CORRELATIONS BETWEEN INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING & ARTISTS BOOK PRACTICE
VOLUME 2
VOLUME 1
C O N TE N T S
INTRODUCTION ESSAY: TIM MOSELY
Ink on paper: meaning made material
STEPHEN FOWLER
SARAH BODMAN
GEORGIA MAITLAND
DOMINIC FORDE
LOUIS LIM
CHRISTOPHER DAY
MARIAN CRAWFORD
THOMAS RAAT
ANA PAULA ESTRADA DE ISOLBI
THE CODEX FOUNDATION
Cosmic Forces Limbo
An Opened Letter Picturing the Island Memorandum
GM Future
Ramps, Pools, Ponds and Pipes New Reading Order
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and More... <usus>, typography, and artists’ books
VOLUME 2 INTRODUCTION ESSAY: SARAH BODMAN “What if?” Books
NUALA GREGORY
MARK WINGRAVE
CATHERINE DE ZEGHER
BRUNO MUNARI
ERIN COATES
BRAD FREEMAN, AK MILROY & TIM MOSELY
JAN NOVÁK
ADOLFO ARANJUEZ & NINA READ
INDIGENOUS ACTION MEDIA
MICHAEL PHILLIPS
Exploded View
the (hemi)cycle of leaves and paper Kinesphere
DUST gamebook Accomplices Not Allies
A journey from one reality to another Seeking comfort in an uncomfortable chair Trumped up empathy Fragmented (# two)
The Democracy of Disease
VOLUME 3 INTRODUCTION ESSAY: MARIAN CRAWFORD
Print Mechanicals: Artist Books and Their Errors
SARAH NICHOLLS
BARTOLOEO CELESTINO
ROSE NOLAN
UTA SCHNEIDER & ULRIKE STOLTZ
BRUNO MUNARI
KATHERINE MOLINE & PETER HALL
LEONARD MCDERMID
LYN ASHBY
ELIZABETH NEWMAN
ANGELA GARDNER & CAREN FLORANCE
Wipe the Slate ENOUGH
Libro illeggibile Twelve Sea Pictures Whereof one cannot speak
Surface Phenomena (120416-150608) mindmap
Experimental Thinking / Design Practices Wall to Wall The future, un-imagine
C O RRE LAT IO NS B E T WE E N I ND E P E N D E N T PUBLIS H I N G & A R T IST S BO O K PRA C T I C E
To what degree can/does independent publishing‘s engagement with the field of artists book shape creative practice within the field, and inform the emerging critical discourse on it. Within an Australian context artists books are commonly associated with fine arts practice and the aesthetics of autographic printmaking. The striated machine aesthetic of printed matter from the design, printing and publishing industries are far less prevalent. This point was highlighted by Dr Amir Brito Cadôr (Professor of Graphic Arts at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) during his keynote lecture at the State Library of Queensland’s 2015 Siganto Foundation Artists Book Seminar. Cadôr’s observation was made in contrast to the Brazilian context of artists books, generally produced within the machine aesthetic of the commercial printing industry. He nominated the scarcity of accessible printmaking studios in Brazil as a significant factor for this quality. The recently established Art Book Fairs at Sydney’s Artspace and the NGV have placed the Australian context under a new scrutiny, one that challenges both the “fine art” and “independent publishers” positions in the field. What these fairs make particularly evident within contemporary independent publishing practices is a highly intuitive engagement with printing that designers are pursuing in counterpoint to the tight space of commercial publishing. This project was supported by the Griffith Centre for Creative Arts Research. It has generated a small collection of books that identifies intersections between independent publishing and artists book practices, and places both within the framework of print culture. Its primary outcome is the collection and a catalogue documenting the collection supported by critical essays by S Bodman, M Crawford and T Mosely. Initially shown in the “... & So” exhibition at Griffith Library QCA 2017 the collection will be toured nationally and internationally.
‘ W H AT I F ? ’ BOOKS SARAH BODMAN
The Correlations project presents some examples of artists’ books as a method of enquiry,a means for us to ask questions about their relationship with independent publishing through content and context, and to consider both the history and continued practice of the book as a work of art. These books within Correlations span more than seventy years of practice from Australasia, Europe, and the USA. In Australia, creative engagement with printmaking practice in the field of artists’ books is constantly testing and expanding the possibilities of both production and reception. Some examples include Marian Crawford’s immersive process of slow production methods through letterpress, aimed to fully absorb and comprehend disturbing factual matter; Tim Mosely’s investigations into haptic touch and the materiality of how we engage with books as viewer/readers through printed surfaces; Angela Gardner and Caren Florance’s experimental works using digital mediation of texts and printed poetry; and Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison’s approaches to book installations and interaction. Indeed, the rich vein of printmaking and book making currently taking place forms a crucial part of how artists’ books are created, interacted with, and discussed internationally.
The fluidity of practice between artists, designers, small presses, and publishers has become more apparent in recent years across many countries. Regular art book fairs across Europe, the USA, and South America are similar to the Australian model, showcasing books about art, artists’ books, art magazines, etc., together under one roof, from Printed Matter in New York and Los Angeles to Friends with Books and Miss Read in Berlin. The conversations that take place at these events and the things we notice as exhibitors and visitors all help to understand the possibilities for the fields of both artists’ books and mainstream publishing. Artists look to publishers for the scale of their endeavours and networks of distribution, and publishers look to artists and designers for new ideas in creating unusual, engaging content and format. The borders between mainstream and art publishing are dissolving at quite a pace, which is mostly due to artists, publishers, and printers having access to both traditional and digital production methods and the Internet. If we predicate the book firmly in print and printmaking culture (as a physical object) and digital as its support mechanism (independent publishing tool, social fundraising, and distribution), then we have the perfect platform for artists to—as we always do—identify, adapt, and employ the tools inside and outside our field that we need to make art.
Sarah Nicholls has been self-publishing her letterpress and relief printed series Brain Washing from Phone Towers Informational Pamphlets since 2010.1 Apart from being beautifully constructed and visually appealing, these small books are part of the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wider consideration of socially engaged printmaking and distribution. Each edition funds the next through a small number of the books being available to purchase, while the rest are sent out through the postal system to people Nicholls thinks would appreciate receiving as a gift. Nicholls is particularly interested in the mechanics of a gift economy, sharing ideas through free distribution of these books three times a year. The content of each book is diverse yet connected through her means of disseminating thought-provoking information. Subjects considered are as varied as the global decline of the bee population (Tell the Bees, Summer 2016), bioluminescent bacteria and the potential of coordinating artificial intelligence (Milky Seas, Summer 2015), how we communicate and if we can do so without being spied on (Prisms and Shamrocks, Spring 2015), and what would happen if all debts were erased (Wipe the Slate, Autumn 2015, which features in the Correlations project). The books are created in much the same manner as traditional broadside print was produced throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. They employ hand-set letterpress type, hand-printed with linocut or woodcut imagery that are folded, bound, and distributed at large to effectively communicate a message to a wide audience.
Another letterpress expert is the poet and artist Leonard McDermid (Stichill Marigold Press), based in the Scottish Borders where he prints in his home-built studio, publishing small editions of hand-set type and imagery. His book Twelve Sea Pictures (2004) is included in the Correlations exhibition. Part concrete poetry, part visual puns, his delightful books are rooted in his observations on nature, based on his past experiences working on trawlers and as artist for The Marine Society.2 British artist and researcher Angie Butler has visited and interviewed McDermid on his practice several times as part of her study of twenty-first- century, letterpress-printed artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; books. She notes that she was fascinated and inspired by his ability to build mechanisms and contraptions that suit his methods of printing editions. It is the dedication of artists such as Nicholls and McDermid that provides the field with reasons to celebrate and continue, embracing the independence of small press publishing and the engaging quirks and eccentricities that become possible.
Elsewhere, Barrie Tullett of The Caseroom Press in Lincoln, UK, has spent the last twenty years on his ongoing project to visually interpret each of the one hundred cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy through ‘obsolete’ technologies. The thirty-four cantos of The Inferno have been letterpressprinted with wood and metal type; the thirty-three cantos of Purgatory have been made with his own collection of manual typewriters; and the upcoming thirty-three cantos of Paradise will be made with Letraset. Tullett has carefully considered the merits of each means of production, comparing the freedom of play with scale and colour in letterpress printing with the immediacy of free form in Letraset and the virtues of twentieth-century typewriters. In his essay “The Typographic Dante”, he describes the choices available in different models of these ‘obsolete’ machines: A typewriter from the 1900s would have given a range of fonts unheard of in the machines available to us today. The Hammond typewriter came with interchangeable typebars that included small roman, script continuous, italic, medium roman, large roman, law italic (a ‘backwards’ sloping italic), attic (a glorious piece of Victoriana) and gothic (a sans serif). Now I have a number of typewriters all of which give me a variation of the same font, in slightly different point sizes and with slightly different x-heights.3
In 2013 and 2014, prompted by the instability of digital communication and its ever-increasing interceptions, it was reported that Russian and German security services were considering returning to the technology of the manual typewriter as a safe means of correspondence.4 In our current age of digital communication overload, it is not such a preposterous idea to imagine that more artists, writers, and publishers could be embracing these ‘obsolete’ analogue methods of production (and distribution if we consider Nicholls’s use of the postal system as a physical means of introducing her practice). The British artist Daniel Lehan uses a manual typewriter every day to create his unique Day Page
(2015-ongoing) books in old musical score books,
notebooks, and stamp albums. Every evening, he types a reflective text musing on the day’s events and collages onto the page using found imagery gathered during the day—newspapers, magazines, leaflets, etc. In between this, he collages into other books, usually small travel guides from the 1940s onwards, in which he places images and texts meticulously cut from medical health manuals. The additions subtly subvert the action within, and atmosphere of the landscape. For example, tiny babies are gently swayed by nurses underground in Wookey Hole Caves Creche (2017). In Elche (2017), a souvenir postcard book of Huerto del Cura (The Priest’s Orchard at Elche, Alicante, Spain, declared a National Artistic Garden in 1943), he has collaged imagery from formal art history books such as The Art of Henri Rousseau together with figurines from a catalogue of Royal Doulton china animals, intermingling ‘high’ and ‘low’ art within the garden.5
The overlaps that emerge between publishing and art and design practices in books can also be seen in formal publishing movements such as Liberature, in which the content, presentation, and context of the book are considered as equally important parts of a whole that strengthen each other. For example, Nieszczęśni, Katarzyna Bazarnik’s Polish translation of B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (2009), was presented unbound within a box, echoing the author’s original intent for the work. I would posit that Eine Enzyklopädie des Zarten [An Encyclopaedia of Tenderness] by Anne Brannys published by Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt in 2017, would also fit in Liberature’s sphere of practice. It is a compendium of references from the humanities and natural sciences published alongside artworks exploring the concept of tenderness.These were compiled and edited by Brannys over her project’s call, with a series of short literary articles written, cross-referenced, and arranged to create the encyclopaedia. The publisher designed and printed the book to reflect the theme, on slightly transparent paper, with a cover wrap that partially obscures the full title, and with pages uncut, so the reader/viewer has the choice to be tender by just peering between the spaces, or less so in cutting the edge to reveal the images. Without the increase of digital mainstream publications and the associated competitiveness of the publishing market, books such as this one probably would not have been published if Kindles hadn’t been invented. Small and independent publishers are now looking for ways in which our interest can be piqued, outside of the usual mechanisms of traditional hardback to paperback publishing.
In October 2017, a new book prototype was announced by the Anne Petronille Nypels Lab at the Van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands that specialises in experimental printing and publishing. The book is an edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, over-screenprinted with black, heat-sensitive ink by the French graphic design collective Super Terrain, who explore printmaking processes as designers. If heat is applied to their book—for example, a match or lighter is held near the pages—the black ink disappears and the text reveals itself.6 This book presents exciting possibilities for artists’ books and experimental publishing, and Super Terrain is one of a growing number of independent designer/publishers such as Liberature who are keen to experiment with the book’s capabilities as well as its appearance. Super Terrain run printmaking workshops across France, encouraging students and schoolchildren to explore the relationships between editorial practice and printed matter. These include producing their own alternative letterpress-printed newspapers, replacing CMYK colours, going on ‘typographic safaris’, and printing and building paper huts as publications.7 Also pushing the boundaries of interactive printed matter, The Laurence Sterne Trust in the UK has launched a call to republish a complex narrative from the 1930s, through crowdfunding publisher Unbound.8 Interestingly, this project sits within the field of artists’ publishing and is attempting to deliver a published, experimental project through innovative funding.
The Trust aims to recreate a work from 1934, Cain’s Jawbone, written by The Observer’s crossword compiler, Edward Powys Mathers (aka Torquemada). His murder mystery novel was like no other; at one hundred pages long, it was printed and bound out of sequence, with the reader being given the task of rearranging them to attempt to solve the mystery. The Laurence Sterne Trust calculates the total possible combinations of pages as 32 million, with only two readers having solved the puzzle since 1934.9 Unbound will publish the book as loose pages within a box, and the Trust has set a competition to solve the mystery that will run for one year from the date of the book’s publication. Cain’s Jawbone is also a candidate for Liberature, and just one example of the Trust’s work in publishing non-linear narratives and experimental bookworks. Access to online crowdsourcing makes valuable artistic and literary projects such as these possible. Rather than digital killing off the physical book, these platforms can be very useful in supporting the creation and distribution of a physical outcome. A work from the Correlations exhibition, Stephen Fowler’s Cosmic Forces (2015) is a fine example of autographic printmaking. His book is a tribute to 1930–1940s American B movies’ portrayals of spiritualism, séances, and mediums exploring paranormal activity. Initially made as a oneoff book for an exhibition in London in 2012, Fowler went on to produce, in very small batches, a complete edition of twenty in 2016. His practice explores the entanglements of religious iconography, folklore, and collections of ephemera, superstition, and ritual. Fowler deliberately
works with low-fi printmaking techniques that he can access to work with anywhere, and specialises in intricate rubber stamp printing, mail art, and artists’ books that evoke the aesthetic of outsider art. He has a vast collection of his own and antique rubber stamps, and a love of working by hand on paper. Fowler makes his books and prints in his studio without a press, surrounded by examples of folk art and ephemera. His eclectic library of resources includes publications on traditional folk costumes, searches for the Loch Ness monster and Yeti, and histories of religion and witchcraft. For this artist’s book, he has employed hand-colouring with antique red ink for the blood-red pages, dipping and drawing with bleach to create the ghostly effects of ectoplasm and spirit auras, and rubber stamp printing for the details of the spectral faces. The apparitions hover on the pages in white, unearthly wisps, their eyes focused way beyond the page, possibly observing something behind the reader/viewer. It’s a hint of otherness that echoes the intent and atmosphere of the original movies, the idea that cosmic forces, good or bad, could be all around us. This is a book that would never work as a commercially produced edition for all the right reasons. German multidisciplinary artists Uta Schneider and Ulrike Stoltz ‹usus›, who also feature in the Correlations project, have been collaborating on books, works on paper, and installations for many years. Each of them brings expertise and sharing of knowledge through teaching drawing, letterpress, typography, and artists’ books in Germany and further afield. Their printmaking practice is an inspiration to artists, bookbinders, and students alike, building on the idea of the book as a
container for thoughts, and pushing the boundaries of printmaking processes through large-scale installations and artists’ books that interweave and overlap narrative forms (fluosz, Ulrike Stoltz, 2004) or explore communication (satz—wechsel, ‹usus›, 2004), for example. They also edit and publish their own newspaper, z.B. [zum Beispiel] [zum Buch] / [for example] [about books], which considers many aspects and themes around the book, the artist’s book, and typography. Articles and essays range from considering definitions of the artist’s book to the spontaneity of creative processes, to the difference between mainstream publishing and artists’ books practices of “ordinary books and extraordinary books”.10 In 2009, my colleague Tom Sowden and I interviewed Stoltz in Braunschweig, Germany, for our Manifesto project. Stoltz described her approach to book practice as follows: In making my own art I also regard it as research work, let’s say on the fundamental ideas of what a book could be. When I was studying, in modern dancing we had this exercise: “I am walking across the room” and suddenly I realised the page is the room, and the letters are walking across the room. With this experimental dance it was clear that walking across the room was not one line after the other, set in a box. So suddenly that was the breakthrough. I think this way of thinking about what a book could be is also a guarantee for the survival of the book.11 In Australia and around the world, artists, designers and independent publishers are working in the spirit of Bruno Munari, testing and experimenting through the book, with what we feel, observe, and experience when we hold it in our hands, asking ‘What if?’ The activities that these practitioners, educators, and publishers are engaging in, and the artworks that arise, are testament to the longevity of the book as an inspirational field of current and future practice.
1. To find out more about the project, see http://www.brainwashingfromphonetowers.com. 2. For information on Leonard McDermid, see http://www. scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/leonard-mcdermid and https://www.nls.uk/collections/scottish/modern/national-poetryday/2010/mcdermid. 3. Barrie Tullett, “The Typographic Dante,” Artist’s Book Yearbook 2014– 2015 (Bristol: Impact Press, 2013), 105-106. 4. Chris Irvine and Tom Parfitt, “Kremlin Returns to Typewriters to Avoid Computer Leaks,” The Telegraph, 11 July 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10173645/ Kremlin-returns-to-typewriters-to-avoid-computer-leaks html; Philip Oltermann, “Germany ‘may revert to typewriters’ to counter hitech espionage,” The Guardian, 15 July 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/15/germany-typewritersespionage-nsa-spying-surveillance. 5. For examples of Daniel Lehan’s collaged bookworks, see http://www.daniel-lehan-books.co.uk/portfolio/ 6. A video of the experiment with this book can be seen at http://www. thisiscolossal.com/2017/10/heat-sensitive-edition-of-fahrenheit-451/. 7. Super Terrain’s practice, workshop archive, and publications can be found at http://www.superterrain.fr. 8. See https://unbound.com. 9. Find out more about the project at https://unbound.com/books/cains-jawbone. 10. Interview with Ulrike Stoltz by Sarah Bodman and Tom Sowden at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig, Germany, 14 January 2009, http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/pdf/canon/stoltz.pdf. 11. Ibid.
Exploded View Nuala Gregory
2010
An art catalogue produced in collaboration with Nuala Gregory at the time of her exhibition Nuala Gregory: Exploded View (Gus Fisher Gallery, University of Auckland, 4 Juneâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;17 July 2010). Twenty-four full colour images are reproduced, along with two essays. The book is designed to have a strong relationship with the use of colour in the exhibited work; this is represented most strongly in the intense blues of the cover and vibrant yellow end papers.
versovisual.co.nz/galleries/zexplodedview/
the (hemi)cycle of leaves and paper Catherine de Zegher 2016 In 2012, Simryn Gill (Malaysia, 1959) gave one of her major works to the MSK, comprising twelve panels with work on paper called Let Go, Lets Go. To honour this gift, it was presented to the public, eventually accompanied by a book containing an essay by Jan Braet and Catherine de Zegher, in the exhibition The (hemi)cycle of leaves and paper.
mskgent.be/en/exhibitions/hemicycle-leaves-andpaper
Kinesphere Erin Coates
2014
As a part of her major solo show Kinesphere and the national Catalyst Commission, PICA Press and Atomic Activity Books have published a monograph on artist Erin Coates. This 128-page book contains commissioned essays by Jack Sargeant, Dr Shevaun Cooley, and Leight Robb. Limited edition copies include an artwork bolted through the book and a custom cast resin climbing hold.
erincoates.net/new-page/
DUST gamebook Jan Novรกk
2009
A complex spatial maze contained within a fifty-four paged book.
www.jannovak.net
Accomplices not allies 2014 Indigenous Action Media This zine presents a strong critique of the political identity of “ally” and the activists who have built an “ally industrial complex” based on their anti-oppression credentials. Written from the context of indigenous struggles, this zine criticises and explains several different types of “allies”: those who wish to “save” oppressed people, those who wish to use oppressed people to advance their own interests, academics, self-proclaiming allies, and more. Rather than “allies,” the zine argues instead for “accomplices” who attack colonial structures and ideals and who are realised through mutual consent and trust.
warzonedistro.noblogs.org
A journey from one reality to another Mark Wingrave 2015 I am interested in the dialogue between translation and visual art. In particular, the shifting perspectives the translator takes and the wider implications of interpretation and invention for making work. The result initiates an interplay of textual and visual symmetries, forming parallels and asserting differences.
mcbaprize.org/wingrave/
Seeking comfort in an uncomfortable chair (1944) Bruno Munari
2014
Munari analyses the most obvious case of the armchair. You must have been seated on countless types of this chair: very low ones, ones with a deep seat, ones with sharp edges, and so on. “But be honest: what is more restful than a tuppenny deckchair?” In Munari’s typically engaging style, the great designer reminds us how we could go on inventing furniture each time fashions change when actually all that is needed is to perfect the most comfortable of the existing models, not forgetting the real purpose: comfort and durability.
printedmatter.org/catalog/33770/
Trumped up empathy 2016 Brad Freeman, AK Milroy & Tim Mosely This piece was a collaborative event involving the ever-faithful, mighty, onecolour Heidelberg GTO. It was conceived and printed before 8 November 2016; with the new US administration well underway, a rereading of this work may provide perspective on the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s progression to date, and may perhaps help shed some light on its coming trajectory.
shop.colum.edu/literature-jab41.html
Fragmented (#2) 2013 Adolfo Aranjuez & Nina Read Fragmented is a Melbourne-based, experimental small-press magazine, that showcases high quality literature, essays, and visual art. It is a platform for broad intellectual thought. Its title alludes to its diverse array of material due to absence of restrictions on themes and subject matter, as well as the age or location of contributors. Every issue is a limited run of 100 so that Fragmented stays independent and small.
www.ninaread.com/fragmented-magazine-issue-two
The Democracy of Disease 2012 Michael Phillips The mystery of disease, the mystery of identity, and the mystery of place and time are combined in this book. The pages have been made by two overprints on make-ready sheets in blue. In the first overprint, (purple) pathology slides documenting various diseases of the human urological system have been scanned and used for imagery commenting on the mystery of the democracy of disease. On each slide in a small neat hand is the patientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name next to images of their failing organs and tissue. The second overprint was made from negatives found in a tobacco tin at a London flea market.
grahamegalleries.com.au/index.php/grahamegalleries-6th-abmf-2017
AUTHOR BIOS SARAH BODMAN is an artist and researcher at the Centre for Fine Print Research, University of West England, Bristol, UK. Sarah is also Programme Leader for the MA Multidisciplinary Printmaking course at UWE, and the editor the Artist’s Book Yearbook reference publication, the Book Arts Newsletter and The Blue Notebook journal for artists’ books. Her artists’ books explore the darker side of nature and human nature, and are collected by the leading collections within the field. MARIAN CRAWFORD is a visual artist and senior lecturer in Fine Art at Monash Art Design & Architecture. She was recently awarded the Siganto Fellowship at the State Library of Queensland 2015/16 and has presented her creative works and writings publicly since 1996. Crawford’s works explore the relationships between the book, fine art printmaking processes, and the printed image in contemporary culture. TIM MOSELY is a practicing artist whose creative output contributes to the fields of print culture, artists books and haptic aesthetics. He is a lecturer in Fine Art at Queensland College of Art, Brisbane, Australia, where he convenes the Print program, the abbe events and dc3p. His work is held in prominent national and international artists books collections and has been included in significant survey exhibitions of the field including Behind the Personal Art Library: Collectors Creating the Canon, the Centre for Book Arts, NY, 2014. His current research draws on the autographic and the indexical nature of prints to address the role of touch in the reception and evaluation of art.
AC KN OW LEDGE M E N TS This publication was made possible with the support of the Griffith Centre for Creative Arts Research. Designed by Emily Stewart at Liveworm Studio, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. www.liveworm.com.au Edited by Evie Franzidis. ISBN 978-0-6483740-0-8 www.dc3p.com
S N O I TA L E R R O C NEEWTEB TNEDNEPEDNI & GNIHSILBUP KOOB STSITRA ECITCARP
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