CORRELATIONS BETWEEN INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING & ARTISTS BOOK PRACTICE
VOLUME 3
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.
At the airport, I sit watching the loading and unloading, refuelling, the little carts coming and going with their trailers full of baggage. I observe all the feeding and loading of the plane that is needed to get it going, and marvel at the magnitude of the activity it takes to achieve that miracle: flight. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d much rather sit here, watching all this machinery move across the tarmac, than wander the boutiquelined, glossy-floored airport avenues, feeling like a stranger among the glittery glassiness of the shops and cafĂŠs. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the mechanics of it that are interesting.
There is a similar fascination with mechanics when making a printed image. No matter the idea, the image, the text, once we send our thoughts off to the printer— whether it’s in the form of a hand-printed etching or a laser-printed Word doc—a similar miracle occurs. Your content is transferred to a printed page. It is all too easy to discount this set of rather mundane and prosaic mechanical activities. But to realise that this sensational transformation would not happen without them is a cause for wonderment: a huge and enormously weighty metal structure is made airborne, a set of hieroglyphics on a screen become text on a crisp white page, and lines etched into a rectangle of copper become a fine art print. How does this happen? What exactly is this transformation and why is this relationship between machine, materials, and idea so endlessly fascinating? The source of my intrigue lies somewhere in the spaces between the preparation and the result, between an artist’s cleverly conceived idea and the mechanics of transferring this thinking onto paper, and in the gap between the glamorous façade of the travel brochure and the exhausting noisiness of air travel. This distance between means and ends in the printmaking studio particularly is always negotiable, elastic, and flexible, and dependent on the complexity of the task and on the skills of the maker. It is this gap between beginnings and ends, the transit and the travel, that beguiles me. French theorist Paul Virilio is fascinated by the implications of flight, which he discusses in terms of the architecture of airports, of boundaries and borders, transit and travel. Although some of his thinking is in the context of architecture, these concepts have potential to sharpen our perceptions of the image and the book.
Virilio considers the recent construction of “tremendous international airports, a METROPLEX”, where “Suddenly, all forms of loading and unloading—regardless of passenger, baggage or freight status—and all manner of airport transit had to be submitted to a system of interior/exterior traffic control.”1 We are all now constantly in transit, he argues, loading and unloading, and this applies particularly given the speed with which information travels via digital communications. Contemporary information technologies present a previously unimaginable potential for surveillance. There is, he contends, a “sudden reversion of boundaries and oppositions … distinctions of here and there no longer mean anything”.2 Boundaries must be re-considered. The advent of film with its moving image and aviation’s presentation of a new type of movement across the surface of the globe both necessitated this reconsideration. Nam June Paik, Virilio notes, said: “Video doesn’t mean I see; it means I fly.” Virilio argues that with this arrival of the phenomena of flight and the moving image, the “substantial, homogenous space derived from classical Greek geometry gives way to an accidental, heterogeneous space in which sections and fractions become essential once more”.3 The space between two surfaces has become “a commutation: the radical separation, the necessary crossing, the transit of a constant activity, the activity of incessant exchanges, the transfer between two environments and two substances”.4
Perhaps it is in the faults, failures, and little imperfections of the printed image that we see evidence of Virilio’s transit zone, and in this journeying we also sense a ‘commutation’ between the idea and its fruition. In printmaking, when we see these little mistakes—the colours out of register, an etched image not quite inked up well enough to be crisp, the line of type a little unevenly printed or over-inked—we mostly think of the mechanics of printing. And while some of us love process in and of itself, per se, for me, the vicissitudes of printmaking processes are all the more interesting because they reveal this mysterious disjunction between intentions and action. Are we, as artist and author of the work, disappointed when our dreams for the image don’t materialise? Is this disappointment nurtured because we haven’t taken into account or allowed for the agency of the complex interweavings of thought, action, and materials? Perhaps we should consider the wonderful potential of what might be, of leaving the printed image as unfinished, permanently being made or underway? Although writing about early modern Europe, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s perceptions about the printed image have resonance here. Of particular interest are her insights regarding the changes that the invention of printing wrought on the ways that invention and knowledge could be recorded, and how this new reproductive technology changed the consideration and understanding of the transferral of knowledge.
The newly printed texts of early modern Europe set off a “knowledge explosion” and this “accumulation of more data [made] … necessary more refined classification, and so on—ad infinitum. The sequence of improved editions and ever-expanding reference-works was a sequence without limits.”5 Eisenstein argues that being able to print something makes that printed something more available. Because it can be reproduced, it is now less likely to be lost. This “democratizing aspect of the preservative powers of print … secured precious documents not by putting them under lock and key but by removing them from chests and vaults and duplicating them for all to see”.6 This thinking of the print as a system that encourages a “sequence without limits”7 surely leads us back to and augments the notion of the print as permanently being made or underway. ............ Georgia Maitland’s 2016 artist’s book limbo / forgotten / people8 speaks of the unique but anonymous experiences of powerless individuals. The brown paper cover of this little hand-printed book is torn and slightly crumpled, perhaps recycled. Its plainness disguises the content. The texts are brutal. I don’t want to eat I want to die. The words float on the pages, pristinely printed in a sea of white. If I am not out in one month you can get me a tomb. Their shockingness needs this surround.
The images are hard to decipher because they are constructed with a layer of mechanical dots that contests clarity. With a bit of squinting and study, they reveal a landscape of rocks, boulders, clouds, and sky. There are no people pictured. Although their voices can be heard, they cannot be seen. Whereas artworks made by Sydney artist Mike Parr horrifyingly interrogate the brutality of political wrangling surrounding the arrival of asylum seekers in Australia,9 this little book packs a quieter but no less deadly punch. Alongside the mechanics of production in the dotty images is an unevenness of another sort. It is the intrusion of real world politics into the ordinary lives of people unfortunate enough to have been transported to Nauru or to Manus Island, those islands of seemingly endless exile and statelessness. Rather than travelling on planes, these people have travelled by sea, and the mechanics of their travel has remained rough and unfinished. This is not glamorous or smooth. They are in stasis, waiting, in limbo, in transit. Lots of preparation, not much of a result. ............ The introduction to Dominic Forde’s Ramps, Pools, Ponds and Pipes (2015) tells us “Prior to the glossy skate magazines, and pro-tours of the late 1980’s [sic] skateboarding’s popularity ebbed and flowed … early skaters had to build their own ramps and locate empty swimming pools, ponds and pipes to develop their skills”.10
Like Maitland’s limbo, these images have also been interfered with. This red, blue, and white spiral-bound book is made with risographs, which add a halftone dot to the image, and layers of colour are printed one at a time. The riso is known and loved for its flaws, its ebb and flow: sometimes images are misregistered, and sometimes the ink lands on the paper unevenly. Rather than digital certainty, the riso offers unpredictability. In Ramps, Pools, Ponds and Pipes, it is clear that a miraculous conversion of data from one language (analogue photographs taken between 1975 and 1985) into another (risographs bound together into a book) has taken place. And the images here—and this a book of images, no text—are also all about the unpredictable and transformative effects of physical forces, the skateboarder leaving the ground as his board (they’re all boys) speeds up the incline of a ramp or a pool. But we can’t see the action all that clearly; the printing isn’t crisp, and the images are blurred and ambiguous. These skaters are trying to fly, to defeat gravity, and the pictures snap them in that fraction of a second before their descent. It’s thrilling and it’s dangerous. Unlike the danger that Maitland’s forgotten people have faced and continue to face (dangers that seem unresolvable and unforeseen), these skaters are thrillseekers, pure and simple. But there’s a similarity in there somewhere, isn’t there?
This book is no glossy tribute to their braggadocio. In these muddied two-colour images, there is a terrifying gap between the grace of flight and the pain of a fall. The penultimate page presents this clearly. The thump of a body hitting the ground is about to shatter the pictorial silence. This skater’s feet are about to fly from the board as his hand flattens along the surface of the ramp in an effort to smooth the crash. Maybe a broken wrist is on the cards. The accident is embraced. The printed accident and skater’s dispute with the determination of gravity to assert itself are aligned in an unhappy synchronicity. The mechanics of both are revealed in a sensational transformation from speed to stasis. These printed accidents reveal the play of forces that transform the freedom of flight into the heaviness of the land-bound, and unceremoniously end the skater’s desire to fly, to soar, to escape. ............ In Bartolomeo Celestino’s Surface Phenomena (120416— 150608) of 2016,11 we are presented with pages and pages of endless ocean. The artist Celestino visited the cliffs of Bronte beach in Sydney during the eight years that appear in this book’s title and photographed the waters below him. His images fill the entire page, creeping to cover everything as water always does. The ocean is close in this envisaging, with the familiar patterning of white water and the spume of the waves sitting over the many and various blues of the sea. Perhaps the tide is coming in, or going out, or the waves have crashed and are cascading toward a shore or cliff. It’s hard to tell. We are all at sea.
Suddenly, an image is rotated, and its up-side-down-ness tips and disturbs any sense of balance or horizon the earlier images may have suggested. The surfaces of the pages change too, from matte to glossy and back again, testing our expectations of consistency as we touch. The pages are disrupted again in another way when a slice of an image of water from another place (or is it another time?) is inserted. Amid all this turbulence, there are blank pages, making another sort of space and presenting an emptiness of endless ocean alongside the never-empty emptiness of the page. As with the skaters in Forde’s Ramps, Pools, Ponds and Pipes, here too there is plenty of ebb and flow, in a ceaseless motion of oceans and of pages turning. In the book, Dan Rule writes By necessity of our status as an island nation, … (Australia’s) shoreline is a flashpoint… Like the waves that track across the surface of the Tasman—starting with a ripple, forming into a swell and toppling with the crash of white water—the violence of our coastal fringe is the reverberation of a world in turmoil.12 And here is the return to Maitland’s limbo / forgotten / people. Surrounded by water, island nations such as Australia, Nauru, Manus and Christmas Islands, and the shaky isles of Aotearoa/New Zealand are constantly reminded of borders and boundaries, and of the play of forces
that insistently test and survey the limits of those boundaries, as if to wear them away. Shorelines are relentlessly negotiated and re-negotiated in this to and fro. The force of the waves is constant and always thrilling, unexpected, perilous. The sound of the waves almost doubles for the thump of a skater’s body landing after those all-too-brief seconds of flight. ............ In an era of mass migrations, of peoples seeking asylum, of tourists seeking diversion, of commuters pouring across cities, perhaps we should be encouraged to think a little more carefully about our expectations of information systems. How extensive and accurate is our recording of these migratory experiences? What should we think about these global migrations? Urbanism and technology scholar Adam Greenfield describes the “internet of things” as “an unruly assemblage of protocols, sensing regimes, capabilities and desires, … (which are connected by) the ambition to raise awareness of some everyday circumstance to the network for analysis and response”. And what connects these interlocking systems is “the inchoate terror that a single event anywhere might be allowed to transpire unobserved, uncaptured and unleveraged”.13 Echoing Virilio’s observations, Greenfield points out the implications of perfecting systems of surveillance: “Against the backdrop of late capitalism, the rise of wearable biometric monitoring can only be understood as a disciplinary power traversing the body itself and all its flows.”14
Given these thoughts about networking, discipline, and the recording of these endless commutations, it is worth re-considering the machinery of the artist-made books described here and their printed pages that openly present all the slips and mishaps of production. In their nature, structure, and makings, these accidentprone hand-printed books remind us not of the accuracy of our records of these events, but of what might be or of something underway, remaining everlastingly farfrom-finished. The printer’s ink is stretching from one surface to another in an endless transfer between matrix and paper, idea and form. Each page remains a transit zone, a reminder that it is likely to be a mere fraction of a greater whole. Surely these qualities of the artist-made book might release us from that terrifying onus and discipline of endless self-reporting as outlined by Greenfield, and allow a gap or a space for error and a more friendly negotiation to emerge. Perhaps it is in this unpredictable commuting of the image and text from plate to paper, and in the endless and restless cycling that this mechanism implies, that we can sense the possibility of a negotiation between hope and error. As the imperfect pages of these artist books turn, we are presented with a sense of change, possibility, and the agency of materials.
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1. Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” in Rethinking Architecture, A Reader in Cultural History, ed. Neil Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 381. 2. Ibid., 383. 3. Ibid., 389–90. 4. Ibid., 385. 5. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, Volumes I and II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 110–11. 6. Ibid., 116. 7. Ibid., 111. 8. Georgia Maitland, limbo / forgotten / people (Melbourne: Selfpublished, 2016). Photopolymer relief prints, bound with a single pamphlet stitch, brown paper wrap around cover, edition of 15. 9. For example, “For five hours this Saturday afternoon, veteran performance artist Mike Parr will sit in the middle of an empty art gallery in Melbourne with his lips sewn together—and possibly his eyes, ears and nose. The word “Alien” will be branded into his thigh. Parr has fasted and meditated for the past few weeks and will not take painkillers or an anaesthetic while he mimics the actions of some of Australia’s asylum seekers. Parr’s latest performance, Close the Concentration Camps, is an expression of solidarity and empathy with those in immigration detention centres whose desperate acts were labelled ‘blackmail’ by Prime Minister John Howard and offending ‘the sensitivities of Australians’ by Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock.” Karen Heinrich, “Flinch Art,” The Age, 12 June 2012, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/11/1022982844221.html. 10. Dominic Forde, Ramps, Pools, Ponds and Pipes (Melbourne: Selfpublished, 2015). Risograph images printed by Dawn Press, cover printed by Press Print. 11. Bartolomeo Celestino and Dan Rule, Surface Phenomena (120416—150608) (Melbourne: Perimeter Editions, 2016). Images Bartolomeo Celestino, text Dan Rule. 12. Dan Rule in ibid., 109-111. 13. Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 32. 14. Ibid.
Wipe the Slate Sarah Nicholls
2015
Wipe the Slate considers debt—What do you owe? Who do you owe it to?—and money: Where does money come from? Where does it go? Are there any alternatives to money? Is it really necessary to pay our debts? Couldn’t we just forget about them and start over? It argues for debt forgiveness as the moderate approach to a stable society.
sarahnicholls.com/portfolio/wipe-the-slate/
ENOUGH Rose Nolan
2016
Made as a special edition for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Book Fair 2016, Enough uses the fold of pages to define letter forms, continuing Nolan’s long engagement with artists’ books.
http://store.negativepress.com.au/product/enough
Libro illeggibile 2009 (7th edition) Bruno Munari In 1949 Munari designs for the first time a series of libri illeggibili [unreadable books], which abandon textual communication in favour of aesthetic concerns. Paper no longer purely supports the text upon it, but also communicates a message through the format, the colour, the cuts and their successions. The elements that usually set up a book (such as the colophon and the title page) are omitted, and the reading seems to execute a melody with different tones over the sequence of the pages. Dominated by visual rarefaction and materialsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; experimentation, the production of the libri illeggibili has continued throughout Munariâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life.
www.corraini.com
Twelve Sea Pictures Leonard McDermid
2007
It has been said of Leonard McDermid’s work that he “wraps his meaning within a shell and hides it in the sea, where it may happily be discovered”.
spitalfieldslife.com/2011/06/27/gravehumour-from-harrow/
Whereof one cannot speakâ&#x20AC;Ś Elizabeth Newman
2016
Conceived during Cutting Mirrors at c3 Contemporary Art Space, this publication features photographs Newman took while on a residency at the CitĂŠ internationale des Arts, Paris, from July to September 2015. Each image has been tipped into the book, making it a photobook in the most literal sense. The only text appears in the colophon.
store.negativepress.com.au/product/ i-whereof-one-cannot-speak-i
Surface Phenomena (120416-150608) Bartolomeo Celestino 2016 Bartolomeo Celestino has been returning to a particular section of Sydney’s coastal fringe—atop an otherwise unremarkable set of cliffs in the eastern suburb of Bronte—day after day, year after year, to undertake the protracted task of setting up his largeformat camera and training his lens downward to the fierce waters below.
shop.perimeterbooks.com/products/bartolomeocelestino-surface-phenomena
mindmap 2017 Uta Schneider & Ulrike Stoltz We made mindmap while preparing our keynote for the ABBE conference...â&#x20AC;¨it is a reproduction of the handwritten original, with a typographic translation into German and English on top.
grahamegalleries.com.au/index.php/ stand-10-usus-6th-abmf-2017
Experimental Thinking / Design Practices 2015 Katherine Moline & Peter Hall The exhibition Experimental Practices/Design Thinking presents something different, another way for envisioning and realising a touring exhibition. This is the third iteration of the exhibition. To date, there have been three names, three bodies of works, presented in three distinct designs, with three different identities, and an evolving curatorial team headed by Katherine Moline. Some of the items in the exhibition have been constant; some have come, gone and returned; and, as with the curatorial team, there have been additions made that respond to the local context of the exhibition.
From Laurene Vaughanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s catalogue essay in the publication
Wall to Wall Lyn Ashby
2016
In a fiery (gridded) universe, the wild birds of life are slowly domesticated and for a while end up as wall features in the upholstered comfort of the readerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lounge room. But the universe has other plans, and the book itself takes flight so that poor Yorick (our reader) must return, with flaming brains, to his origins in the stars. This small book is a fast-forward gush through one version of postmodern cosmology. Originally designed for the Center for Book, Paper and Print, Columbia College Chicago, where it was offset printed and included in the 2016 spring issue of the Journal of Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Books volume 39.
lynashby.com/Wall to Wall.html
The future, un-imagine 2017 Angela Gardner & Caren Florance In 2015, poet Angela Gardner was invited to the print studio of artist Caren Florance to set some blocks of ‘random’ text using metal letter¬press type. As a separate creative work, ‘The Future, Un-imagine’ was taking form in Gardner’s mind; there was also ambient sound in the studio, a radio playing, and wide-ranging conversation taking place between the two as Gardner set the type. Her seven ‘key’ textblocks were then print-performed by Florance for over a year to produce multiple readings and visual patterns, reflecting the structured chaos that Gardner uses in her writing practice.
recentworkpress.com/product/the-future-un-imagine/
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 978-0-6483740-2-2 www.dc3p.com
S N O I TA L E R R O C NEEWTEB TNEDNEPEDNI & GNIHSILBUP KOOB STSITRA ECITCARP
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