “disconnected” in a “making sense” kind of way—sometimes the lines seem connected through common aural or visual elements. Written poems or spoken poems? Or both?) Do you see these different choices of how to break the lines as a single or several constants running through the manuscript, or do you make the decisions of line breaks on a poem-by-poem basis?

KS: The poems in this book are primarily composed of shorter lines, flush left, with very little punctuation. You also may have noticed that the words are primarily monosyllabic—not a formal exercise like Kit Robinson’s The Dolche Stanzas, but there is an informal restraint at work at work in the poems, a desire to strip down to what sticks. How many times have you been to a reading where the author struggles to read the poems aloud? I edit for sound, for music, and the visual aspects of the writing must follow. They need to look right in order to sound right and vice versa. In a way, it’s highly formalized, I want something solid and polished, but I’m not looking to impart with a particular “message” or prescription for an audience real or imagined.

NLP: Would you group the poems into different classifications? What would those classifications be?

KS: I like the relationships you’ve observed in the question that preceded this one, and agree very much with your thinking, but no, I wouldn’t try to classify my own writing beyond the unit of the book. I like collections of poems very much, and although it’s unfashionable these days, I don’t feel that books need to be defined by a single idea or “project” that predates composition. Historically, I admire many works that do so, but as poetry becomes more and more professionalized, I think that many writers could benefit from thinking carefully about what goes into print and what falls on the cutting room floor. Catchy concepts will do much for a book’s identity, but sometimes this comes at the expense of the writing itself, or as Mallarmé reminds us, “poems are made with words, not ideas.” All of my work has a conceptual foundation, but when I put together a manuscript, I put the object before the concept to arrive at a subject. No two books that I’ve written are alike, so in that sense, the books are their own units of composition.

NLP: This is related to the idea of accumulation, it’s the dialectical partner of accumulation actually, the dispersion of the poems. I think dispersion when I see the table of contents, which is another poem made up of the titles of the rest of the poems. Did you order the poems based on how they made sense in the manuscript, or did you order them according to how the titles worked as a poem in their own right? Are there any other poems that pull their lines from a source text? (Something about “To The Letter” strikes me that way.)

KS: Reading the table of contents top to bottom and back again is almost the final test of a manuscript, but long before that, I look at the relationship between the last line of a poem to the title of the poem that follows:

In reverse
The long goodbye
Tijuana cigarette
Today
I’m walking
Lost wall
Wear pajamas again
I’m always being
For seven minutes today
Just a thought
Or something
There’s nothing more
A mess
When the shit hits the fan
A furrow for sure
Stringing bobbles
Maud collar
Stands to reason
Everything at once

Etcetera. Not a narrative, but a line of thought that gets you from the bottom of the page to the top of the next. There are a few lines from other sources in a very literal sense, like “The Long Goodbye” is the title of Robert Altman’s terrific film from 1973. “Casa de Lava” is the title of an unpublished poem by the magnificent Gregg Biglieri. He used the phrase in a letter to me and I put it in the poem long before I realized that he was referring to his own work, so it seemed natural to dedicate the piece to him (elsewhere Gregg wrote: “when I think about you, I quote myself”). Several lines from “Stands to Reason” come from conversations with Miles Champion.

NLP: But I guess this idea of dispersion always works in concert with the idea of accumulation. The poem “Stands to Reason” exemplifies this idea in its structure: the lines of the first stanza are repeated, in their respective places, in all of the subsequent stanzas, and then are gathered back together in reverse in the final stanza. This is the poem with the most obviously patterned structure. Is that a pre-existing form, or did you build it along with the poem?

KS: I wrote a poem called “Shedding” that appeared in The Pink (Kenning Editions, 2008). It was dedicated to Thom Donovan and the first strophe is an excerpt from one of Thom’s poems. I used that form again in that poem for Miles, but the lines in the first strophe came from talk, not writing.

NLP: I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I’m preoccupied with structure. I find that responding to the structure of the poems will yield a more interesting book. For me the design of the book is not a question of illustrating (or even complementing) the poems with images, or of finding a design that somehow “reflects” the character of the poems, but to construct the book, visually, materially, procedurally, in way that builds off of the text. So that’s what I’m trying to get at here, to go back through, or underneath, the finished text, in order to build a book from the same, or a related, point or idea.

KS: I’m with you entirely on that point. It isn’t a question of finding the shoes that match the suit, but a prismatic reflection on the text’s relationship to the book as a while. That said, I want this to be your book as much as it is mine (it that’s agreeable to you). The poems need not necessarily appear in this order, nor do they necessarily need to read the particular way that I’ve set them here, intact, so to speak. I’m up for as much or as little collaboration as you see fit, so long as the conversation is an “open book.”

THE NEW NEWLIGHTS PRESS LIBRARY POLICY

As an attempt to activate and actualize the (micro/gift/alternative/public/general) economy of knowledge-objects that we talk about, the NewLights Press is offering a new deal for public and academic libraries that are interested in our work. The deal is this: if a public and/or academic library buys any NewLights book for their special collections, we will give them, for free, any available book (the same book or a different one) produced in an edition of 100 or more, on the condition that that extra copy will be placed in general circulation.

So, a library buys a copy of The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press. They would receive an extra copy of the Manifesto (or say, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer if that was what they wanted, if it was still in print) that they would put on the stacks, and any person with a library card could check it out, take it home, read it, and live with it for awhile. And once they were absolutely disgusted by it, they could return it. And so on, the next person, the next reader, and the text continues its movement, and the gears keep grinding away.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (4a): WHAT YOU WILL (4a)

I think that it is fair to ask if the process of building grids for the design, described in the previous PRODUCTION post, is really necessary and/or useful and/or efficient. (Efficient? Since when was that a concern? Aren’t you letterpress printing these books?) Is it necessary? Any useful step seems as necessary as the making-of-books itself, which I believe is very necessary. So is it useful then? It is, for me, for the process at this moment.

It is an opportunity at the beginning of the design process (which is often the earliest stage of concretely “working on” a book) to dwell in that process and in the design itself. The careful mapping of the two dimensions allows me to understand it more fully, visually and intuitively. But that movement inside those two dimensions also happens in time as well, and that active yet meditative time is extremely important (for me) to real-izing a design with sufficient tension and potential energy. I often joke about letting ideas for projects “marinate.” Time is all-important. There must be enough time to “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something more to it.” (Jasper Johns) The more, usually, is where we learn.

Thought, technical: If such a big deal is made about using an internal system of measurements based on the overall size of the book itself, doesn’t it make sense to also base that overall size on an appropriate system of measurement? Like points/picas, in order to harmonize with the scale of the type? I’m sure lots of designers have come to the same conclusion before, and yes, I think it does make sense. Counter-thought: Is the minute discrepancy between points and inches even worth worrying about?

Thought, meta: This rhetorical technique of asking, then answering, questions is getting a bit schizophrenic. I think we should stop.

TEACHING MANIFESTO

[It’s that magical time of year again, the time when applications for teaching positions (starting in the fall) are due. One very common component of those applications is a “teaching philosophy.” “Teaching philosophies” are difficult to write—perhaps more difficult than the ever dreadful artist’s statement. I think the trickiest thing is to really write a statement that says something. I feel like 98% of the teaching statements that I’ve read are essentially the same statement. I attempted not to write that statement over again. The full text is posted below. [There is one part the specifically references some assignments I taught in my 2D class. I think this info is hard to get without the context of the application’s supporting materials—a portfolio of student work and class documents. But please bear with me.]]

I think that the fundamental problem facing teachers of art at a university level is the problem of facilitating engagement and agency among their students—not just an engagement with the specific material of the class, but with the discipline of artmaking on every level. This two-pronged problem of engagement and agency is similar to one of the fundamental problems that I address in my studio practice—how to make readers aware of their activity/position as readers, so that they can engage the text and determine their position in relation to it critically, not as passive consumers but as active agents. The “successful” reader works with and against the text-object in order to come to a new understanding. In the same way as that reader, successful students are aware of their activity/position as students, and can guide themselves through their classes and course of study in a way that will bring them to a fuller (but never filled) understanding of artmaking. The crucial thing is to prepare the student not to be a student.

In beginning and intermediate level courses, the instruction tends to revolve around learning successive steps of technical skills. But how can the learning of those very important basic skills be framed in such a way as to simultaneously develop a critical understanding of their uses? It is more than just coupling a technical objective with a conceptual objective. The class needs to be structured like a mini-curriculum, with a core group of technical assignments and broad conceptual approaches, followed by more complex assignments where the students actively and lucidly utilize all of those core technical skills to develop a more complex, focused, and sophisticated negotiating of content and concept. To give a specific example: in my 2D Design class I taught the formal principles of “Marks/Lines,” “Unity,” and “Figure/Ground” each with a broad conceptual goal: “Form as Content,” “Expressive (Constructed Self-Portrait),” and 
“Social/Cultural/Political” issues, respectively. These were then followed by two long-term assignments, “Rhythm/Pattern” and “Time/Change/Motion: Artists’ Books,” where the students were tasked with developing their own content in tandem with the technical/formal objective.

Perhaps most importantly, the series of assignments and their structuring principles were presented as such—the structure of the class was explained to the students, and then reinforced through the guidance and feedback that they received, as well as through a series of reflective writing assignments. As the students progressed through the semester, they were given more and more control over what they made, and most accepted the responsibility and challenge of that control, leaving the class with work that they were incredibly proud of.

And with those core sets of skills and a willingness to engage deeply with the challenges of artistic discipline, the students are ready to move to the advanced classes, where they are given feedback on self-guided and self-motivated work. At that point the teacher needs to intervene less, and to work more as a facilitator—pointing the students to resources to broaden their understanding of critical theory, giving them honest and rigorous feedback, asking them difficult questions that they will probably only be able to answer years later, and fostering engaged discussion and debate in group critique settings. The best thing that an instructor of graduating students can do is encourage and further their momentum, so that after their thesis work is complete, and the brief celebration of graduation has passed, they are not halted, left adrift, but can pick up where they left off, in whatever their new circumstances will be.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (4): WHAT YOU WILL (4)

Before any of the actual designing of What You Will began, I had some general ideas about the kind of paper that I would use. I knew that I wanted the text pages to be an off-white, and I knew that I would use French Paper (selection + price + quality + recycled). With the size and grain direction of the parent sheet (the large sheets that the paper is cut down from) determined, I could calculate the maximum size of the sheets that I would print on, keeping in mind: 1) the size of the presses, 2) the size of the book itself, and 3) efficient use of the parent sheet.

The poems are long and narrow. I wanted to use a format that could complement and play off of the shape of the poems. I decided on a page size of 4.375” x 8.75”, a long and narrow shape, like the poems, but that opened into a square, a generally neutral format, which could then be complicated internally by the division of the pages and the rest of the design.

Figure 01.10.04
Initial division of the pages using the “standard” (1/9) canon.

Lately I have been starting the designs for books with a geometric mapping of the page surface. I prefer this method because it doesn’t apply an outside, arbitrary system of measurement to the organization of the page, but maps them according to their given proportions. (Of course the size of the pages was originally determined by an outside, arbitrary measurement. No matter how hard we try, arbitrariness, chance, creeps in around the edges.) The pages are divided using a “canon” devised by the 13th century architect Villard de Honnecourt, where any rectangle can be systematically divided into smaller and smaller units, starting with 1/2, and on to 1/3, 1/4, 1/6, 1/9, etc.

Figure 01.10.05
The canon used to divide the page. See an earlier post about this, a test of the canon, here.

Once the main measurements of the pages are determined, I construct a series of grids based on each division. From those grids, I can pull digital “leading” (the black square in the bottom right corner) to use to set distances in the design.


Figure 01.10.06
The pages divided into 1/12.

After all of the grids were built, they were superimposed over each other. And within that “super grid” I determined where to set the margins. The top and fore-edge (outside) margins were set at 1/12, the bottom margin is 1/9, and the center margin is 1/18 (1/9 split across the spine).


Figure 01.10.07
The “super grid.” The gray rectangles show the text areas of the two pages.

One thing that I am looking forward to is when these page divisions are translated into the “real world,” and I construct a ruler based on them, to use to register the plates while printing. But more on that later.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (3): WHAT YOU WILL (3)

Figure 01.10.01
Some tests of hand lettering for the theoretical title pages of the book What You Will.

So, as I said before, there is backlog of these “Production is Reception” posts at the moment, as I have been working steadily on What You Will, but have not been writing about it (I was having so much fun with “Gleaming the Cube”).

Early on in the process of brainstorming the design for the book, I thought that I might like to try doing some hand lettering for the title pages, and perhaps in the book itself. “Hand lettering” isn’t quite the right term, because I actually used my trusty “Gothic” letter stencils. I had no idea what the letters were actually going to look like, so I did some tests.


Figure 01.10.02
Narrowing it down.

The main test was to determine how the letters could or would be filled in. I thought that if they were going to be stenciled, that they should be filled in, but not filled in completely. I wanted to make the fact that they were stenciled readily apparent. I settled on some sort of grid pattern for the filling-in, but then more questions came up: should they be filled in freehand or with the stencil as a guide? Should they have an outline or not? What thickness of line should be used? (See the bottom of Figure 1.10.03: “new”s and “newligh” to get a sense of how the thickness of the lines affected the individual letters.) All of these minor details were going to be important.


Figure 01.10.03

But then that importance fizzled so quickly. A day or two of pondering the drawings, reading the poems, and thinking through the rest of the design led me to abandon the idea of stencil letters for this book. They seemed unnecessary, a way of visualizing (in the sense of making visible, or rendering opaque) the language that was unrelated to the primary concerns that were developing and taking hold in the rest of the design. I like the way those stencil letters look, but they did not fit with the primary structuring principle of the book, so they had to go. Was the time that I spent on the tests wasted? Not really. First of all, in the large scheme of the book it wasn’t that much time, and second, and most important, time spent in development, even of ideas that are abandoned, is not time wasted. It is time spent narrowing and focusing, meditating, working out the shape and parameters of the book’s concept by testing its limits.

YEAR 10: FOR NOW

& here we are at the beginning of Year 10. Calendars of the first three months have been printed out and are hanging on the wall in front of me. The next month is heavily marked already. That marking-up of the days-to-come-and-pass is a result of two things: 1) a new teaching position, teaching an Intro to Book Arts class, and 2) a new book on the verge of full-scale production, Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will.

As the class develops, and as it unfolds in time, I hope to use the IDE(A/O)(B)LOG(Y/UE) to make some notes about book arts (art, really) and teaching. When I was in graduate school, our Foundations Program supervisor used to tell us that we should seek and develop some relationship between our studio practices and our teaching practices. That, to me, was one of those revolutionary ideas that makes total sense. It is, of course, trickier than it sounds. It is about the how of teaching, the structuring principles and how they are represented, as much as the what, the individual assignments and their subsequent critiques.

The intoxicating energy of the new book is grinding its way through my bones. Printing begins this weekend, and printing this book will be a furious, glorious affair. There are a backlog of “Production is Reception” posts waiting, and I will try to catch us up on those in the coming weeks.

Year 10, shimmering, turbulent. There is so much work to be done.

SOMEDAY THE NEWLIGHTS PRESS WILL HAVE ITS OWN STUDIO

and I already know three broadsides that I will print specifically for the studio walls. First is this classic from the eminent scholar and typographer Beatrice Warde (which seems to be required decor for every letterpress studio):


The image that you see here is from a photocopy of a version that they had in the letterpress studio at ASU. I will make a new edition.

And this, a slightly modified version of what Woody Guthrie had written on his guitar, to be hung on the wall behind the press(es):

THESE MACHINES KILL FASCISM

And the last, a recently rediscovered piece of a poem by Jack Spicer, from his book Admonitions, from the poem “For Jack”:

Tell everyone to have guts
Do it yourself
Have guts until the guts
Come through the margins
Clear and pure
Like love is

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 8, Epilogue

So here we establish a provisional end [1] to this series of posts. What exactly has been going on here?

On a basic level, the “Gleaming the Cube” posts were a series of responses to Daniel Scott Snelson’s essay “Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions,” published in Mimeo Mimeo 3. The responses were more creative than critical, focusing on elaborating on ideas constructed or described in the essay.

The posts were an exploration of what it can mean to, and one way a reader can, engage creatively with any given text. The original essay was entered at various points, cut apart, re-presented, recombined, and placed in juxtaposition to new images and texts. I would not call it a “critique” or “deconstruction.” Perhaps the neutral word “response” is the most fitting. Perhaps. But the most important thing (to me, as I built those posts) was to elaborate on the source essay productively, to make that essay do more work. This is, after all, a blog focused on and of production, not reproduction.

What is reproduction in this sense? Are there two (or more) types of reproduction—one type that copies the object in question simply and transparently, and one type that re-produces or re-constructs the object in order to position it critically?

1. A “provisional” end because we will inevitably come back to it. The kind of engagement undertaken in the “Gleaming the Cube” posts provides a weird ownership of the source text, albeit in a distorted and personalized form. Although those texts have distorted “me’ as well, have changed the shape of this blog. Every time we enter or use an object it does the same to us.

OLD FRIEND

The following poem is from one of Jack Spicer’s notebooks, written around 1964. It is reprinted as the epigraph to Robin Blaser’s essay “The Practice of Outside,” which is a part of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, published by Black Sparrow Press in Santa Rosa, CA (I have the 1999 version). (One of my most prized, most weathered and beat-up books).

With fifteen cents and that I could get a
subway ride in New York. My heart
Is completely broken. Only an enemy
Could pick up the pieces.
“Fragments of what,” the man asked, “what?”
A disordered devotion towards the real
A death note. With fifteen cents and real
Estate I could ride a subway in New York. No
Poet starved. They died of it.

I CHOOSE NICE

Several months ago I had the good fortune to see Jim Sherraden of Hatch Show Print (see video above) give a lecture in San Francisco. It was a really great lecture. Jim said that Hatch’s success (they have a Smithsonian show traveling right now, they are probably the most well-known letterpress shop in the country) came down to one simple thing: they are nice to people. Supporting that niceness is, of course, years and years of very hard work. But those two things in tandem are exactly what the world needs.

As time goes on and I meet more and more great people that are involved in the same weird little world as me, I am constantly reminded of how much community means. So to all the nice people out there, a few things: a) thank you, b) I hope I have the presence of mind and grace to do the same, and c) I’m looking forward to meeting you if I have not already.

Posts will be sporadic from here until Jan. 4th. I hope All is Well.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: PART 7c

So we decide to listen to Brecht and begin building from the assumption that form and content are not mutually exclusive, that when they are held in tension they can activate a critical awareness in the author and/or reader.

Arranged below are a series of diagrams that represent the ways in which and artwork’s relationship to form and content can be viewed. The diagrams do not so much represent “stages” that are moved through progressively as they do “available modes” that can be navigated at will by a viewing subject (author and/or reader), depending on the nature of their dialogue with any given artwork.

Figure 12.09.09
Form and content locked in binary opposition.

The first diagram represents the idea of a form/content relationship that is the most basic; that is, there is only form and content, and an artwork is either a divisive screen between the two, breaking them both into mutually exclusive areas, or the artwork is an anchor, holding them both in tension.

Figure 12.09.10
The fixed or stable artwork in the expanded field. The space of the field eats away at the work’s edges.

The second diagram shows “the expanded field,” where an artwork is seen to exist in a larger field of practices, simultaneously mediated by both the author and the reader (and their ideas of each other). This diagram is a specific elaboration that comes out of working with books, where issues of process/production and display/reception come to the fore (when they are considered against conventional forms of visual art).

Figure 12.09.11
The work expanded, making it spatial, like the field itself.

The crucial difference between Figs 12.09.10 and 12.09.11 is the imagining of the artwork in each. In Fig. 12.09.10 the artwork is a fixed point in the field, holding the different poles in tension. In Fig. 12.09.11 the artwork is not a fixed point but a mutable zone that changes as the author/reader navigates the various channels or lines of meaning of the artwork. The artwork, then, literally is a kind of work or movement, as opposed to a fixed object for contemplation, and for sale.


Figure 12.09.12
The work exceeds the field. The field exceeds the work. These are moments where discourse is shaped and channeled.

And when we really get them going they start to exceed their or our own frame, and we find ourselves radically reoriented to the discursive parameters that allow the functioning of the work.

(Notice how in Fig. 12.09.12 the artwork still is bounded by another invisible frame on one side. It is possible for multiple frames to be exceeded simultaneously, but that’s when they really take us apart, when we have those experiences of sublimity, standing before the turbulent oceans of language and structures.)

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 7b

Figure 12.09.07
El Lissitzky, page from Pro Dva Kvadrata, Skythen-Verlag, Berlin, 1922.

Part 7b, where we continue yesterday’s questioning of formalism—the “restricted” formalism of shape and the “expanded” formalism of structure, of structuralism. [Thought: what happens when all this attention to structuralism runs into its post?]

The second main complaint against “formalism” that one often hears (and this is the criticism that I am most sympathetic to) is that it is apolitical and anti-social—that it does not look beyond the artwork, that it retreats into the old “ivory tower” of aestheticism, that to concentrate on an artwork’s form is to concede it its autonomy and cut off art from life.

And art-cut-off-from-life is something for rich people to buy and professors to argue about.


Figure 12.09.08
El Lissitzky, Propaganda Board in Street, photograph, 1920.

There are some of us who refuse that state of affairs. And there are some of us that believe, as part of a deep commitment to making art relevant and useful, that work on form is always necessary.

Our friend Brecht was one of them:

alienation-effect A translation of the German Verfremdungseffekt, coined by the dramatist BRECHT (1949, 1962) to describe the effect produced by his EPIC theatre and the style of acting appropriate to it.

Brecht’s dramaturgy breaks with the traditional values and conventions of naturalism and psychological realism, rejecting empathy, suspension of disbelief and unity of action on the grounds that they are expressions of a bourgeois IDEOLOGY that has no place in a scientific modern society. In order to create a revolutionary socialist theatre, a new style of writing and acting is essential. Brecht’s objective is encourage the audience to take a detached and critical attitude towards what they see on stage. The audience must be made aware that they are watching a reproduction of incidents drawn from real life, but must not be allowed to forget that they are in a theatre. The spectator’s attention is drawn to the artificial theatricality of the play by the songs that interrupt the action, by the slogan-painted placards that are brought on stage, and by the actors who step out of character to address the audience directly. The audience [is] thus encouraged to think about what has caused the incidents they are watching.

[…] To the extent that it involves an ALIENATION from theatrical conventions that are so familiar as to appear natural, Brecht’s theory has something in common with RUSSIAN FORMALISM’s concept of OSTRANENIE or defamiliarization. Written at a time when he was actively promoting Brecht’s theories as a model for popular theatre (1956), BARTHES’s demystifying studies of the MYTHOLOGIES of everyday life (1957) are intended to produce a cultural alienation-effect. [1]

This appears to be going around in circles. TO BE CONTINUED, as always, as we try to break these linkages and get to a larger picture…. [I think I see the aforementioned POST up ahead.]

1. David Macey, Dictionary of Critical Theory, (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 8.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 6b

And speaking of primary information, there is also another amazing archive of mimeo era publications at the Eclipse archive. The description from the site:

Eclipse is a free on-line archive focusing on digital facsimiles of the most radical small-press writing from the last quarter century. Eclipse also publishes carefully selected new works of book-length conceptual unity.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: PART 7 (FORMALISM)

Figure 12.09.04
Frank Stella, installation shot of Aluminum Paintings, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1960.

From Daniel Scott Snelson’s “Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions:”

[…] Importantly, for Brecht, Barthes, and many writers and artists to follow, the anti-neutrality of language led to an emphasis of artifice (for Brecht, the lights, set, and material of the theatre, for later Barthes, the Text) always charged with political significations (against the woozy seamless instrumentality of Nazi rhetoric, for example). From this Brechtian formalism, we can derive Barthes’s famous dictum: “a little formalism turns one away from History, but a lot brings one back to it.” Bois correctly points out that this distinction of the two “formalisms”—Lukacs's “restricted” morphological formalism, versus Brecht’s formalism of historical-structural signification—is “essential to a retrieval of formalism (as structuralism).” […]

The work of the NewLights Press could be labeled “formal” or “formalist.” And indeed it has. Some would apply that label negatively. But let’s be clear about which kind of formalism we’re talking about here (and so into Danny’s source text for the above passage):

[…] Thus the term “formalist” was an insult that Lukacs and Brecht tossed at each other, but the word did not have the same sense for each. For Brecht, a formalist was anyone who could not see that form was inseparable from content, who believed that form was a mere carrier; for Lukacs, it was anyone who believed that form even affected content. […] The antiformalism that was prevalent in the discourse of art criticism in the seventies can thus be explained in great part by a confusion between the two kinds of formalism, one that concerns itself essentially with morphology (which I call “restricted” formalism) [Lukacs], and one that envisions form as structural—the kind embraced by Brecht when he sorted out the “continuity” of Goering’s and Hess’s speeches as an essential part of their ideological machine. […] [1]

[More on the political agency that attention to form allows later.]

There are two main complaints about formalism in day-to-day art discourse. The first is that if a work is formal, or pays attention to form, then the work must be devoid or scant on “concept” or “content” (these two terms are often used interchangeably, but do not in fact mean the same thing). And if a work is devoid of “concept” or “content” then it must be devoid of thought, it must be merely pretty, it must be decorative. (“The decorative” has always been the evil twin of abstraction.) This complaint rests on two (false) presuppositions: 1) that a formal artwork, if decorative, is not and can not be theoretically rigorous; and 2) that form and content are mutually exclusive areas that an artwork can engage, that paying attention to one necessarily excludes the other (and now we’re back to Brecht). I have two answers, and both can be used for both of those presuppositions:


Figure 12.09.05
Pablo Picasso, Bowl with Fruit, Violin, and Wineglass, mixed media, 1912-13.



Figure 12.09.06
Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, enamel on canvas, 1959.


1. Yves-Alain Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 33.


TO BE CONTINUED: the second complaint to formalism, that of political agency

OH WHAT TO DO

There are so many books to design, signify, de-signify.