letterpressbkart

Milestones Decreasing!

2011-02-23T16:12:00.000-08:00

I so appreciate the conversations that have happened around milestones in the book arts. You will recall that this came up originally when Monica Moses, editor-in-chief of American Craft magazine, asked me to supply up to 20 book art milestones that would be integrated into a larger craft timeline, to celebrate the magazine's 70th anniversary in its June/July issue. I knew that this would prove to be an impossible task, but I felt better asking several of the field's most knowledgeable practitioners to weigh in with their suggestions.

So, here's the latest. I returned from a trip yesterday to find another email from Moses, asking me to resubmit the milestones, but to reduce their numbers to 10, and even to 5. What torture! It sounds like the magazine's graphic designer is struggling to produce something that will be readable. I am sympathetic to the challenge, and I came up with something, but now am quite nostalgic for the struggle to come up with 20.

So, I've decided to list my 20 entries here, so that they will be listed somewhere! Recognizing that every person who reads this will have a different opinion, here is what I came up with after receiving all of the suggestions that I listed in my previous entry.

20 BOOK ART CRAFT MILESTONES

1940

1949. Lloyd Reynolds begins to teach calligraphy at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Over 35 years his efforts spark a revival in the lettering arts, whose influence extends from italic handwriting taught in elementary schools to typographers designing digital fonts used in Macintosh computers.

1960

1969. Visual Studies Workshop founded. The VSW Press is the first of several artist-run offset presses that powers the rise of the multiple bookwork.

1970

1971. Kathryn and Howard Clark establish Twinrocker, Inc. Papermill. Six years later Claire Van Vliet develops paper pulp painting there as a visiting artist, seen first in her book, Aura.

1973. Printer and papermaker Walter Hamady publishes his first Interminable Gabberjabbs, a series of books whose content, format and materials tweak book conventions while showcasing exceptional craft.

1974. Richard Minsky founds the Center for Book Arts, in New York City.

1974. Keith Smith publishes Structure of the Visual Book, the first of his books that picture, instruct and interpret non-traditional bookmaking.

1975. Fine Print journal published until 1990, the first journal (of several) to explore craft issues in the book arts.

1976. Dieu Donné Papermill is started up in New York City for the preservation of hand papermaking in contemporary art.

1979. Book conservator Hedi Kyle creates April Diary, inventing the simple yet elegant flag book structure used by countless book artists.

1980

1982. Columbia University’s School of Library Science sponsors the Fine Printing Conference with exhibition and book fair. Thirty-two printers attend, and Columbia later publishes the proceedings.

1983. Paper and Book Intensive founded, a yearly “working sabbatical” for established and emerging artists and others in the book arts.

1986-1988. The National Collegiate Book Arts Exhibition, organized by Richard Zauft and the University of South Dakota, travels to nine sites across the U.S. to highlight the growing options for study at the college level.

1983. Papermaker and scholar Timothy Barrett publishes Japanese Papermaking: Traditions, Tools, and Techniques, based on his travels and research in Japan, and later leads efforts to produce conservation-sound papers while teaching at the University of Iowa.

1985. The University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa launches its M.F.A. in the Book Arts Program through the School of Library and Information Studies, which remains the U.S. program most closely identified with a high level of craft.

1986. Hand Papermaking journal founded.

1987. Printer Harry Duncan’s writings published in Doors of Perception: Essays in Book Typography, giving voice to a new generation of letterpress printers.

1990

1994. Peter Verheyen starts the Book_Arts-L listserv, and in that moment the book arts community goes global.

1998. Gerald Lange's Digital Printing on the Cylinder Hand Press explores the expressive possibilities of polymer plate-making conjoined with desktop publishing and improved font software for letterpress printers.

2000

2007. CODEX Foundation founded to preserve and promote the art and craft of the book through a biennial symposium and a book fair strong in international participation.

2008. College Book Art Association established to support and promote academic book arts education with a biennial conference and (as of 2011) an online journal.

Craft Milestones in the Book Arts

2011-02-14T14:58:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I was contacted by Monica Moses, editor in chief of American Craft magazine. The magazine marks its 70^th anniversary this year, and as part of that celebration it will publish a “70 Years of Making” timeline for craft practice. Each craft can submit up to twenty milestones. Moses said that a milestone could be specific (development of a material, tool, practice or technique), or broad (a social, political or cultural event that changed the craft world). It could be the establishment of an organization, museum, gallery, association or foundation, or a media product (book, periodical, paper, web site, dvd). It could of course be a groundbreaking artist, a show or exhibition, or a significant craft achievement. In other words, anything that can be justified as critical to the development of craft.

Now, imagine choosing twenty milestones from seventy years of papermaking, binding and printing! After accepting that the book art list will honor only a tiny percentage of worthy milestones, I sketched in my list, and then sent emails to a number of artists to ask for their suggestions. A final complicating factor was that because of travel and other commitments, I had a week to do this. I greatly appreciate the artists listed below, who made time to send along their thoughts, especially as some of them were in the midst of preparing for the CODEX symposium and bookfair.

With that, many thanks to the artists who suggested book art milestones: Carolee Campbell, Betsy Davids, Amanda Degener, Gary Frost, Peter Koch, Paulette Myers-Rich, Richard Minsky, Bridget O’Malley, Jeff Rathermel, John Risseeuw, Harry Reese, Gerald Lange, Barbara Tetenbaum, Peter Verheyen, Kathy Walkup and Richard Zauft.

I’ve listed below their milestones and mine in no particular order. The point for me is not to match milestone to artist, but to get all of us thinking about how our field has evolved. There are some names that recur, and others that suggest another direction entirely. Which milestones would you add? Which are your top ten or twenty? Be sure to check out the June-July issue of American Craft for the full timeline. You will see my twenty, arrived at with much gnashing of teeth and after several discussions with artists via email and in person at the CODEX book fair. Feel free to comment and add your own thoughts.

CRAFT MILESTONES IN THE BOOK ARTS

Survival of Guild of Book Workers in the post-war period to grow beyond its NYC base in the 1970s-80s (now 105 yrs old). Largely responsible for the maintenance and transmission of fine craft techniques through its Journal and Standards seminars. Development of national traveling exhibitions. Development of regional chapters.

Hedi Kyle's April Diary of 1979, the prototype of all flag books.

Establishment of conservation program as part of Columbia University library school in 1981. Stimulated critical thinking about book structure and long-term viability. Program later moved to Texas and was dissolved in 2010.

Flood in Florence, Italy in 1966, which brought together the leaders of the conservation and binding fields and reintroduced non-adhesive sewn and limp structures.

North Bennet Street School bookbinding program in Boston. Started in 1986, this is still the only program to teach craft bookbinding in the US.

Richard Minsky’s iconoclastic and groundbreaking Birds of North America (1975).

Hedi Kyle’s flag book (April Diary, 1979). Innovative and now one of the most used structures.

Keith Smith’s non-adhesive binding books, the bibles for a new generation of book artists.

As for papermaking, clearly the work of Dard Hunter has made a huge impact on handmade paper as a craft, and his travels to far flung places links eastern and western paper traditions.

Twinrocker has had an amazing impact on handmade paper, broadening it from just the craft tradition to its use in art applications. A look at their early roster of interns includes Tim Barrett, Lee McDonald, Barb Tetenbaum—just amazing.

Tim Barrett being awarded the MacArthur genius grant in 2009, and Claire Van Vliet also awarded that honor in 1989 brings attention and validation from outside the book arts world to what we in it have always know to be its greatness.

1975 -- the First North American Hand Papermakers' Conference in Appleton, Wisconsin, organized by Joe Wilfer.

Douglass Morse Howell, papermaker

Launched in 1957, Sputnik 1 was the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. Since then, more than 25,000 space objects have been tracked and as many as 8,000 of these man-made instruments currently orbit the planet. Sputnik placed a metaphorical “proscenium arch” around the Earth, and by the moon landing of 1969, the planet had been transformed from a global village into a global theatre. Because of their cyclical and simultaneous effects, these satellites can be considered as part of a new environment. Technology and nature combine to make a new art form in the satellite environment, just as new writing materials and new writing implements established a novel writing environment 6,000 years ago….Craft in any form has risen in value because of mechanization, automation, assembly lines, industrial farming, and on and on. Craft’s stock goes up in proportion to the dominance of mass culture in any given area of work or geographic location.

My second milestone is the invention of acrylic resin, which was the basis for acrylic paint and other water-soluble acrylic polymer developments. Invented by Otto Rohm in the 1940s, acrylic paint was first commercially available in the 1950s. Water-soluble acrylic media has allowed countless people to experience the art and craft of painting, from fine art applications to house painting and home repair. Acrylic polymers have been highly important in all fields, most recently in the guise of polymer plates for letterpress printing and printmaking. Collage as we know it today would not be possible without acrylic polymer media.

1983. Timothy Barrett publishes Japanese Papermaking: Traditions, Tools, and Techniques, based on his travels and research in Japan. The book was written from Barrett’s understanding of the history of paper as well as his experience as a papermaking practitioner. Barrett has trained a generation of papermakers at the University of Iowa Center for the Book to create conservation-sound paper. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2009

1945. Esthétique du Mal, by Wallace Stevens, is published by Harry Duncan with Paul Wightman Williams at The Cummington Press. It contributes to fine printing’s revival through its sensitive typography and presswork and Williams’s semi-abstract drawings.

Typo-L listserv (1993), Book_Arts-L listserv (1994), etc. Many other lists have followed including Letpress, but pioneers are still the leaders.

Founding of Twinrocker and their apprenticeship program which expanded the general knowledge of papermaking and spawned a large number of practitioners and teachers of papermaking.

Founding of the Friends of Dard Hunter

Social/political/cultural events & developments: broad acceptance of women in public roles (greatly increased the pool of talent available to the book art field, to say the least); emergence of the personal computer (not only as a specific tool that significantly affected book art, but also as the opening to digital culture in all its ramifications); the Internet; the flood in Florence (the recovery of so much awareness of historical binding practices):

1975-1990. Fine Print journal, followed by Bookways (1991-1995) and Parenthesis (1998-present), three of the journals that explore craft issues in the book arts.

Establishment of Twinrocker papermill!

Syl Labrot's Pleasure Beach (1976), where the images were created in the act of color separation.

Gerald Lange’s Printing digital type on the hand-operated press (1998) and the founding of the PPLetterpress group site (2001).

Walter Samuel Haatoum Hamady

Polymer platemaking

Richard Minsky’s 1973 binding of Pettigrew's History of Egyptian Mummies, included in the landmark exhibition, The Object as Poet at the Renwick Gallery (Smithsonian American Art Museum) in 1977.

Cummington Press

1984. New York’s Center for Book Arts opens The First Decade exhibition at the New York Public Library, showing work across the book art spectrum, from traditional craft to non-traditional experimental works of sculpture.

Windover Press

Organizations: Center for Book Arts in New York (as the first of the U.S. centers); U. of Iowa Typography Laboratory in the School of Journalism (wasn't that the first of the postwar higher education facilities?); U. of Alabama M.A. program (first and most craft-oriented of the graduate programs); PBI (year after year disseminating the latest in book art craft).

Where was the first collegiate fine press: Nebraska or Iowa? Or?

1982. “New American Paperworks,” an exhibition curated by Jane Farmer that toured the U.S. and Asia, in which handmade paper is shown in a variety of artistic formats and interpretations, including sculpture and installation.

1976. While printing Pleasure Beach on the offset press, Syl Labrot orchestrates a number of experiments, describing the result not as a book of reproductions but rather “a matter of making pictures with the printing press.”

Perishable Press

When Harold "Jay" Kyle invented the Boxcar Base system, that revolutionized letterpress and caused the big revival. That along with digital typesetting and typeface design and software.

Gary Frost

Development of a material, tool, practice or technique: the rise of offset printing; PVA? (when was it developed? I've always imagined it belonged to the 50s era of plastics technology, but I don't really know); the emergence of the Vandercook (70s) as the press of our time for book artists; digital typography; PageMaker (earliest widely used page layout software); Coptic sewing (popular example of the transition to visible structure and medieval sewn structures); tunnel book (as example of the rise of displayable non-codex structures).

Craig Jensen and BookLab for sustaining high craft standards in production of fine books. Under Craig's working supervision this enterprise produced fine edition binding in runs of 25 to 500 that excel in finesse of craft and magnificent action in the hands of readers. Craig also pioneered fine "print-on-demand" book production setting standards that are still far, far from achieved. Note his collaborations with Russell Maret (Aethelwold) and Gaylord Schanilec (Sylvae).

Leonard Baskin’s combination of contemporary printmaking/illustration and letterpress in book form was quite influential on others who would follow in his path.

Book arts go online: Richard Minsky, University of Idaho, Peter Verheyen Book Arts Web (1994/5)

Book, periodical, etc: Keith Smith's instructional books; J.A. Szirmai, The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding; Bonefolder.

Internet communications with information sharing that allowed text, videos and images to be sent globally to anyone who needed to learn a technique, find a press or press parts, or to find community, sell work, list exhibits, etc. This is huge! It saved the dying and/or arcane knowledge base of the trade printers and typesetters and transmitted it to the next generation. It helped us locate the very rare old books that were once used in high school shop class or trade schools to teach letterpress techniques. These are now getting quite expensive and desirable. Internet commerce and Fed Ex shipping have allowed me to obtain book arts supplies online including metal type, book cloth, rare papers and hard to find inks. Email has allowed me to send a PDF of a proof to a poet in Ireland to review and return electronically. Websites. The ability to see others’ work, to put my own out there. The access cannot be underestimated. The digital revolution has helped in many ways to strengthen my work as a book artist and letterpress printer as it has streamlined so many of the business and communications side of things, as well as offering new printmaking possibilities with digital/analog combinations.

Ditto Hamady

Founding of Visual Studies Workshop Press/Nexus and other offset artist presses.

Off-loading of letterpress equipment into the studios of university art departments and small press publishers as the print industry moved from metal to electronic type.

The development of photopolymer relief printing plates for letterpress printing, though slow to be adopted by the field (both commercial and art/craft/hobby/educational), has had an enormous impact on allowing the craft of letterpress to continue farther into the 21st century than many would have predicted. Fueled, in fact, the resurgence of small design/commercial letterpress shops catering to a new public.

The development of digital type, joined and facilitated by polymer plate technology, has changed typography and design, which are interwoven into the craft of letterpress.

Groundbreaking artist: Kathryn/Howard Clark (for pioneering the revival of hand papermaking in America); Hedi Kyle (not only for all the influential specific structures she introduced, like the flag book, but also for modeling the creative process of inventing or adapting a structure); Gary Frost (for the influence of his elegant structures appropriate for smaller lightweight books); Tom Phillips (for leading the way to the altered book); Alison Knowles (pioneer of book as installation); Susan Joy Share (book for performance).

Claire Van Vliet was the first to use contemporary printmaking in conjunction with the Vandercook proof press, and Walter Hamady, who followed her at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was the first to promote this type of press for edition printing.

The near demise of the old style letterpress printing industry which first caused tons of used presses and equipment to be dumped on a smaller craft/art/educational market that was not ready for it, and then the rise of that field causing a demand for that old equipment some 10-30 years later, after much had been scrapped or sent abroad, coupled with the closing of Vandercook/Vandersons, has lead to increasing difficulty for young craft printers in finding affordable and available presses and type and equipment. This has to have a large effect. We have more educational programs than ever before training art and craft printers and fewer of them will be actually able to set up their own shops as before. Include in there the shrinking of the typefoundries casting quality type for serious printers. (Which increases the push to move from type to polymer.)

Claire Van Vliet (1989), Timothy Barrett (2009), Matthew Carter and Nicholas Benson (2010) become MacArthur geniuses gaining recognition in a broader context.

Explosion of crafty manuals by everyone for everyone.

One contributor to the craft side of letterpress was the sudden availability of good quality presses for printmakers. Vandercooks, C&P and Heidlebergs all got scrapped or sold off or given away. Then typefoundries all over America began to close- and that was a huge concern. The saving of M&H Typefoundry and situating it at the Presidio in San Francisco was another important milestone to keep hand setting foundry fonts available.

1991. Jim Trissel at The Press at Colorado College publishes The Cycle of the Day, a Book of Hours, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, which demonstrates the expressive potential of polymer plates for letterpress printers to incorporate into their work bodies of text printed from improved digital fonts, as well as various kinds of mark-making, and imagery from the web.

Significant craft achievement: Xu Bing (not only did he hand-carve all those blocks for thousands of characters--then he redid them a second time); Philip Smith's wall of fine bindings, Lord of the Rings; Arion Press’s Moby Dick, or maybe the Bible (just the outsize letterpress ambitiousness of those editions); any recent Julie Chen book (the mind always boggles); Emily McVarish's Flicker (the book printed from the feet of the type)

Gerald Lange's book, "Digital Printing on the Cylinder Hand Press" and the technical knowledge sharing common in our field was very important.

Increased niche letterpress printing has lead to a greater awareness of the desirability of handmade papers. Increased numbers of papermaking classes and programs in higher education is providing more young artist craftspeople making paper and wanting to furnish the market with HMP. Compare to mid 1970s when Twinrocker and John Koller and Bob Serpa were just about it.

Julie Chen

Creation of Center for Book Arts by Richard Minsky (1974) as model for regional book arts centers throughout the US. Provided venue for instruction and exhibition.

Paper and Book Intensive founded in 1983 at Oxbow, MI

The establishment of MCBA of course! The rise of book arts programs where the commercial aspects of letterpress have given way to the art and craft of the artists book; The CBAA.

Claire Van Vliet’s Bone Songs (1992), perhaps the first artist’s book with text laid out in the computer and printed from polymer plates.

Growth of academic book arts programs/centers at the graduate level, including Alabama, Iowa, University of the Arts-Philadelphia, Scripps College, Columbia College Chicago, Utah, Arizona, etc.

Book Arts in the USA exhibition (1990), the exhibit that circulated through Africa and Latin America courtesy of the United States Information Agency.

Fine Print and Bookways founded and gone away. Still among the best!

The introduction of the Vandercook as an editioning press was quite significant in fostering the “fine press renaissance” of the mid-1970s and into the 1990s, and the documentation and promotion and preservation of this movement by Fine Print, and followed by Bookways, and followed by Parenthesis was quite significant. It should be noted that alternative publishing and the do-it-yourself concerns of the mid-1960s and 1970s were primary in furthering such publications.

Drucker’s The Century of Artist’s Books (1995), Bright’s No Longer Innocent (2005).

Wordpress, Blogger enable website creation allowing artists to easily share their work.

The Bonefolder: an e-journal for the bookbinder and book artist founded 2004. First (still only) open-access journal for book arts that is freely available.

ETSY as online marketplace for craft products including books.

(Aside from Craig Jensen and BookLab), the single milestone in Craft development in book arts of the last 60 years has been its general decline and more isolated survival. From a wide, demanding base of excellence and expertise, printing, papermaking, printing and book production handcraft has declined. This is not a negative remark any more than the comment that physical books have lost status in a context of their screen delivery. Dedication to craft excellence is not an easy path and obstacles of distraction and displacement are everywhere.

Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts (Easthampton, Northampton) as a mecca for all disciplines of book arts including printmaking, letterpress, binding, edition binding (Gehenna Press, Arno Werner, Alan James Robinson, Dan Keleher, Claudia Cohen/Sarah Creighton/Carol Blinn/David Bourbeau/Dan Kelm, others?)

Collegiate Book Arts Exhibition, 1983-86. 140 artists' books traveled to 9 sites. First comprehensive exhibition of artists' books.

Polymer plate makers; laser cutters; ink jet printers; the work of Hedi Kyle and Gary Frost; the book and paper intensive; the superannuation of the vandercook press; and desktop publishing; and samizdat type design.

The Fine Printing Conference at Columbia University, May 19-22, 1982. The conference, run by Terry Belanger when he had Book Arts Press at Columbia (this was pre-RBS days), was perhaps the first time a group of practitioners across a broader spectrum of book arts met together to discuss their commonalities (paper, binding, ink, type). It was here that conservators began to educate printers and binders about the importance of archival materials, for instance.

The emergence of book arts programs at Mills College, University of Alabama, and others, as well as the development of book arts centers, such as Minnesota Center for Book Arts, were significant in providing interest and training in the emerging book and printing arts.

People. We can look back at the people that Lawrence Barker (who trained with Howells) taught at Cranbrook during about a 7 year period: Hamady, Koller, Winifred Lutz, Roland Poska. That's incomplete. Then there are the many printers and bookmakers that Hamady taught and who went out into the field to teach others or to produce. Wow. Twinrocker influenced the field with its intern program (MacGregor, Tetenbaum, and others I can't recall right now), let alone its model for business and shear production. Tim Barrett is nearly single-handedly responsible for the firm establishment of Japanese hand papermaking as a craft interest in this country. I attended one of his first workshops after he returned from Japan and used that information later in teaching 20 years worth of students that bit of papermaking.

Desktop publishing in all its forms, from Ditto and Mimeo to Xerox to Ventura to Quark to InDesign, from Laser to Inkjet. In 1988 Betsy Davids was doing it on a Mac+ in California and Richard Minsky was doing it in DOS on a 386 in New York. Betsy went from the computer to RIP for offset and commercial paper and Richard went straight to inkjet on handmade paper through a postscript interpreter. This was a huge shift in craft discipline from letterpress.

Exhibition: “Center for Book Arts: The First Decade,” in 1984 organized by Francis O. Mattson, Curator of Rare Books at the NYPL, which put 132 examples on exhibit at the main library (42nd St) where hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to an outstanding selection of CBA members' work from across the country and around the world.

The primary technological change in contemporary studio letterpress was the conjoining of the photopolymer plate process and desktop publishing, which occurred in the early 1990s. The introduction of the GUI interface on the Macintosh computer, the development of the Linotronic imagesetter, the Altsys PageMaker page layout software, and the availability of digital type were of primary influence in this regard.

Exhibition: “Book Arts in the USA,” in 1990 (which premiered at the Center for Book Arts in connection with a conference on the same subject) was an exhibition that circulated in Africa and Latin America for two years. It reached a huge audience and inspired artists in many countries to become bookies.

Barton Lidicé Beneš’s Sculpture Books exhibition at the Allan Stone Gallery, 1974 and Letters from Aunt Evelyn exhibition at the CBA, 1975.

Stella Waitzkin’s Sculpture and Wall Works exhibition at the James Yu Gallery, 1975 and A Library-Sculpture exhibition at the James Yu Gallery, 1977.

More generally for craft, Rose Slivka as Editor-in-Chief of Craft Horizons for 25 years changed the way people perceived craft and changed the sort of craft objects that people made. Polly Lada-Mocarski was her Bookbinding Editor. The fact that the magazine had a bookbinding editor was itself remarkable, and there could not have been a better one than Polly. Polly Lada-Mocarski thought that Buckminster Fuller’s Tetrascroll was a milestone.

Cycles like the return to handwork and "green"—today is similar to the late 1960s/early 70s.

Rose Slivka arranged a series of panels on “The Art/Craft Connection” ca. mid-1970s that were printed in the magazine. There were four panelists: Richard Minsky represented book art, John Kelsey represented woodworking, Pete Voulkos represented ceramics, and Dale Chihuly represented glass.

Establishment of: NY Center for Book Arts 1974; Fine Print Magazine 1975-90; Rare Book School 1983; MCBA 1985; SFCB 1996; Codex Foundation 2007; CBAA 2008.

Bunting Magnetics introduction of their magnetic flatbase in the mid-1980s, the development of water-soluble sheet photopolymer, were made known to the fine press community through the work of the San Francisco printer Julie Holcomb. The stabilization and sophistication of desktop publishing allowed this approach to be furthered by several fine press printers—primarily James Trissel, Bradley Hutchinson, and Patrick Reagh. The latter also introduced an economical magnetic flatbase and provided processing for plates that made this technology quite accessible.

Franklin Furnace

Establishment of PBI

Five MFA programs: MFA in Book Arts Program at the University of Alabama 1985; U. Iowa Center for the Book MFA program begins 2011; Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts; University of the Arts MFA in printmaking and book arts; and Mills College MFA in Book Arts and English 2009.

Franklin Furnace and Printed Matter as repositories/archives/bookstores for public education and consumption.

Paper/Book Intensive which brought conservators, paper artists, book artists and librarians together in a co-creative environment, allowing for an exchange of materials and processes which led to new developments in these fields.

Lloyd Reynolds introducing italic calligraphy to a new generation of artists and school children, and made it an "everyday art" accessible to anyone with ink and a pen nib or an avenue for artistic expression.

Founding of the Center for the Book, which led to many other book arts centers being established around the country.

Founding of artist residency programs focused on the book arts: Women’s Studio Workshop, Nexus Press, etc.

Publication of Fine Print

In the late 1980s, Adobe Systems introduced the Postscript Type 1 format and along with it a line of very professional and historically considered typefaces. The Adobe team was made up of folks who were young calligraphers and designers who—in the most impossible scenarios, and of great significance—hung out in the fine printer Jack Stauffacher’s print shop. Their concern for classical type and the influence of metal type on the direction of digital type is directly connected here.

Martha Stewart (sorry, but it had a strong effect for us, as she showed the world what a bone folder is, etc.)

What Peter Verheyen started in 1994, the Book_Arts-L listserv. Richard Minsky interviewed Peter for the October 2010 issue of Fine Books & Collections magazine. Peter discusses the impact this listserv has had globally. To me this is a strong contender for a milestone.

Increasing use of polymer plate

PC/Desktop publishing and everything that came after

The establishment of the Center for Book Arts in 1974 and its subsequent effect on producing craft-oriented printers, binders, papermakers and designers. Add Dieu Donné as a major paper influence. Then add the workshop programs at Arrowmont, Penland, Haystack, PBI, and elsewhere and the multiplier effect is obvious.

Richard Minsky

The Adobe work was significant in developing my own concerns about the idea of making digital type perform in a classical manner. Gerald Lange’s Kill Series, 1992, is considered the first to explore the idea that digital type and page layout software could play a significant role in replacing the dwindling sources of metal type, and produce a book in the traditional manner (as opposed to thinking of the computer as an experimental medium in this regard).

Visual Studies Workshop and Joan and Nathan Lyons had a huge impact on generations of photographer bookmakers. That influence and those students/artists/teachers who followed brought credibility to the offset-printed artist book, firmly placing offset books, from the 'democratic multiple' to the art photo book, in a secure area of contemporary artist books. (Not ignoring Ruscha and Walker and others.)

Thinking through Craft, Art, & Letterpress

2009-07-23T13:07:00.000-07:00

Who reading this has described what they do as craft? If the term is used by others to describe your work, do you smile or flinch? Craft is one of those words that generates a visceral reaction that can differ dramatically depending on who you are and what you do in this bookish universe of book art.

At the same time, what are the limits of craft in art, and in book art? How about if we were to agree that craft meant the knowledgeable involvement with a technology, material and method to the degree of executing work of a high standard on a consistent basis. I just made that up—does that define craft for you, and if not, what does?

Since my current research focus is on letterpress printing, it was inevitable that craft would come into the picture. And anticipating attending MCBA's Biennial this Saturday, with one of its panels, "Book: the Object," being about craft among other things, I’ve been considering the meanings of craft, and how those meanings survive (or not) when talking about letterpress practice. This is important because those meanings lead us toward key concepts that shape the way artists and others perceive this work.

Debates around craft and art, and around letterpress and book art, express dichotomies that have long been in the larger art world. That art/craft divide influences views of letterpress, and despite rising evidence of an interest in process and material in the art world, within our field some still believe that an investment in craft removes a work from serious art-world consideration. So, even though we may wish to simply ignore the bias, it is undeniable that this attitude has repercussions for artists and others. I’ve decided to read what has been written about craft, in the hopes of coming to an understanding of its place in artistic expression today.

Let’s begin by talking about definitions and how they change. For example, consider letterpress. You’ll note I’m using the term letterpress rather than fine press or fine printing. Many printers today describe themselves as letterpress artists, perhaps because the term letterpress returns us to, well, the medium of relief printing, and removes any value judgment or cultural connotation suggested by “fine press.” At the same time, the cultural norm of literature implicit in the term, “letterpress,” as Inge Bruggeman recently noted (at the "Hybrid Book" conference in Philadelphia), establishes a relationship with language that remains active in assumptions about letterpress whether or not the content in the finished work carries any text.

Equally important, there is not one kind of relief surface for letterpress printing. Historically, letterpress was associated with handset type (and then linotype). Today, type can still be lead or wood, but for over a decade now, type can also be made of plastic, “cast” in a relief polymer plate and composed from a design “set” on one’s computer. The involvement of computer technology vastly expanded the expressive range of letterpress, even as it unseated any simple equation of “handset type” with a justification of craft.

Where does that leave ideas about craft? I believe that we have entered the 21st century of craft, where definitions are fluid and distinctions multiply. Evidence of craft (or lack of it) can still be most readily discerned in a hand-thrown pot, but I think that a sense of craft can enlarge and diversify to also represent values about making. My own changing opinion about what constitutes craft is what led me to pick up Thinking through Craft (above right), a book I've written about recently in this blog. In that earlier entry I considered Adamson's observations on art education. Today I'd like to look more closely at different meanings of craft and art, and how those meanings might affect our expectations about letterpress printing or book art.

Thinking through Craft, as I mentioned before, was written by Glenn Adamson, who is Deputy Head of Research and the Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which is the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design. Thinking through Craft is one of a stack of books to appear in the last five years that track and analyze an upswing in interest in craft, and it places us squarely in the midst of more questions than answers.

What I appreciated in Adamson’s book is not that I agreed with everything he said, but that his thinking repeatedly forced me to revisit and clarify my own ideas about craft. He states his main premise as, “Craft is not a defined practice but a way of thinking through practices of all kinds.” (p. 7, my emphasis) With this statement Adamson suggests that craft’s profile is fluid and responsive within the larger universe of making. At the same time, I wondered, how can craft not (also) be a defined practice? In book art alone, the Guild of Book Workers has been sponsoring Standards of Excellence seminars since 1982. I would suggest, instead, that the identification of one’s own work as craft is determined by the artist first, with all the risks implicit in that choice. In other words, craft can reflect a work’s standards of production, or it can depart from or comment upon such standards, more like Adamson’s sense of craft as “a way of thinking.”

In this way the artist directs the traffic, so to speak. At the point that a work is released to an audience, however, those of us who encounter it weigh in with our own responses, judgments, and biases about craft. But what about art? Where is art in this discussion?

Art, for Adamson, is not here at all, at least for most of his book. To achieve the end of craft as a way of thinking rather than as a defined practice, Adamson asserts that craft will regain an active artistic profile only when it is set free from what he sees as its static condition, a condition that has accrued from the term’s historical and philosophical associations. In fact, Adamson argues that we must “dispense with the simplistic formulation that the crafts can (or should) be art.” (p. 2) This is because of three facts about craft: craft is supplemental, it is material, and it is about skill. These attributes remove craft from the realm of art. Let’s begin by unpacking these three terms.

By supplemental, Adamson means that craft does not function as the vehicle of rigorous internal analysis that art does. Craft is instead a supplement to the artwork, that which “provides something necessary to another, ‘original’ entity, but which is nonetheless considered to be extraneous to that original.” (p. 11) This is, to me, an outdated definition of craft that has been projected onto it by a larger art community in which concept and content are somehow leeched from material and process. This is not my meaning of craft, but I understand that Adamson is seeking clarity through opposition.

Adamson explains further that, by supplemental, craft is not, then, what he calls autonomous. Art is autonomous, because it is independent, it “strives to stand apart from the interests that are everywhere manifested in the rest of the world,” as “a zone of free practice” (p. 9) that seeks to critique social, political and cultural institutions, including art itself. The frame around a painting, for example, asserts art’s detachment.

I am disagreeing with Adamson by this point. For one thing, this distinction he makes for art as being at its essence inherently separate and self-critical is the goal of much art but not all art. The face of art can certainly be critical through biting commentary or satire, but art can also explore formal qualities of its genre, or it can be elegiac, or celebratory. Clearly my sense of what art is, differs from Adamson’s.

And when he asserts art’s autonomy, its presumed independence from the stuff of life, I fear that Adamson has become ensnared in the same kind of romanticism that he later points to in some of craft’s supporters. Art’s autonomy is true only as long as everyone in the room follows the group-think. In truth, issues of art patronage undermine any claim for autonomy, to cite just one example. For hundreds of years patrons have supported artists, and in some cases at least, they have influenced art, and today that support exists as foundation or government grants or a university’s resources available to its artist-instructors in off-hours. Art is many things, but autonomous? I don’t believe so. Later in the book, Adamson will suggest that contemporary craft can actually take on an art persona when it embodies a self-critical
stance. One artist whose work he pictures is Mike Kelley, who attaches stuffed animals and afghans to a quilt which is then hung in a gallery.

I try to give both art and craft more room to maneuver. I fundamentally disagree with the opposition that Adamson has chosen: autonomous for the art object, vs. supplemental for a crafted object. I think that craft, and, for our purposes here, book art that incorporates evidence of craft, occupies a much more charged position in the culture. There is nothing supplemental about an object in which the process and act of crafting is integral to its ultimate expression. If that were true, then we could turn the tables and apply it to a work of “fine art,” say, the painting, Old Books, by British artist Howard Hodgkin (above). Would this work exert the same powerful presence if we scraped off the impasto and left the surface flat and without articulation? I think not. Hodgkin’s brushwork is as much craft as art, revealing evidence of the exchange between brush, paint, and surface.

Let me suggest a different term which may better align with craft’s characteristics. Let’s consider the word, integral, as it represents the role of craft and art as they coexist in Harry Reese’s Arplines (cover, right). Integral is defined as, what is essential or fundamental, that makes a whole complete. When craft works within the realm of art, it does not supplement anything but plays a key role in contributing to the ultimate expression of a work along with image, text, symbol and form, even as it asserts physicality, invites touch, and teases us with a record of its making.

Arplines was published in 1990 in an edition of 43 copies. Its ten folded sheets are held within a chemise wrapper and box by Sandra Liddell Reese. On each cover panel of the completed boxes Harry Reese created an original acrylic painting. The content of Arplines consists of Harry Reese’s selections from the poems and writings—the lines—of Jean Arp. Reese recombined those phrases into a new voice, and then responded with a shifting palette of pattern and line created from a surprising means of mark-making.

On this page (below) we have one of the meldings that punctuate the book, as the reader sorts out what is Reese, what is Arp, and where the two have merged. Collaged fragments appear from a French book that was coincidentally given to Reese at the project’s inception (coincidence being an aspect of art-making that Arp and Reese both embrace). These fragments appear to have drifted down and settled on the surface of the opening. On the righthand page a fragment sits on an irregular patterned field, and below it the fragment is echoed, more or less, by a space of absence caught in a loosened grid.

The background pattern is actually composed of a most commonplace material: cellophane tape adhered to a type-high wood block (below right). Reese realigns Arp’s phrases into a poem that references Reese’s process in constructing the poem, and, more subtly, in image-making itself: “I stuck together, unstuck, began again, and destroyed, / But language broke in my mouth. / I shut my eyes, chose words and lines from newspapers. / From that time on I’ve used only the most primitive forms.”

In another opening (below left), Arp’s words are at once stuck and unstuck, present and not-there, due to the blind-printing that Reese reveals through strokes of graphite. The reader is led irresistibly to follow the type’s impressions, a finger drawn across the page, like a child learning to read, as if to conjur again the transformation from silence into speech. Arp’s reconfigured text calls for creating “new appearances” through the use of “new materials which were not weighted down with tradition.” In his turn, Reese renders “new impressions” that evoke a range of voice possible with letterpress. His typography here is as quiet as an exhalation, the shapes to left and right subtly biomorphic.

In the previous opening Reese fashioned a field out of cellophane tape. Here, he again follows Arp’s approach of inspired improvisation by coaxing texture from inked bubble wrap (in blue), and in gray, what Reese describes in his "Guidelines for Arplines" as, “a strange spongy material [sent by] LA Type a few years ago...as a protective wrapping for some type we ordered.” Materials so ephemeral as to be un-identifiable, the resulting stippled effect would no doubt elicit praise from Arp himself. To return to terms, let us remind ourselves that, as opposed to Adamson’s autonomous art object coolly reigning separate in its presumed objectivity, and craft restrained in its supplemental, subsidiary role, the word, integral, suggests the complexities of a crafted object engaged with larger ideas beyond the object itself, even as it is situated in the everyday and open to the intimacies of reading.

Now let’s move on to Adamson’s second point, that craft, unlike art, is, “grounded in material specificity.” Adamson contrasts that materiality to modern art, which he describes as visual, a purely optical experience. In contrast, craft’s investment in the material places it at odds with what he calls, “the normative idea of modern art [that generally-held view, which]...involves the transcendence...of just this encounter.” (p. 39) The assumption is that art is primarily optical, and craft is primarily sensual. This simple opposition only grows clunkier when applied to books. The opposition of material to optical doesn’t work for artists’ books that carry text and image, the tactile experience and the intellectual response altering as they are unearthed page by page, cumulative in every sense of the word.

Third and last, Adamson equates craft with skill, which is a no-brainer, except that in order to enforce his opposition, by extension he divorces skill from art-making. Again, this dichotomy doesn’t work: art means concept but not craft; craft means process, but not content. Does this make sense to you? This dichotomy seems outdated, and sure enough Adamson supports his assertion by hearkening back to Conceptualism of the 1960s, to the idea as the machine that makes the art. The historical reference is accurate, but in this field at least, conceptual content is a rich vein often quarried by book artists, letterpress printers included. Art today is never one thing and often too many to enumerate—or maybe we are simply capable of seeing now what was always true: idea and material, image and object, language and its absence can layer into a palimpsest that is revealed differently to different people over time. Books are not either/or; they are implicitly and.

Consider Arplines once more. This kind of book is far from a unilateral and univocal object. Its conceptual program engages chance and the legacy of Dada, and its voice is literally multi-vocal, as Reese uses French, German and English, thus varying the degree of comprehension for each reader. Add to that his playfulness with the readable (printed) and the once-invisible (revealed through the act of rubbing). Confronting non-English words, language itself becomes an element of mystery if you don’t know the language, and, play, if you do, as punning wordplay can extend into concrete poetry. Reading Arplines we integrate touch and sound and sight, and add texture and scale and weight, all senses firing, and accumulating in time: this, then, is the artist’s book, the ultimate challenge to any simple dichotomy.

In regard to skill, Adamson suggests elsewhere that not all crafted works should be treated as art. Many works can bring pleasure as objects that fit the body and enrich the visual landscape of our daily lives. As such, these works should be prized but not subjected to the kind of critical apparatus brought to bear on artworks today. Instead, they pursue a more traditional ideal of craft as excellence in technique for its own sake, free of a larger conceptual program or agenda. Adamson suggests that such a designation should not devalue a work, and I add that this is another instance when the artist’s intent is crucial. In our field, the general term of the book arts designates that larger sphere of activity that acknowledges and celebrates the contributions of binders, papermakers and printers engaged in the ongoing investigation of a craft. The research conducted by these practitioners feeds in turn the artistic development of the field as a whole. I agree with Adamson, that we could profit from a more pointed consideration of what constitutes art and what craft, but I also acknowledge that such an exchange will need to address the persistent art world bias that seems to lie behind some of Adamson’s own observations.

I feel that to be fair to Adamson I should emphasize that he does not reference book art. When he cites craft, he discusses ceramics, fabric, or wood. I am left to wonder how he would view books. As I have noted, books have numerous streams of content to deploy. Books (often) carry language and embrace multiple voices, in text and pictorially. A book’s conceptual program may extend from the page to its binding, even its materials, such as a vellum-bound book that magically flexes and relaxes when held in a reader’s hands, skin to skin, craft and concept cohered.

As I have suggested, and no surprise, the book form greatly increases the complexity of expression on every front, and so it follows that a debate over craft and art is similarly fraught. On the one hand, a choice to print books by letterpress implies a stance to engage a letterpress aesthetic (note that I say, a letterpress aesthetic, not the letterpress aesthetic). Each printer finds his or her way through or around standards of design and printing. If the printer chooses the longer route, to ignore printing standards and instead engage the medium in a free spirit such as we find in D.I.Y. (do it yourself), printers should then heed Adamson’s warning that, “when an artwork is not made to the standards a viewer might expect...skill becomes all the more present as a consideration. It is most conspicuous in its absence.” (p. 69) A rejection of traditional craft standards may be exactly what an artist seeks—but in the end the book’s success will turn on its cohesiveness in form, content and execution.

Adamson’s book includes observations on a number of related topics. To mention just one, he explores the historical contexts of craft in Britain and the U.S., although that history is salted throughout the book in a way that is a bit difficult to track. Although I wish the book were organized more coherently, I appreciate Adamson’s ambition to address what he sees as the reasons for craft’s perception as “second-class.” Adamson’s solution is to apply his reframing of craft to all manner of production, even including architectural design. Upon finishing the book, however, I was left wondering why Adamson didn’t attempt what I see as a greater ambition—to identity those traits that coexist in art and craft rather than to reinforce the artificial oppositions that have served so long to prop up art world clichés still active in some gallery cultures, which underlie a market economy of art held separate in the frame, to adopt a trope of Adamson’s.

The apparent contradictions in, Thinking through Craft ultimately paint a portrait of a transitional time in craft and art. Turn that around and it becomes a time of opportunity for each of us to add our perspectives to the mix. Adamson’s book succeeds in making us think about craft, and about how patterns of thought may impede fresh considerations of craft’s artistic identity. His findings suggest that we have much to think about, summed up in the compound term of “book art.” Book joined to art challenges us to find our footing on the slippery ground shared by art and craft. Adamson has found his; I’m still looking, and what about you?

We need to begin a discussion with one another from a 21st century perspective, to better articulate why this work matters. It’s not about making a case for craft to measure up to art. It’s about understanding how the book and letterpress can create craft and art together, how those two entities find in the book an optimal medium and format for integrating all manner of expression: visual, haptic, sensual, perhaps literary, in a format that continues to challenge and reward makers and readers alike. When that happens, when the forces align, memorable works result.

Toward the end of the book Adamson states that, “craft’s specificity and limitedness [have] offered a possibility for useful friction. In such sleights of hand, the challenge is always to see craft not as a subject for celebration or self-congratulation, nor as a disqualification for serious artistic enterprise, but rather as a problem to be thought through again and again.” (p. 168) With this, I agree, and again, I recommend Thinking through Craft as each of us thinks through what is craft, what is art, and why it matters.

See You at the Biennial?

2009-07-07T19:58:00.000-07:00

There is no better launch pad for generating discussion about craft and art, than in the five finalist books competing for the 2009 MCBA Prize, the first international prize from the U.S. that in its conception supports artistic invention and investigation across the book art spectrum. Full disclosure: I served on a committee (along with MCBA Artistic Director Jeff Rathermel and artist Paulette Myers-Rich) that drafted the guidelines. The prize expresses MCBA’s longstanding commitment to opening up discussion across the field and supporting the best in contemporary book art today.

A look at the finalist works on MCBA’s website can’t help but get you thinking about content and craft and the vast number of ways that books engage readers. Their means of making include calligraphy, offset printing, and letterpress. One book is hand-lettered on walnut-stained Cavepaper, and another is letterpress-printed on 50 year-old gossamer-thin Toshaban-Genshi paper. Languages used include German, Japanese and English. Graphic character marches forward in layered sans serif type, or it is coaxed from subtle progressions in ink accompanying nautical charts and scientific data that subtly respond to three poems in the book.

Pictured in this post are the five contenders: Julie Chen's Panorama (top right), Jan Owen's Requiem (above right), Clifton Meador's Avalanche (below left), Veronika Schäpers's Durs Grünbein: 26°57,3’N, 142º16,8’E (below right), and Simon Redington's Bomb (bottom left).

The three judges who chose the five finalists are respected artists John Risseeuw and Scott McCarney, and Wellesley College Special Collections Librarian Ruth Rogers. They brought a vast range in experience and interest to the task of winnowing down the field of over 100 submissions from ten countries.

If you can make it to Minneapolis the evening of Saturday, July 25, join with the jurors and our local artist community to share cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, gaze at the finalist works on display, and debate which work most deserves the inaugural MCBA Prize. Later that evening the winning work will be announced. In fact, the three jurors will have chosen the winner just the day before after arriving in Minneapolis. You will be joined that evening by four of the five finalists: Julie Chen from Berkeley, California, Clifton Meador from Chicago, Illinois, Jan Owen from Belfast, Maine, and Simon Redington from London, England. (The travel plans of the fifth finalist, Veronika Schäpers from Tokyo, Japan, are as yet undetermined.)

Equally important to note, is that the Biennial actually begins at MCBA in the morning and runs throughout the day. Juror John Risseeuw will deliver a keynote talk at 10 am, followed by panels on “Artists’ Books as Agents of Social Change: a Tool Kit,” and then, “Book: the Object.” Panelists will include the jurors and local arts leaders, and the visiting finalists will no doubt add their thoughts to the discussions. See MCBA’s website for registration details; it should be a memorable day.

Hope to see you at the Biennial!

Artist’s Book Profile: Inge Bruggeman’s Simple Harmonic Motions

2009-06-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

What does a successful merging of craft and concept look like in the letterpress book? Is it possible to make a book whose contents and presentation instigates conversation of sorts with the craft of letterpress printing, that is not distracting or dismissive of skill or of the driving content behind the book? At “The Hybrid Book: Intersection + Intermedia” conference earlier this month in Philadelphia, I took the opportunity to talk about Inge Bruggeman’s Simple Harmonic Motions (2001), as an example of a letterpress book that, beyond satisfying its content, brings into play ideas about craft, art and letterpress printing.

Every so often I will present a profile on this blog that describes a favorite letterpress book, either one I have long admired, or a book that has recently caught my attention. Bruggeman's book resides in both categories, because whenever I spend time with it, it sends my thinking in new directions.

Simple Harmonic Motions, carries poetry by Hank Lazer, and is printed from polymer plates. Because the book acts as a vehicle for literature, a reader might be lulled into an expectation of the book delivering just that--a satisfying typographical presentation of literature. Once a reader begins to page through Simple Harmonic Motions, however, he or she finds that the book integrates multiple sign systems, both literal and implied, and employs a surprising strategy to question assumptions about a letterpress, literature, and reading.

Bruggeman seeks to bridge the divide between sound and vision, between the silent perusal and the poetic performance. The title page introduces a spherical motif, carried throughout the book, that echoes the dimension of the mini-disc held enclosed: the spoken. Along the bottom runs the verbal equivalent of Morse code, in some combination of: dah-dah-dah dah-dit. Its syncopated character echoes the rhythmic word play in Lazer’s poetry, as when the first stanza ends, “thelonius all alone.”

Here is letterpress delivering systems of meaning that collide or reflect, each seeking to convey thought into the air and the reader’s ear and mind, through language, image, and sound.

Once the poetry begins, the Morse code converts to dots and dashes, as if to remove literary competition, although the sounds of the dots and dashes reverberate in the reader’s subconscious. Along the top edge of the page runs photocopy transfers of sound waves. The text of Lazer’s poetry, presented in a spare typography, carries handwritten annotations that post-date its printing. Periodically in place of a poem Bruggeman presents an image of a mouth, speaking, caught within the circlet, a collage of texturized photographs and charted sound patterns.

And at the end of Simple Harmonic Motions, Bruggeman closes the circle, by making an endless book and delivering a surprise. We complete the poems and turn the last page to find….a second title page!

Here, Lazer’s name is gone; this is Bruggeman’s version, and the sound waves above carry us into this second sequence, anchored by the mystery of an unreadable text. Bruggeman has reprinted the poems in a smudged state, breaking typographic rules, refusing comprehension. Now the “dah dah dit dit” reappears along with the collages, as these alter-languages advance into prominence. If we wish to solve the puzzle, Lazer’s handwritten dates remain, and lead us to the same dates on each poem’s original presentation, which happens to be--on the exact opposite of the page.

Why present this secondary unreadable stream, which appears cloaked, held back?

Perhaps it serves as a subconscious echo of the original reading, of what remains buried, as we try to recall a poem months later. For me, any effect is heightened by the fact of the printing medium of letterpress, accompanied by its historical connotations with classical typography

and the privileging of literature and readability. Bruggeman has created a doubled performance

of Lazer’s poetry. The first version (the book’s public persona?) places the poems' literary (literal) manifestations alongside the sound patterns that are the visual references to the poetry's voiced version on the accompanying cd. In the second, artist’s version, the unreadability of the poetic text suggests what lies behind language, the Other that we experience, for example, in a country whose language we don’t share, as we gather clues and discern a mood but are ultimately shut out of full comprehension. It is a gutsy move in a book of poetry, but this book is about much more than poetry.

Craft, Art & Education

2009-06-17T17:21:00.001-07:00

Over the last several years I’ve had the chance to visit with students and faculty at several of the educational programs around the U.S. that offer an M.F.A. degree in book art, or an M.F.A. with a concentration in book art. The programs vary greatly from one another, but each in its own way confronts the unique status of the artist’s book in respect to art and craft. Tracking and reporting on those programs is one of the projects underway by the College Book Art Association. It is a challenging undertaking, as many, many schools have incorporated book art coursework in departments that include art, English, graphic design, intermedia, and the library. Sometimes it’s a matter of just finding where the program resides, and depending on its “home,” the coursework itself can vary widely.

I could not help but think about that diversity and the challenges of integrating book art into higher ed pedagogy while reading a recent book by Glenn Adamson, Deputy Head of Research and the Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The V&A, as it’s called, is the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design. Adamson published Thinking through Craft in 2007, one of a number of recent books that have responded to an upswing in interest in craft. There is much to talk about in the book, and I will be commenting further on it here and elsewhere in the next few months. I recommend it, in part because I would very much like to hear other readers’ thoughts on Adamson’s ideas about craft and art, which is an area of confusion and debate that affects book art in general and letterpress in particular.

At one point in the book Adamson talks about teaching craft in post-secondary education, and his comments apply to the book art field as well. Adamson sets historical context by describing the debate over Progressivism in the 1930s and later, as promoted by John Dewey, when, concurrent with the expansion of schooling to the working class, social reformers pushed craft-based teaching. The critique was that the well-meaning infusion of craft contributed to a two-tier educational establishment, with the working class directed toward craft as a means of vocational training for marketable employment in an industrial economy, and the upper class accorded more abstract approach keyed to a more reflective, liberal education. Behold the beginnings of craft’s ambiguous profile in art education. Adamson goes on to describe philosophies that occupy different places along the spectrum of craft- or process-based teaching, including a section on Joseph Albers, who believed that, “art is not an object, but experience.” [86]

Adamson’s premise in all of this is that education plays a huge role in how craft is perceived by the larger culture. Indeed, Adamson suggests that the educators among us may hold the final balance of power in the ultimate dispensation of craft in art, as the attitudes inherent in their teaching are passed along to the next generation of artists and teachers.

Moving into the later twentieth century, Adamson points to a change that occurred in the 1970s as higher-level art educators began to teach skills to students “as and when.” The change instigated a sea change in craft education. In this approach, students in the arts are trained to approach their art-making much as a professional artist would, where concept is king. Students are exposed to a range of materials and techniques, they read extensively, and then they devise a project. At that point, they learn the requisite skills to execute their project. Their work is idea-driven and conceptually-based. As a result, content is divorced from in-depth and sustained training in process or “making.”

In itself, this may not seem like a bad thing to teachers wishing to emphasize content in teaching, but when Adamson projects that disconnect beyond a student’s education and into the community, he finds art fairs that are populated by artists who “may present sculptures, paintings, etc, each with a high degree of conceptual sophistication and (unless the fabrication of the work has been hired out) amateurish production values.” Adamson goes on, “This post-disciplinary approach to making art is compatible with [the] notion of skill not as a calling in life, but as friction applied to an action in the service of any intended outcome.” [74] In other words, skill bent solely toward the realization of an art object and not as an investment in the process itself, dislocates an artist from another, organic means of art-making and a sense of material that develops from a sustained immersion in technique and material.

But the answer is not simply to ride the pendulum to the other end of its trajectory into pure process. My sense of the most successful book art graduate programs honor craft, process, and material, even as they challenge students to begin to find a voice, to work through content. Denying or devaluing craft leads to, in Adamson’s opinion, “The craft world [that] often seems like a ghetto of technique, [with] the art world as an arena of the free play of ideas shockingly divorced from knowledge about process and materials.”

With these words, Adamson summarizes the contentious climate in higher education today in which many of the educators among us must operate, gamely trying to balance concept to craft, or perhaps simply lining up with one approach or the other. Is it possible to achieve a balance, or is that even a preferred option? Is it possible to study letterpress at the collegiate level (or for that matter, at a community arts organization) without time spent with an experienced printer at the press, learning the craft? Is it possible to make good art without craft? How does diy translate into letterpress?

Hunger for the “Altogether Here” as Found in the Book as Sensorium

2009-05-16T17:01:00.000-07:00

Pyramid Atlantic’s 10^th biennial book arts fair held November 8-9 in Silver Spring, Maryland (just outside of Washington, D.C.), provided the best mix out of the book fairs that I visited in the last year. Artists showed work in both letterpress and offset-printed books. I was curious to see how this mix would work considering the organizing theme of this year’s gathering, “Society and Sensoria: Books at the Speed of the Senses.” As a confirmed generalist (for me it’s about the quality of the experience, the memorability of the work, not about a particular medium or approach) I was also curious to hear the speakers address the theme, which attested to the upswing in interest in the book’s haptic properties that entreat and entrance viewers. And in the back of my mind I was wondering how much letterpress would play a role—primarily it was in evidence at the Fair more than the conference. That’s not to say that the speakers didn’t offer food for thought for all book artists.

In particular, Jana Harper’s talk, “From the Dérive to the Digital,” was mesmerizing. Harper is a Senior Lecturer in Book Arts at Washington University in Saint Louis. When I think sensoria, I think of the human sensory apparatus and the book’s embodiment of those touchstones of sound, sight, smell, the haptic, of course, with movement and the integration of multiple frames of reference and experience into a time-space interaction, heightened by an emotional resonance that emerges from a cumulative paged experience. Harper focused her comments on touch and time and breath, and pacing—in its multiple meanings.

She related walking to reading in pace and rhythm, and then she explored how that relationship affects our experience and perception of an artist’s book—such as in the books of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton—above, you see an offset lithograph from Fulton’s Seven Winds (from Fourteen Works), 1982-1989. Harper interspersed brief videos of her bipedal movement (the camera directed down toward her feet, walking), and compared her progress through a landscape with paged reading, to emphasize how both unfold through time. She examined a number of books in the Urban Books Collection at Washington University, to illustrate her observation that the mind, and our feet while walking, move at roughly the same pace, at 3 miles per. hour, evidently. She added that the poet Wendell Berry suggested that the faster one goes while engaged in any activity (not just walking, but reading, we might suppose), the greater the strain that is exerted on the body, on one’s system. The suggestiveness of the affective power exerted by a book-based experience is clear, as well as Harper’s interest in the gap between the mind and the body in other daily endeavors, when the body does not caught up with the mind. The book appears to offer the ideal union of body and mind, as suggested by phrase coined by Berry, the “altogether here.”

Harper followed her topic into other byways. One comment was that her students, net-savvy every one, move through the world differently than she does. Even the architecture students are more comfortable talking theory or surfing the web than taking a walk and recording that walk through their body’s response. Harper said, “it freaks them out.”

If it is true that our bodies have become the new frontier to be feared and longed-for, the new Beyond, then the students who are turning to books today, and (to bring this back to my focus) to letterpress printing in particular, those students comprise our seekers wishing to return to themselves. St. Paul printer Paulette Myers-Rich shared a frustration with me that sometimes afflicts her while teaching. I had asked her how she would define craft to a student. She spoke at first of some of her students’ divorce from the physical that has to be dealt with before discussions of craft have relevance. “What do I say to those who barely can handle a ruler or need safety scissors the first semester, who call the human body ‘meatware,’ who are so removed from physical objects in space and are living in a world of screen-based mediated experience, that to make things, to handle things, is just as valuable to their thinking as reading Descartes?”

Clearly, Harper and Myers-Rich are confronting the same loss that is leaving this rising generation hungry for experiences in three dimensions that realign them with body time. In the discussion period that followed Harper’s talk (where she was joined by other presenters Chris Burnett and Tate Shaw), Ward Tietz suggested that perhaps what he called the cultural distribution may be changing, in that the dominant visual culture is being slowed down to a more humane pace or rhythm, as part of a sensorial shift, as opposed to the “imperative of speed.” I think this may be wishful thinking regarding a change in the mediascape we all move through, but I agree that the rising interest in letterpress and book art in general demonstrates that the haptically disaffected see in the book a haven and a fundamental means for realigning mind with body.

Assumptions About Craft

2009-05-16T12:52:00.000-07:00

What does craft mean to you? What artists and books come to mind? In letterpress, do you think back to William Morris's Chaucer (1896), below on the left?

Or do you think of books by Harry Duncan, such as, Four Early Stories by James Agee (1964), and, The Naming of the Beasts and Other Poems by Gerald Stern (1973), pictured above on the right?

You might think of printers such as Claire Van Vliet and Walter Hamady, whose influence has extended in this country over several decades. Or, you might think of next-generation printers such as Carolee Campbell, Harry and Sandra Reese, Robin Price, Julie Chen, you add the next name. Read on to my preceding post, below. In it, I'm thinking about craft that not only encompasses works and artists such as these, but I also wonder whether an involvement with craft should be narrowly assigned, or opened up to a wide range of interpretations.

What names would be high on your list?

The Meaning/s of Craft

2009-05-16T11:58:00.000-07:00

For me, craft happens at the intersection of the haptic and the object, as it expresses an artist’s investment in process and response to materials and medium, as well as a response to tradition (or not), and to daily use (or not). The complexity of that response is carried through to the reader. The final piece to this is a sensual engagement that to me is undeniably enhanced when content and intent are carried through with skill in a process and with materials and finally in the object that emerges.

What do you think, printers and book art folk among us? What does craft mean to you? Is it about pace, about engaging the body in process, about trace-making? Or...is it irrelevant, a distraction, a non-starter?

As I have more consciously begun to read about and talk with artists and others about craft, I’ve encountered a range of opinion, much of it emotional, about the role of craft in this field. Much of this is déja-vu, We are schizophrenic about craft. Consider this. Earlier this year, Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts sent out a postcard announcing the exhibition: "Makeready, Choke, Bleed, and Knockout." The first line of the description began: "High speed rotary offset printing requires a significant degree of craft." Craft in offset printing? The idea might surprise some letterpress artists, especially if they have picked up on an attitude still held by some passionate offset aficionados--that two-step of, “if it’s letterpress, it is only about craft” (read: not conceptual and not content-driven). However blatantly wrong this assumption is, the bias still surfaces today. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise us, as it is echoed in the larger art world too.

So when others who work with offset adopt the term, craft, to indicate a level of skill and care in printing, it stands out. Personally, the idea of craft in offset doesn’t surprise me at all. Offset printing has its own aesthetic and technical demands, and, for a small number of printer-devotees who have mastered the process, the enormous demands of the medium can be directed toward nuances in effect that could be characterized as craft. (For those of you interested in offset printing, let me recommend an excellent catalogue from 2007, Production not Reproduction, curated by Tony White, Head of the Fine Arts Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, for the Center for Book Arts in New York. The catalogue includes an essay by White—in which I find the statement, “High quality offset printing requires a significant degree of craft at multiple levels”—along with family trees of printers that include where and with whom they studied.)

My research this year has focused on letterpress, but a discussion of craft in related media such as offset, or in other kinds of printmaking, as well as papermaking and bookbinding, or for that matter in sculptural and installation work, would be of equal interest. Does the meaning of craft change depending on the medium or object created? What is your response when asked by a student, or a collector, or a friend:

What is craft and how is it embodied in your work?

2009-03-17T20:37:00.000-07:00

The picture at left shows some of the people in the standing-room-only crowd that came to hear our panel called, Risk & Renewal in Letterpress, at the inaugural conference of the College Book Art Association (CBAA), at the University of Iowa-Iowa City in January 2009. Inge Bruggeman (partially viewed at left, in front), Harry Reese and I talked about the changes that we see happening in letterpress today. I led off, describing historical influences that have affected letterpress since 1980. Inge followed, and then Harry. Each spoke eloquently about how their work in letterpress has developed throughout their careers. But the reason that I've started my blog off with this picture and this conference, is because, before things got started, the three of us had wondered just who would show up. There were plenty of people in at the conference--240 attendees, to the excitement of the planners--but with three panels running concurrently on very different topics, we had no idea what would be the interest level in our letterpress panel. We couldn't believe it when people kept coming in, and we were only disappointed that the discussion period at the end was too short to allow comments by only a few of those who wanted to speak. Clearly, we had hit a nerve. Letterpress--that bastion of tradition, so many would have us believe--was generating a lot of interest among artists of all ages. Clearly, it was going to continue its role as a lightning rod for discussion and debate in the book art field.