Artists' Books as (Sub)Culture Organized by Natalie Campbell, Guest Curator, The Center for Book Arts, New York

January 15-March 28, 2009 Curators text only Catalog available via; http://www.centerforbookarts.org/bookstore/catalog.asp Works by: Center for Book Arts Dexter Sinister General Idea Group Material LTTR Primary Information Temporary Services Visible Language Workshop Visual Studies Workshop Woman's Building/Women's Graphic Center Women's Studio Workshop Book art has found a function within the politics of space. Its specific contribution lies in providing an artspace beyond space as a counter both to the commercially-limited object and to the paradox of the public precinct. (1) This exhibition considers the artist group a loose category engaging collectives and collaborations as well as workshops and nonprofits in relation to artist book production. In doing so, it suggests relationships between subcultures that develop around artist publishing (in artist-run workshops and education centers) and evolving contemporary artistic practices that deploy prints social and spatial potential. Resonances between earlier groups that used books as sites of technical experimentation or investigations of personal/political boundaries and current artists multivalent book-centered practice have been little explored. It is no surprise that for many such groups, publishing books and running alternative spaces become complementary, mutually invigorating activities. Contemporary artists books have been fundamentally influenced by recognition of prints potential to disseminate and present artwork outside the context of galleries and museums. Conceptions of the artists book as an alternative space have been instrumental to its development. Recalling her mindset in 1976, when she co-founded the artists book collective Printed Matter, Lucy Lippard writes: We dreamed of artists books in airports and at supermarket counters. Operating a store, a classroom, a gallery, or a workshop puts modes of dissemination, distribution and manufacture in the hands of artists themselves. For some artist groups, developing and presenting cohesive bodies of work becomes secondary (or supplementary) to a social function: providing a workspace,

running a small press, organizing events, running educational programs. Book space becomes an extension of real space that reflects these self-made economies. Yet what is the space of artist publications and how is it changing? How is activity in real space reflected in the space of the page? This exhibition highlights different facets of the activity of book-making as a social activity, exploring ways that groups cohere around economies of self-publishing and a shared understanding of books as a social object. In doing so, it fosters conversations among several very different artist groups for whom making and distributing books is an essential component of broader cultural activity. Books produced by the participating organizations are juxtaposed with displays of ephemera related to specific projects which demonstrate engagement with the social and spatial possibilities of print. Often a discursive outlet for historically marginalized artists, artists books evolved in tandem with centers for feminist art, which embraced yet altered Ruschas revolutionary approach to the medium, integrating books and print with specific social practices and critiques. Such centers combined artist book programs with innovative approaches to exhibition (in both public and private space), education, and funding (for example using the federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act to support working artists). As Laurel Beckman has suggested, the import of this work is in its content as played out through form, display and distribution1." Founded in 1973 following several years of activity by women artists who were energized by the feminist movement throughout the USA, The Womans Building in Los Angeles housed numerous programs, including the first independent school for women artists, the Feminist Studio Workshop, and The Womens Graphic Center along with an evolving assortment of woman-centered business, studios, and performance spaces. Providing classes, presses, galleries and an outreach network, the WGC was crucial component of Womans Building programming which engaged many notable book artists during its 18 year history and promoted the use of design and print to maintain ethnic and sexual identity in graphic communications, inviting multiple responses through a feminist engagement with transmission and reception. Evident in offset, letterpress, screenprint, photocopy and diazo works from the WGC is the impact of allowing artists direct, unmediated access to modes of production2 that combined fine-print traditions with the tools and approaches of commercial graphic design. Paralleling this activity on the east coast is the Womens Studio Workshop (1974present), which founded its Artists Book Program as one of several activities that provided funding, employment, and visibility for artists. In their personal, political, formal, and material diversity (drawing upon the resources of book arts, papermaking, printmaking, and ceramics studios), WSWs books are echoed by multifaceted social programs which are documented and promoted in printed work. Posters promoting guest artist talks, residency and education programs, and exhibitions foster a sense of feminist community (often connecting WSWs community with that of the LA Womans Building); ephemeral documents record site-specific, temporary performances and collaborations. While the Womans Building was conceived as a multifunction space in an urban center of feminist foment, WSW continues to value the role of its semi-rural

setting in establishing a space apart for encouraging the voice and vision of women artists. Yet for both the Womans Building and WSW, workspace and exhibition space function similarly to books themselves, not only as alternative spaces but as necessary havens for expression by artists who fall outside of male art-world hegemonies. Founded as an artists' space and graduate program in partnership with SUNY Buffalo, the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY was one of the most influential book centers linking production to exhibition to distribution. The VSW has been engaged from its inception in issues of transmission, reception, and community, through programs such as its early Book Bus project, a touring library of artists' publications, and the Options in Independent Art Publishing Conference at VSW Nov. 6-9, 1979, which for the first time brought together representatives from an emerging book arts community, including panelists Joan Lyons from the VSW, Richard Minsky from the CBA, Sheila de Bretteville from the Woman's Building, Dick Higgins from Something Else Press, as well as Clive Phillpot, Martha Wilson, Judith Hoffberg, Betsy Davids and Jim Petrillo. Photobookworks from the VSW reveal a history of experimentation with sequencing, flow, and the book form, as well as a conceptual interest in new technologies. The 40year-old institution operates a Gallery, Traveling Exhibitions Service, VSW Press, Media Center, and Research Center; it also publishes Afterimage: the Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, offers artists' residencies and summer workshops, and is now partnered with SUNY Brockport for an MFA Program in Visual Studies. Bookmaking continues to be one of the ways VSW artists explore media's role within visual culture, using print-on-demand and commercial production methods and reflexively engaging with VSW's extensive photographic and media archives. Building upon the role of education and resource-sharing in expanding the possibilities of print, the Visible Language Workshop at MIT (the precursor of MITs Media Lab) likewise challenged existing social paradigms, although in this case traditional hierarchies of printing, design, and production. Again, understanding groups physical workshop space helps to elucidate activity within the space of the page. Under the guidance of visionary designer and educator Muriel Cooper and artist/designer/technician Ron MacNeil in MITs School of Architecture and Planning, the VLW was inspired by Bauhaus workshops and came into being when undergraduates in Cooper and MacNeils jointly-taught Messages and Means course demolished the wall that separated the offset press room from the photographic pre-press room filled with enlargers, typesetting machines, and emerging electronic technologies. The VLWs guiding principle was eliminating the specialized roles of author/artist/designer and typographer/printer. The production of artists books was instrumental in teaching and realizing this vision, which anticipated both the changing landscape of print in the era of digital design and publishing and the expanded realm of artist publishing.3 The implications of changing mechanisms of print production and indeed the systemic restructuring of print and design processes is reflected in changing attitudes of artistpublishers toward the role of books as alternative space. In 1980, when Studio International magazine published a feature issue on artists books, criticisms of the viability of alternative space were evident in statements by RoseLee Goldberg,

Howardena Pindell, and others. By 1999, in Art Matters, Lippard lambasted her own earlier populist ideas for the distribution of artists books and art criticism. Collectives such as Group Material, which initially ran an alternative exhibition space out of a storefront on 13th Street in Manhattan, became critical of this hermetic position and began to use publishing as a means of inserting a viewpoint into mainstream discourse. Projects such as Inserts, produced and distributed within The New York Times (1988), and The AIDS Timeline (initally created as mixed-media installation for the University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley, later published in fragments within 11 issues of different commercial art magazines simultaneously in 1990 for World AIDS Day) used mass publication rather than the increasingly specialized medium of artists books to alter the existing space of printed matter. Group Materials later practice continued this act of dispersion, generating publications and posters from public meetings, conversations, and research, blurring artistic, curatorial, political, authorial, and design practice. General Idea, the 25-year Toronto and New York-based collaboration of Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz and AA Bronson was marked by prolific production including performance, print, installation, multiples, photographic works, and numerous boutiques. In their work, print becomes a vehicle through which an eclectic, spatially dispersed practice inverts high/low art hierarchies, embraces counterculture(s) and emergent queer politics and invites public participation. The Pop appropriationist strategies of FILE Megazine, published from 1972-1989 (and recently reissued by JRP-Ringier), embrace rather than resist the cultural space of mass media. FILEs look and logo are visual/conceptual puns on LIFE Magazine in its 1950s-60s heyday. Ephemera from performances and mail-art projects such as Club Canasta and The Great Canadian Art Tragedy Project, Performed for General Idea by Dennis Wheeler demonstrate how performance and reader response cards activated the text. General Ideas printed work is not passive: it playfully confronts its own critics and takes on life as performance residue and commodity. General Idea founded Art Metropole as a not-for-profit archive, distributor, and publisher of artist publications and multiples in 1974 in response to the success of FILE, and as a way of accessing their distribution system to other artists; some of those artists took up the challenge, founding Printed Matter in New York in 1976. The diverse approaches to print evident in groups active from the 70s onward continue to resonate with artist collaboratives that for whom print functions as a social mechanism, subject, and tool. The artist collaborative Dexter Sinister describes itself as Just-InTime Workshop & Occasional Bookstore which deploys publishing as a facet of layered public (and semi-public) activity. Founded in 2006 in response to an invitation to create a catalogue for the art biennial Manifesta 6 (structured as an art school but not finally realized), the artists instead proposed to set up a temporary workshop to print course materials on demand (and on site) in Cyprus. The three works on view by Dexter Sinister turn the relationship between work and ephemera in this exhibition on end: a bookshelf, constructed on site with available materials to the artists specifications, which serves as display for the shows handling copies; a library-bound copy of Library Book, a printed version of texts which have been and continue to be transmitted by the

artists in a variety of forms, including freely downloadable PDFs on their website; and a microfiche which functions both as index and legible compendium of texts disseminated in print and electronic formats as the artists contribution to the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Modes of transmission and site of reception are weighed equally alongside modes of production, print design, and subject matter in a necessarily open-ended process. Founded by James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff, the non-profit Primary Information engages in complementary activities of exhibition design and publishing, researching and exhibiting recent art historical material (such as Art Workers Coalition documents and ephemera), and articulating temporal and spatial possibilities by re-publishing out-ofprint artists publications (such as The Great Bear pamphlet series by Something Else Press) at an affordable price. As for other artist publishers such as Continuous Project, Primary Informations act of republishing reveals a keen interest in the way that vast fields of historical avant-garde and ephemeral material becomes rapidly inaccessible. In this exhibition, the display of the original Great Bear texts dismantled for scanning exposes a destructive act that is conversely an act of preservation. This engagement with means of transmission and agencies hidden within seemingly transparent cultural production further articulates the possibilities of publishing-as-retrieval. The axe lodged in LTTRs recurring reading table is a fitting emblem of a practice which uses performance and participation to activate the space of reading. The five journal issues produced by this feminist genderqueer artist collective from 2002-2006 bring together images, artist multiples and writings selected through an annual open call circulated internationally and interpersonally through queer communities. The collaborative selection of work yields a multiplicity of voices and contradictory politics, exploding personal/political boundaries and undermining notions of univocal authorship. LTTR also produces performances, screenings, and events including Radical Read-Ins. Inviting audiences to read and share texts which changed your life, these events bring together individuals, collections, and archives and encourage interactivity through means such as specially-designed bookmarks for flagging and annotating passages. Through its interest in texts production and reception, LTTR goes beyond the practice of publishing to show text not as inert but as living, fierce, and mutable. Since 1998, Temporary Services has embraced many of the aforementioned strategies in a democratic creative practice that embraces collaboration, supports others work, and nurtures social ideals irrespective of whether such work is considered art. In addition to printing unique bookworks in a pamphlet series, they engage with the life of books through public action and performance. By facilitating donations of frequent flyer miles to purchase magazine subscriptions for people in maximum-security prisons, Supermax Subscriptions (ongoing) connects surplus of well-traveled citizens to a population that never goes anywhere. In The Library Project (2001), the group researched and selected 100 books (primarily artist-made small editions) which were not included in the collection of the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago, and inserted these books physically onto the shelves. That this guerilla intervention, also documented as a pamphlet/bibliography, was ultimately accepted and incorporated into the public library system by its librarians is an example of the way Temporary Services uses books to

activate the space of reading. As host to this exhibition, the Center for Book Arts has a history of engagement with many of the participating organizations approaches to printed space, as a site of studio practice, exhibition, exchange, and learning. Founded contemporaneously with the Womans Building and Womens Studio Workshop during a period in which General Idea and the Visible Language Workshop were helping to redefine possibilities of artist publication, the CBA was the first not-for-profit book arts organization of its kind in the nation, now operating in dialogue with book arts centers in Minneapolis, Des Moines, and San Francisco. The CBA is committed to exploring and cultivating contemporary aesthetic interpretations of the book as an art object, while invigorating traditional artistic practices of the art of the book. In organizing public programs and exhibitions and providing book arts facilities, residencies, and classes, the CBA bridges centuries of bookmaking practices and craft tradition and reflects new trends in cross disciplinary artmaking practices. Catalogues from three landmark CBA-organized exhibitions reveal a cross-section of the 5,000 book artists whose work has been shown at CBA and other national and international venues; newsletters from CBAs 35 year history situate its role within ongoing dialogues about the book as social object. Contemporary artists continue to build on print strategies that have emerged not only through the work of individuals but importantly in the cultural context of artistpublishers, workshops, and collaborations. Some of these strategies include nonhierarchical approaches to publishing and design, exploration of print as alternative space, insertion of new texts into existing structures, re-publishing, open-ended investigation of transmission modes and public action. Often, artist groups catalyze the reception of texts as curators, librarians, and performers, holding up a mirror to the way culture is recorded and created. Do-It-Yourself and Punk aesthetics recur among many exhibited works, suggesting their complex influence among these groups and on contemporary print practice. At the same time, integrated modes of design, production, and collaboration not only in pre-digital print workshops like the Womens Graphic Center and the Visible Language Workshop, but also in the viral social network of Temporary Services anticipated and developed the potentials of on-demand publishing and online communities. The investment of these groups not only in the production of books as artwork but in how print might be created, transmitted, and received suggests that importance of considering artist publishing as a layered social activity, yielding unexpected connections among artistic production that are reflected within, not limited to, the space of the page. 1 Beckman, Laurel, The Problem with Role Models: Contextualizing So Cal 1970s FemArtBooks and the Matter with Contemporary Practice, JAB08 (Fall 1997)
2 3

from email conversation with the author

My research on the VLW is indebted to David Reinfurt of Dexter Sinister, whose essay on Muriel Cooper and the Visible Language Workshop, This stands as a sketch for the

 future, is online at http://www.dextersinister.org/MEDIA/PDF/Thisstandsasasketchforthefuture.pdf