7:8:1

7 one word poems of 8 letters or less by various authors
Including contributions from: Lauren Bender, Anselm Berrigan, Aaron Cohick, Jeremy Sigler, Hunter Stabler, Nate Wilson, and John Yau
24 pages, softcover, saddle stapled, 4 ¼” x 9”
Letterpress and screenprinted cover with photocopied text pages
Edition of 100
2003
$3 Currently unavailable

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

the survivalist’s guide to contemporary mood inhibitors

Poems and images by Justin Sirois
114 pages (versos unprinted), softcover, perfect bound, 8 ¼” x 5 ½”
Letterpress printed cover with photocopied text pages
Edition of 50
2002
Out of Print

A PORTRAIT OF THE YOUNG JUNKY IN TERMINAL NEED

Systems-based text and collage images by Aaron Cohick
32 pages, case-bound with printed dust jacket, 8 ¼” x 5 1/2”
Letterpress printed images, digitally printed text
Edition of 10
2002
$100 Currently unavailable

VIVISECTIONS

Experimental texts by Aaron Cohick
56 pages (versos unprinted), softcover, saddle stapled, 8” x 5 ¼”
Letterpress printed cover with photocopied text pages
Edition of 50
2001
Out of Print

DUCK DUCK GOOSE

Images and text by M. Bovie
76 pages (versos unprinted), softcover, saddle stapled, 5 3/8” x 4”
Screenprinted cover with photocopied text pages
Edition of 50
2001
Out of Print

MY DREAM ABOUT ROCKS

Text and image narrative by Hannah Dougherty
94 pages (versos unprinted), softcover, perfect bound, 5 ½” x 4 ¼”
Screenprinted cover with photocopied text pages
Edition of 50
2000
Out of Print

99 WAYS TO DIE

List poem compiled by Aaron Cohick
204 pages (versos unprinted), softcover, perfect bound, 5 ½” x 4 1/8”
Screenprinted cover with photocopied text pages
Edition of 50
2000
Out of Print

HOW I FEEL ABOUT YOU

Drawings and text by Hannah Dougherty
48 pages (versos unprinted), softcover, saddle stapled, 5 ½” x 4 ¼”
Laser printed cover (on construction paper) with photocopied text pages
Edition of 50
2000
Out of Print

AD ASTRA PER ASPERA

Poems by Justin Edwards, images by Aaron Cohick
102 pages (versos unprinted), softcover, perfect bound, 8 ¼” x 5 ½”
Screenprinted cover with photocopied text pages, also contains 6 three color screenprints
Edition of 50
2000
Out of Print

A SHORT TREATISE ON DEATH AND TRANSFORMATION

Here is another excerpt from the in-progress manifesto:

Digital technology has killed the book, finally. Digital technology has killed the book in the same way that photography, once upon a time, killed painting. The book has been freed of its mimetic function—it no longer has to look like, function like, a "crystal goblet."

“There are no more books to be written, thank God.”

UPDATE

My apologies for the sporadic posting. Moved to a new apartment in a new city over the weekend, and I have yet to establish a workspace. Everything in boxes, not even a place to type.

More soon.

AWAY, AWAY

Going to be on the road for the next few days. Posting will resume on Tuesday. I know you're heartbroken, but there's nothing I can do.

FIZZLE(S) #1

This morning I tried to write a thoughtful post about my reasons for using, almost militantly these days, collage (stealing) as a basic premise for working. I couldn’t get anything good going in a reasonable amount of time, so, in the spirit of the public/private ambiguity that books and this blog are partially about, what follows is the two aborted attempts (by the way, I lifted the title for this post from ol’ Sam Beckett):


A regular reader of this blog might notice that I have a predilection for copying text from other books and re-producing it here. It’s true—I’m a collagist, a borrower, a plagiarist, a thief. I always have been.

I initially learned to draw from copying the pictures in comic books. (My interest in comics would eventually lead me into my first forays into self-publishing, with photocopied and stapled books.) Later on, in art school, thinking I was a painter, I almost always based the compositions for the abstract, mixed media/collage paintings that I was doing on another source, either recycled drawings of mine or an art historical reference. What the source was was only of vague importance to me; most of all I needed a place to start. The blank canvas seemed impossible. I couldn’t come to terms with starting from nowhere. Back then (20 years old, on the verge of making my first book), using some sort of source was just part of my process, something I did, like sharpening a pencil—it did not figure into the overall conceptual configuration of any individual piece or into my larger ideas of what I was actually doing (of which there were none, admittedly).

A regular reader of this blog might notice that I have a predilection for copying text from another book and re-producing it here. It’s true—I’m a collagist, a borrower, a plagiarist, a thief. I always have been.

I have my reasons, other than the perverse enjoyment I get from sitting and retyping another piece of text, which is the kind of meditative, hand-mechanical work that is extremely common in bookmaking. How different is it from setting another writer’s work in lead type?

COMMUNITY, HISTORY, A RESOLUTION, MANY THANKS

The past few weeks have put some important publications into my hands. Important in the sense of personal importance; those books that you encounter (or re-encounter) and instantly feel connected to, that are so critical at that very moment that after you begin them you can’t imagine not having read them, of living your life without their articulations and revelations.

The first of those is the journal Mimeo Mimeo, edited by Kyle Schlesinger and Jed Birmingham. Here is their editorial statement, copied from the contents page:

“Mimeo Mimeo is a forum for critical and cultural perspectives on artists’ books, fine press printing, and the mimeograph revolution. This periodical features essays, interviews, artifacts, and reflections on the graphic, material, and textual conditions of contemporary poetry and language arts.

Taking our cue from Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips’ ground-breaking sourcebook, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, we see the mimeograph as one among many printing technologies (letterpress, offset, silkscreen, photocopiers, computers, etc.) that enabled poets, artists, and editors to become independent publishers. As editors, we have no allegiance to any particular medium or media. We understand the mimeo revolution as an attitude—a material and immaterial perspective on the politics of print.”

The second book is actually the one that they make reference to, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960-1980, by Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips (New York: New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998). (This is a book that I’ve owned for awhile, but it was in storage for years. I needed it again.) It’s a book about the “mimeo revolution”: the explosion of independent publishing (and of an American poetic avant-garde) around the country from 1960-1980.

Here are some excerpts (one from the beginning, one from the end) from the Pre-Face, written by the poet and scholar Jerome Rothenberg:

“Since everyone loves a paradox, let me start off with this now familiar one: the mainstream of American poetry, the part by which it has been & will be known, has long been in the margins, nurtured in the margins, carried forward, vibrant, in the margins. As mainstream and margin both, it represents our underground economy as poets, the gray market for our spiritual/corporeal exchanges. It is the creation as such of those poets who have seized or often have invented their own means of production and of distribution. The autonomy of the poets is of singular importance here—not something we’ve been stuck with faute de mieux but something we’ve demanded as a value that must (repeat: must) remain first & foremost under each poet’s own control. And this is because poetry as we know & want it is the language of those precisely at the margins—born there, or more often still, self-situated: a strategic position from which to struggle with the center of the culture & with a language that we no longer choose to bear.

[…]

And while the Reagan years might have brought about a new resistance (& sometimes did), they also brought a new defensiveness in what became increasingly a culture war directed against the avant-garde rather than by it. The secret locations of this book’s title were no longer secret but had come into a new & far less focused visibility & a fusion/confusion, often, with the commercial & cultural conglomerates of the American center. Increasingly too there had developed a dependence on support from institutional & governmental sources—the National Endowment for the Arts, say, as the major case in point. The result was to impose a gloss of professionalism on the alternative publications & to make obsolete the rough & ready book works of the previous two decades. But the greatest danger of patronage was that the denial of that patronage, once threatened, would become an issue that would override all others.
At the present time, then, the lesson of the works presented here is the reminder of what is possible where the makers of the works seek out the means to maintain & fortify their independence. […]”

So now I want to explain, briefly, why these two publications are so relevant (if it’s not already obvious from the stolen statements posted above). It’s actually pretty simple, one book connects the NewLights Press/me to my history, and the other book connects me to my contemporaries. These books begin to build a community with a historical trajectory, and they provide that community with examples of shared past practices that can be mined for the future. After a year of living (essentially) alone on the western edge of the continent, I feel deeply connected, and I want to start making my contribution, seriously. There is always so much work to be done. Hence:

I am setting a new NewLights Press goal for publication: three chap(ish)books per year, at least two of which will be with a writer/artist that I’ve never worked with before. Giving up the first part of this year to the new manifesto and the Codex Symposium, there will still be two to follow. Be warned.

SIGN-CHAIN #3: DIS-

From Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press/October Books, 1996), 2-3:

“In ‘What is an Author?’, a text written in early 1969 in the heyday of such returns, Michel Foucault writes in passing of Marx and Freud as ‘initiators of discursive practices,’ and he asks why a return is made at particular moments to the originary texts of Marxism and psychoanalysis, a return in the form of a rigorous reading. The implication is that, if radical (in the sense of radix: to the root), the reading will not be another accretion of the discourse. On the contrary, it will cut through layers of paraphrase and pastiche that obscure its theoretical core and blunt its political edge. Foucault names no names, but clearly he has in mind the readings of Marx and Freud made by Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, respectively. (Again, he writes in early 1969, or four years after Althusser published For Marx and Reading Capital and three years after the Ecrits of Lacan appeared—and just months after May 1968, a revolutionary moment in constellation with other such moments in the past.) In both returns the stake is the structure of the discourse stripped of additions: not so much what Marxism or psychoanalysis means as how it means—and how it has transformed our conceptions of meaning. […] The moves within these two returns are different: Althusser defines a lost break within Marx, whereas Lacan articulates a latent connection between Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure, the contemporaneous founder of structural linguistics, a connection implicit in Freud (for example, in his analysis of the dream as a process of condensation and displacement, a rebus of metaphor and metonymy) but impossible for him to think as such (given the epistemological limits of his own historical position). But the method of these returns is similar: to focus on the ‘constructive omission’ crucial to each discourse. The motives are similar too: not only to restore the radical integrity of the discourse but to challenge its status in the present, the received ideas that deform its structure and restrict its efficacy. This is not to claim the final truth of such readings. On the contrary, it is to clarify their contingent strategy, which is to reconnect with a lost practice in order to disconnect from a present way of working felt to be outmoded, misguided, or otherwise oppressive. The first move (re) is temporal, made in order, in a second, spatial move (dis), to open a new site for work.”

MANIFESTING

What follows is an excerpt from the beginning of the first draft of the new NewLights Press manifesto:

The book is a dangerously unstable object, always between, continuously opening. It is interstitial, occupying many planes at once. It hides its workings in the spine, along the fore-edge, between the lines, words, and even the letters themselves. It betrays, bless it. The author is dead, slain by the book. No matter. The book moves, promiscuously, from reader to reader to reader, creating meaning after meaning after meaning after meaning. It is unthinkable for a book to be faithful, for one to have faith in a book. No matter. The book lies, cheats, steals, conjures illusions, and tells stories. We do not trust it. No matter, we cannot live without it.

The book is an impossible thing—comprised entirely of edges and full of holes. It moves. It happens between.

It is our goal to mine the between-spaces of the book, to articulate its mechanics, to expose it for the fraud that it is. We will lift up the curtain. We will be watching the magician’s hands. We will be watching its language. We will be breaking its back.

DIY, PEOPLE

A number of years ago, when I was an art student in Baltimore, I had a class with the poet and art critic John Yau. I’m pretty sure he made the class up as he went along, which was fine, good even. Some of those discussions, the topics thought up on the train ride from New York to Baltimore, have stuck with me for years. A few of them have grown to have a profound effect on how I make and think about my work.

On one of those afternoons the discussion was about artists who purposefully limit the scale, distribution, and capital involved in producing their work. The question John asked was this: You all are young art students, most of you borrowing a fair amount of money for your education. How are you going to deal with being out of school and making work when you have to support yourself, pay off your loans, and the current artistic champions continue to spend more and more amounts of public and private money on their projects? How does a fresh art school grad that is $40,000 (or more) in debt compete with Matthew Barney and Damien Hirst?

But, thankfully, it was not a lecture on how to apply for grants. John told us that there were other models of a committed, courageous, artistic practice. He cited Jack Spicer’s grouchy provincialism and his attempts to keep his work from leaving the West Coast. He told us about Kenneth Anger and his strange films. We learned about Wallace Berman, refusing to show in commercial galleries and distributing his work, mainly the collage magazine Semina, through the mail. He talked at length about Bruce Conner, and the myriad methods that Conner used to control his market, to keep it purposefully low. He only needed enough money to be comfortable…

What John was showing us was a collection of artists who chose to stay on the edge, in the margins. They had no need for huge grants or super-rich private collectors. They made work, often for their immediate community, that was absolutely critical at the time and that continues to be relevant, perhaps even more so now in the age of bloated, spectacular art.

Bloated. Spectacular, in the Debordian sense. The contemporary heroes of the art world are the ones that allow it to bask in its own capital-infused glow. The common advice in critiques and discussions these days is not to make it better, but to make it bigger. “What would this look like if it filled a whole room (and/or) covered an entire wall?” I agree that changes in scale do change a piece. Of course they do. But they can only take it so far. There is a lot of music that demands to be listened to at a high volume. But it gets painful after a while, and it makes it hard to hear anything else for days. A weak piece at 10 or 100 times the scale does not get much stronger.

When this country started to go into economic crisis mode, there were murmurs in the art world, people wondering, “Where will the money come from?” Answer: Nowhere. There are better things for the government to spend its money on right now (necessary social programs, not ridiculous “bail outs” & wars), and maybe we don’t need all that money. Maybe there are better places for us to spend our money as well. Hasn’t it gotten a bit out of hand?


Fig. 1.09.07
Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007
Contemporary art marvels at its own visage. Finally, an artist makes a piece that is about how much capital that artist can command. The ultimate bauble, where the piece is the price tag.

ARTIFICIN’

Over the weekend I officially started designing/writing the New NewLights Press Manifesto. I say designing/writing because in many cases these days (and this is certainly one of them) both the writing and design happen at the same time, as one essentially undifferentiated process. This tends to be the case with the more concrete/typographic work that I do—books with more straightforward typography tend to be written first, designed later.

I decided to build the design a little differently this time. For the title spread I wanted to make some crazy typographic pattern thing that would simultaneously reference William Morris’s The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896-8) and Ulises Carrion’s For Fans and Scholars Alike (1987). I decided that I would layout the page spread like Morris, using the medieval system for determining margins based on the page proportions. I enjoyed constructing the first margin schema, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to do the entire book that way, by basing its composition not on measurement by numbers (my usual method) but by pure geometry—proportional divisions based on the rectangle of the page spread (Fig. 1.09.01).

Fig. 1.09.01 Medieval style margin scheme, based on page proportions.

This system of geometrical division was apparently “discovered” by the 13th Century French architect Villard de Honnecourt. It was reapplied to design later through the research of Jan Tsichold in the 1950’s. (or at least that’s the gist, I’ve got scant actual info, just image captions on photocopied book pages, if anyone has more info, I would love it) The schema is used to systematically divide any rectangle into proportionate pieces. Shown below is the schema applied to the vertical (Fig. 1.09.02) and horizontal dimensions of the page (Fig. 1.09.03).

Fig. 1.09.02
Page/spread divided into ninths by height.

Fig. 1.09.03
Page/spread divided into ninths by width.

Fig. 1.09.04 Height and Width schemas layered on top of one another. Note the synchronicity of the two.

If you layer both the images on top of each other, you can see how they line up (Fig. 1.09.04). I laid them over top of each other for the first time while writing this post. I knew that they were synchronized, but I thought it hinged around the 1/3 division. Apparently not.

According to Tsichold’s research, the division of a page into ninths was the most commonly used. I thought that this was because of the synchronicity of the 1/3 (1/9 in 2D) measurement. I constructed a master grid based of 9x9 per page, 9x18 across the spread. I then used the same schema to subdivide that measurement into ninths. (Fig. 1.09.05)

Fig. 1.09.05 Master grids for determining measurements in the rest of the design.

The gray blocks that you see scattered around these images are my spacing/measuring “material.” Whenever I use arbitrary/visual measurements in digital design I make myself little guide blocks that I cut and paste to make those arbitrary measurements exactly repeatable. A little trick from letterpress printing (where spaces are solid pieces of metal that don’t print) brought to use in the computer.

I had played with this system a little bit in the past—using it to make systems-based, non-representational drawings and collages. But now that I’m beginning to explore and use it for other applications, I am in awe of its elegance and relative simplicity—a simplicity that quickly escalates into a crazy, synchronous complexity.

Fig 1.09.06
Working drawing, trying to figure this damn thing out.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

This is the very first day of 2009. Everything is open.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE BRINK

Sitting here on the edge of another holiday, of another year, I wanted to write a brief post to let you know, dear reader, what is coming down the road.

I have re-collected the early work of NewLights (first four years, 2000-2004), so now I can begin cataloging all of the books for this (and future) website(s). I intend to start doing that on top of regular posting. There will be one catalog entry at a time, in reverse chronological order, so that when the whole subject string is viewed the newest book is first. So, gulp, the first book I will be posting will be my first book, in all of its not-quite-rightness. (But I was so proud back then, so in love with the idea of making books, reeling from that utilitarian revelation.)

There will also be some more serious writing as well, some review type things and more essay sketches, possibly more sign-chains. I think first on deck for review (that word doesn’t seem quite right, but I’ll use it anyway) is Mimeo Mimeo #2, which I, bursting with excitement, received right before Xmas. Great journal—the sheer fact of its existence makes me happy.

I hope everyone has a good New Year. I miss you all terribly.

SIGN-CHAIN #2: THE HAND-MECHANICAL

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Begin (Vivi)Section 1: Lupton, Ellen, Thinking With Type, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 29.::::::::::::::::::::“In the early 1990s, as digital design tools began supporting the seamless reproduction and integration of media, many designers grew dissatisfied with clean, unsullied surfaces, seeking instead to plunge the letter into the harsh and caustic world of physical processes. Letters, which for centuries had sought perfection in ever more exact technologies, became scratched, bent, bruised, and polluted.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++Barry Deck’s typeface Template Gothic, designed in 1990, is based on letters drawn with a plastic stencil. The typeface thus refers to a process that is at once mechanical and manual. […]” [italics mine]::::::::::::::::::End (Vivi)Section 1&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&Begin (Vivi)Section 2: Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real, (Cambridge: MIT Press/October Books, 1996), 63-66&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&“In time, however, seriality could not be avoided, and this recognition led to demonstrations and counter-demonstrations of its logic. Consider, for example, how Rauschenberg tests this logic in Factum I and II (1957), each canvas filled with found images and aleatory gestures that are repeated, imperfectly, in the other. Yet not until minimalism and pop is serial production made consistently integral to the technical production of the work of art. More than any mundane content, this integration makes such art “signify in the same mode as objects in their everydayness, that is, in their latent systematic.” And more than any cool sensibility, this integration severs such art not only from artistic subjectivity (perhaps the last transcendental order of art) but also from representational models. In this way minimalism rids art of the anthropomorphic and the representational not through anti-illusionist ideology so much as through serial production. For abstraction tends only to sublate representation, to preserve it in cancellation, whereas repetition, the (re)production of simulacra, tends to subvert representation, to undercut its referential logic. (In future histories of artistic paradigms, repetition, not abstraction, may be seen to supersede representation—or at least to disrupt it most effectively.)++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++Since the Industrial Revolution a contradiction has existed between the craft basis of visual art and the industrial order of social life. Much sculpture since Rodin seeks to resolve this contradiction between “individual aesthetic creation” and “collective social production,” especially in the turn to processes like welding and paradigms like the readymade. With minimalism and pop this contradiction is at once so attenuated (as in the minimalist concern with nuances of perception) and so collapsed (as in the Warholian motto “I want to be a machine”) that it stands revealed as a principal dynamic of modern art. In this regard, too, the seriality of minimalism and pop is indicative of advanced-capitalist production and consumption, for both register the penetration of industrial modes into spheres (art, leisure, sport) that were once removed from them. […] Both minimalism and pop resist some aspects of this logic, exploit others (like mechanization and standardization), and foretell still others. For in serial production a degree of difference between commodity-signs becomes necessary; this distinguishes it from mass production. Indeed, in our political economy of commodity-signs it is difference that we consume.”::::::::::::::::::::::::End (Vivi)Section 2:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

A FEW THINGS ABOUT A FEW THINGS

Figs. 12.08.05, 12.08.06, 12.08.07, 12.08.08
05 and 06 are of the Proofs & Ephemera binder. 07 and 08 are of the Functional Analysis.

Above are some more images from the IDE(A/O)LOG(Y/UE). Two images each of the other two binders from the first iteration. I’ve slowly been coming to terms with the fact that I won’t have a full website operational by Feb. Or at least I won’t if I want to get anything else done, which I do. So this blog will do for the time being, thus

I will be building the catalog of NewLights books on this site. That starts by

Going home (the PA) for the holiday. Overnight flight to Pittsburgh, then 4 hours by car…

DEFINITIONS, part 2

I’ve been thinking about that last post all weekend. I realized by the end of writing it that I had irresponsibly gone into territory that I couldn’t fully explore under the time/space constraints of the blog (Normally, I write these posts in the morning before I go to work. That may change.). Thus the abrupt “TO BE CONTINUED!” What follows is an explanation/retraction from the last post, some more measured reflections on the subject of definitions in the field of artists’ books, and a brief assessment of how these definitions do and do not shape the output of the NewLights Press.

First of all, an apology to Johanna Drucker and The Century of Artists’ Books, about the line “she pretty much ignores un-imaged fine press books, and calls the kind with pictures livres d’artistes.” The word “ignores” is not accurate. She does in fact discuss fine press editions, and in doing so she shows why they are outside of the scope of the rest of her book. Her book is not about fine press books, thus, she doesn’t talk about them. That is the kind of decision every writer has to make whenever they are writing, so the word “ignores” is unfair, as it connotes some sort of scholarly irresponsibility or prejudice.

Also from the last post: “Bookarts/Artists’ Books is a discourse with a particularly pernicious definition problem.” Here is the opening of Betty Bright’s No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America, 1960-1980 (Granary Books, 2005):

The story of book art in America in the 1960s and 1970s is a story of persistent identity crises and of fierce allegiances as well as dissensions. Much to the chagrin of critics and the frustration of artists, the enduring debate over the years has turned on the most basic of questions: What is and what isn’t an artist’s book? In his essay “The Rise of the Book in the Wake of Rain,” printer Jim Trissel laments that too often the critics of artists’ books have resorted to an “effort to segregate kinds of books into categor[ies] and to proclaim something now called the ‘artist book’ the emergent and superior species.” By this, Trissel refers to writers who claim for art one kind of artist’s book to the exclusion of all others. To the uninitiated, such hair-splitting may appear confusing, even mean-spirited. Why the polemic?
A preoccupation with definition is perhaps understandable given the diversity in artists’ books, which appear in dramatically different forms and with radically divergent content. […] (p. 1, italics mine)

So the problem is that there are so damn many of the things, and that they are all so different. And of course, books have their own history that was separate from art as such—until the emergence of the term “artists’ book.” But all this confusion is what makes the field interesting. There is a long history as well as a sense of newness and exploration.

Normally, I try not to let the field’s definition problem bother me too much. But it’s come up recently as I try to organize my work for presentation on the web. For the record, I have decided not to list books by “type,” they will only be listed by author(s) and by date.

The definition problem does have its broader consequences as well. As a practitioner of the bookarts, as a publisher of literature, and as a maker of art in book form, where does one (myself, many others) belong? I very deliberately pull from traditions of craft printing and binding, of independent publishing, ‘zines, and a rapidly expanding indie culture, trade publishing, as well as avant-gardist strategies usually associated with the visual arts. I distribute my work over the web, at “trade shows” and book fairs, through bookstores, and at art galleries. Having an education in the visual arts, I feel a strong, compulsive need to show in galleries. But the nagging question: Should I be?

Books are interstitial objects. By definition they occupy a series of planes simultaneously. So the book, so the book artist. Provisional solution: buckle up, bite down, and see where this thing takes us.

A HANDFUL OF DEFINITIONS (mostly useless)

In the post below (NewLights Mission Statement), I mentioned a few different “types” of books, all of them produced by NewLights. I want to take a few moments today and try to define those types; but first, a few things about definitions in general.

Definitions, while extremely useful and even necessary sometimes, are tricky things. They often provide the illusion of stability, of some kind of authority filling the hollowness of the word. It is in that sense that they are misleading—they mislead in the fact that they make promises against such a thing. Definitions are not stable, and they are not finite—they are zones, porous and soft, and they bend to the will of their user.

Bookarts/Artists’ Books is a discourse with a particularly pernicious definition problem. The first question is always: “What is an artists’ book?” When one starts to look at the books though, there is the inevitable, “What is a book, anyway?” One could posit that every artists’ book starts with that question. But I do not intend to go down that road today. I want to speak more locally and immediately.

Do-It-Yourself Books: Starting with the easy one. The NewLights Press DIY Books are a series of books that are available in two different forms: a) as pre-printed, unbound, packaged pages, generally distributed at gallery shows, and b) as pre-designed digital files, available for downloading and printing. Both forms come with binding instructions so that the reader gets a free book and learns to make them at the same time. Up until now, only public domain texts have been published as DIY Books, but someday, someday, there will be new, original books made specifically for the format.

Chapbooks are, generally speaking, small books of poetry (I suppose one could have a chapbook of prose, right?). The magic number seems to be 20 pages. NewLights chapbooks are a little longer, are usually made in an edition of 50 or 100 (depending on how popular I think they’ll be), and almost always have a letterpress printed cover and digitally printed pages. Sometimes there is some sort of dustjacket as well. They are also sold cheap, anywhere from $5 - $20. This definition starts to fall apart when the emphasis on the object is cranked up to equal the writing. Is it still a chapbook, or does it make the leap to artists’ book? Or fine press book? This was the case with the somewhat infamous silver standard.

Fine Press Books are the older, more refined siblings of the chapbooks. Usually a fine-press book is thought of as an edition of a book (it could be old or new, Shakespeare or Brian Evenson) that is designed, printed, and bound by hand, with a great deal of attention being paid to materials and craft. In my somewhat limpid definition, they can contain text and/or image. In Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books (Granary Books, 1994), the classic text on artists’ books, she pretty much ignores un-imaged fine press books, and calls the kind with pictures livres d’artistes (“artists’ books” in French). A NewLights fine-press book could be all text, all image, or all both (heh). So far there have been two, and they both have text and images. NLP fine-press books are more elaborate productions and are printed in smaller editions that are sold for considerably more money. Question: is the difference between the fine press book and the chapbook economic?

Artists’ Books are the last and most porous category. Quick definition: a work of art realized in, meant to be, inseparable from, the form of the book. Implicit in the term and definition is a value judgment, hinging on the old art/craft divide. Fine press/chapbooks/mass produced literature is craft and design, artists’ books are art. This judgment also hinges on traditional separations between form and content. But more on that at another time.

So for the NewLights Press, artists’ books tend to be the books that are extremely specific to their own form and the form of the book in general. Things that I can perhaps safely call “not literary.” (But that falls apart immediately. This is a useless gesture.) They can be unique or editioned, precious or cheap. At the moment, all NLP artists’ book production is focused on large, unique, altered book works….

TO BE CONTINUED!

NEWLIGHTS PRESS MISSION STATEMENT (revised, again)

Fig. 12.08.04
Binding tools, after 2 days of use in a gallery.

The NewLights Press is an independent printer & publisher of experimental literature and artists’ books, concentrating on where the two can and do overlap. All of the books (so far) are printed & bound “by hand,” using a variety of different techniques, ranging from the obsolete (letterpress) to the utilitarian (laser printing). We try to maintain inclusive (& purposefully problematic) definitions of such mutable terms as “experimental literature,” “artists books,” and “printing techniques,” and to be similarly inclusive in the types of books that we produce (Chapbooks, Fine Print Editions, Do-It-Yourself Books, & Artists Books), in an attempt to allow the different kinds of production to merge, separate, and converse with one another. We believe in the actual use value of art objects as tools or channels for individuals & communities to articulate their thoughts, identities and roles, which leads us to support engaged, critical cultural production, be it individual or collaborative, dreadfully serious or dreadfully funny; and we try to do our part in making sure that spaces for alternative vision remain available to producers and receivers alike. We represent only one of the many meeting points of a vital and diverse community of active, thoughtful people, and our work would mean nothing without that community. The production of books is our own way of telling the rest of the world that we believe in them. Currently, the only items on the Press’s Five Year Plan are: MAKE BOOKS. MAKE MAKING BOOKS COUNT.

Next Episode: That old bookarts downfall—definitions!

GETTING THE WORD OUT

Dear Internet,

I had an idea last night, and I am going to need your help. I was thinking about how I haven’t seen any sites that are profiling young, innovative independent presses and makers of artists’ books. Do these sites exist? Doesn’t every site exist somewhere? I know that there are other sites like the Flurry blog, which has its “Titans of Letterpress” series. But enough about the “old masters.” We will, of course, continue to learn a great deal from them, maybe even rely on them for equipment, but it’s time to look elsewhere as well. It’s time to begin to critically assess what those crazy kids are doing.

But first I’ve got to find them. That’s where you come in, Internet. If anyone out there knows of the kind of press that I’m talking about--one that’s doing interesting, experimental bookwork, in both form and content and/or production and distribution, let me know. Send me information. And then I’ll find out what I can, maybe even interview them, and write about their work, right here on this blog.

MORNING WITH THE MACHINE, a PRE-TEXT

Figure 12.08.03


The question, as always, is where to begin. One could begin from the beginning, but that idea quickly becomes as slippery as the present. And besides, why not skip right to the good parts? What are the good parts? Which good part should I begin with?

There will be no strict order to these sketch posts. They will be written as they can, against the field of the morning quiet. At least I got something done today.

It is, more than ever, a question of work and productivity. This is the machine life. These are its spasms. It wants so badly to do what it does. I want to be a machine. The artist is an idea that is the machine that makes the art.

The calendar endlessly bears down. Is it Monday already? It wants so badly to do what it does. Machines endlessly grinding together. Machines beginninglessly grind to a halt. It was over before it began.

Here it is. I took a lot of trouble with it. Here it is. Because we’re keeping it apparently. Here. It was nothing at all.

RANDOM SUNDAY, or SOME THOUGHTS FOR THE FUTURE

Spent the day at the studio today, giving Brandon Mise of Blue Barnhouse his final lesson on the Heidelberg windmill. You can read about his experiences with the machine on his blog (which is, by the way, very well written, informative, entertaining, and funny). After looking at the website of Cuneiform Press, I tried to write a post on the history of the NewLights Press, but stopped because it was getting too long and self-indulgent (I do, believe it or not, try to keep these posts at a reasonable length). So I thought I’d take some time now and lay out my plan for the blog over the next few weeks.

As I prepare to write the NewNewLights manifesto, I need to make notes and sketches of the various ideas that I want to address. And making those essay sketches is the main IDEA (of the) IDE(A/O)(B)LOG(Y/UE). Thus, a list of possible topics:

• Constraint and Freedom
• Inspiration, Originality, and Genius (a brief against)
• DIY Ethic and the Current State of Spectacular Artworks
• Between Spaces, or Operating in the Nexus
• The Hand-Mechanical
• Book Arts, Printmaking, and the Expanded Field, or Rethinking Form & Content
• & many, many more.

Another highlight of the weekend: volunteering for both days of the San Francisco Center for the Book’s Holiday Fair: tons of fun, lots of nice work, really nice people. I’m looking forward to becoming more involved with the Center down the line. If you live in the Bay Area and like books, you should really check it out. Places like that are one of the reasons that this kind of work is so fun & rewarding. Not many other disciplines have such an open, dynamic, and engaged community. I am continually amazed & thankful.

(PS: In case anyone was wondering, I intend to try to post every weekday morning, and occasionally on the weekends. I will, undoubtedly, not be able to post everyday, and I have no intention of posting unless I have something worth saying.)

(PPS: I’m sure that you millions, nay billions, of faithful readers that this blog has gathered in a week were deeply disappointed by the lack of a new post this Friday last. I am so very, very sorry. My apologies to you and your families.)

DISCIPLINE & PUNISH

In December of 2007, just about 1 year ago, I completed my graduate studies at Arizona State University, achieving a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Printmaking. Unlike many of my colleagues, I chose not to go the academic route, and instead I got a full-time job. So I moved to one of the most expensive cities in the country, where I don’t know anyone, to work 40+ hours a week and try to be an artist on top of that. It seems like a silly decision, I know.

But my job is great. I work full-time as a letterpress printer for Hello!Lucky. This provides several advantages: 1) I like what I do and the people I work with. At other jobs, I always had a hard time getting up in the morning. Not so now. 2) Everyday I print, thus everyday I become a little bit better at printing. If you really want to learn a process, do it 8 hours a day for five days a week. 3) I get full access to a top of the line letterpress studio with superfast & accurate German presses. So, my job, in a sense, not just supports, but somehow is, partially, my studio practice. A good situation for a young artist to be in.

I’ve been thinking lately that artists, generally speaking, are too afraid of full-time jobs. The thing is, if you want to work, if you’re going to make work, you will find a way to do it despite how broke and/or tired you are at the end of the day. When I was in Baltimore last month, my good friend Justin and I spent a fair amount of time talking about work habits, discipline, and productivity. He works a 9-5 as well, except he has flexible hours, so he goes in around 6-7 and gets off around 2-3. And then as soon as he gets home he spends at least a couple of hours writing, without fail. It’s about discipline, or as Ted Berrigan said, “cultivating the habit.” Just working in the “studio,” everyday, even if you’re not actually productive, is one of the most important things. I’m not quite as disciplined as Justin; on most days I don’t sit down to work until 9 – 10 PM, unless I’m working at the (job) studio, then I start around 6. Finishing The Drownable Species was a personal achievement, because it proved to me that I could still pull obscenely long hours under deadline pressure while I was still working 8+ hours a day. I could (job)work from 10-6, then (studio)work from 6-1, go home, go to sleep, and do it again the next day.

Whenever I’m working on a piece with a deadline, there’s a point when someone asks me, “Are you going to get it done?” My answer is, “I’ll get it done, I always do. The question is how much it’s going to hurt from here to there.”

Discipline and punish.

NUMBER ONE (OLD NEWS)

Fig. 12.08.02


"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..."

ABOUT THIS OBTUSE BLOG TITLE, or THE BUREAUCRACY OF ONE

Some of you may be wondering where that ridiculous blog title comes from. It’s actually a riff off of an earlier, on-going piece that this blog is essentially an extension of. That piece is called IDE(A/O)LOG(Y/UE). What it is, very simply, is a log of the ideas that I have for pieces.

Fig. 12.08.1
The front and back of the “Taxonomy and Notes” section of the IDE(A/O)LOG(Y/UE). Shown here is the entry for the IDE(A/O)LOG(Y/UE) itself. Note the negative conception date.

Taxonomy & Notes
I designed myself a form to fill out every time I have a specific idea. The front of the form (Fig. 12.08.1, left side) has boxes for: Conception Number (date of conception plus one extra number to distinguish it from different ideas entered on the same day), Working Title, Source (stolen, adapted, or constructed), Form (what it is & made of), Description (a detailed physical description of the piece), Commentary (my thoughts on the piece as it develops, potential problems, etc.) Connections (artworks, of mine and others, that the piece relates to somehow), Final Title, and Reception Number (date of completion plus one number). The back (Fig. 12.08.1, right side) simply provides space to expand the Description and Commentary sections as the piece develops. Initial entries are typed in on a PDF form, which is then printed, 3 hole punched, and placed in a binder. Every time that I change the idea or something in general happens with the piece, I make handwritten additions/changes to the forms. When a piece is finished, it gets a “MADE” and date stamp in red in the Status section.

The IDE(A/O)LOG(Y/UE) goes through “iteration cycles.” An iteration of the log ends when it is displayed (generally at a NewLights solo show, although I think the current cycle may end at the Codex Symposium). When an iteration is complete, the status of all pieces in it must be assessed and accounted for, receiving stamps such as “PENDING” or “ABANDONED.” Other stamp possibilities: FUTILE, FAILED, SOLD, COMBINED, etc. The new iteration begins with its first entry. All “PENDING” entries from the previous cycle are photocopied and placed in the new binder.

Proofs & Ephemera
There is a second binder, referenced to the first, which collects documentation of the process of each piece in the log--sketches, order forms, receipts, print set up sheets, and other scraps. If a piece is actively worked on through two or more iterations, its documentation remains inside its original binder.

Functional Analysis
The third binder appears at the time of display. It is more or less a guest book for a gallery show, providing forms for people to leave their contact info and whatever comments they wish. I was pleasantly surprised to see that many people used the comments section as a place to leave their own artwork, so in the end the “Functional Analysis” became a multi-person collaboration.

Completed IDE(A/O)LOG(Y/UE) iterations will be scanned and released via the NewLights Press website.

So, hence the title, hence the blog itself.