See You at the Biennial?

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.