THERE'S NEVER ENOUGH TIME

...to do everything that one wants to before a big show like Codex, which is approaching fast. Posts will be sporadic for this week and the next, as I use my mornings to make stuff.... More stuff!

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.

THE BLOG OF THE PRESS THAT IS THE PRESS AT COLORADO COLLEGE

Finally, I have gotten the blog for The Press at Colorado College up and running. I won't go into too much of an explanation here, as the post up right now on that blog gives all the details, but let's just say it will be 1) an archive of the activities of The Press at CC, and 2) (hopefully) a resource for other book artists/educators and students.

My first post is up, as well as all of the posts from the former incarnation of The Press Blog.

LINK!

& THEN THERE’S THIS

Half Letter Press, a publishing and distribution venture for artists’ books and other interesting things, brought to you by Temporary Services. The books that they’re making and selling look great, but the way that they are doing that making and selling is important too. Check out all of the info, the FAQs, the bartering, etc. This is a politics of reception/distribution.

MIMEO MIMEO #4 IS AVAILABLE NOW

The new issue of the great little magazine Mimeo Mimeo is out. Here’s the description from the website:

Featuring interviews with Tom Raworth, David Meltzer, and Trevor Winkfield; essays by Richard Price, Ken Edwards, and Alan Halsey; a selection of letters from Eric Mottram to Jeff Nuttall; and a long out-of-print statement by Asa Benveniste, poet and publisher of London’s legendary Trigram Press. Cover by Trevor Winkfield.

Buy one here.

THE WORLD, THIS WORLD

The College Book Art Association Biennial Conference took place this past weekend at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. It was, to say the least, a great deal of fun.

I have written many times, both on this blog and in books, about how important the book community (artists, writers, teachers, readers, collectors, critics, students, etc.) is to me and to what I do. Books are public things, existing in the world, irrefutably a part of the world, and it is always an honor and a pleasure to get to spend time in that world, with the rest of the book arts community. & so we can all be a part of that world together.

There were too many interesting presentations to see, but the ones that I did get to were great. Some highlights were a presentation about teaching chapbooks (in a writing class at an art school) by Casey Smith, “relational aesthetics” and the book arts (Book Bombs, ILSSA, Temporary Services) by Bridget Elmer, a talk that described the distribution models of ‘zines and proposed them as models for distributing artists’ books, by Emily Larned, and a presentation about a public, sustainability-focused book project done at Wellesley College, by Katherine Ruffin and Amanda Nelsen. & there were many more. & I will be able to draw from all of those things for years to come.

This was my first time attending one of these conferences. I knew some people there (two good friends that I was really looking forward to seeing couldn’t come at the last minute, alas!) but not many. There were around 200 attendees in total, which is small enough to see & meet just about everyone, but large enough for there always to be someone new to talk to. At other large academic conferences I have found it difficult to meet and talk to people. Not so at this one—everyone was friendly, welcoming, approachable, and interested in who you were, and what you were up to.

So join up. Get involved. Be welcomed & welcome others. We are all, always & marvelously, thankfully, in this thing together.

BLUER PASTURES

Ah, the first day back at work. Ah, the last day of work this week. I'm hitting the road again tomorrow, heading for the blue grass of Kentucky and then off to the College Book Art Association conference in Bloomington, Indiana. I will be there through the end of the week, so posts will resume next Monday. If you're planning on going to the conference, I'm looking forward to seeing you.

TWIN PEAKS PRESENTS: LESSONS IN CONTEMPORARY POETICS (1)

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (15): (DE)COLLAGE (3)

These past few weeks have been particularly scribal. (De)Collage is nearing completion. All of the text is written and stenciled into the newsprint mock-up. I am now in the process of stenciling the text into the actual book. Then cutting, then peeling, then binding. The full, final text is below. It is the same as posted earlier, with just a little bit added to the end:

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 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. People would just come and wouldn’t put on a show or entertain. They came happily and sat down and left four hours later: you’d listen to some music and you’d look at things. What I enjoyed was not the conversation but the things we looked at…there were evenings where there was not much talk.

(OR THROUGH, OR AGAINST)

And here we are in 2011. Nice to see you, as always. These past weeks I have had collage and de-collage on my mind. Below I have retyped and pasted in sections from a passage in Collage: The Making of Modern Art, by Brandon Taylor. That is the book that I have delaminated for the NewLights (De)Collage, and yes, all of the text is gone from my copy. But the text is still there in my other copy—I liked the book so much that I got two, knowing that one would be made into something entirely different. That book is the best broad survey of collage that I have read, and one of the main reasons for that is that it includes really interesting European artists (like Jiři Kolář, described in the passage below) that I had never heard of before reading the book. [Note: the book from which these passages were taken is a British book, hence the single quotes, etc.]


Jiři Kolář
Story, 1952
A confrontage.

[…]

It was not until the end of the 1950s however that [Jiři] Kolář embarked on the vast experiment with the divided image for which he has become justly celebrated since. In a curious historical parallel, it was in the first years of French Lettrisme that Kolář’s unique experiment with the verbal image began, first as a ‘cut-up’ technique applied to given items of printed matter ranging from labels, recipes, mathematical formulae, and texts on medicine and astrology: such poems were collectively called ‘Instructions for Use’ and immediately endeared Kolář to concrete poetry movements further west. ‘From the beginning’, Kolář has said, ‘my concern was to find the interfaces between the fine arts and literature. All previous attempts in this direction seemed inadequate, and above all not consistent’. Imprisoned for most of 1953 and officially debarred from publishing until 1964, he nevertheless created from 1961-2 entire series of sign-poems, number-poems, puzzle-poems, and eventually ‘silent’ poems composed of hyphens, question-marks, commas and other resources of the typewriter (some were dedicated to the memory of Malevich). Soon came object-poems, or things subjected to essentially literary structures such as repetition, rhyming, or inter-leaving, or books themselves which are ruined, torn or glued, as if evading the censor of his poetry by craftily switching into another medium. ‘Someday’, said Kolář, ‘it will become possible to make poetry out of anything at all’.

Jiři Kolář
Baudelaire (Les Fleurs Du Mal) Series, 1972
I believe that this is a rollage, because it is made from two copies of the same image. One is inverted, which creates the strange mirroring-repetition.

[…]

In prollage (another invented term) he takes two or more images, and having cut them into identical width strips reassembles them in sequence: prollage stretches images lengthways, giving a behind-bars appearance that is also a simultaneity-effect whose purpose is to tease the mind and the eye. A variation known as rollage (from 1964) meant cutting several copies of the same image into strips and then mounting them in staggered sequence, creating a dazzling ‘optical’ effect not unlike Op Art in the West. ‘My head was bursting when I realized the possibilities which opened up for me when I put together the first two reproductions for the first time. I was permeable and so was the whole world; a non-illusionistic space could be created…’.

[…]

‘Rollage has enabled me to see the world in at least two dimensions’, he has said; ‘the stratifications made me realise just how many unknown layers make up life and just how many unknown deposits exist within each of us’.

[…]

Not trained as an artist, he has seldom invented a line or cut a silhouette that was not already given in the image in front of him—this too confirms his status as a writer for whom ‘poetry’ resides in images that resemble, dissemble, repeat or inhabit each other, and perhaps never more so than in the recent series known as intercollage which exploits the Magritte-effect of silhouetting one reality into (or through, or against) another

[…]

True to his writer’s mission, Kolář compiled a Dictionary of Methods, published in Paris in 1986, in which he articulates all the other techniques of his invention such as ventillage, crumplage, kinetic collage, and which underline further still his affinity to conceptual classification, lexicography, systematization, seriality: not only an implacably anti-Romantic attitude to the image, but one attuned to the linguistic as such. ‘The world attacks us directly’, he has said, ‘tears us apart through the experience of the most incredible events, and assembles and reassembles us again. Collage is the most appropriate medium to illustrate this reality’.

[…]

Jiři Kolář
Cow Having Eaten Up Canaletto, 1968
An intercollage.

Full Citation!
Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 181-186.

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
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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
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2222222222
3333333333
3333333333
3333333333
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4444444444
4444444444
4444444444
5555555555
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8888888888
8888888888
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8888888888
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9999999999
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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. […]

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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.

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (6a)

The hand-mechanical is a deliberate manipulation of the codes and conventions of artistic practice.

The first and most obvious of those codes/conventions put into play by the hand-mechanical is the (limited) edition. (From here through the rest of this post, the term “edition” will be used to refer to a “limited edition,” but specification will be used when necessary.) Hand-mechanical processes can be employed to produce an artwork in multiple, but can they be used to make a proper edition?

What is a “proper” edition anyway? When a work is done in an edition (usually a print, book, or photograph, sometimes a sculpture, sometimes something else, and it’s that something else we’re interested in) the original artwork is made in multiple. There is not one original and then a number of copies, there is no single, stable source—the editioned artwork is multiple, the multitude, plenitude, the network, the rhizome, from its very beginning. The matrix that is needed to make an editioned artwork (the printing plate, the photographic negative, the mold, and yes, the digital file) is not a part of the finished piece—it is part of the process, no more and no less a “source” of the artwork than a pencil is the “source” of a drawing.



A “proper” edition

[Definition break (it’s best to proceed slowly): “proper” here means “as traditionally defined and realized.”]


A “proper” edition is almost always a limited edition. The original edition is produced once, and that’s it, no more. The matrix is theoretically destroyed (“canceling the plate”) to insure that no unauthorized copies [“copies?”] can be made. 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.



We could describe the limited edition with the paradoxical term singly multiple: it is multiple, but that multiplicity is contained within a single iteration. The unlimited edition is, in theory, infinitely multiple: in order to be unlimited, the edition must be produced in multiple iterations (first printing, second printing, third printing, and so on) or be in constant production, on a machine set to run and produce forever.

[Idea: limit an edition not by number of copies, but by amount of time spent in production. The edition is x number of copies produced in y units of time. “This is an edition of three days (that happens to include 304 copies).” Should one exclude variant copies as usual, or should one include all copies, even the really messed up ones? Does the use of the time boundary require the shattering of the edition’s consistency?]

An artwork could be made in an edition that is somewhere between those two poles: doubly multiple, triply multiple, etc. But is an unlimited edition masquerading as limited to drive up value, or a limited edition designed to exceed its own limits?



Unique artworks exist in a restricted economy in its most restricted sense. Uniqueness is the ultimate scarcity.

Limited edition artworks, depending on the size of the edition and the mode(s) in which that edition is deployed in the world, can function in either a restricted economy or a general economy (an economy of excess, plenitude). “Proper” editions exist in a restricted economy. An “improper” edition might be limited but can be deployed in such a way as to disregard its own scarcity—given away or sold cheaply.

The unlimited edition is a theoretical practice—an edition is always limited, because we are finite beings in a finite world.




[As of this writing, as of this reading, here, in this soft, snowy morning in Colorado, my finite amount of time is scraping against the ragged edges of this post. It really is a mess, but we will start here, with this heap, already spilling over, and see what we can do.]

IMPRACTICAL LABOR IN THE SERVICE OF THE SPECULATIVE ARTS

This seems appropriate to the current line of posts, and to the NewLights Press in general:

Impractical Labor in the Service of the Speculative Arts

From the site:
Impractical Labor is a protest against contemporary industrial practices and values. Instead it favors independent workshop production by antiquated means and in relatively limited quantities. Economy of scale goes out the window, as does the myth that time must equal money. Impractical Labor seeks to restore the relationship between a maker and her tools; a maker and her time; a maker and what she makes. The process is the end, not the product. Impractical Labor is idealized labor: the labor of love.

I love the tagline: "As many hours as it takes!!!"

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (5b)

From 5a
The hand-mechanical is, at least in my formulation of it, “monkish business.” These processes are quiet, disciplined, meditative, and are, to a large degree, hidden. Hidden not for secrecy, but for humility, to keep the process a process willingly undertaken, and to avoid the pitfall, the temptation, of performing the process. The process must, at all costs, be kept from becoming an image, from passing into a stable, transferable, and consumable representation. The process must repetitively dismantle and destroy any image of itself. The process must be thoroughly infused into the facts and factitiousness of the object as an object. The process must be a thing done, in time, a task completed and here, here, in the object that is in the reader’s hands.

& into 5b, which will pull its predecessor to pieces
There are a few different things going on, a few different ideas circulating, in the paragraph above. We will get at them through the question of authenticity: “to avoid the pitfall, the temptation, of performing the process.” What is “performing” the process? I would define it as using a particular working method because of the meaning of that method, and that meaning may be more than, or just as important as, the actual results. A method performed is a method deployed because of its ability to act as a signifier in and of itself. The performer acts with a large degree of self-consciousness. The conventions of the method are taken up, examined, and are either left intact, or they are disturbed, tweaked, displaced, reworked.



What is the opposite of “performing” a process? A process not performed is a process simply done. It exists as an event, in time, mute (yet always legible, like everything, to the desire to read), in the same way that the sun rises, the wind blows. The process done is engaged with by the artist as a fact, conventionless, its meaning and role so stable that there is, essentially, no meaning. The thing done is a thing real, of this world. The thing done is an authentic act in a simulated discourse.


[Here, here, is where the reversal, the folding, the doubling, of terms begins. It is never a question of one or the other.]



The idea of authenticity is an idea that is politically hard to let go of. If the world is shaped by economic flows and the spectacles of corporate power, then “authenticity,” of an act, of an experience, or of a person, is one of the few anchors that we have. And authenticity is important, necessary even. But authenticity is not the same thing as innocence. Authenticity comes from a deep and sustained engagement with an idea, to the point where the idea becomes inseparable from the one who struggles with it. Every role, every medium, every sign, every thing, every meaning is, authentically and at its root, unstable and multiple. The “performer” accepts this instability and manipulates the codes and conventions of the role, to see what new material it can yield. The one who simply “does” believes thoroughly in the stable meaning of their role, of their method, or wants to believe thoroughly in the stable meaning of their role, of their method.





The stability of signification is one of the oldest illusions. Feigned innocence will be the death of us all. And now the text gives way to a new formulation:

The hand-mechanical is a deliberate manipulation of the codes and conventions of artistic practice.


The photograph used in this post, in its singular form, is: Art Kane, Andy Warhol as Golden Boy, c. 1960, color photograph.

SOMEDAY I WILL LIVE IN A HOLY PLACE

Yesterday I paid a visit to Special Collections at the Tutt Library here at Colorado College. We have a great little collection here, and it’s always fun and interesting to go up there and look at and page through things. Somehow during yesterday’s discussion the above photograph was produced from the archives. It is from c. 1920, and it shows Archer Butler Hulbert sitting in the Colorado Room in Coburn Library at Colorado College.

Getting closer everyday.

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (5a)

The hand-mechanical is anti-spectacular and anti-heroic.
A little over a month ago now Darren Wershler came to Colorado College as a visiting lecturer for the Press. (His visit was what led me to reading his book on typewriting and typewriters, The Iron Whim, mentioned in a previous “Machined” post.) Before his visit we had done a broadside with him, a broadside that relied on delamination, so the hand-mechanical was very much on my mind during his visit. On the second day of his visit, Darren did a workshop/discussion/lecture with a group of students (and a few faculty & staff), and in that discussion he mentioned Kenneth Goldsmith and his piece Day, where he re-produced a particular issue of The New York Times.

I had always been under the impression that Goldsmith had physically retyped the newspaper. But according to Darren (a friend of Goldsmith’s) he did not. Goldsmith began by retyping the newspaper, and after doing that for a while, he decided to scan and OCR (optical character recognition, to convert the scanned image to malleable text) them. When Darren first disclosed that fact, I was, I admit, shocked. The mythology of that piece, and thus of Goldsmith’s work in general, was shattered. This was particularly disappointing because I had been thinking, for a while now, at least since the writing of the first iteration of The New Manifesto..., of Goldsmith’s “uncreative writing” practice as a writerly example/precedent for the hand-mechanical.

This massive, interior deflation of mine occurred in about one second. Then the whole thing changed completely, because Darren when on to say something more, telling how Goldsmith thought that the act of typing the newspaper was too heroic, that it was the sort of thing that he could do in a gallery window, that the typing became a kind of performance that focused on his (heroic/nostalgic because of the typewriter) labor. But if he scanned them, then what he was doing wasn’t special, wasn’t heroic. He was replicating the way that written documents are converted to digital text every day, by the assembly line workers of the information economy.

One could make the argument that Goldsmith was not concerned about the “heroism” of his typing, that what he was concerned with was the amount of time-energy that it was going to take, and that he switched methods because he got lazy. One could make that argument. But we’re not interested in that argument, because the idea of the implied heroism of a process, or of its display, has helped me to articulate what I think is an important aspect of the hand-mechanical:


The hand-mechanical is anti-spectacular and anti-heroic.

(I did retype that sentence, instead of copying/pasting, but you would never know, nor should you ever believe me, here, here, in the realm of seamless replication.)

The hand-mechanical is, at least in my formulation of it, “monkish business.” These processes are quiet, disciplined, meditative, and are, to a large degree, hidden. Hidden not for secrecy, but for humility, to keep the process a process willingly undertaken, and to avoid the pitfall, the temptation, of performing the process. The process must, at all costs, be kept from becoming an image, from passing into a stable, transferable, and consumable representation. The process must repetitively dismantle and destroy any image of itself. The process must be thoroughly infused into the facts and factitiousness of the object as an object. The process must be a thing done, in time, a task completed and here, here, in the object that is in the reader’s hands.



This is getting difficult, now, because the process must also be an image of itself unfolding, an image that is transferable to the reader, so that they can, potentially, enact it themselves, or at least understand it, or at least destroy it, themselves.


So the image must exist. But its meaning must be precise. How is precision in meaning possible in a system with multiple inputs and outputs? How is exactness in meaning justifiable in a system that is claimed to be open? How can I, writing about this process, try to simultaneously dissolve and solidify my position of authority? Is that the game of the hand-mechanical?