FOR RODCHENKO

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

For Rodchenko/For Travis:
Working Notes Toward The Heads
NewLights Press: A. Cohick, et al
3 digital books, 96 pages each, 9” x 12” (open)
Pure RGB colors
Edition determined as viewed
2011
Free

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!

LIKE AN OLD BALLOCKS

& a reader of this blog, or some of my other book-things might notice that I am obsessed with beginnings:

It was he that told me I’d begun all wrong, that I should have begun differently. He must be right. I began at the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that? Here’s my beginning. Because they’re keeping it apparently. I took a lot of trouble with it. Here it is. It gave me a lot of trouble. It was the beginning, do you understand? Whereas now it’s nearly the end. Is what I do now any better? I don’t know. That’s beside the point. Here’s my beginning. It must mean something, or they wouldn’t keep it. Here it is...

& also with non-beginnings in that whenever I want to emphasize a beginning I begin with an ampersand, partly as a nod to the decorated initials of illuminated manuscripts but mostly as way to stress the idea that every beginning is only provisional, imaginary, mythological, because everything, always is part of, subject to, the great continuity.

I am meditating on beginnings here, now, at the end of the day, in the bleeding of night into day, because I find myself slowly making my way into yet another. Another new life that will hopefully be a refined continuation of the old life—better, always better, a little bit anyways, if we are willing to work for it.

& of course beginning again, and doing something over again, or reading something over again, can yield attention to new things. In the case transcribed below (taken from Karl Young’s essay “Notation and the Art of Reading.” Reprinted in A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections about the Book and Writing, Steven Clay and Jerome Rothenberg, eds. (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 47-8.) I can once again see how this new beginning is another link in the great and vibrant history that we are all a part of:

[…] A large portion of the audience for contemporary poetry gets involved in publishing the work of other poets at some time in their lives, and this becomes a further means of participation. They may act only as a magazine’s assistant editor for a short time, or they may edit their own magazines, or run their own presses. For some, this becomes a way of life. Poet-publishers tend to read manuscripts carefully and critically in determining whether or not to publish them, and they put a great deal of effort into the means of producing those they decide to publish. This type of activity tightens the bonds between poets, opens channels of communication with a larger audience, gives the editors a sense of proportion in terms of nature, size, and scope of their audience, and, again, can encourage the intimacy with the text latent in copying. Publishing requires commitment and encourages the poet-publisher to be textual analyst, literary critic, and graphic designer. Working with layout, type, perhaps presswork and binding, has suggested new kinds of notation and presentation and has inspired work that would otherwise not have been done. The method of production a poet-publisher uses often effects or reflects her or his work: offset publishers often write differently from letterpress printers. The mimeo format of d.a. levy publications continues to be an integral part of the outlaw urgency of the work, even though levy’s been dead for many years. The austere design and impeccable typography of Elizabeth Press Books underscores the restrained precision of the poets published in that series. The limited press runs and personalized distribution of most poetry publishers creates a sense of intimacy and fellowship not unlike that created by the circulation of manuscripts in Donne’s time. […]

& in the section after that he actually goes on to talk about artists’ books, but let’s hold back a little, but let’s save a little, maybe for tomorrow, maybe for our next false beginning, true & brilliant in the brilliant light.

WE'RE NOT HERE

Facing the terror of the blank, white screen this morning, I thought of the following passage from the “Preface” of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition (trans. by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) xxi:

[…] How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. […]

And I think about the necessity of writing and I wonder who this blog, who these books are for. Is this for you, reader, my haphazard electronic shadow? Is this for me, the writer? The I, the me, is not in here. This is not my voice.

This is an object in the ghost world. It is external. Once can see its shape, its flaws.

Form is necessary. Necessary but not static. A channel through time. A translucent window. A perpetually repeating moment of coalescence. But neither of us are here, nor should we want to be, nor should we want us to be. Simply the here and we look on coldly.

We are united in the gaze at this spinning. It is nice to see you again, but neither of us is here. Just this spinning, the void, ever dilating. Nice to see you again.

I am motivated by a strong desire to write, to make books. I have nothing to express, nothing to say. This is not my voice. This is a desire to make external, to see, manipulate, and understand. This is a desire for, a rage for, a reptilian interest in, the reptilian function of thought. This is a desire to see what this can do.

It snakes.

Ghosts of Old Sam. All that fall. Not my voice.

It snakes. The fingerprints on the window.

SMUDGING THE SURFACE

Translucency instead of transparency/opacity. Transparency is the ideal of the crystal goblet. Opacity is complete illegibility of the text. (Note: we are assuming that what is being printed is meant to be read as text.) Translucency makes the surface of the goblet visible. We can still see the contents, taste them. But we can see our fingerprints as well. We feel the fragility of the stem. The proper movement could destroy the whole thing. The drop of water on the camera lens. The fingerprint on the window, on the surface of the page. How does that fingerprint extend the work (the work of the artwork in question) into the broader field?

SOME NOTES ON LEGIBILITY

How to construct a thing (a book, printed) both badly enough and goodly enough. How to make making it count. Bend the process towards the surface of legibility. The printing becomes the text. What is says, how it says it, how the how says what it says, & how what is read by the reader. Infinite elusive figure. Recedes. Unlimited offerings to an unknown force. Unknowable? Unpredictable? Thus the how of reading. Thus the irruption of form into content, process into reception. Always the principle of uncertainty. This is certain: it moves.

“What you see with new outbreaks is a series of smaller outbreaks.” Some part of the object twists inside the subject. They unite. Production, vomitous or accretious, ensues. In this we twist. Ah, the object flows and surrounds.

LEGIBILITY

Taking notes, playing in the stream of the dictionary. All definitions from the 10th Edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:

Legibility: adj. (of handwriting or print) clear enough to read

Print: v. 1) produce (books, newspapers, etc.) by a mechanical process involving the transfer of text or designs to paper. produce (text or a picture) in such a way. publish. produce a paper copy of (information stored on a computer). 2) produce (a photographic print) from a negative. 3) write clearly without joining the letters. 4) mark with a colored design or pattern. make (a mark or indentation) by pressing something on a surface or soft substance. 5) fix firmly or indelibly in someone’s mind.
n. 1) the text appearing in a book, newspaper, etc. the state of being available in published form. [as modifier] of or relating to the printing industry or the printed media. (informal) a newspaper. 2) an indentation or mark left on a surface or soft substance by pressure. (prints) fingerprints. 3) a printed picture or design. a photograph printed on paper from a negative or transparency. a copy of a motion picture or film. 4) a piece of fabric or clothing with a colored pattern or design. a pattern or design of this type.

Handwriting: n. writing with a pen or pencil rather than by typing or printing. a person’s particular style of writing.

Clear: adj. 1) easy to perceive or understand. leaving or feeling no doubt. 2) transparent; unclouded. free of mist; having good visibility. (of a person’s skin) free from blemishes. (of a color) pure and intense. 3) free of any obstructions or unwanted objects. (of a period of time) free of any commitments. 4) free from disease, contamination, or guilt. 5) (clear of) not touching; away from: the lorry had one wheel clear of the ground. 6) complete: seven clear days’ notice. (of a sum of money) net.
adv. 1) so as to be out of the way of, away from, or uncluttered by. 2) with clarity: I heard the message loud and clear.
v. 1) make or become clear. cause people to leave (a building or place). [chiefly soccer] send (the ball) away from the area near one’s goal. discharge (a debt). 2) get past or over (something) safely or without touching it. 3) show or declare officially to be innocent. 4) give official approval or authorization to or for. (of a person or goods) satisfy the necessary requirements to pass through (customs). (with reference to a check) pass or cause to pass through a clearing house so that the money goes into the payee’s account. 5) earn or gain (an amount of money) as a net profit. 6) (of a person’s face or expression) assume a happier or less confused aspect.

Read v. (past and past part. read) 1) look at and comprehend the meaning of (written or printed matter) by interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed. speak (written or printed words) aloud. (of a passage, text, or sign) contain or consist of specified words; have a certain wording. 2) habitually read (a particular newspaper or journal). 3) discover (information) by reading it in a written or printed source. [as adj. read] having a specified level of knowledge as a result of reading: she was well read. 4) understand or interpret the nature or significance of. (of a piece of writing) convey a specified impression to the reader. 5) proofread. 6) present (a bill or other measure) before a legislative assembly. 7) inspect and record the figure indicated on (a measuring instrument). indicate a specified measurement or figure. 8) [chiefly Brit.] study (an academic subject) at a university. 9) (of a computer) copy or transfer (data). enter or extract (data) in an electronic storage device. 10) hear and understand the words of (someone speaking on a radio transmitter).
n. 1) [chiefly Brit.] a period or act of reading. 2) [informal] a book considered in terms of its readability.

NOTES ON PRODUCTION/TEMPORALITY

What follows is some text that was generated while the New Manifesto of the NewLights Press was being made and written. It is a couple of attempts to describe the metonymic, repetitive chains that turn the gears of “the book.”

The book, as it commonly appears, is a repetitive, rhythmic structure. It is built out of a series of overlapping, synchronized, chains of movement. The text moves from letter to letter, word to word, image to image, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter. The book itself moves from page to page. The meaning produced from this reading-movement is of a staccato linearity, flickering, gathering in density at certain points, thinning out at others. Meaning is at once explosive and implosive, connecting out and gathering in.

The book, as it commonly appears, is a repetitive, rhythmic structure. On one side, its inherent temporality seems to make some kind of narrative structure or progression unavoidable—the book, like time, passes. It is (structurally) finite, possessing a clear beginning, middle, and end. We, as readers, expect a book to “take us on a journey.” We, as readers (and viewers), expect books (and all other art) to do what we expect.

But the book, while locked into its endless progression towards the end, constantly frustrates its own temporality by staging exactly the same event over and over again. Each page turns the same as the last. Imagine a story describing, physically, a person reading a book. Could it even be a story, with each occurrence exactly the same as before, maybe slightly recontextualized each time? [footnote 5] The repetitive structure of the book, of its reading, undermines its own progression, nullifying and occupying time at the same time.

PLAY IT UP

From Tony White, “From the Guest Editor,” JAB: The Journal of Artists’ Books number 25 (Spring 2009): p. 3:

[…] In the 1950s, Eugene Feldman started referring to the offset press as his brush and the paper as his canvas. “Painting with the press” was how he described his process of artistic experimentation that he conducted after business hours on the Harris high-speed rotary offset press in his commercial shop. In the 1960s Joe Ruther used the phrase “playing with the press” to describe his experimental approach to pre-press and printing experiments and production. In the late 1970s Philip Zimmermann coined the phrase “production not reproduction” to parse the difference between artistic works and commercially printed products for our industrial society. […] [italics added]

From Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), reprinted in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 968-9:

[…] The work is normally the object of a consumption; no demagogy is intended here in referring to the so-called consumer culture but it has to be recognized that today it is the “quality” of the work (which supposes finally an appreciation of “taste”) and not the operation of reading itself which can differentiate between books: structurally, there is no difference between “cultured” reading and casual reading in trains. The Text (if only by its frequent “unreadability”) decants the work (the work permitting) from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining them in a single signifying practice. The distance separating reading from writing is historical. In the times of the greatest social division (before the setting up of democratic cultures), reading and writing were equally privileges of class. Rhetoric, the great literary code of these times, taught one to write (even if what was then normally produced were speeches, not texts). Significantly, the coming of democracy reversed the word of command: what the (secondary) School prides itself on is teaching to read (well) and no longer to write (consciousness of the deficiency is becoming fashionable again today: the teacher is called upon to teach pupils to “express themselves,” which is a little like replacing a form of repression by a misconception). In fact, reading, in the sense of consuming, is far from playing with the text. “Playing” must be understood here in all its polysemy: the text itself plays (like a door, like a machine with “play”) and the reader plays twice over, playing the Text as one plays a game, looking for a practice which re-produces it, but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a passive, inner mimesis (the Text is precisely that which resists such a reduction), also playing the Text in the musical sense of the term. […] [emphasis added]

THE PRODUCERS

This past weekend I received the new issue of the JAB, The Journal of Artists’ Books. The current issue, # 25, focuses on “high-speed rotary offset printing and the various ways artists have used offset in the creation of their work.” I have yet to give it a thorough read, but one thing that caught my eye/mind was the following phrase, “coined” by Phillip Zimmermann:

“Production NOT Reproduction.”

(Which reminds me of a printmaking t-shirt, made by students at the University of Iowa (I believe?), that reads: “Printmaking, like sex, has never been solely about reproduction.”)

What does this mean for or to the artist/printer? Especially the artist/printer who is using industrial printing processes? An offset press is not a copy machine. It does not automatically reproduce a book or magazine already set into physical form—offset is, most often, the process that locks those texts and images into a definitive physical form for the first time. (Before printing, text and image are manuscripts, dummies, films, separations, etc.—physical but intermediary.) Is there a way to print that puts printing before the construction of the matrix? Probably. But many artist/printers, including a few discussed and discussing in this issue of JAB, allow both components of the construction of the printed object, the matrix and printing process, to affect each other. Here is Phillip Zimmermann’s advice, from the “Foreword” of his book Options for Color Separation: An Artist’s Handbook (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1980):

The techniques described herein are on the whole interpretive rather than reproductive. They have a life of their own and their beauty lies in their own specific qualities rather than in the qualities of an original art work or the precise reproduction of reality “out there.”

This is essentially the high modernist principle of letting, making, the medium speak of its own inherent qualities. Yet somehow it remains radical. Is it because of the fact that it is attached to a process that is the industrial process for the mass production of printed items? Or is the foundational tenet of high modernism more complicated, more pernicious than many “postmodernists,” myself among them, would like to admit? Does such a principle, of letting the medium do its thing, and only its thing, become extraordinarily complicated when the medium is meant for industrial, mass-cultural use? When the medium is considered in a larger social field, instead of a purely physical/optical one?

TECHNICS

A Confession:

The fine craft, precious, luxurious qualities of letterpress printing have always bothered me. I don’t know if I can say exactly why—could it be a strange class anxiety on my part? Some sort of Oedipal complex? A general annoyance with fussiness rewarded and prized?

But I love letterpress printing. So how does that work?

It works, literally works, by mining a space in which the dominant assumptions about how letterpress can/should be used, and what and how it means, can be contested and played with. The tradition of fine printing goes back a long way, but right alongside of it is the fact that up until the 1960s almost everything commercially printed was letterpress as well. That means that for the majority of its 500+ year history, letterpress printing was simply the way in which things were printed, no more, no less.

So, historically, letterpress has its job printing side. A whole area of its signifying history waiting to be mined. Some might say that the job printing aspect is a moot point, as there are now more efficient ways to do job printing, and efficiency has always been the key.

But there are more commercial letterpress shops right now than there have been for a long time. BUT they do high-end, expensive job printing.

BUT their presence in the culture broadens the discourse, because they are teaching people how to print, to think about printing, in a way different from what can be learned in academic settings (which is my background). A whole area of signifying history waiting to be lived.

Printers, printmakers, are (the oldest) media artists. Like photographers, film and video makers, digital artists, we are tied to our equipment to make our work. And thus our equipment plays a role in determining the boundaries of what we can do—how big? How many? How long will it take? What will it cost? Etc.

Access to commercial equipment—fast, accurate, automated printing presses, and photopolymer plates—means that letterpress, within certain circumstances, can still be economically (both time and money) competitive with other methods out there. And the artist still has a tremendous amount of control over the process. Every reason to love the act of printing is still there.

Meaning is never permanently stable. Letterpress printing, like many media, is in a state of flux. Where will it go? We will have to make and see.

HAND-MECHANICAL: THE MARRIAGE OF REASON AND SQUALOR

Figure 04.09.01
Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959
Stella's early paintings are examples of hand-mechanical painting processes.

Excerpted from Caroline A. Jones, The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 148-9:

[…] the painterly aspects of [Frank Stella’s] Black Paintings (and even their "bottomness") still linked them to earlier evocations of the natural sublime. Not yet the fully technological icons of the Aluminum Paintings to come, they could still allude to tenebrous depths, and oceanic (if regular) expanses. Thus, despite the discipline of Stella’s housepainter’s brushstroke in the Black Paintings, there were still drips that escaped, irregular layers of enamel that built up, erratic widths in the painted bands that allowed certain oscillating "breathing lines" between them, ranging from narrow white interstices to mere whispers of oil-stained canvas. Although almost impossible to convey in reproduction, some aspects of this visual instability can be seen in [Fig. 04.09.01], the second version of The Marriage of Reason and Squalor that Stella painted in November 1959 for the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition. The interstitial breathing lines are soft, the bands’ borders ambiguous. There is a perceptible drift to the right as the configuration "leans" towards the painter’s preferred hand, muting the success of the hardening program at which repainting was aimed. The "black" in the earliest canvases is not pure, not complete in its denial of light; mixed with white in the earliest works, it reads as brown or dull gray, a "no color" according to Stella (a color of earth or darkness-in-the-body, which Richardson describes as "a somewhat brownish cast"). The penetration of the glossy enamel into the unprimed cotton duck is erratic. Some layers of Stella’s dutiful overpainting are soaked into a matte texture of dark canvas; other layers are repelled, as the impervious lacquer began to dry and build into a soft sheen. As one moves laterally in relation to the painting, light is reflected, refracted, and absorbed in varying degrees. William Rubin wrote of "being mesmerized" by the Black Paintings "eerie presence," and indeed, I want to argue that the eerie presence of an other world is what gives these paintings their force and bite. Stella’s executive stance was at curious odds with the painter’s workmanlike facture and black deviance; the readings of these canvases that were authorized by their defenders emphasized a brisk, problem-solving approach, but the paintings kept on signifying otherwise. The complex polyvocality of the Black Paintings […] precisely the marriage of reason and squalor—the union of control and flow, the matings between differences, the pleasures of conjugation—[…] allows the procreation of meaning in the Black Paintings […].

NEVER LEAVE A TRACE

I will be writing-designing-printing (making, that is) an insert to be included with the third issue of Mimeo Mimeo. The essay (the written essay, the visual essay, the structural essay) will be about “bad printing” and why it is good sometimes. I prefer the term “naughty printing” myself. The idea for it grew out the manifesto, and from some of the comments about it that I have received. It goes back to Andy Warhol’s comment on why he made his films the way that he did, paraphrased here: If you do it badly, people realize they’re watching a film.

So “bad printing” becomes a way to make the process legible, to leave the marks of the making visible. It is an idea related to the “unfinished” or “unrefined” canvases of the abstract expressionist painters. But a printer cannot assert themselves, their presence, in the same manner that a painter can. Printing is, by its nature, always removed, always always already. The printer is a machine-like absence, and it is only in the movement of the process of production that a trace of the printer can be found.

The traditional approach to printing, the “crystal goblet” approach, dictates that the printer should not show themselves in the final work, as to do so would interrupt the transmission of the contents, would leave fingerprints on the surface of the goblet, so to speak. I believe that this idea guides “fine art printmaking” as well, as far as the actual process of printing goes. Approaches to the construction of printing matrices are radically different, but the approach to printing remains fundamentally unchanged. There are, of course, always exceptions.

It would seem that this “crystal goblet” approach is very postmodern. Didn’t postmodernism begin with the suppression of the artist’s hand, with the readymade, the fabricated industrial object, and the simulacra of popular culture? The problem is, in printing, not showing one’s hand has always been the way to play. Printing never went through the same modernist-postmodernist development that painting did, except when it was chained to painting, (re)producing its already thought out, already authorized images.

Hal Foster (in the book Return of the Real, quoted here) puts forth the idea that the logic of seriality is central to modernism and postmodernism. Seriality comes directly from the printed object, and Modernism and its Post did as well. Printers, printmakers, have failed to acknowledge this in their work, beyond vague references through appropriated imagery. But the articulation of those concepts cannot come only through content, it must come through form, the processes of production, and the modes of reception as well.

QUOTES & FLOATING QUESTIONS

“A book is a flexible mirror of the mind and the body. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little bit about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.”
–Robert Bringhurst

“I want to be a machine.” –Andy Warhol

How can the emergent texts and practices of postmodernism in the visual arts (minimalism, pop, conceptual art, etc.), in which the artists’ book had its beginning as an “art genre,” be used to re-evaluate the artists’ book and push it toward a productive, generative, and/or critical fusion with contemporary art & writing?

Is it possible, given the current state of criticism in the field of bookarts, to come up with a working theoretical model, for use by a working artist, that can account for producing different “types” of books (“artists’ books” vs. “fine press books,” etc.)? Is a theoretical model even needed? Should artists maintain or cultivate an ambivalent attitude towards those categories and just see what comes out? What comes first, the theory or the work?

How does the Book Arts vs. Artists’ Books discussion fit into, or follow the lines of, the art/craft discussion? Is it just a specialized version of that argument?

Is there only “good craft (well-made)” and “bad craft (poorly made)?” Or are there “other” modes of working within the terms of craftsmanship that open new subjective categories?

ONE AMONG MANY

So I’ve been giving serious thought lately to the idea of starting a literary/art journal (or a literary art journal.) Evidence of this thought process is right here:

The initial idea, heavily influenced by/stolen or adapted from Wallace Berman’s Semina, was to create a journal that was open in form—to print the contributions on a variety of sizes, shapes, and colors of paper and issue each subscriber a 3-ring binder in which they were free to arrange the “issues” of the journal as they liked. The idea, then, is to put some of the material and editorial control, those things that I get to enjoy all the time, into the hands of the subscriber. But I don’t think I like that initial idea, and here’s why:

It won’t really work that well. I bet, despite everyone’s best intentions, that all of the various pieces of paper would just sit in their envelopes, looked through but once, and the binder would never be filled. It would be one of those things that would fall by the wayside for most people. I probably wouldn’t be able to keep it up. One solution to this problem would be to do maybe only 4 issues, and have them released in a pretty rapid succession, in order to sustain the energy and engagement. Maybe. But then that’s 6 months to a year of commitment just on that piece…

The second reason I don’t like that idea is because it relies on the old technique of “I, the artist, so special, will give you, the viewer, so pedestrian, a chance to access my unlimited and god-like powers. If only you could be like me!” What would the subscribers’ gain from being able to arrange their own journals? This is a small world we operate in, so half of them would probably already be running a journal of their own. Other than that, it would only be a mildly fun activity, partly a chore, and they would only buy into the process if they simultaneously bought into my authority, but the point of doing this kind of piece would be to undermine and question that authority. But any questioning cannot occur this way. So the idea must be adjusted.

VIV*I*SEC*TION

Books are living things. Thus:

1. the action of cutting into or dissecting a living body.

2. the practice of subjecting living animals to cutting operations, esp. in order to advance physiological and pathological knowledge.

MONDAY

A few notes on this fine morning:

The artist Nick Deford has put up a new website. He uses the word “hand-mechanical” in his artist’s statement. I plan on writing about that in relation to Nick’s work, which I like very much.

Laying plans for an essay for Mimeo Mimeo. About “bad printing.” Should be fun.

I am undecided about Watchmen (the movie).

The text for (De)Collage continues to grow. Latest draft:

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’.

THE HAND-MECHANICAL: FIRST ATTEMPT

(pulled from the New Manifesto of the NewLights Press)

The processes of building the book, as a unique object or as a multiple, give way to a particular mode of production. These processes, such as typing, setting lead type, stenciling, stamping, folding pages, sewing signatures, are repetitive and machinelike, but they are performed by a person, by hand. They are hand-mechanical. Such processes can be found in and can inform any other artistic discipline as well, as seen in printmaking in its broad sense, painting/drawing (as in the stripe paintings of Frank Stella and the wall drawings of Sol Lewitt), the fiber arts (crocheting, knitting), and even writing (the “uncreative writing” of Kenneth Goldsmith).

The idea of the hand-mechanical draws the making of books away from the preciousness of the “handmade,” of the consummate taste/skill of the master craftsperson (vestiges of authority there), and towards the literality of industrial processes, without losing the methodical rigor so valued in the book arts and so necessary to independent production.

[…] “Meaning” partially or totally converted into “use” is the secret behind the widespread strategy of literalness […]. The narratives of Kafka and Beckett seem puzzling because they appear to invite the reader to ascribe high-powered symbolic and allegorical meanings to them and, at the same time, repel such ascriptions. The truth is that their language, when it is examined, discloses no more than what it literally means. The power of their language derives precisely from the fact that the meaning is so bare. […]

SHAZAM!

This morning, 28 copies of the New Manifesto of the NewLights Press, 1 copy of the Movement-Image, 1 copy of the Drownable Species, and 1 copy of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer all went out in the mail. Things are moving...

THE ANXIETY OF ANXIETY

I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety lately. Up until now, I’ve been able to work in relative isolation, making small editions of books that were seen by a small group of people. All of that is starting to change now. Although the group of people seeing my work is only a little bit bigger at this point (going from very small to not-as-very-small), it is now being seen and read by some people who are very well established in the field, people whose work I respect and admire. Having them read the work is very exciting. It’s also slightly terrifying. Funny how the two often go together. These things, this life, never goes how one expects it to. So I am anxious to see what happens from here.

To review (my position): I have been making books for almost nine years. I graduated with my MFA a little more than a year ago, and have been in the Bay Area for almost as long. I turned 29 this month. I work full-time as a letterpress printer at a small commercial studio. Over that past year, I have released 3 books. I want to ramp that up. I want to raise the stakes.

It’s strange, to be suddenly in a conversation. This blog is part of that, as I use it to announce things, and more often to sketch out critical and theoretical positions on various bookish/artish topics. And I’m seeing how this works. I’m learning what it means to be “out there.”

Absolutely.

Terrifying.

As it must.