MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (11)

The past few mornings and nights I have been writing an essay for a forthcoming ILSSA publication. The essay is about “hand/mind.” (This is a part of a small series of essays by multiple people—the other subjects are “old/new,” “work/play,” and “time/money.”) Below is the opening paragraph (as it stands, here, now, this morning):

Look hard was the dictum of the class. We were attempting to make accurate, representational, still-life paintings of white on white tableaus—eggs and white ceramic ware against white backgrounds. One thing that became almost immediately clear was that the idea of white—pure, bright, disembodied, unmodulated—did not map well against white-in-the-world—never pure, wrapped around objects and/or embodied in pigments, and always appearing in shades of gray mixed with reflected and projected color. This fact became apparent to this group of struggling students very soon, but it became apparent not in the abstract of language (as it does in this essay) but in the actual practice of painting that we were engaged in. The linked act(s) of looking and making were de-verbalized, connected in the building of moments, and existed as concrete moves and the testing of procedures. We were studying representational painting. We were studying the mechanics of representational painting, and the knowledge that we were developing existed in the circuits between hand and mind. Only later, during class discussions, did we attempt to represent that knowledge in language; but our understanding of each other’s comments was always filtered through the work of our own hands. Knowledge is always connected to practice.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (31): WHAT YOU WILL (17)

This will be the last post documenting the layering and building of the covers of Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will, because them covers are done gloriously done.

This is a good way to preview the book in its entirety, because the book is reprinted, in its entirety & exactly in position, on the cover. You are seeing the entire book collapsed. This is what time looks like.

I am intrigued by the surface of the printed areas, by how the ink and (non)color built up, and by how the edges and impression of the different plates left different marks. There is something in these covers that can be expanded into future books—an approach, an idea, an insistence on the physicality of the printed object. Books are for handling, after all. These covers are like oil paintings that you get to play with, finally.

Only the jackets remain to be printed. Only 24 more runs. It won’t be long now. This is how time stands as a wall against our bending backs.

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (7)

And one thing that had made me very uncomfortable last week was the reactivation of my Facebook account and the creation of a page for NewLights. One concrete issue that the BlazeVOX discussion brought to my attention is that I could/should be doing more to get the word out about the books. The NewLights Facebook page is a start to that. “Like” NewLights and then you’ll get to watch me figure out how to use that page as an effective way to communicate, in painfully slow, discontinuous, and awkward “real” time. I know that sounds enticing. It will also be a good way to get news if you don’t like this blog. Or to get news easily separated from the rest of this mess. Or something. Anyway, here’s the link, one more time, who doesn’t want to like and be liked:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/NewLights-Press/276760435686307?sk=wall

Any other small presses out there, I would love to be pointed to your pages as well.

And there will probably be a Twitter account in the future too. Yikes.

NOW (NON)LIVE ONLINE: THE COLLECTED BOOKS OF JACK SPICER

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

You can see the initial post about this book here.

FOR RODCHENKO

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

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

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (6)

In the last post on this topic I wrote: “For a person to set up as a publisher and declare themselves an editor without any socioeconomic vetting by an acknowledged institution of authority (one with money & power) is a subversive act.” I’d like to explore that statement a little more, grounded in a particular experience.

Many years ago now, when I was living in Baltimore, I was acting as the “Project Coordinator” of the Dolphin Press, which was a fine press run out of the Printmaking Dept. at the Maryland Institute College of Art. NewLights had been started by then too. Running Dolphin was a volunteer position—a stopgap measure to keep the press producing during a time of little/no funding. The Dolphin Press, in any official sense, did not exist. But I figured it was good “professional” experience—and it was.

I put “professional” in quotes, because, back then, even more so than now, I really had no idea what I was doing or what I was supposed to do. But enough background—this post is supposed to be about the subverting of institutional authority.

At some point during my time at Dolphin, one of the other departments at MICA purchased a book from the press, and, naturally, asked for an invoice/receipt. Of course nothing like that existed, so I had to make one. I kept thinking something along the lines of: I’m just some normal jerk, I can’t make or issue an invoice. I don’t have the authority to do this. I did it anyway, of course. I made an invoice for a transaction between two academic departments—one of which was imaginary.

The small press world, though, as a whole, is imaginary. Imaginary despite the aching muscles, the bottomed-out bank accounts, and the stacks of wonderful books. Our imagination will tear us apart from the inside.

A year or two down the road, when it became time to design an invoice for NewLights (when actual businesses (bookstores) and other institutions (libraries) started buying things), I realized that the detritus of the institution (“the institution” in the general sense)—its forms, invoices, documents, correspondence, paperwork—is one of the major things that constitute its identity outside of its local time & place. Thus the strange looking invoices, correspondence forms, inspection slips, etc. that NewLights uses. Such things are the flimsy foundation on which this imaginary institution rests.

What makes a press “real” and what makes it “imaginary?” Is it a physical location? Is it money? The things that it publishes? Its paperwork? Its tax forms? Its ISBN numbers? Its authors? Its publishing practices? How all of those things congeal into an image of “the press” in the mind of the public?

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (30): WHAT YOU WILL (16)

The image above shows the covers of Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will as they now stand, to change again tomorrow. The versos now have all of the poems, 12 of them, printed (the white rectangle on the left side). There will be five more plates printed on that side, from the title sequence. & one run of scoring and the covers are complete.

The images below show the jackets with the first two runs on them. Please excuse the colors on these images—the lighting in the studio is awful for photos. The last image is the most accurate, color-wise.

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (5)

I remember reading a comment on an HTMLGiant post a few months ago (I have no idea which post) where the commenter was talking about how anyone can set up a small press or journal and declare themselves an editor, despite any actual qualifications and/or experience they may or may not have. And I think that’s an accurate observation—when I started NewLights I had no idea what it meant to be an editor, how to be an editor, what an editor actually did, etc. I still don’t, really, which is one of the reasons why I am interested in this conversation.

What is it that we actually do?

For a person to set up as a publisher and declare themselves an editor without any socioeconomic vetting by an acknowledged institution of authority (one with money & power) is a subversive act. It is a usurpation, a move against power bestowed, a move for power built up from the ground. Built up from the ground in the sense that the self-appointed small press editor openly acknowledges their lack of institutional approval, but declares, through their actions, that “I/we will learn this, figure this out, build this up.”

I started the NewLights Press in May of 2000. All I had was access to a print studio (I was in school), a copy of A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, and a need to make books. I certainly did not have a clue. I didn’t know of any other small presses operating in Baltimore at that time (there were some). Websites for such operations were becoming more and more common, but for a 20 year-old still seemed very exotic. This is not a “let me tell you how hard it was back in my day” passage—it’s an attempt to establish the fact that the social/cultural context in which small presses begin and operate now is radically different than what is was just 11 years ago. The closeness of the community and the long reach of small presses now is a consequence of electronic communication and the ever-accessible “storefronts” of our websites. And this context continues to change—we will see how digital books and e-readers play out. Almost every day we read about how big publishers are struggling. Almost every day we read about another small press that has started up.

Publishing/running a press is, like just about anything, a process. And it’s not a straight climb towards ‘better” work or more sales and more secure financial foundations. It fluctuates, sometimes with astonishing rapidity. If small presses gave up because they could not figure out a way to make a profit or at least break even, then almost all of them would close down after a year or two, or five or seven years down the road when things got rough. And no matter how promising a start, things will get rough.

The higher the profile of a press, the more “anonymous” its operations become—it begins to attract an audience and potential authors outside of an immediate, local community. And thus the press needs to become more “professional”—more like a large publisher. With that comes accountability and transparency.

NewLights, despite being the same age as BlazeVOX, has remained a much smaller operation, with a different (but overlapping) set of goals and interests. And because of that I really don’t think too many people would give a damn if I started asking authors for money. Some people wouldn’t like it, for sure, but there would be no big outcry. And any discussion/argument that might ensue about it would happen under very different terms, because NewLights operates under very different terms.

There is a fine line to walk between asking small presses to operate under certain community-approved standards and hollowing out their identities and practices. One of the things that make small presses great is the fact that their practices are person to person. When they begin to detach from that local, personal interaction without being able to predict and account for the consequences, nasty messes can ensue.

NOW (NON)LIVE ONLINE: THE NEW MANIFESTO (FIRST ITERATION)

The first digital version of a NewLights Press book (The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press (first iteration)) is now here and available for your reading pleasure. More out-of-print (and probably some in-print) titles will be added as the days get shorter.

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (4)

A week has passed since the initial furor of the BlazeVOX incident. I am trying to continue using the event as a springboard for an analysis (a haphazard one, to be sure). As time goes on this is less about the specifics of what happened and more about the conditions that allowed it to happen (or produced the event), and an attempt to string together something productive in the aftermath. I am trying to pay my attention.

If there’s one consolation that Geoffrey Gatza (the editor/founder of BlazeVOX) can take from the whole controversy about his publishing practices, it’s that people in the small press community care about what BlazeVOX is doing, and that the press has become a major force in the scene (it actually has been for awhile now).

And of course, in the sense of “any publicity is good publicity,” even more people know about the press now.

But in the exchange we saw the cost of that high profile. It raises the bar for what people expect from a press. And it seems like the small press world, whether we like it or not, is becoming more professionalized, and the presses that operate in this world are becoming more institutionalized, more public. Sometimes, they are becoming more business-like—even if that business continues to lose money.

Changing technology has helped to increase the public profile of small presses. Websites and internet publishing and sales have been around for awhile now. Public sites where discussion is an active part, like blogs, are more recent but very widely used. Social networking sites as a means of promotion are also thoroughly integrated into how we work. Another more recent trend has been book trailers—video ads for books meant to be posted and shared. And there are ad spaces on websites as well. All of these things are good things—they help to get more books out into the world and help to bring sales to authors & presses.

Writing is generally thought of as a solitary activity, and for the most part, it is. Publishing has been, historically, always a group/public activity, utilizing different people and businesses with different areas of expertise. A press like NewLights, where I can take a book from initial concept to final distribution, is an exception, not the rule. Publishing is, in one aspect, the construction of a channel through which artworks can be disseminated—publishing is public, both in “intent” and “structure.” But at the same time, the process of bringing together a book, for a small press, is often a very intimate affair, involving a fair amount of work done in solitude, or with a very small group of collaborators. This small group is often just editor and author, as the editor tends to do most jobs at the press. The experience of bringing a book together is not that different from the experience of writing a text—it involves a closeness with the work, it is mediated by technology, the decisions made are aesthetic as well as practical, and it is done with a potential audience in mind. Publishing is a creative act, productive in and of itself, and is not simply, as stated above, “the construction of a channel through which artworks can be disseminated.”

We could say that the identity of the press is constructed within and by the interactions of the object that it produces with its audience. In this formulation the press is an always still-forming social entity. It is social and political.

We could say that the identity of the press is constructed in the process of production (before a publication’s public life), in the interactions of its constituent parts: author, editor, designer, printer, etc. In this formulation the press makes finished things that are then distributed after the fact. It is authorial.

We could say that the identity of the press is constructed in the reach of its publications, in the reputation of its authors, and in the dollar amount of its sales. It is economic.

We could add more. None will be correct.

More soon.

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (3)

Curses—it looks like I’ve spent most of my blog writing/coffee drinking time reading, trying to catch up on recent conversations on the BlazeVOX controversy. Much good discussion continues. A few quick questions have sprung to mind:

1) What is the role or job of an editor/publisher? Are an editor and publisher the same thing? Are a “role” and a “job” the same thing? What are the images of the small press editor/publisher being constructed in this debate? How do those images map to actual experience?

2) And parallel to that, was is the role or job of a writer in the small press community? What images of the writer and her/his role are being constructed? How do those images correspond with our lived experience?

3) What specific publishing practices are being marked as illegitimate? What practices are being marked as ones to emulate? How do presses identify which practices are best for them?

4) What does the general call for transparency in publishing practices tell us about the how we view or exist in our community? Does a move toward transparency signal a shift in the development of the community’s professional identity?

5) Am I any good at what I do? How can I do it better? What are my priorities as a publisher? How do my priorities match up with what other members of the small press community believe they should be? Should I care?

6) What makes a small press successful? What makes a small press legitimate?

7) Is there something productive, and I mean that in the sense of an actual product (I always return to making), that can come from this?

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (2)

[It occurred to me this morning that I forgot a perhaps important part of the disclosure in the first post about this. Not only do I know several people who have been published by BlazeVOX, but the NewLights and BlazeVOX list of authors overlap slightly. This has since been amended in part 1 as well.]

Over the summer and now into the fall (soon, closer every chilly morning) I’ve been reading The Nature of the Book, by Adrian Johns (University of Chicago Press, 1998). It’s a work on the history of printing, focusing specifically on printing in early modern London, from roughly 1500-1800. It describes how printing, as an idea and as a practice, was constructed in that time and place, how the players involved (authors, printers, binders, booksellers, the state, the crown) actively created the discourse surrounding and fueling the new craft. The book demonstrates how everything that we take for granted about printed books (their fixity, their reliability, etc.) were not always givens and had to be developed over time through a complex array of discussions and the implementation of various regulatory practices, both informal and formal. It’s a very interesting book.

The reason that I mention it is because the BlazeVOX controversy is, essentially, exactly the same historical process being described in the book—this time happening in and around small press publishing, here and now. This process has been going on for a long time, outside of the current BlazeVOX discussion, but its recent intensity, coupled with my current reading, has finally made the process visible to my often belated perception of such things.

The parallels between the functioning of the small press world, bound together now by digital media, and the public discourse of early modern London (and other European and colonial cities & countries) are many. Blogs are the equivalents of early pamphlets: short, printed texts about current subjects, distributed widely and cheaply. And the comments section of the blogs and social media sites are the equivalents of the coffeehouse or tavern. And the stakes here are real, just as they were then, even though they are being played for outside of any legal system. The financially precarious world of bookmaking and selling in early modern London was based largely on reputation, and by extension of that, credit. The reputation of a major small press publisher of innovative poetry is being contested now. And in this world in this time, the reputation of a press remains one of the most valuable things that it can possess.

In McLuhanish terms, the “global village” inaugurated by the new media of the mid-twentieth century is being hybridized, through contemporary digital media, with the rowdy city of the “typographic man.”

The BlazeVOX controversy is a spontaneous, collective, public disciplining of the small press world, particularly of the publishers. [My hope is that it will help us change our practices for the better. I think it will.] Small press publishing, especially publishing focusing on avant-garde poetry/fiction/non-fiction, has been, historically, a practice almost entirely regulated by social (not legal) norms and interactions, often unspoken and intuited through “regular” social interactions. Almost entirely—the US government did get involved in prosecuting some publishers (City Lights, Grove) for obscenity. But those cases were in a sense not just about small press publishing, as they had bearing on the entire literary community in the US and other countries. But for the most part, the practices of small press publishing have been constructed outside of any official legal setting. And because of that they have been very unruly, uneven, haphazard, criminal at their worst, heroic at their best—messy. Wonderfully messy.

We have found ourselves in the midst of a particularly messy part right now. I’m sure that the fiery parts of this controversy are over, and many people will want to forget about it (if they even wanted to pay attention in the first place), but I want to continue this series of posts in the hope that something productive can be elaborated out of this “crisis.” What that something is, I’m not sure. But I do believe this is an important process and discussion. And I imagine the NewLights contribution to it being just as uneven and haphazard, undisciplined, as the discourse in the community as a whole. And I don’t want to pretend that NewLights is outside of this discourse either. Because we are all in this together.

More soon.

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (1a)

One thing that I thought it was important to add: the BlazeVOX controversy really doesn’t affect how I feel about the work that they publish, and I don’t really give a damn if the authors helped to subsidize their books, as far as the work is concerned. As has been said elsewhere, BlazeVOX is not a “vanity press,” and the stigma that usually comes along with work put out by such presses does not apply here. The work being published is good. I don’t see any reason to doubt that.

In the midst of all these opinions about the “author donation” practice is a struggle for/questioning of legitimacy in the small press world.

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (1)

Yesterday there was an event of no small controversy in the small press world. It all started with a blog post, written by Brett Ortler about BlazeVOX [books] and their submission/publishing policy. After Mr. Ortler’s manuscript had been accepted by BlazeVOX, he was asked to chip in $250 towards the publication of the book. Mr. Ortler was surprised and disappointed by this (it’s best to read his entire post, as I can’t adequately describe his reaction here), and wrote a blog post about it, calling out the questionable practice and publicly calling “for Mr. Gatza to amend his submission guidelines and website to include information about this policy, the amounts he’ll expect of other authors, and the like.”

And so the event began, spreading through blogs and other social media. Some questioning the practice:

http://htmlgiant.com/presses/blazevox-goes-vanity-press/

Others defending BlazeVOX and the editor/proprietor Geoffrey Gatza:

http://my3000lovingarms.blogspot.com/2011/09/power-glory-blaze-vox-meet-pouter-my.html

http://mimeomimeo.blogspot.com/2011/09/hooray-for-blazevox.html

http://notellpoetry.blogspot.com/2011/09/no-tell-books-supports-blazevox.html

And some have been reflecting on what this all means:

http://htmlgiant.com/presses/a-kingdom-of-kings/

http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=1858

http://slopeeditions.org/index.cfm?p=n.7

http://blog.shannacompton.com/2011/09/oh-vanity.html

And the official BlazeVOX response:

http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/blog/to-the-blazevox-community-35/

And as I get to the Internet this morning I can see that a bunch of people have been writing about this, of course, and already it all feels overwhelming. But I did write (most of) this post already & I feel compelled to participate as well, but probably more in the third category—trying to figure out what can be learned from this, not just in a moral sense, but also as way to investigate the small press world and its growing pains.

But first a disclosure: I do not know Geoffrey Gatza, have never corresponded with him, and have never submitted a manuscript to BlazeVOX. I do, however, have several close friends who have had books published by BlazeVOX. The BlazeVOX and NewLights list of authors overlap slightly. There is a BlazeVOX book that recently arrived in the mail sitting on my desk right beside me as I write this. BlazeVOX has been operating for a long time, and puts out many books every year, and probably just about everybody in the small press world knows someone who has been published by BlazeVOX, if they haven’t themselves. That’s actually important, I think, to this discussion—or at least to this version of it.

All I have to say in terms of an opinion about the BlazeVOX co-op approach is this: In 2006 I borrowed $100 from Justin Sirois in order to complete silver standard. It wasn’t a question of whether or not the book would be published, as I was already in the middle of production. The book was literally half-finished, in pieces all over my studio. I probably needed the money to buy another toner cartridge, or more magnets maybe. Justin is a good friend and we had worked together many times, so I felt comfortable asking him—I was, in essence, reaching out to a friend for help, the one with the most vested interest in the project. I actually don’t remember if I paid him back. But he did get lots of copies of the book, and they sold quickly. That was the only time that I have ever asked an author for money. Will it be the last? (I hope so.)

Whenever I find myself working with a new author/artist, I always tell them up front, in the first letter detailing the publication process, that there is no money to be made and that I can’t pay them. (Hopefully that will change in the future.) But I do give them copies of the book (so many for free, plus more at a discount) to do with what they choose—give them away, sell them, burn them, whatever. This approach has worked so far, probably because the NewLights books are different and exist/circulate under different circumstances than most books. But this very informal, contingent approach might not work all the time.

Because I think that one thing that we are seeing with this BlazeVOX incident is that the small press world has gotten perhaps uncomfortably public, and that small presses that have been successful (in the sense of longevity & profile, not money) are becoming institutions in the eyes of their writing/reading public. And people are now, naturally, demanding accountability and transparency in the operation of these institutions. Wait a second are we—gulp—asking ourselves to professionalize?

Other than the immediate controversy around this controversy, it seems that there is more to be talked about here. To be continued.

THINGS & THINGS

that I found interesting on the Internet lately. The first is the work of Dafi Kühne, a designer and printer in Zurich. Not only does he produce interesting designs, but he prints them himself, often using constructed matrices—collagraph/relief, from contact paper, laser cut acrylic, cardboard, and even some wood type that he had fabricated. I thought these posters were particularly gorgeous:

They were printed from letters cut out of contact paper and stuck to a sheet of OSB. You can see more images on Mr. Kühne’s website. Thanks to the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts for bringing that to my attention. They are doing some great exhibitions and programming there lately.

And then I would take the hell out of this class: Graphic Texts: Looking at Text and Image Combined. And there are some great links in the post, which is probably the main reason I wanted to repost it.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (29): WHAT YOU WILL (15)

The image above shows the current state of the covers of Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will. As you can see, printing on the verso (left) side of the covers has begun. They are 4 runs deep at this point. Hopefully printing on the jackets will begin tonight, after work.

Speaking of “work,” there’s been a lot of posts at The Press (at Colorado College) Blog lately, as I try to catch up on everything from last school year before this was begins. Recent highlights include a CMYK & delaminated letterpress broadside by Darren Wershler, and a book/broadside project integrated with Twitter through the use of a QR code. Check them out here.

COMPLINE

Poet & printer Michael Cross, who used to publish wonderful books under the imprint Atticus/Finch, has started to publish wonderful books under a new imprint: Compline. The first book from that new press is C.J. Martin’s Two Books.

Two Books is one the best looking books I’ve seen from a small press in a while. It’s very elegantly designed, small in size but with a heft to it (it’s a little bit more than 200 pages). The image at the top of the post shows the (digitally printed?) cover while this one below shows the simple and beautiful letterpress printed jacket. Find out more about the book, the author, and the press, and buy the book, here.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (28): WHAT YOU WILL (14)

The right half (recto) of the cover of What You Will is complete: 44 runs. 17 remain on the verso. And then 28 on the jacket. Because I am back “on the clock” at the Press at CC, production is being adjusted slightly—I will print the jacket, 1-2 runs per session on weeknights after work, and do the cover, 2 runs per session, on the weekends. The runs on the cover are 4 times as long (2 covers x 2 sides) as the runs on the jacket. So now both pieces will develop simultaneously, and hopefully there will be images of both as they build up.

Long projects like this, with lots of printing, always help me generate new technical ideas as I’m working. Things happen that I did not anticipate, sometimes those things are interesting. The important thing, as always, is to pay attention.




I am intrigued by the surface of the printed areas of these covers. I am also intrigued by the deboss/emboss of the large, “negative” type inside a solid block. The use of multiple impression depths in combination with figure/ground reversals seems promising.

This book was conceptualized and designed (and went into production) when I was still in the Bay Area, when I had no reliable access to lead type. I had to make the book with what I had access to: photopolymer plates. It made sense to me to convert that constraint to an advantage—to make a design that fit with & drove the work and could only be achieved through photopolymer. This is what led me to the transparent, mirrored letters and the “negative” type blocks. This book could not be printed digitally. This book could be printed offset. But then that’s where things like impression and other on-press interventions come in.

I have been asked why I don’t offset print the NewLights books. The answer, at times, is as simple as: because I don’t know how to run an offset press. It’s important to me to be able to participate, actively, in the production of these things. & now, to set these things up so that they require that active participation to function.

THE HOLE ART OF PRINTING

When I was a graduate student in Arizona I lived my life in a series of small, windowless rooms: my studio apartment, my studio, and the letterpress shop at ASU. I referred to my various places as my “holes:” sleep-hole, work-hole, and type-hole, respectively. And then the other day I came across this passage in The Nature of the Book, by Adrian Johns (which is about printing & books in early modern England):

[…] A printing house, as already observed, must be represented as both private and public. One the one hand, it could not be open to all and sundry. The craft skills of the workers must remain mysterious, and it must be subject to the proper uninterrupted oversight of the master over his household. On the other, however, it must avoid being labeled “private” in the seventeenth-century sense, meaning illicit, secret, or seditious. Printers engaged in such dubious operations were said to do their printing in “holes,” or in “corners.” [Joseph] Moxon [1] defined a “hole” as “a place where private Printing is used, viz. the Printing of Unlicensed Books, or Printing of other Mens Copies.” That is, privacy immediately generated the two great evils of the trade: sedition and piracy. The notion was accordingly destined to become central to disputes over the status of printed materials. […] According to Moxon, printing in holes was lucrative and fairly common. There is reason to believe him. The Stationer’s Company certainly never lacked for spoils when it launched its periodic purges of offenders […]. Successive measures passed by both Parliament and the [Stationer’s] Company attempted to curtail such operations, […] aiming to discover “Printing-houses, and Presses erected in by-places and corners, out of the Eye of Government.” Parliament eventually ruled that printers must work only in “their respective Dwelling Houses, and not elsewhere.” […] The consequence is remarkable. It was not by chance that printing houses were set up in homes: the conjunction was formally obligatory. By corollary, a “private” press was one established anywhere but the space that society today considers archetypally private. Truth was made at home; lies emerged from holes. […] [2]

1. Joseph Moxon was the author of Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, published serially in England from 1680 – 1684.

2. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.), 128-9.

ONE THING CLOSES & ANOTHER OPENS

& so back from my travels in the vastness of the west. & marking one complete year here in Colorado. My summer break from Colorado College ends today—this morning I go “back to work,” even though I was never away for that long.

The two months of this summer break seemed like such a luxury. Part of me felt guilty about having that time. And that time was wonderful, even though money was tight. My biggest fear going into the summer was that I would waste it, that I would not have the “get up & go” to get up & go to the studio every day and do the work. But I did, and even though things (of course) took longer than I thought, I still managed to get a lot done. A great deal of work still remains. As these long projects are finally drawing to a close, I find myself anxiously looking forward to a tentative batch of new publications. But first things must come first.

My hope in the coming months is to broaden the scope of both the NewLights Press and The Press at Colorado College. This is a state of permanent of transition. The only reasonable thing to do seems to be anchor that transition in production. And so we go again, one more day, one more day into the breach. A constant morning, both empty and full.

The world is there. The light strikes it lovingly.

GOING TO GET A CLOSER LOOK

at these western lands. So this blog will be quiet until next week.

THE FIRST ITERATION OF THE NEW MANIFESTO OF THE NEWLIGHTS PRESS IS NOW OUT OF PRINT

“But wait,” they said, “how could a book supposedly printed in an ‘unlimited edition’ be out of print?”

& that is an excellent question. The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press is printed in an unlimited edition, but that edition will be comprised of successive iterations, each of those iterations being different versions of a single book. The different iterations will not be simply re-designed or re-edited versions of the same text/book, but will be entire re-visionings, based on what has been done before, and always looking forward to what could be done in the future. The book will be a literalization and activation of the reality of the text-in-flux, always immanent, always imminent. So each iteration is the same book. So each iteration is a new book. So The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press will be continually new continually.

The second iteration will hopefully be complete and released by the end of 2011 or beginning of 2012. From here on out, the first iteration will be available for FREE as a PDF—just email Aaron (newlightspressATgmailDOTcom) if you would like a PDF copy (maybe someday when NewLights has a “real” website it will be available for download). & it will also become our first experiment with an online edition, which will hopefully be up & accessible by the end of September 2011.

YOU WERE ON THE GROUND FLOOR (2)

“All I can tell you is what it feels like when you leave the studio…. it’s like you have a bunch of rocks in your stomach [and] then, all the trouble starts…. You have to go through it, like somebody preparing for sacred vows, the sensation of you putting paint on…. You do it and the work is done…. And then you leave the studio and those rocks aren’t there anymore.” [1]

[…] “To say that Stella, Warhol, and Smithson invoked the industrial is not to say that these artists worked literally to make machines, or sought employment in actual factories […]. What Stella, Warhol, Smithson, and other purveyors of the 1960s technological sublime intuitively understood was the need to play the codes: that is, to tolerate the seemingly necessary and always enforced ‘uniqueness’ of the art object and establish their own author-functions within art discourse (through statements, interviews, exhibitions), while simultaneously asserting and performing assembly-line production techniques, ‘executive artist’ efficiency, or geological agency that resonated with other cultural systems. […] [T]he artists of the 1960s unified the iconic [image of] and the performative [doing of] in the place of the studio (or, in Smithson’s case, in place of the studio), effecting this change across ‘styles’ and ‘isms’ as different as Minimalism, Pop, and Earthworks and expressing it in the useless objects of Art. That they sought (and achieved) a kind of sublimity (in technological form) is a measure of their ambition—to reach for that overwhelming response that had always been held out as the highest goal for American art. […] Stella’s praise of ‘executive artists’ and use of assistants in producing his brand was one unifying [of the ‘iconic’ and ‘performative’] move; another was Warhol’s conversion of studio into Factory, use of assembly-line silkscreen techniques on serial objects, and claims to delegate art production to ‘Brigid’ and ‘Gerard.’ A seemingly final, ‘post-studio’ stage was initiated by Smithson, who moved art production to the industrially mediated peripheries of abandoned quarries and mining sites, and located its meaning in discourse rather than in the object above all else. This was not some ‘Triumph over American Painting’ (to twist the standard paean against itself). It was an inversion and critique, an “anti-romantic anti-studio” dependent for its luminous salience on the Romantic constructs of an earlier age.” […] [2]

[…] “During the 1990s, many companies that had traditionally manufactured their own products and maintained large, stable workforces embraced what became known as the Nike model: don’t own any factories, produce your products through an intricate web of contractors and subcontractors, and pour your resources into design and marketing. Other companies opted for the alternative, Microsoft model: maintain a tight control center of shareholder/employees who perform the company’s ‘core competency’ and outsource everything else to temps, from running the mailroom to writing code. Some called the companies that underwent these radical restructurings ‘hollow corporations’ because they were mostly form, with little tangible content left over.” […] [3]

Fig. 08.11.01 "Art is the ultimate luxury." Screenshot from http://www.daum.fr/en-eu/



Fig. 08.11.02 Bruce Nauman, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967-68.


1. Quote from Phillip Guston, 1966, reprinted in:
Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.

2. Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 57-8.

3. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, (New York: Picador, 2007), 359.

YOU WERE ON THE GROUND FLOOR (1)

Coming home from the studio yesterday, I caught the end of Democracy Now! on the radio, where Amy Goodman was talking to Billy Bragg. They discussed many different and interesting things, but one exchange struck me particularly:

[…]

AMY GOODMAN: But this is David Rovics’ other question. "You were on the ground floor of the punk rock scene that was sweeping much of the world in the late ’70s, early ’80s. What impact did the early punk scene have on society culturally and politically?"

BILLY BRAGG: Well, the thing that it did was it—the great thing about punk was it was DIY. You know, the year before punk rock broke, I went to see The Rolling Stones at Earls Court, in a massive stadium, some of the first stadium gigs in the U.K. The distance, culturally, for me, in row Z, and Mick Jagger, I had absolutely no concept of how I would ever get from here to there.

Within a year, I had been to see The Jam. The Jam were my age. They looked like me. They had the same guitar as me. They had the same attitude as me. And suddenly a light went on in my head. How do you do it? Well, you just do it. You don’t wait to be asked. You don’t have to be a brilliant musician. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest singer. You know, I’m not technically a great guitar player, as your viewers would have already worked out, nor, you know, do I have a fabulous singing voice. But I have an idea. And that is all the justification you need to stand up on this table and sing as loud and as out of tune as you want. I mean, Woody Guthrie did that. I do that. And that’s what punk was all about. It was in your face. It was all about attitude. It wasn’t a haircut. It wasn’t a pair of bondage trousers. It wasn’t a ripped T-shirt. It was about, this is what I’ve got to say, and you better listen, because I’m not going to go away until you’ve heard it.

[…]

Bragg’s response to seeing the Stones playing a stadium show is similar to the response that I have when going to a museum and seeing contemporary “museum” art—it’s big & expensive & spectacular & seems to come from a world totally different from the one that I (and my peers) inhabit.

At this past College Book Art Association conference Ann Hamilton was the keynote speaker. She talked about her work, naturally. Her work, both big and small. Ann Hamilton is a very intelligent person (& she seems really nice too) and we have many interests in common, but I am definitely most intrigued by the simple, elegant videos that she makes with a tiny camera sitting at her kitchen table:



& the pictures that she takes with her mouth:



There is something to be said for work that one can make at home or with a relatively simple studio, without an enormous grant and an army of assistants. & I think I will be writing some of those things to be said on this blog this week. TO BE CONTINUED!

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (27): WHAT YOU WILL (13)

The images above show the cover of What You Will where it currently stands, 62 runs deep, with 26 on the left side now, and 36 on the right. Every plate used in the printing of the book is printed on the covers in white, in its exact location on the page, one on top of another. The books will be bound with a double-signature pamphlet stitch, so there are two cover sheets for every book, printed exactly the same on the front and back. So when the covers are folded and wrapped around and into the pages, the rectos of both sides of the cover will have all of the plates from the recto pages of the book, and the versos of the cover will have all of the verso plates of the pages. The layered structure of the entire book will be visible at once, both collapsing and exploding the pages.

Printing right now is very routine: just switching plates, making slight adjustments to the position, and printing long runs (100 books x 2 covers per book x 2 sides per cover = 400 impressions per plate). Yesterday I was reminded of an incident in one my painting classes when I was in art school in Baltimore, an “incident” that at the time was small (a normal critique of work done in class) but looking back from here, that professor, was, in a way, predicting the future….

The first semester of my sophomore year (Fall of 1999, the semester before I learned to print and started the NewLights Press) I was in a painting class that was based loosely around traditional techniques of figure painting in oils (glazing, etc.), but also featured a large amount of independent work. I was in the class mostly because I wanted to work with that professor, who was great. One day we were doing an in-class figure painting from a model. I was working on small, square canvas, and had set up a painting where most of the model was cropped off of the canvas and the majority of the composition was the white wall behind him. Because what I was interested in was painting that wall.

And so I tried to paint the wall (on my canvas), but I really wasn’t trying to paint an image an image of the wall (I thought I was), I was just putting white paint onto the surface of the canvas and enjoying that. The professor stopped me and explained that I wasn’t really painting, in the sense of trying to make a picture, but that I was just “marking time,” making a series of essentially arbitrary brushstrokes on a surface. The only thing being articulated by those strokes was the time it took to make them.

This was before I learned to make books. I thought of myself, more or less, as a painter. I was trying (not really trying) to be a “good” one. I had no idea what that meant. I was 19. I had not yet been pointed to the work of Robert Ryman, though it probably happened soon after this “event,” perhaps because of it:


Robert Ryman, Ledger, Enamelac paint on fiberglass, aluminum and wood, 1982.

Robert Ryman, Series #33 (White), Oil on canvas, 2004.

That professor was pointing out that my engagement with that painting was an engagement with the raw or mundane or technological aspects of the process: making marks on a surface. That was a valid critique from his point-of-view, the point-of-view of the assignment, because we were supposed to be doing a figure painting from life. But sometimes critiques like that open up other doors. And I think that is one of the main things that made this professor good—he didn’t just tell me to stop and get back to the figure, but talked to me about what I was doing, helping me to see something in my approach that I was blind to. [Thank you, Karl.]

So fast forward to yesterday. I was printing, white block after white block. And at some point I stopped, and thought:

Am I just marking time?

And the answer, at least for the moment, seems to be yes and no—yes, marking time, but no, not just marking time. Marking time because the time of the process of printing the book was being articulated on a single surface and distributed across the edition. Marking time because the temporal structure of the book would be legible at once. Not marking time because the surface of the page, and its 2D composition were also being articulated. Not just marking time because that time will be re-inscribed into the here-and-now of the reading of the book, of the reader’s understanding of the book as an object, as a made thing-in-the world.

PARTIES IN THE USA

I decided today that I will hereafter, at least in conversation, refer to “printing” as “partying.” That way I can say things like “I spent this entire summer partying,” or “I get up at 6 AM everyday so that I can start partying as soon as possible,” or “All this partying is just killing me.” Man, I can’t wait to PARTY ALL WEEKEND LONG.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (26): THE NEW MANIFESTO (1)

This lovely tired morning and looking over the current draft for the second iteration of The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press. Here’s an excerpt:

If we are to engage with the labor of making books we must not do so only in an effort to preserve them and the traditional crafts that go into making them. We must not lock them in the display cases, the glass coffins, of the museum. The book has a long history, but it is not, never has been, must never be, an object frozen in time. The book has a long history, but it is our job, as producers and readers, to make sure that it continues to have a living present. Everything that we cherish about books, about making them, reading them, owning them, collecting them, living with and through them, will be preserved if they continue to be culturally relevant. We must keep them out of the museums, out of the archives. They must live in our libraries, in our streets, in our stores, on our bookshelves, and in our hands.

Books are not art in the traditional sense. Books do not require viewers. A book viewed is a book dead. Books need readers, and thus they must circulate outside of the venues of art alone. A book read is a book alive, breathing, beating, shining and reverberating through its readers.

ADVERT!

The other day a friend of mine offered me space for a free ad in a publication that she was putting together (it was free because she ended up with 2 extra pages that needed to be filled quickly). I said yes. Then I was stuck with the odd task of making an advertisement for NewLights. I have never actually made anything that was strictly and discreetly an ad, at least for the press. So a new challenge. Strange to try to embody the whole thing in a single image/text composition. It is, after all, about movement. But the image below shows what I ended up with:

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (25): BROADSIDES & ACCIDENTS

A while ago I wrote a post describing the severe physical consequences of not storing one’s photopolymer plates properly. I never really tried to print those curled plates—I attempted to attach one to the base to see if it would flatten out, and it didn’t, so those never got used. But I did, at another time, for another project, manage to print from some plates that were severely warped.

The pictures shown in this post are from January of 2011. [I had forgotten about them until recently.] Before I left the Bay Area in August of 2010, I had made the plates necessary to print the letterpress portion of KC Trommer’s and Brenda Iijima’s broadsides. Those plates were stuck in an envelope and shipped to Colorado, and then they sat at the Press until I made time to print them in January. Which means they had been sitting, with minimal protection from the environment, for roughly 5 months. I think that the envelope that they were in did keep most light off of them, and provided restraint against severe curling, but they were far from perfect. Fortunately, for these projects, less-than-perfect plates were okay. (All of the printed “negative” space on these would eventually be peeled away, so print quality did not matter.) And their less-than-perfectness provided some interesting results.



Two things made these plates particularly prone to warping—the large amount of solid areas of type-high polymer, and the very dry climate here in Colorado. One thing that I was surprised about is that the plates don’t just curl, but that the actual surface can change shape over time.



A not-flat printing surface means that solids are not solid. In some cases, the shapes of the letters were just barely visible enough to do the cutting.






A little bit into the runs the plates actually cracked. (The curling is a result of the plates slowly hardening and drying out, meaning that they are also becoming more brittle.)


That reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg’s lithograph from 1963, Accident, where the stone broke during printing, but was used anyway and incorporated into the print.


When I went back to printing What You Will about a month ago, I was concerned because even though I had stored the plates properly (flat, in plastic bags and in the dark) they had still curled quite a bit. And I had imagined them being as printed as dark, flat, perfectly geometric solids. I didn’t know what would happen. I was worried that the surface of the plates had warped and the type would be completely illegible. And I wondered, not so much worried, if the plates would crack. And I think that if they had, and assuming that the cracking would not have rendered the small type completely illegible, I would have went with it. Partly because I couldn’t afford to remake those plates for a third time, and also because the cracks would have added another layer of legibility. A nice, dark, as-planned solid lends a physicality to the print (especially in a book where the ink can be touched by the reader) but I think that they remain (at least somewhat) abstract. Whereas a cracked plate + print would be more concrete, more specific, more opaque, more legible, more present. The reader would be brought ever so slightly closer to the matrix and to the process.

So maybe, maybe next time I will figure out how to really destroy those plates.