Category Archives: diary entry

Codex Foundation Bookfair and Symposium

by andreweason

The Codex Foundation is producing the first biennial CODEX Book Fair and a Symposium entitled: The Fate of the Art, The Hand Printed Book in the 21st Century. The Book Fair and Symposium will take place February 12, 13, 14, & 15, 2007 on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley

This looks interesting, and I imagine a lot of crossover between the speakers (which include my PhD advisor, Sarah Bodman) and some of the other participants. The general character of it looks like it will overlap a good range of different approaches and ideas of book art. It’s really something that I should be at, but of course I can’t afford to go and the prospect of helping out/going along with Impact press is nonexistent (I didn’t, in fact, get to know about this from my advisors).  The poetry-heavy listing of speakers leads me to think that this will be a symposium that will open up some meditation on the expressive qualities of book art (how could it not?) – about the continuum between the spoken or intoned intention, the written, printed, made, and the otherwise accessed. Well, that’s what I would’ve spoken about anyway. About intention living in different media, about ‘readership’ in those places. Can authors transfer the situation of the book elsewhere? What’s to transfer? What is the nature of this situation, the book?

Wish I was there.

Jasmine tea

by andreweason

L and I visited Ta-Hwa in Amsterdam, which is a Chinese exports emporium (in practice there seems to be stuff in there from all over the far East). It’s crammed with gorgeous things from furniture to ceramics to tea. I bought a couple of gifts for Christmas while I was over there, and L bought a tin of jasmine tea. I just had about a pint of it, which may be less than wise just before bed. It’s delicious stuff, and I had fun drinking it out of one of the little earthenware bowls that I also bought there. Not my morning cuppa, of course, which will remain coffee. I think the sensibility to appreciate the delicate aroma of jasmine tea escapes me in the mornings, when I’m more likely to be stubbing my toe on something or trying to find my key.

Tomorrow we’re off to see the Be Good Tanyas at the Colston hall. Not the most preposessing venue of course. The Tanyas are probably seen to best advantage in some dim and churchy room somewhere rural, rather than the suspiciously municipal Colston Hall. Still, the Seu Jorgé concert we saw there was really great, and I enjoyed Madredeus there a few years back. This could be another eye-opener. It’s strange the way that a musician’s presence can have nothing to do with the physical magnitude of the venue.

I had hoped to start reading Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality tonight, but unfortunately, I left it in Lindy’s glove compartment and I was still too shaken by the torrent of bargains at Wilkinson (bought a tablet of paper, some bungies for my bike rack, and one of those astonishing devices one clips onto radiatiors to dry clothes with). However, after Elaine Scarry’s book I am looking forward to getting into it. I need some other reading though, on two fronts.

Firstly, something that handles what the aims of art practice are. What sorts of experiments can artists be undertaking in their practice (ie, not as public art, or specifically as a social interaction, but just in making)? Something, that is, towards a theory of artistic practice. How can we talk about what artists are doing while they are making? We always talk about the work and the intentions prefiguring it. What are the experimental paradigms, or grammars of success and failure, that artists use in working. What could an experiment be?

Secondly, something on the phenomenology of reading that attends to the book itself. There are some things I have encountered that treat reading and readers seriously in this regard, but more or less disregard the books themselves (though I confess that I would like to reread The Uncommon Reader for example.)

But tomorrow is another day.

Dreaming By the Book, and an Aristotelian arc

by andreweason

I finished reading the Scarry book Dreaming By the Book today.

There are lots of interesting paths to go down prompted by her ideas, but I found the book a bit disappointing in terms of making some sort of ironbound claims for its thesis. (Not what I should have expected anyway,) Of course, my reading suffers from being done with a particular purpose in mind. Had I been reading it with an interest in aesthetics or with a mind on the intersections of narrative and cognition in literary terms, I’d have found much more to use.

However, it’s a far from barren read for me in research terms, introducing me to vectors of authorial action and instruction in the text-for-the-reader (the instructions the author gives) and in the ‘dictation’ that the author takes (for example, Blake’s experiences of practicing dictation: mimesis of the imagined world unfolding). I also found Scarry’s exegesis of the shield of Achilles as the story of how a social world is knit together by story and by the shared dance of imagery in the story very moving, and together with Kearney’s work On Stories (his book about narrative, heavily drawing on Ricoeur) and Henry Plotkin’s The Imagined World Made Real (about scientistic notions of intention and culture searching for paradigms that sufficiently interact with social sciences and humanities disciplines), there is a sort of Aristotelian arc that takes us all the way from genetics to the phenomenology of the imagination.

That’s what Scarry’s book is about.

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Continue reading …

Turn

by andreweason


Untitled-01, originally uploaded by aesop.

The first of a set of drawings for Turndust.

I want the words to stay on the same level as the images, to be read at more-or less the same rate as the images, to have the same ‘range of clarity’ that the images have. Sometimes more obvious than others.

All these images will be reworked for silkscreen. I’ll be reducing the range of tonal values to try to exercise some control over how they posterise in the print process. (I’ll be printing another colour underneath as a sort of duotone as well). I want to use some digital mark-making alongside the hand-made marks. Also, perhaps, put in some photographic material.

Several will need lots of reworking, and in fact I want completely different versions of some things, but this is laying down the material to work from.

I’ve had a lot of fun doing these. It’s a little challenging thinking how they’ll be altered by silkscreen, but it is by far the easiest bulk print setup I have access to. (Litho is just too tricky for me, and there’s little sense of ownership with the setup.)

Blue Notebooks

by andreweason

The Blue Notebook

I had my first read of the first number of the new UWE-based artists’ book publication, The Blue Notebook. First impressions are very good. I’d read the Marshall Weber article in its online form on the Australian site that documents the symposium it was delivered at, but it’s good to see it in this form with the pictures and the typesetting for the initial poem.

First impressions of Mike Nicholson’s piece were very thought provoking. It seems that he’s thought a lot about what he’s doing. I seem to see something I could learn from in his way of valuing people’s natural commitment to their work (I can’t think of another way to put it, but it’s the opposite of a desperately earnest/networky sort of working). I think, given the hard time I’ve had getting into my research, that I must come off a bit ‘desperate’ in that sense. But I’m also thoroughly based in my books in a real and natural way ( I think people give me a bit of slack/tolerance for that). Because the more social side of my research seems a bit daunting to me sometimes, I’m sure I come off a bit more boring and ‘desperate’ in that sense than I really am. There’s a side of me that would really rather be making books. I think I’d be better understood that way at any rate. But I’m trying to balance things out. I felt far more comfortable on my last visit to the ICA, even though I had to push myself through at at trot to get it all done. Partly that was simply because of time, but partly also because I needed the momentum. It makes one look a bit puffed-out and daft, but it’s a hurry to get your bit said before someone starts talking over you. Still, hopefully I can be more relaxed in less strained circs. Nicholson’s essay seemed to describe some of the feelings one has about showing work and assuming a particular identity. (I’m a book artist, eg) He also wrote about the company he’d kept as a result of taking up this way of doing things and the way that had changed his ideas about what he was doing and why. I wonder if I can transform my sense of what it is to be a researcher as I settle into it more?

There was another piece that I’ll need to re read. Can being able to read the intent of artists’  books set us free?

?

As I say, I’ll need to re read it. I’ve just been writing in my previous post about ‘reading’ artists’ books though, so there may well be a point of intersection there.

Also some interesting artists’ pages. The one that stands out for me had a photo of a dead rabbit and a text- a sort of prose poem seemingly detailing a stream-of-rabbit-consciousness fading out to oblivion. I found it effective. It was interesting also from the point of view of my previous writing on Scarry’s text, where she’s writing about the evocative power of language. The association of picture and image (one live, one still?) makes me think about how I’m planning to do the same in a couple of different ways in Turndust.

updates

by andreweason

I’m off to Edinburgh on Monday for a few days. This means I’ll miss out on a meeting to do with Electric December, a project I’m undertaking for the library this year that has tenuous connections with my book art work (through narrative and animation). It’s a chance to improve some existing skills and work on something new. A preliminary animation I’ve done with a ‘librarian’ character is working out okay. More work on this soon.

Anyway, I’ll be passing on my draft storyboard to Andrew Cox, who’ll be representing the library at this meeting while I’m in Edinburgh.

While I’m there, I’ll be doing further research on Helen Douglas using the resources of the Scottish National Gallery Library at the Dean Gallery, having recently gotten in touch with Ann Simpson. I’m going to revisit the collection at the Edinburgh Central  Library, too.

Meeting notes

by andreweason

Work done on creating questions and shortlists was time well spent.
    • structured the methodology
    • showed complexity of thought going into subject
    • sets the stage for prog exam
    • criticisms arising are constructive: mostly about couching terms/sensitive interviewing
    • will knit well with assignment materials

As regards assignments:
    • Iain will get hold of the new, simpler set of instructions for me.
    • It’s expected that some work I have done will fit in quite well (in particular, my assumptions about the taxonomy of terms exercise seem to have been more or less corresct)
    • It’s important that my advisors can say that I will have this work done, but it may not be essential that it is done now, though clearly I’d like to get it sorted out anyway.
    • There seems to be more leeway about providing work that obviously fits the intention of the assignments without adhering to the letter of the law. This is good news because I’ve done a lot of work on the relevent areas: maybe just not the specified work.

On the artwork:
        • General agreement with my self-criticism. Work has lacked material and expressive richness of late because of time constraints and production capabilities. My stated aim of spending more studio time doing autographic work (versus digital production chipped away at inbetween my research studies) seems well received as a proposed remedy. I just need to make that work! However, no complaints about my work. Quality could be better, but I’m obviously doing what I can under the production circumstances.

Some points not covered:
    • joining art practice to my case stufy methodology: I’ve a pretty decent idea of how my writing and researching is going to perform self-reflexive/hermeneutic research, but as yet, I’ve only pencilled-in how I intend to examine issues in the research in my artwork. Although I’m clearly relating my own work and its’ accompanying propositions (my understanding of what book arts are and my work’s place in it), to the work of others, and stating an aim to scurry backwards and forwards between my assumptions and what I glean from other folks’ practice, this is more about comparing theory. I’m not really comparing the work itself that clearly here. So it’s not comparative analysis, this reflexive process that the work is supposed to take up. It’s more, I think, going to be about finding understandings of issues raised through art means… Obviously I’m unclear here. How can I make work that forms part of my investigation. Do I have to wait and see what I start finding out?

• I also want to figure out how I am going to construct my thesis. I was reading about Ricoeur this morning, about how the studies in the Rule of Metaphor gradually unfold the different levels of R’s theory of metaphor. From a stylistic point of view, I think I’d like to take up something similar, I think. I haven’t read the Rule of Metaphor yet, so I can’t say what this unfolding means in terms of R’s methodology (one presumes, in setting out to writew, that he already knows what his theory is, and is using these ‘layers’ as illustrations rather than as hermeneutic experimentation) Nonetheless, my existing metaphor of ‘back and forth’ or of ‘repetition’ could easily make for dull reading if there is no ‘dramatic structure’ to how my understanding unfolds. The problem is, that I don’t know what I’m portraying. So I can’t decide in advance what to unfold, what bits will unfold in different case studies, etc. Perhaps it won’t be possible to do this. Or, perhaps, I will discover a story in the course of my research which I will later be able to edit into something readable. A hermeneutics of continuous repetition or fractious back-and-forth could be very trying, and I aspire to something less dull. Fingers crossed for a good story! This would be an interesting point to discuss another time.

tangled

by andreweason


Tanpit Woods 2, originally uploaded by aesop.

Today is going to be all about setting down some of my ideas into the structures already in place for the progression exam writing I’m doing. There are plenty of ideas and sufficient theoretical framework in the background, even though the more I see of it, the better I would like to delve into it more fully. In particular the theoretical articulation of how studio parctice is a form of research. I’m reading Graeme Sullivan’s book on this just now, which is ever-so-slowly peeling away layers of theoretical grounding: I’m waiting for the chapter where he begins his exposition of the theoretical heuristics that allow the richness of research within artistic practice to be examined critically. As I say, I’d rather know more about my application of this at the moment. Beyond a certain hermeneutic program of interrogating and instigatingmy work through the selfsame questioning matrix that I will be bringing to my case-study data, I’m not too specific about how cog ‘a’ will mesh with gear ‘c’. I suspect it’s something that by definition will work itself out in the hermeneutic process.

Be that as it may, I’m now writing so as to have a locus to edit, to add ideas to. At the moment, I’m conscious of having many different vectors of thought on and around my research interests and in tandem with several interpretations of the web of theoretical and other ‘outside’ references.