As I look at the website of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, I’m seeing pretty clearly that there’s a whole lot of bridges to be built between that [field/tendency/whatever] and the things I write about in my thesis.
I’ve just written nearly 60000 words challenging the centring identity of the artists’ books field, clearing space for a narrative of hybrid practice and trying to create a network of value for the hybrid practice’s affordances as well as the formal affordances of the book form and whatever artists throw at it (affect and effect)… and taking this lot inward towards the book form’s affect on the maker’s consciousness, and outwards towards whatever version of the republic of letters makes sense these days. And I’m finding a whole raft of other ways of ‘not belonging’, of ‘yet/also’ cropping up here. There are some great models for the changing face of authorship, and ways of understanding common ‘ownership’ of a field that really light up some of the tensions so markedly to be found in Book Art in a new way.
I have to go do some more reading now, and come back with some sort of primer on how I might get these ideas to shake hands.
Some of the writing for my thesis – from the chapter on the concept of ‘making-reading’ – will appear in late summer/ early autumn in The Blue Notebook.
Blammo. Dammit, I wish I had heard of Jenkins ages ago. The following excerpt pretty much arcs across where I’ve come from (‘What’s wrong with trying to define artists’ books?’) to where I’m going (“How can we help people find their own ways through media — or in some way support their own agency in doing so?”) So here’s Henry Jenkins from the linked page:
Over the course of the 20th century, however, genre categories have become ever more specialized as media industries refine techniques for monitoring and targeting particular clusters of consumers. These more rigid and precise subgenres are the product of a more general tendency towards what anthropologist Grant McCracken calls “specification.” Subcultures break down into smaller subcultures, niches become smaller niches in an eternal dance between our desire to differentiate ourselves from and affiliate ourselves with others who share our tastes. There are more different categories of books, records, and films than ever before; all that diversity produces an anxiety that is being met by more aggressive policing of boundaries. Using more sophisticated tools, media consumers are trying to find the “perfect choice,” rather than taking for granted that a work designed for a general audience is going to contain some things we like and some things we don’t.
Picked up the bound volumes of my thesis today and began researching materials to help me prepare an application for an MSc in Information and Library Management. By way of an inaugural post on the topic, here's an, umm, exciting MIT video on metadata.
What I hope to do is to find ways to bring issues raised in information management into contact with issues in the practice and meaning of artists' books. As I've shown in my thesis, the sorts of things we use as descriptors capture a sort of formal essentialism that's entirely appropriate to cataloguing, but it doesn't come close to saying what they actually mean. This is no mean project, and it will have multifarious means of extending its arguments across all sorts of interdisciplinary poking around. So perhaps it's best to see it as a series of recces into and around the issue of how libraries might share "the meaning of the artists' book field", as well as the books themselves. That phrase in quotation marks is probably not quite what I mean. It's something like – how can institutions impart some of the "added value" that the field itself contains, or "feels like"? (And this is just as true of fiction genres etc, except that I have a special interest in artists' books.) You get inklings of it sometimes in exhibitions. Or is it something only makers get to experience? And is there any *point* in looking into this for libraries?
To probe that last point, I think that the information professional could be involved not only in the pursuit of systemic ordering, but of methods of understanding. There might be something hermeneutic, something pedagogical about the future librarian, who would not only help us to fish the sea of data, but help us to fully appreciate what we have caught. Something that helpud us to impart methods of understanding as well as simply information, could be of use. I think typically we see this 'baked-into' the narratives that inform our cataloguing systems. One of the great things about new ways of including metadata, though, is that our material can belong at the same time to many different hierarchies and structures. The task of the librarian becomes not so much to show how the structure works (though that is indispensible), but further to show how we can use that structure as a path to create or choose our own narratives. I'm 'thinking aloud' here, but I think what I might be proposing is a pilot into reader's 'interpretive narratives'. How they make their sense of the artists' books field. And what I can do as an information professional to facilitate that.
I suppose typical methodologies might include analysis of a 'folksonomy' or studying other's research habits, or conducting interviews that probe researchers' means of understanding.
Come to think of it, this really sounds like another PhD. Hmmm.
Edit. I've just watched the first thirty seconds of the film, googled Henry Jenkins, who is mentioned in his absence, and decided that I nedd to investigate his theories of world-making and fandom in relation to the, perhaps parallel, notions of making-reading and the shared world of reading (which for me come out of book history, typically Darnton). I probably should've known about Jenkins, but I can't be everywhere. Anyway. Darnton says something interesting about all authors being readers, and that's true also of book artists. The sense of community, of building a world *together* (with perhaps a few hardcore canonical underpinnings) prevales strongly in artists' books. If one swaps out 'fandom' for 'republic of letters', we get some interesting correspondences. And "bookdom"'s ambivalence about canonical sorting might be looked at as symptomatic of its interpenetration by its producer-fans. Perhaps the 'democracy' of the artist's book is another telling sign here. (And of course that implies a democracy of art, which gets us into fairly deep art history waters, bobbling along with Beuys and his inheritors and critics). I haven't, um, actually read any Jenkins yet, I should add.
Still wrestling with the topics that have come up in interviews. There'll be more before I really feel like I'm getting anywhere properly. Doesn't bode well for me having something readable ready to send around the end of the month. But this is progress, I think.
I’m working on a short piece of writing for the artists’ books yearbook on ways to talk about artists’ books. Here’s a brief snapshot.
The one book everyone seems to have read about artists’ books, namely Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists Books, is open to readings that are less than helpful [regarding balancing the urge to define and the necessity for flexibility]. The book’s mission, to provide an identity for artists books and show how they’ve been important to almost every major art movement of the 20th Century, is highly successful. It’s too easy to read it and come away with the idea that one now has a pretty good idea of what artists’ books are. Drucker’s book is a bulwark for the identity of artists’ books. It is a critical foundation for making a claim that artists’ books are important. It’s too tempting simply to build on that foundation, I think. A different reading of the Century is of artists making books in concert with other processes, interests, forms and pursuits. Books are always a place where more than one thing, more than one role, is happening. They are always hybrids. If it’s the case the at the Century is the strongest case yet made for the identity of the artist’s book, it’s ironic that it also functions as a very compelling study of how that identity is always composed out of the shadows cast by other events and processes. It’s still true. The Century is an extremely useful survey, but its readers have often confused its function as a pedagogically- useful history with a functioning definition that they can use to talk about books in the present. If we learn one thing from the Century, it should be that the books it describes arise not from definitions, but from collisions of materials, people and technology.
In the late 1940s, the Better Books chain pioneered the idea of the bookshop as a bright and appealing space, “a social centre with a coffee bar, poetry readings and other literary events”, notes Randall Stevenson in The Oxford English Literary History.
The above quotation, from a recent article by Andy Beckett on the seeming decline of sections of the publishing industry was interesting to me because of a question I was recently asked myself:
“How do you think bookshops/galleries/specialist shops will adapt to distribute books produced using just digital media”,
asks a survey for the University of the West of England’s AHRC research project ‘what will be the canon for the artist’s book in the 21st century?’. It was a question I found difficult to answer at the time, and still do. My attempts at answering it seemed to circle round something of the same attitude as in the first quote. The shops themselves would become more social centres than distribution points. I think that ‘distribution’ is the key problem. Like libraries, bookshops have to look beyond their original role as distributors. Distribution has been taken over by purely digital media, and by mail order. I do almost all my shopping except food shopping over the web. I almost never buy books on the street. (For two reasons: a- I work in a library, so um… ; b- they’re almost invariably cheaper online.) The only exception is the occasional item from Fopp, who pick and choose interesting cheap things. Their sales strategy seems to be that of a cunningly packaged jumble sale, and it pretty much works. Returning to the point in hand, distribution isn’t the thread to pull at here, I think. That’s a lost battle.
The future for libraries and bookshops alike lies more in the ways they create real social networks, communities of readers and other interest who can be served (how??) by these shops and institutions. People will want it both ways of course: they will want and expect bookshops and libraries to be fully stocked with all their old favourites even though the public doesn’t give this model the support it used to. At the same time, the response from shops and libraries will gradually tend towards trying to encourage participatory engagement through just such social interaction. The two tropes aren’t mutually exclusive, but they don’t have completely compatible values either. There’s always some sort of balancing act going on: some kind of management of engagement and institutional conservatism.
Before public libraries, there were subscription libraries, kept afloat by the charges made on members. Some, like the London Library, still exist and even flourish, partly because of how their patrons identify with the services offered. For the most part, the services offered are deeply traditional. Also, for the most part such libraries wouldn’t be very impressive (The London Library is an exception). Whatever failings they do have, public libraries at least benefit from operating on a fairly large scale. Nevertheless, perhaps we, the public, will find ourselves investing in cultural centres as a matter of personal choice: where it might, 175 years ago, have meant subscribing to a circulating library, it could in the future mean subscribing to a space that supports literary, artistic and poetic events and, oh, by the way, sells the odd book, etc, either physically or over the LAN.
Subscription communities are huge today. Think of the web and any paid service you use. Flickr? World of Warcraft? EVE online, etc? Most of these have either no or only a tenuous physical presence. But I think a niche might exist for an institution that would add some sort of real-world physical, social value to these subscriptions by creating a place where they happen. In a sense, some of the surviving internet cafés do this, by playing host to gamers who could perfectly well play at home, but prefer the atmosphere (and perhaps the hardware) available at their favoured LAN/cybercafé. Is it possible to imagine a place that is attactive for some of the same reasons, but offers more than games? It’s difficult. One problem is that these communities have global reach. Whilst the book art community might have a thriving website with 2000 active members, in a single town one would be lucky to find a dozen, let alone a dozen who’d subscribe to the local communities café (or whatever we’re calling it).
The games industry is itself as pragmatic as book publishing ever was. Both book and games publishing are at a stage where the costs of distribution are falling, as less and less paper and plastic gets shunted around, and the end product is delivered digitally, or printed on-site. Development costs for games are huge, though. While editors aren’t cheap, writing is. So there’s a comparison there where writing is more competitive than games. I think it’s probable, that as we enter our fourth decade of computer games, that it will become easier and easier to create user experiences that are interesting without needing to be intensively developed. A bit like the invention of moveable type, we’ll start to see a greater diversity of materials because they’re easier to produce. It would be interesting to trace in book history how new consumer markets for the increased takeup of books was developed, because I think we will see more and more branching away from games-proper into other realms. There are inklings of this already. There’s a lot of Flash development that moves towards poetry. There are texts produced for consumption on mobile devices. How could this pan out into some sort of community interest that someone can set up a space for and make a living out of?
I still haven’t answered the question. Perhaps this is because I’m seeking an affirmative answer, whereas the reality is that such communities will only ever cohere over the network, existing physically only in ad-hoc get-togethers. Maybe the future is publicly-funded and non-profit. Maybe it’s libraries?
Continuing work on this new book project. Some basic animation ideas are coming to the fore, like that suggested in the images above. The title is revealed by an effect as it moves over the surface of the hand.
Much of what the book will be is derived from collage, so ther ewill be lots of seprate elements which can interact. I’m going to develop some simple Flash transitions as I go along in order to (perhaps) produce a Flash version of this book as well.
Pagemakers will be a weekend book art fair with talks and workshops at Brewery Arts, Cirencester. The weekend will be the 14th-15th November, and I'll be starting to invite participants shortly. Although I would prefer to have a more general call for entrants, the limited amount of space at our disposal means that it's impractical to do so. I'll be posting more information about this project as it unfolds, including, I think, a more general call for proposals for the talks. You'll be able to view them, collected, here.
Amongst other things, I'd like to try to produce a catalogue for the show. It wasn't very difficult to produce one for Small Smaller Smallest using Blurb, and I think that the results were pretty good. I'm going to see if it's feasible to do the same for Pagemakers.
I gave a talk at the Scottish National Poetry Library on the 27th on the subject above. The full version of the text is after the jump.
I’d like you to imagine a fairly popular book you know, say for example ‘Pride and Prejudice’. When you open it up you are in touch with a world in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. We go there. It’s a place that’s been drawn from someone’s imagination and experience that doesn’t exist, yet it has causal force, bringing Jane Austen tourists from all corners of the globe to visit places made famous by television adaptations. Other works on paper, of fact as well as fiction, have, sometimes, more powerful causal force. A marriage license is one such, being something that has authority because we say it does. The printed word is one – particularly powerful aspect – of the world of human culture, which is a world we share. It’s important to us, in ways I want to touch on a bit more later.
To put it another way, many people here might may have read this book, Pride and Prejudice. Some of us may not have done, but have, perhaps, seen adaptations on tv or seen other works inspired by it, for which it represents an origin to be acknowledged and sometimes undermined. The book, the thing, the place conjured in our common experience is one we share. It is a corner of the shared world of reading. I want to talk about this world a little bit today.
I’ve just finished v 2.1 of ‘Holding Breath’, my book based on a snippet of the ‘Cupid & Psyche’ myth. I’m devising this as a sequence of double page spreads in Blurb: each page will have 1/8″ overlap in the gutter so that the bit one otherwise loses gets repeated so that the problem is mitigated a bit. That’s the idea anyway…
Here are the contact sheets so far. I’m still editing- that’s what the sheets are for. There are still weak pages and the visual narrative is still gelling; I still need to work across the pages some more and there are may be some more writing to do to meet up with visual developments.
