IN SILENT PRAISE OF SILENCE

Nothing like a long, holiday weekend. Emerging from an existential fog. The Noise in the System. I’d like to take a moment and apologize to any readers of this blog for what I feel has been a decline in the quality of the writing lately. Is it bad to admit this weakness? Perhaps. At any rate, I have not been satisfied.

[do not read this, space for contemplation, do not read this]

So, a few things about a few things:

The deadline for the first issue of Et Al, the new experimental, jet set, trash and five-star journal of the arts, is this coming Sunday, the 31st of May. Click here for more info. We have already received some very intriguing submissions.

The writing thread of last week, about issues of display & reception with artists’ books will continue, most likely with a few digressions. Museum visits always get me thinking about scale, scope, and ambition of artworks. (For those of you in the Bay Area, the William Kentridge show at the SFMOMA is incredible. I was, honestly, surprised by how much I liked it. The show closes this weekend. Go see it if you haven’t, and make sure you block out at least 2 hours so that you can watch all of the films.) So more on that old thing. Hopefully it will cohere into coherence.

The NewLights Press has made an official decision to return to painting, or, perhaps, more specifically, to intervene in the discourse of painting. What this actually entails is the execution of several (old, developing, marinating) ideas for hand-mechanically painted books. The crucial difference that is they will officially be referred to as “paintings,” and talked about/shown as such.

The bookarts critic and scholar Betty Bright has started a new blog to document her research. Here.

A few other things, swirling: a new essay (sub-manifesto?) for the third issue of Mimeo Mimeo, a book of poems by Kyle Schlesinger, a new book of concrete-performance-hand-mechanical-printing poems by NewLights, aforementioned paintings, the second volume of (De)Collage, the world tilting madly towards itself, and the brilliance of days.

DISPLAY, DISTRIBUTION, RECEPTION, part 2

The first provisional solution to the books-in-gallery problem is to set up the gallery like a reading room or library. (This is an option that many of us have seen, participated in, and one that NewLights has used (and may very well again.)) The premise is simple—allow the books to be handled and read. Break the traditional “look but don’t touch” rule of the gallery, which has been done with various forms of experimental, interactive art since the 1960s. The gallery has become a kind of generic framing device that tells the public that whatever is inside, being it a series of paintings, a person living their daily life, or a bunch of flies and rotten meat, is art. So if anything else goes in the gallery, why can’t we just read books in there and be satisfied with that?

The gallery-as-library has many advantages. I think first and foremost is the fact that galleries are spaces that are open to the public, and shows often last for at least a month. So that is a large amount of time for people to come in, sit down, and read the books (and even a completely visual book with no words needs to be read). A show in a gallery will provide more time for engaged interaction than most other commonly available experiences with artists’ books—book fairs and library special collections. (Private ownership allows for a great deal of time to spend with the work, but inherently excludes the idea of public access.)

But books are often an awkward fit within the gallery. Artists’ books shows that are meant to be handled are often littered with tiny signs that encourage visitors to do so. Often shows will have a mix of work, some to be handled, some in glass cases, some out on shelves or pedestals and NOT to be touched, all of which can get confusing. Another danger of the “mixed show” is how display cases affect the work that is inside as well as outside. The case lends the books inside of it an aura (in the Benjaminian sense) of preciousness and authority. The book under glass is positioned, posed, preserved and unknowable, a mannequin and/or an image, glowing with the soft light of monetary value on display. The display case functions as a sort of auratic lens, gathering and focusing that discursive glow on the objects inside of it and rendering the books outside of it, radical in their denial and dismantling of the preciousness/untouchability of art, as decidedly ordinary objects. Books—we all are familiar with them. And indeed it is in that very familiarity and ordinariness, that common touchability, that makes the book form an excellent vehicle for the perpetual circulation of meaning, power, and authority. Which is why we love it so much. Which is why we believe that there is something at stake in the form.

TO BE CONTINUED

DISPLAY, DISTRIBUTION, RECEPTION, part 1

The problem of the display of artists’ books is a well-known and much discussed one. Briefly, the problem lies in the fact that books are meant to be handled and read, but art objects, traditionally, are not. So a very expensive and/or fragile book is displayed under glass, completely inaccessible, and the would-be reader becomes a viewer, having to be content with a single page spread. Ultimately, a reader-become-viewer is blocked from ever knowing the book.

A few solutions exist and have been implemented, ranging from acceptance of the glass case to the complete refusal of it, with the books always being shown for gallery visitors to handle. Other provisional solutions include the use of white gloves for reading, the creation of “display copies” (difficult for unique works), and/or limited, supervised reading time for the books in the show. It seems that at least 30% of the various calls for entries are for shows where the work is meant to be handled. But I see just as many books locked in glass coffins. Sometimes it seems that artists aren’t thinking about/dealing with this (fundamental) problem, that we simply acquiesce to whatever the terms of the show, usually set forth by the venue/curators.

But the point of this series of posts is not to go over all of those old arguments again. What I would like to think through is the various conditions of presentation/reception set in place by the traditional gallery, how those terms are complicated by the book, by book (or art) fairs, and to look at the possibility that galleries are not the best venue for showing artists’ books.

TO BE CONTINUED

CLASSES AT SFCB

This morning I was making notes for my upcoming classes at the San Francisco Center for the Book, so I thought I'd use today's post as a chance to plug them:

Basics of Boxcar Plates: May 27th, 6:30-9:30 PM. Learn to use the photopolymer system made famous by Boxcar Press: a transparent, plastic-backed photopolymer plate that is adhered to a gridded aluminum base. You will learn how to make the plates, and the many advantages that these plates provide on the Vandercook, from registration to changing your layout while on press. This class qualifies you to rent time on the Center's photopolymer platemaker. Prerequisite: Letterpress I.

Heavy Metal Typography: June 23rd, 6:30-9:30 PM. This class will introduce you to the finer points of typography and setting lead type by hand. We will cover design history and basic theory so that you can start to set complex, elegant compositions entirely in lead. You will learn tips for handling and composing type for easy lock-up and registration, how these ideas translate into digital typography, and more. Prerequisite: Letterpress I.

Production: The Sophisticated Chapbook: July 24th, 10 AM-5 PM. Learn how to design and construct structurally sophisticated chapbooks efficiently and cheaply. We will cover a series of simple binding techniques as well as how to "upgrade" them to make more complex books. There will be discussion centered on relating form, function, and content, and other design issues, as well as the practical nuts and bolts of chapbook publishing.

DISCIPLINE (NOT PUNISH)

On the train ride this morning I was thinking more about discipline, about having it in order to get one's studio work done on top of having a full-time job and trying to have some semblance of a social life. When I was in NYC my friend Sara told me an alternative definition to the word discipline that she had been using. I'm not sure where it comes from:

Discipline: Patience with and faith in the physical world.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMIN

I literally peeled this out of a book yesterday. It’s a quote from Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street:

[…] Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out into the street…. If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on the sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed work entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular. […]

PRINTERESTING

My friend Max showed me this blog the other day. Not only does it have a portmanteau name, it’s also smart, funny, and about contemporary printmaking:

http://printeresting.org/

Enjoy!

SMUDGING THE SURFACE

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

PCBA PRINTERS' FAIR THIS WEEKEND!

If you are in the Bay Area on Saturday, come on down to the Pacific Center for Book Arts Printers' Fair. The NewLights Press will have a table & I would love to show you some books. There will also be some letterpress prints from my friend & colleague James Tucker. Here's the official text:

This annual event features dozens of vendors (45 tables this year!) presenting their finely made books, papers, prints and more. An array of printmaking, bookbinding and paper decoration techniques will be featured by various artists. There will be a children's book arts area, hands on printing demonstrations, and mini-workshops by PCBA members. The event is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!

PCBA Book Arts and Printers' Fair

Saturday, May 9th

9-4

Ft. Mason Center

Building A

San Francisco

For directions please visit:

http://www.fortmason.org/directions/index.shtml

SOME NOTES ON LEGIBILITY

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

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

MORE LINKS

Inter-webbing turned these up yesterday:

Projective Industries: http://www.projectiveindustries.com/

Interbirth Books: http://www.interbirthbooks.org/

Good stuff!

INDEPENDENCE DAY

The NewLights Press is nine years old today. Thanks to everyone out there. It seems worth reiterating the end of the "official" mission statement:

The NewLights Press represents only one of the many geographical/historical 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.

LEGIBILITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FIRST 1OO POSTS

This is the 100th post of the IDE(A/O)(B)LOG(Y/UE). How anti-climactic.

NOTES ON PRODUCTION/TEMPORALITY

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

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

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

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

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!