FORM VS. FUNCTION

Figs. 04.09.04-05
Two forms, one for general correspondence (Fig. 04.09.04) and one purchase record/invoice (Fig. 04.09.05). More of the “Bureaucracy of One.”

THEY ALWAYS MAKE ME COME BACK

I spent the end of last week at the Celebration of the Chapbook, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. It featured a bookfair with various publishers of chapbooks and chapbookish things, panel discussions, and workshops. As mentioned briefly in my previous post, I had a great deal of fun, and I am really glad that I went.

The whole thing was well-organized. Turn-out was good. There was the usual bookfair conflict where as an exhibitor one is torn between going to the panels and staying at one’s table. That is a problem that it takes specific planning to avoid. The panels, one on the history of chapbooks, one on chapbooks nowadays, were interesting. I did not attend any of the workshops.

There was some great work on the tables. Highlights (for me) include:

Ugly Duckling Presse is a publishing collective that is putting out tons, tons of great work.

Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs is the publishing venture of Brenda Iijima, and they are releasing books from a variety of interesting writers.

X-ing Books/Booklyn: Booklyn is an artists’ books group in NY. X-ing Books is a sub-sect that is doing some literary publishing. Mark Wagner (of both groups) was kind enough to show me some of his decidedly unchapbook, high end artists’ books.

And of course there was Cuneiform Press (say no more).

I came home with a bunch of new books—bought, traded, and gifted. I also unloaded a bunch of work (see post below) and spread the word about Et Al.

My favorite thing about doing these fairs is the amazing, kind, generous, intelligent, and engaged people that I get to meet and hang out with. Incredible.

GONE, GONE, ALL THAT GONE

The Collected Books of Jack Spicer and The Book 1: The Movement-Image are now officially out of print. The Chapbook Fair in NYC was a lot of fun.

ET AL, FOUND

In order to make the pertinent information readily accessible for all you soon-to-be contributors out there, a new, separate blogsite has been started for Et Al., the journal that we will soon be starting. The site will grow as work begins on the journal, but for now it is just submission and contact info. I can't wait to see what you send. Visit the site:

http://www.etaljournal.blogspot.com

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

If you are (or are going to be) in NYC at the end of this week, you should come to:

A CELEBRATION OF THE CHAPBOOK

(From the website) "A Celebration of the Chapbook festival calls attention to the rich history of the chapbook and highlights its essential place in poetry publishing today as a vehicle for alternative poetry projects and for emerging authors and editors to gain entry into the literary marketplace. The festival will forge a new platform for the study of the chapbook inside and outside the academy and celebrate the importance of chapbooks to America’s cultural heritage and future."

at The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue & 34th St

For a full schedule, list of exhibitors, location, and times, click here.

I will be sharing a table at the Chapbook Fair with Cuneiform Press, so that's a high density of mind-blowing books in a 30" x 72" area. Come and say hi. I would love to show you some books.

PREPARATIONS

This weekend I was working on the info sheets for Et Al., to be handed out at the Celebration of the Chapbook this week in NYC. Images:



Figs. 04.09.02-03
Both sides of the new cards. The construction of this card is the beginning of negotiating what the journal will look like. These images were made from the digital files. The printed version of the second image has a variable stripe attained from an almost empty toner cartridge.

OUT THERE (PUBLISHING)

Yesterday I was happy to receive an envelope of treasures (books) from Adam Robinson of Publishing Genius, located in the city-of-my-heart, Baltimore, Maryland. The magazine Poets & Writers recently released a nice article about one of Adam’s many projects: Is Reads, a journal that is not, physically, like other journals. The pages are hung up around Baltimore City (it also operates in Nashville) in various public places. I have seen other public poetry ideas like this implemented, but I don’t know of any that are run as a journal—which is crucial, because organizing the project like a journal makes the path of transmission of it public to public, as opposed to private to public, the typical path of transmission for poetry, whether printed in a book, or posted on a website and/or telephone pole. (That public, of course, is made up an aggregate of individual privates, on both ends of the transmission.) The community of the journal becomes literally (literarily?) embedded within the public space that the larger community occupies, and when the poems get noticed, they may for second, help to draw attention, simultaneously, both to the poem and to that public space. I think Adam put it best: "...for the ten seconds people stand in front of it, I hope they just kind of wonder about poetry again."

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?

TALKIN' NEW YORK

The NewLights Press is very excited to be participating in this:

A CELEBRATION OF THE CHAPBOOK

Thursday April 23rd, 2009 - Saturday April 25th, 2009

A Celebration of the Chapbook festival calls attention to the rich history of the chapbook and highlights its essential place in poetry publishing today as a vehicle for alternative poetry projects and for emerging authors and editors to gain entry into the literary marketplace. The festival will forge a new platform for the study of the chapbook inside and outside the academy and celebrate the importance of chapbooks to America’s cultural heritage and future.

Thursday, April 23
at The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue & 34th St

Chapbook Fair
10:00am-6:00pm, The Elebash Recital Hall Lobby

Brief History of Chapbooks
3:00-4:30pm, The Elebash Recital Hall
With Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection; Eric Lorberer, Editor of Rain Taxi; and Michael Ryan, Director of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia University. Moderated by Richard Kaye, Hunter College, CUNY

Chapbooks in the 20th and 21st Centuries
4:30-6:00pm, The Elebash Recital Hall
With Michael Basinski, Assistant Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, SUNY at Buffalo; Anne Waldman, Chair and Artistic Director of Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program; and Kevin Young, Emory University. Moderated by Ammiel Alcalay, Queens College, CUNY.

Keynote Reading
6:00pm, The Elebash Recital Hall
Readings by Lytton Smith, Gerald Stern, Judith Vollmer, Kevin Young and others, with an introduction by Kimiko Hahn.

Friday, April 24
at The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue & 34th St

Chapbook Fair
10:00am-4:00pm, Rooms 8301/8304

Chapbook Now: Producing Chapbooks
A Workshop for Poets
10:00-11:30am, Room 8400
With Rachel Levitsky (Belladonna*); Sharon Dolin (The Center for Book Arts); and Ryan Murphy (North Beach Yacht Club). Moderated by Alice Quinn (Poetry Society of America).

Chapbook Now: Producing Chapbooks
A Workshop for Publishers
11:30am-1:00pm, Room 8402
With Jen Benka (Booklyn); Matvei Yankelevich (Ugly Duckling Presse); and Brenda Iijima
(Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). Moderated by Rob Casper (Poetry Society of America).

To register, call (212) 817-2005 or e-mail abozicevic@gc.cuny.edu – registration is offered on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Friday, April 24
at The Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor

Bookmaking for Writers: A Studio Workshop
With Susan Mills and Karen Randall
2:00-5:00pm

Bookmaking for Publishers: A Studio Workshop
With Susan Mills and Karen Randall
2:00-5:00pm

To register, call (212) 481-0295 or e-mail info@centerforbookarts.org – registration is
offered on a first-come, first-serve basis. There's a $20 materials fee for each workshop.

RECEPTION
at The Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor
6:00 pm
All are welcome! Visit the exhibitions at The Center for Book Arts: \’fl \:art, text, new media,
Roni Gross: Zitouna at 20, and Spotlight: 2008 Artists-in-Residence.

Saturday, April 25
at The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 16 West 32nd Street, Suite 10A

Collector’s Show-and-Tell:
The Secret History of Asian American Literature
Patricia Wakida
2:00-3:00pm

Publishing from the Margins
4:30-6:00pm
With Tan Lin; Dawn Lundy Martin (Third Wave Foundation, Black Took Collective); and Bushra Rehman. Moderated by Ken Chen (The Asian American Writers’ Workshop). Followed by a brief reading from the Workshop's Postcard Poetry Project.

RECEPTION
at The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 16 West 32nd Street, Suite 10A
6:00 pm

Co-sponsored by The Office of Academic Affairs, The Graduate Center and MFA Programs in Creative Writing of the City University of New York, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Center for Book Arts and Poetry Society of America

Participating Publishers

Achiote Press

Belladonna*

Booklyn

Book Thug

Cuneiform Press

Dancing Girl Press

Diagram/New Michigan Press

Flying Guillotine Press

NewLights Press

Noemi Press

North Beach Yacht Club

Octopus Books

Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs

Rain Taxi

Sarabande Books

Slapering Hol

Small Fires Press

TinFish Press

Toadlily Press

Ubu Editions

Ugly Duckling Presse

X-ing Press

­and others

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 […].

THE OWLS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM

Fishing around on the Internet during morning coffee turned this up this:

http://www.signoftheowl.com/blog/

It's a blog about artists' books, by Elisabeth Long, who lives in Chicago. I have yet to do a thorough reading, but a brief skim makes it clear that the posts are meaty & thoughtful. I will be adding it to the list...

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.

YE OLDE BLOGGUE

is not the focus this week. More next.

PRESS CHECK!

This morning, so no time to write!

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?

SCHMIMAGE

Here’s an old one:


Beth Staples & Aaron Cohick
Image
Delaminated paper
14” x 11”
Edition of 35
2006
Done as a part of the Visual Text Project, a print exchange portfolio featuring collaborations between visual artists and writers.

CHANGES

A few changes have been made to the Et Al. submission guidelines, specifically:

A limit has been placed on the number of images that can be submitted: no more than 5.

A limit has been added to the “Other” category of submissions: up to 3. It should also be noted that “Other” submissions are just as open to change as the other types, perhaps even more so, as they will each require serious logistical planning and negotiation.

A more specific publishing schedule: if the first issue, “Material,” comes out by the end of this year, let’s say November or December, then the fourth and last issue, “Potential,” will be released a year and a half after that, May of 2011.

All changes listed here have also been written into the original post, so all information is consolidated.

ET AL., AN EXPERIMENTAL JOURNAL OF THE LITERARY & VISUAL ARTS

The NEWLIGHTS PRESS is seeking FOOLHARDY ADVENTURERS in the LITERARY & VISUAL ARTS to embark upon a PERILOUS JOURNEY through the land of EXPERIMENTAL ARTWORKS. What we RISK is the loss of FAME, FORTUNE, even the COMFORTABLE BOUNDARIES of our own WORK and IDENTITIES. What we will GAIN is a NEW, TEMPORARY WORLD of SHARED and INFINITE POTENTIAL.

Et Al. is an experimental journal focused on the possible intersections of the literary and visual arts. It starts from the idea of an “arts journal” as a (non)site of the collective production and reception of meaning; one object, in multiple, built from multiple inputs and transmitting to multiple outputs. While traditional journals operate by reproducing text and images as discreet entities centered around a common theme, aesthetic direction, or author-function, Et Al. will be built on the principle of active production and the legible intersection(s) of text, image, typography, material, printing processes, and the temporal structure of the book form. Each issue of Et Al. will be, in essence, an artists’ book of rhizomatic (non)authorship, textually, visually, and structurally.

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Et Al. will consist of 4 issues, to be published at the theoretical rate of 2 per year. Each of the four issues will have a theme: 1) Material, 2) Structure, 3) Production, and 4) Potential. Submissions will be accepted on an ongoing basis (with a “soft deadline” for encouragement), and the individual issues will be considered filled when enough material condenses around that potentiality. The rough (ever subject to change) publishing schedule:

1 MATERIAL: November 2009
2 STRUCTURE: May 2010
3 PRODUCTION: November 2010
4 POTENTIAL: May 2011

The nature of this project requires that all contributors give up “absolute control” of how their work is presented (an illusion anyway). What this means is that images may be cropped, flipped, halftoned, overprinted, etc. and that text may be cut, interpolated into another text, disarranged, typographically disrupted, and/or spread across a series of pages. That being said, part of the process for the preparation of each issue will be an opportunity for each contributor to work back into their piece or pieces in its new form (details below). Submissions of fragments, unfinished, totally bizarre, or “what the hell do I do with this?” pieces is encouraged.

SUBMISSION FORMATS
Submissions of all types of visual, textual, and literary art will be considered. General guidelines for the different types below:

IMAGES: This category includes text as image. Keep in mind that these images will undergo (probably black and white) graphic reproduction. Submit no more than 5 images as digital files, JPEGs of 300 dpi at 100% of their original size. While email submissions are preferred, files over 8 MB should be sent on a CD (mailing address below). Ideas and suggestions for how the images should be used are welcome.

TEXT: Submit 2-5 pages of proofed writing (poetry, prose, fiction, scholarly, critical, what-have-you) as a Microsoft Word or PDF document. Ideas and suggestions for possibilities of the how the text can be formatted are welcome.

OTHER: Submissions for specific interventions into the form of the journal will also be considered (example: safety pin these 3 printed images onto the upper right corner of a page). You may submit up to 3 different proposals. Logistics for these types of submissions will be negotiated with the individual contributor, and each will probably have to change (at least a little) to fit into the overall structure of each issue. Please keep in mind that while we here at the NewLights Press are known for labor-intensive work, there is actually only one of us, and he has other things to work on too.

All submissions should be made via email to newlightspressATgmailDOTcom. Please use “Submission: Et Al.” as the subject line. Attach all submissions as separate files. Be sure to include the following information in the body of your email:

Your name
Your mailing address
Your email address
Which theme you are submitting for: (Material, Structure, Production, and/or Potential. Multiple theme submissions are okay.)
A little bit about yourself (if we don’t know you already) and relevant web links to see more of your work. The idea here, ultimately, is the growth of a community. Links will most likely become part of a simultaneous electronic announcement at the time each issue is published.

Mail physical submissions (only if you have to, and be sure to include the info listed above) to:

NewLights Press
601 William St. # 413
Oakland, CA 94612

Decisions as to what submissions will be included will be made as soon as they can be, but final decisions cannot be made until each issue begins to take shape. Some pieces will be accepted immediately to form the basic skeletons of the issues, others will need to be marinated and tenderized before they are ready. All responses to submissions will be made via email.

As each issue draws closer to publication, each contributor will have the chance to revise their piece(s). All contributors will be sent a PDF proof of their piece as it stands in relation to the rest of the journal, and they will have the chance to make edits (or suggestions of edits, depending on how drastic) before the pieces are committed to print. We want all the contributors to be both surprised and pleased by the final form that their pieces take.

(A brief editorial aside: A valid question at this point is: “You expect all of the contributors to give up “absolute control” of their work, but what you’re doing is taking that control for yourself. How is that sharing?” The answer: Yes, we agree, and that was the main theoretical problem we had to face when thinking this thing through. We hope to lessen our own control through the following means: 1) letting contributors respond to and rework their pieces after initial formatting, 2) opening the submissions to the “Other” category of structural interventions, and 3) by soliciting the input and help of other printers and bookmakers in production. If there are any volunteers for such a task, please let me know.)

10-20 contributors will be included in each issue. The journal will be produced in editions of 100-200, using a combination of letterpress, digital printing, collage, and hand-mechanical painting/drawing on a variety of materials. Each contributor will receive 2-3 copies of the issue that they are in.

Did we forget anything? Questions? Comments? Please use the comment option below.

The deadline for submissions for the first issue, “MATERIAL,” is May 31st, 2009. Thank you for your time and interest.

THIS THEORETICAL JOURNAL

I've been spending most of my time this week reading and thinking, as is usually the case immediately after I finish a big push. My main goal for the coming weekend is to put together all of the necessary information to get started on the aforementioned "journal," and so that all of you can start to think about contributing...

PRINTER'S FAIR!!!

For all you folks in the Bay Area, the Pacific Center for the Book Arts is now taking reservations for tables at its annual Printer's Fair. The Fair will be held on Saturday, May 9th, from 9 AM to 4 PM at Fort Mason in San Francisco. The tables are reasonably priced, and although I did not go last year (was out of the loop, apparently) I have heard that it's a lot of fun. I sent in my table reservation yesterday...

With Codex, this PCBA fair, and the San Francisco Zine Fest, that makes 3 fairs just this year. The Bay Area is a good place to be a book person.

(DE)COLLAGE

This morning I sent off my entry for the MCBA Prize. Below are some images from the book, followed by a formal description:





The work presented here, (De)Collage, is the latest in a series of sustained, rigorous engagements with the idea and form of the altered book. The original book was Collage: The Making of Modern Art, by Brandon Taylor (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), a beautifully illustrated and in-depth survey of the role that collage (as well as the related principles of assemblage and appropriation) has played in the development of modern and postmodern art. The alteration enacted on the book is one of massive excision—all text and images were systematically removed through delamination, a technique of cutting through just the surface layers of a sheet of paper and peeling them away. Only the ascenders and descenders of the text and a thin band of the outside edges of the images remain. A new text has been added, through the delamination of stencilled letters, at the bottom of each page, running into the gutters and around the fore-edge. This new text is built on the same principle as the rest of the book; it was “written” by removing words from the original text.

(De)Collage is, mainly, a meditation on discursive form and the strange, unstable image-text-object nature of the book. It takes as its starting point the “moment of collage,” that moment when, through the simple, rebellious act of gluing a piece of paper into a painting, art began to split into the two dominant discourses of the 20th century: hermetic, formalist modernism (that piece of paper makes the picture plane apparent, the formal nature of the medium is emphasized) and open, multiple, post modernism (that piece of paper, found and stuck to the surface of the picture, brings the rest of the world into the conversation). The act of excision in (De)Collage is an act that bends both of those discourses back into each other. The ideal, two-dimensional picture plane is exposed as a three-dimensional object. The radically inclusive, surgically specific bricolage of the art historical images and text is reduced to a series of abstract signs and traces. A simple act of deconstruction brings both discourses back into play.

INSPIRATION, THE STOLEN, THE MEDITATIVE, THE HAND-MECHANICAL

1) “The only literature is voluntary literature.

If I may refer to the henceforth famous dictum in Odile, we can add to this notion the considerable consequences resulting from the fact that: The really inspired person is never inspired, but always inspired. What does this mean? What? This thing so rare, inspiration, this gift of the gods which makes the poet, and which this unhappy man never quite deserves in spite of all his heartaches, this enlightenment coming from who knows where, is it possible that it might cease to be capricious, and that any and everybody might find it faithful and compliant to his desires? The serious revolution, the sudden change this simple sentence introduced into a conception of literature still wholly dominated by romantic effusions and the exaltation of subjectivity, has never been fully analyzed. In fact, this sentence implied the revolutionary conception of the objectivity of literature, and from that time forward opened the latter to all possible modes of manipulation. In short, like mathematics, literature could be explored.”

2) “Deep thanks to Richard O’Russa and Situations Press for the republication of several pages from O’Russa’s Elastic Latitudes. The section “Zeros and Ones” was written directly out of a process of copying the pages of Elastic Latitudes, a typewriter-written poem made entirely of the numbers 0 and 1, into duplicate lines with the numbers spelled out. By the end of each page I would be in a trance-like empty state and write what turned out to be all the poems that make up that middle section.”

1. Jean Lescure, “Brief History of the Oulipo,” Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, ed. Warren F. Motte, Jr. (Illinois State University: Dalkey Archive Press, 1986), 34.

2. Anselm Berrigan, Zero Star Hotel, (Washington D.C.: Edge Books, 2002), copyright page. This quote is from the thanks/acknowledgements section.

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.

PRIORITIES

Were not this blog this morning. Thanks for bearing with me.

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. […]

(DE)COLLAGE

This morning I started to write the text for the altered book that I am working on. The book, called (De)Collage, physically functions on the principle of delamination. I am slowly removing all of the contents from the book—images and text, leaving behind just the 1/16” inch strip at the outermost edges of the images. I will be adding new text as well, also built on a subtractive principle, the same method used by Lauren Bender in her Dictionary Poems—words are crossed out from the original text, and what is left behind is the new text. The first two sentences:

“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.”

These kinds of writing practices, based in the idea of collage, provide a different sort of interaction with language than “traditional” writing. These methods are not new—they first came into the wide literary discourse with the “cut-up” work of William S. Burroughs in the 1960s (though the idea was certainly implemented before that)—but they are fundamentally different from, and thus provide different results than, “normal” modes of writing (what I’m doing now). To quote the book artist Emily McVarish (who uses collage-based writing in her work), these processes “externalize” language, they separate language from the voice and from the interior monologue constantly droning in our heads. This externalization makes language new, and strange, even abject sometimes. Its material aspects, its rules, its pieces, its weird physicality (the actualization of language through writing/reading(language exists in time)) becomes readily apparent. Methods like these, as well as methods based in randomness and/or constraint, help the writer to see their habitual relationship to the words that they write. To see a process, to see one’s position in it, is to be able to manipulate it.

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...