The Rise of Art Publishing, Kit Hammonds

Artist-led publishing is on the increase, stimulating a growing number of both DIY and institutional publishing events, Kit Hammonds investigates
A small crowd of people gather around the beer and bowls of monkey nuts served among the shelves in Donlon Books for the launch of Succulent Legume. Later, in a now heaving crowd, performances get underway – a mix of music, semi-nudity and slapstick gymnastics – a live equivalent to the collaged melange in the pages of the fanzine itself.

This is one of many launches at Donlon Books in the East End of London that demonstrates one of the key roles in artist-led publishing – bringing people together. The bookshop owner, Conor Donlon, and Ele Brown who works in the shop, run events there under the moniker X marks the Bökship. Like some return to the (in)famous Better Books store, or a hangout for beat poets from the 1950s, Donlon taps into a redundant tradition of independent book stores that operate as much as a hangout as a storefront.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, to find a social undercurrent to this activity, particularly if one thinks of how the media in general is used today. Social networking has transformed the way in which the media, in particular textual media, penetrates our lives.

Fever Zine is one such example – its publishing editor Alex Zamora being an avid participant/user, whatever the appropriate term may be for those operating within social networking software. The zine itself is fairly traditional, but its deployment is one that capitalises on the potential for intermedial presentation, rather than being a translation of it directly onto the page.

Pablo Leon de la Barra has published zines since 2006 at irregular intervals, producing not only macho not rough, a mix of art, architecture and men, but also releasing special issues for events such as a tour of the Copan Building in São Paulo during the 2007 biennale opening, or issuing a bootlegged version of Suely Rolnik’s The Geopolitics of Pimping at Subvision Festival, as part of the micro-programme at annual self-publishing fair Publish and Be Damned.

For all of these people, the publication takes a central role in consolidating such networks and events into a cohesive if schizophrenic whole where more than one, seemingly unconnected idea might be pursued alongside another.

Last year my students pointed out an interesting point of intersection between the new potential of personal computing, access to affordable video equipment and artist-led publishing in the form of Radical Software.

As a group, Radical Software operated beyond the page, the zine acting more as the manifestation of a critical dialogue, itself in dialogue with actions, performances and interventions. The history of the artist group – the surrealists, situationists, dadaists, bauhaus – often appears to include publications, all radical in design and content and quite at odds with marketing and mainstream publication: mouthpieces, voices from behind the sheets, messages between the lines of the media. The underlying message of Radical Software marks an early incidence of the move towards open-source ideals of licensing creativity. No surprise then that the founders of the magazines were students of Marshall McLuhan, and that the leftist politics of this quasi-manifesto encouraged the use of current technology to take control of the media as an act of counterculture.

Such a heritage helps consolidate some of the vital signs by which we can gauge the state of health of current publishing activity. Not just its production, but also its visibility and agency within broader social concerns.

From the inside, the mass of self- (and associated genres of) publishing seems to be a sea change of sorts. This may be just a perception. But this year’s Publish and Be Damned certainly saw a change in the number and make-up of stallholders. Likewise the fair itself attracted unusual attention in the mainstream media – in particular from the hoary old cultural establishment, Radio 4, with two of their journalists, perhaps ironically, reporting on the publications. Underlying this interest however, might be a more questionable point about the focus of attention falling on publishing of this kind, its DIY nature perpetuating the current social image of low budget outlets in the climate of a recession – what I like to call ‘austerity chic’.

Institutions are equally savvy to this current discourse around experimental forms of published books. Art writing appears to be another cohesion in the making, as universities develop it as a growth industry. Notable at the vanguard of this work is the art writing MA at Goldsmiths. Headed by Maria Fusco, also editor of The Happy Hypocrite and 2009 writer in residence at the Whitechapel Gallery (which, in September this year, hosted its first London Art Book Fair, a public event organised with an international ‘art fair’ model of sophisticated commercialism in mind), the course focuses on the experimental use of text and image, particularly outside the mainstream press.

Further afield, FR David, a periodic journal edited and designed by Will Holder for De Appel, Amsterdam looks at text as a medium in which experimental work can take place; criticism and creativity brought together.

The word on the page, as opposed to on-screen, seems to be burgeoning, while that of image on the page may be on the wane. It would be relatively easy to sketch out a cause and effect; as archival and promotional material moves into the more immediate database retrieval systems on the internet, the traditional catalogue with images and essays no longer feels a necessary component for the development of art history in quite the same way as it used to only recently. And in some respects art magazines suffer the same humiliating redundancy.

However, art has long fought to ensure a continued life for redundant forms of representation, and so debased as this may be, it opens up an opportunity for the book to become an experimental site, more than a record. It is not the work of art itself that has been dematerialised – in fact the work of art has become specifically rematerialised even if only as a commodity. No, it is the archive and the document that now appears to be evaporating, unshackling the book to perform its own gig.

Event publishing is not limited to the avantgarde and underground, but can also be found prominently in another art form, the comic book. Since the turn of this century, the term ‘event publishing’ has been used to portray a large-scale series, normally crossing over titles from within the same stable, or, as they call them in the industry, universes – in short, their own continua with their own characters and natural laws accommodating the mutations, space travellers and psychic phenomena particular to them.

Almost inevitably these story lines spread out over as much as a year, revolve around calamities, the end of the universe, or even the end of the multiverse – that is all reality. These relatively cheap publications are naturally a huge industry, but the need for even pulp classics to reinvent themselves for an era of new media is proving surprisingly successful, and there are more similarities with the economy driving the art world than may at first appear. In effect it is driven by collectors, albeit normally teenage ones.

Cynically, one could see these effects as an attempt to reinvigorate crime-fighting characters now old enough to be pensioners while also maintaining a highly profitable enterprise. With a little more critical freedom however, one can also see this as part of a trend towards publishing being more than simply a media operating on the page. What is absolutely clear is that the transition of comics into a digital format is not taking place. While there is an extremely healthy transference of characters from cartoon drawings to storyboards to Hollywood movies, there is little or no call for reading through a VDU even when it seems like a medium which could easily absorb it, technically at least. Instead, they are burgeoning in the caucuses of comic conventions when fans create fanzines and slash fiction. Previously distributed under the radar in photocopied manuscripts, they are now circulated in a free economy online just as easily.

The argument for the internet supporting book trades, what has been coined the Long Tail Theory, has been widely discussed, not least by the artist Mark Leckey in his recent performance lectures. Economist Chris Anderson’s proposal that certain businesses, namely Amazon, thrive online not because they make available mainstream titles at a discount, but because their strength is to alter the balance by profiting from the provision of difficult to find and niche books which would otherwise be inaccessible to the specialist reader. While the theory itself remains contested, there does seem to be a noticeable effect on the market that is buoying up off-mainstream production.

George Orwell describes in his betwixt war essay ‘Books Vs Cigarettes’, how working class people at that time still saw expenditure on books and reading as a luxury despite improvements in education, while the same people would think nothing of spending two pounds (at the time a significant sum) on a day trip to Blackpool, or equivalently large sums on beer and smokes. The idea of books as a leisure pastime rather than a source of information might appear odd, leisure now being held up almost solely as a social activity. But if anything, books are forming a bridge to relatively achievable areas of experimentation and discourse now increasingly dependent on the way in which technology is driving how we come together to drink and smoke, and often, simply to talk.

Kit Hammonds is a London-based curator and a tutor in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art. He is also co-founder of Publish and be Damned an a trustee of Book Works

Above copied from: http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=413

Interview: Sina Najafi: On Cabinet magazine, critical writing & ethics, Claire Ruud

Sina Najafi is a co-founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Cabinet magazine. …might be good caught up with him last month while he was in town as one of Arthouse’s Visiting Lecturers.

…might be good [mbg]: I’ve heard that one of the reasons you founded Cabinet was to fill a gap you saw somewhere between journalism and academic writing. You saw that in Europe public intellectuals could publish in popular newspapers in a way that they couldn’t here in the States. Since then, have you perceived a shift in the presence of the public intellectual in the U.S.

Sina Najafi [SN]: Here? No. It is shifting in Europe though, unfortunately for the worse. I think today there is less space for the public intellectual even in Europe, at least in newspapers. In Sweden, which is where I was before I moved to this country in 1995, there were four newspapers. Two of them were tabloids, and a friend of mine was editing the cultural pages of one of these tabloids, Aftonbladet. They were publishing interviews with intellectuals like Paul Virilio and Baudrillard. That blows away the content of the cultural pages of the New York Times, for example. In Europe at that time, it wasn’t unusual for academics and other public intellectuals to write for newspapers in a way that was both smart and jargon-free. These types of intellectuals cared about trying to engage in a larger cultural conversation and I felt like the New York Times—well, I have not read the New York Times for a long time, actually—

mbg: Really?

SN: I can’t read the Times anymore—I get most of my news online from European newspapers like the Guardian or Dagens Nyheter in Sweden—but when I still used to read it, people like Stanley Fish and Edward Said used to write for it sometimes. Then after a while Said’s views were considered too radical for the Times and they dropped him. On the whole, the cultural pages of the Times are—or at least were when I used to read it—highly disappointing.

There are not enough non-academic venues in which intellectuals can publish. For that reason, I think, they end up being sequestered in academic journals, where they write in a particular mode, and their language atrophies. It’s very sad because what those specialists know can and should be of interest to a much larger audience. However, writing for a larger audience requires a different type of language that you have to practice to become good at. So, we thought of Cabinet as being—and this was one of the impetuses for starting the magazine—a place where we could encourage that mode of writing. About a third of our articles are written by academics. Many academics in the United States are dissatisfied with what academic writing offers them, so we’ve not been turned down by many—unless they’re about to get tenure and they know that, in that last stretch, writing for Cabinet won’t be considered relevant by their tenure committee. Other than that, most people are very happy to have the opportunity to write for our audience. Our audience is fairly small; we sell about 13,000 copies of the magazine and it’s usually estimated 3 people read each sold copy, so we’re looking at around 30,000 people. But that’s a lot more readers than the journal of 18th-Century French Studies, or wherever academics might usually publish.

mbg: Do you find that academics are well-prepared to write for Cabinet’s audience, or do you have to work fairly closely with them as an editor?

SN: Well, we interview a lot of academics, in part because I find that the interview format allows them to speak very naturally in much more accessible language. They do write for us as well, and sometimes we have to edit vigorously to push them towards a language that’s jargon-free. However, the academics we approach to write for us may be from a self-selecting pool. We can already see that their mode of writing is going outside of the traditional bounds of academic writing. There’s exuberance there, there’s speculation there, and you can see them busting out.

mbg: As an editor and writer myself, I think a lot about what “critical writing” is or could be today. What part of critical writing do you think Cabinet is doing, or is it doing critical writing at all?

SN: I’ll tell you components of critical writing that we are not interested in. The idea of critical distance is something we are definitely not interested in; this idea that I somehow survey the object of contemplation from a particular distance, which is the right distance, and from this right distance that is only available to certain people, I can then make judgments that are true or valid in some way. That we don’t like. We prefer the person who is too close in some way, who is passionate and makes no claim to being at just the right distance, the person who in some way acknowledges that her insights and blindnesses are deeply related. But we also prefer the person who is too far, who is too distant to have any engagement at all, including the act of judgment, and is providing almost a cold description of an object that most people would want to pass judgment on. I say “almost” because I don’t want to pretend that neutral description is possible, but there is a permanent delay in reaching a conclusion in this second mode of writing that I think is worth holding onto.

There are also certain genres that we are not interested in. All those catalogue essays, for example, I don’t know who reads them, to be honest. They have a certain mode that you know in advance—you know what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it. I’m being grossly unfair here; there’s lots of fantastic writing in catalogue essays, but as a genre I feel it has no audience, and for good reason. We also don’t have reviews, for example, in the magazine because when we started to think about reviews we kind of fell asleep. People should trust tedium as a guidance system for what is good or bad. I don’t know many artists who are excited to read those big long articles in the middle of most art magazines, and if art magazines aren’t read by artists, then something’s going on. Part of what we wanted to do with Cabinet was bring different modes of writing —including new experiments in critical writing — and see if we could help dislocate some of these sedimented tendencies.

mbg: So is there anything left to keep from critical writing?

SN: From critical writing in the dominant mode? Yes, there’s carefulness and specificity, and that has to co-exist alongside the potential for abandon, exuberance, speculation, adventure. At Cabinet, we’re looking for writing that is anchored somewhere; we like the text to hit ground at some point and have traction. It’s not about creative writing, otherwise it becomes an exercise in just making stuff up and I don’t think that’s ethical or interesting in the context of our pages. I’m a traditionalist in this sense: academics have produced all sorts of great texts about the world and how it became what it is, and we have to take that work on board and think about it.

mbg: Okay, so you’re talking about a kind of faithfulness to facts and histories of ideas that results in specificity. Where does critical processing come into this?

SN: To take an example, if we have a fictional dialogue between Robert Smithson and Andy Warhol walking through New York—a text that Saul Anton wrote for us in 2001—we want the conversation to stage exactly what those artists could have and could not have said. This requires thorough familiarity with their work and writings, absorbing it, and then producing wholesale something that is built on all that research but doesn’t end up just rehearsing the same positions. The dialogue genre will itself produce new knowledge and insights into the two artists.

Many texts that we normally think of as being critical share a strategy: they aim to show the reader the falseness of some other person’s position by carefully dismantling it. It’s in part a game of intellectual one-upmanship. These are very authoritative modes of passing judgment, and they have a lot to teach us, but these are exactly the modes of engagement that we try to sidestep. There’s a place for those traditional modes of critical writing, but we’d like to be a venue for modes of writing that undermine themselves, that are at times excessive or not appropriate, and they certainly don’t worry about decorum, or how things should be done. They might even undo their own authority by overreaching or by refusing to gather things up in the right way. They definitely shun disinterestedness as the primary criterion for criticality and they want to interact with the object in as many different interested ways as possible. They are experiments or essays in a deep sense, and they might fail, which is ok.

mbg: So I have a couple different questions related to what you’ve said so far. You mentioned that artists don’t read art magazines very much. Anecdotally, this feels right to me. But I wonder whether you have any hard evidence about how much more artists read publications like Cabinet.

SN: Hard evidence? No. Scanning through our subscriber list, I’d guess that roughly half of our readers are artists, just from the names I recognize. But then I have a skewed set of friends, you know? [laughs] Not knowing your readers is very helpful because the moment you start imagining the reader, you risk attempting to cater to that reader. When we’re editing a text, we never imagine, ‘will readers understand this?’ ‘will readers like this?’ ‘will readers be disappointed?’ None of those questions ever enter our heads.

mbg: What are the questions that enter your heads when you’re putting together an issue?

SN: Do we enjoy this? Are we learning something from it? Can we understand everything we are editing? We think of ourselves as the first readers. We’re a large group, so hopefully it’s not just one ego being refracted.

mbg: I’ve always wondered how you come up with the themes of issues.

SN: Sometimes one of our editors will suggest a particular topic. That happened with “Electricity” and “Ruins,” for example. Other times, the topic comes out of conversations between me, my colleague Jeffrey Kastner who’s senior editor of the magazine and is in the office with me, and one other editor who randomly walks in. “Insecurity,” for example, came out of a conversation in that way. And sometimes people from outside have suggested themes to us. “Shame” was suggested by a reader who was a professor at the New School.

mbg: How do you decide whether an idea is a workable topic for an issue?

SN: We would like the topic to be large enough so that it can extend into all the sorts of nooks and crannies of culture. Some theme ideas, even though we liked them, seemed too specific to two or three disciplines, at least given the amount of time and energy we have to devote to each issue. We also would like the topic to be untimely. If everyone is talking about a particular topic, we definitely prefer not to do it. We prefer something that has fallen out of favor or is marginalized. We liked “Shame,” for example, because it was important in 18th-century philosophical discourse before guilt sidelined it in the 19th century. We’ve in fact only done one issue that was timely, which was the “Animals” issue. We were doing an issue on “Evil,” and mad cow disease was happening. Those scenes of cows being burnt in England were so incredible that we decided to postpone the “Evil” issue and do an issue on animals. That was the one time where we responded to something happening in real time.

Part of this is just functional. It takes roughly nine to twelve months for us to go from an idea to getting it together to publishing it to getting it back from Belgium where we print. Something that is timely would be untimely by the time we get to it. The other part of it is that if everyone is talking about something, I don’t see the point of being one more person talking about it. There are so many things to talk about.

mbg: Your upcoming issue on education seems pretty timely.

SN: To be honest, that’s a reason why we are uncomfortable with it. We’ve even thought about canceling it but we’ve already put it in the distributor’s catalogue and received submissions for it, so we’re going to go ahead and do it.

mbg: And you recently had a show touching on the topic of education at your space—videos of classrooms by Darcy Lange. Do you think of your space as an opportunity to be more timely?

SN: No, though Lange’s work is of course about pedagogy and education. In the 70s, he made a series of works in Birmingham and Oxfordshire in which he would put his camera in a classroom and film the whole class and then show the tape to the teacher, and tape the teacher watching the tape and having a discussion about his or her performance. Then he would show the tape of the classroom to the students and tape them watching the tape and having a discussion about their performance. I think it’s an incredible body of work and one that had never been shown in the United States.

mbg: How do you understand the relationship between the space and the magazine?

SN: Some of the shows have come out of the magazine. Recently we showed work by Victor Houteff, a Seventh Day Adventist from the 1930s who founded the group in Waco that was later taken over by David Koresh. Houteff’s paintings were part of his evangelical work and they’re amazing—many of them offer strange timelines of history understood through Houteff’s particular religious framework. We showed them in the magazine in 2001 and we all loved them, so now, nine years later, we decided to show them in the space. I don’t know many places that can show this kind of historical material on its own. Our shows will go back and forth between contemporary artists—our next show is with Mark Dion—and historical stuff.

mbg: So the shows are just based on whim?

SN: They’re based on what is interesting and would be great to see and learn from. Whim, in some sense, in that if we ever tried to get a grant for the space, I don’t know how we would describe the program, but not whim in the sense that we of course think that the work we show is absorbing and compelling.

mbg: How do you fund the exhibitions?

SN: We have a budget of about $2000 a year for it.

mbg: No.

SN: Yeah.

mbg: So the work and labor are all donated?

SN: Well, for example, with Darcy Lange’s show, they sent us the DVDs from New Zealand and uploaded the scanned pictures for us and we printed them out on a donated Epson printer and mounted them ourselves. The whole show cost $250, and I think it was a great show.

mbg: And you use the same space in which you produce the magazine, eliminating those costs.

SN: Yes; whoever is in the office working also oversees the gallery. That’s the only reason why we can pull it off. I love having no budget on certain things. I love the fact that at the end of this year we’ll probably spend less than $2000 having done about eight shows. I like the ethics of being tiny. Olafur Eliasson will forgive me, but his waterfalls piece is antithetical to what the ethics of the art world should be, I think. With that much money, you could have 1,000 great art projects instead. That’s one a day for 3 years. Those kinds of enormous projects should be rejected out of hand. I’m not saying it’s comfortable to do things with the budget we have, and I’m not saying it’s fair to everybody who participates because we can’t offer any fees, but all the participants know that we’re not getting any money for it either, so in that sense we’re not abusing them, or if we are, we’re abusing ourselves first and inviting others to join us. If it’s unethical, it’s a shared unethics.

mbg: As you’re talking about ethics, I want to go back to something you said earlier. You mentioned that what you called “creative writing” unethical in the context of critical writing.

SN: Not creative writing per se, obviously, but creative writing in the mode that we are interested in at Cabinet. We want to look at historical materials and the pre-history of the contemporary. If we un-tether the texts completely from the factual and historical, if the speculative, the imaginative, the creative, the unbound, the adventurous become our only guidelines, then we would end up with what I mean here by creative writing. We want an attention to style, and we also like to offer the freedom to mix genres and voices within the same text, but we also want to always signal our commitment to the factual and historical and the idea that there is some stake there that needs to be taken seriously.

mbg: I have another question about ethics. I get why the idea of a Cabinet of Curiosities is attractive for its rich juxtapositions, but I sense some ethical danger here, too, given the place of such cabinets in the history of colonization.

SN: There are dangers in what we’re doing. Historically, certain types of curiosity, women’s curiosity for instance, has been highly regulated and censored. And of course, with the figure of the collector, there is the danger that the objects, whether textual or actual artifacts, are simply there to reflect the collector himself.

But dilettantism is another way to discuss this. If you learn a little bit about something, this may seem like dilettantism from the specialist’s point of view. But gaining little bits of knowledge about many things can also be an additive process whereby you start to care about the histories and the artifacts that surround us. You begin to think, “my god, this window next to us, when did this become the dominant way to decorate a window frame? Where is this wood from and who made this thing?” All of these little bits of knowledge become a way of thinking around the social, material world around us. Those little bits of history, I think, if offered to you in the right way, can help to shift your perspective. We become more careful about thinking about why the world is the way it is. In that sense, I do think what we’re doing at Cabinet is ethical.

mbg: I think you’re right, in an ideal world that’s how the magazine functions. It doesn’t always function that way, though. Cabinet’s aesthetic seems to play right into a trendy, mostly cosmetic antiquarianism right now. I still read The New York Times, and last summer they printed an article about the “new antiquarians,” 20- and 30-somethings in Brooklyn who are collecting relics of a colonial past, but are completely disassociating these objects from any kind of historical, political context.

SN: Well, first, I think collecting objects is a little bit different than putting texts together around ideas. Texts are harder to fetishize than objects. Second, that is a trap that we have certainly fallen into at times: a bad issue of Cabinet may have too many articles about “19th century fads,” as one of our editors put it. That’s a danger, but I hope that a good issue of Cabinet is not just about antiquarianism. And I hope that many of our articles can be read as a pre-history of what happens today and help us understand our relationship with the world today. Sometimes this is explicit in the articles, and sometimes it’s not, and we’re trusting the readers to make the connections. If they don’t, that’s a failure of our part and we need to then address that in some way.

mbg: Or also a failure of all texts in some way. You can’t, of course, guarantee the reader will read the same thing you wrote.

SN: Which is maybe why it’s best not to think too much about the reader. [laughs]

Above copied from:

http://www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/index.php/interview/index/146/73

FAKEPRESS. UBIQUITOUS PUBLISHING AND DISTRIBUTED STORYTELLING, Penelope.di.pixel

Eng: Monica Fontana


“Swarming city, city full of dreams! Even in broad day the spectre accosts passers-by. Everywhere mysteries flow like saps through the narrow canals of the mighty giant” - C. Baudelaire (Paris, 9 Aril 1821 – Paris, 31 August 1867)


Infoscape

The scenario described by a timless flaneur as Baudelaire has been significantly modified during the last one hundred and fifty years, but the image of those "mysteries that flow like saps in the mighty giant" belongs to us. An information layer in multiple levels and distributed over the space, as well as objects, people and architecture, determines the possibility to change the world into a hybrid reality generated by a great variety of viewpoints, voices, shapes, gestures and sounds.

SPIMEs (1), location based media, augmented realities, a distributed interaction, sensors that capture changes and distribute them, emotional and experiencing design: these are the main tools that enable the transition and help the transformation process.

Enormous implications, anthropological, philosophical, political, economic and relational: reconsidering the way we communicate, exchange, share, distribute and disseminate knowledge within and through Infoscape(2), where to interact with the inhabitants/elements (both physical and immaterial) of the new landscape, a desire/need is evident and it deeply affects the collective mind

A new idea of publishing house

How does the role of the publisher change in this context? And how do literature, essays and the reading experience change? Which and are the media involved and how do they get involved? And finally, what are the faces and voices of these stories? How are they told, and where?

According to Salvatore Iaconesi (3) and Luca Simeone (4), as well as for Federico Ruberti who soon joins the conversation with great enthusiasm about the project, the answer is FakePress (5). A new model of publishing house, based on the creation of open narrative, cross-media, multi-artist, able to use location based technology, augmented reality, SPIME and natural gestural interfaces to build layers interpreting reality through non-deterministic and intrinsically pluralistic network issuing processes.

The publishing house does not lose its basic requirements - select, package, distribute information. But it expands. Interstices, distributed displays and projections become a stage to represent the information, the spime stories and the sentient cities(6): everyware. the book shape is disappearing, and it has been disjointed and rejointed through media tracks made by a variety of subjects: wide-tagging, geo-localised contents free to download, open-ended stories.

In short: ubiquitous publishing and storytelling distribution. A process where design, learning methodologies, education and narrative forms cross together and easily tend to adopt strategies p2p, by changing theorists, specialists and "staff" in new types of authors/publishers/communicators.

How it works

A FakePress publication is made according to precise methodologies. The topic - that was the result of a selection through projects, authors, social networks and territories - is described trough many media that can express a geographic and time distribution of the contents, possibilities and forms of interaction, the creation of social relationships, the interaction of bodies, emotions, ideas and knowledge, according to the case. This step is performed through the contribution of some groups

According to this description, the contents are joined together using a series of existing platforms (and made from some mashup works) or specially prepared. In the case of the first publications, for instance, three communicative channels have been created: one in relation to the web, one to the territorial consultation and the last to the paper format consultation. These are able to interact with other modes.

“The contents - as Salvatore Iaconesi explains - have been joined thanks to a modified version of the Wordpress platform to create a fluid process in which a group of publishers/authhors could prepare the contents for all the channels. On the one side the elements of the publications are arranged in a visual way through georeferenced coordinates given by GPS, Google Maps and Google Earth functions. On the other side the same contents are organized to be accessible both from the web and on mobile devices ( iPhone, Android and Symbian platforms with adequate number of technical requirements, by now), covering the territory. And on paper format, for books that through a crystalised form of hypertext allows to serf on places, times and points of view”.

In short: a web application; a mobile platform to view the publication in the form of location-based contents and of an expanded reality; a paper publication in the form of a hybrid (half touristic guide and half a crystalised hypertext) produced in self-publishing and printed on demand, and wordly distributed online. The three levels are not competing but correspond to different needs and use different objects/products, while other publications have other channels of communication, and there will be different forms of interaction and different technological devices.


Then, reading becomes a complex activity, which consists of reading the classics, or looking at geographical and architectural locations - where you can experience contents through the places in which they were conceived and see the reason of their existence – or as well, it can be the ability to make continuous changes of perspective between authors, topics, times and spaces.

To get a better idea of the browsing experience, of visualisation and of the type of platforms used, we can finally surf the website of NeoRealismoVituale-Nervi (7), an ongoing publication by FakePress, but perfectly serves its purpose .

On going project

The newborn FakePress has already had its official baptism in Rome at the Frontiers Interaction V (8), an environment that deeply belongs to it and which has shown interest to blend its stimuli

Ubiquitous Anthropology is instead a project in which it will get involved in the future. Anthropological research by Massimo Canevacci on the Bororo, population of Mato Grosso that the professor has been studying for about 20 years, turns into a cross media publishing and location based web application where access is a prerequisite for the creation of a "tourist guide "ethnographic evolved and a new way of conceiving the academic publications /research.

We'll talk about Ubiquitous Antropology in another article.And we leave with a clarification: apart from its name, FakePress is a real publishing house open to work with artists, researchers, institutions, and entrepreneurs interested in experiiencing the same viewpoint and the same themes that inspired its creation.





1. Dumbing Down Smart Objects di Bruce Sterling ("Wired" ottobre 2004): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/view.html?pg=4

2. O datascape: paesaggio di dati/informazioni.

3. http://www.artisopensource.ne/t

4. http://luca.simeone.name/

5. http://www.fakepress.net/

6. v. SENSEable City lab : http://senseable.mit.edu/

7. http://www.neorealismovirtiale.com/

8. http://frontiers.idearium.org/2009/program/

above copied from: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1567

How to Make a Soufflé; or, What Historians of the Book Need to Know about Bibliography[1], Carl Spadoni

At last year's conference of our association, Professor Yannick Portebois graciously asked me to speak to you today about bibliography and in particular what historians of the book should know about bibliography. She mentioned that I could take out sheets of paper for you similar to Terry Belanger's demonstrations in his Hollywood‑inspiring movie, the Anatomy of a Book.[2] Voilà une grande feuille de papier! Fold a large sheet of paper once to make a folio, twice for a quarto, and then thrice into an octavo. Say a few judicious words about format, mention chain lines and wire lines in my discussion, and then add a note about watermarks and countermarks. After more elaborate folding, perhaps a cutting of these sheets for what is called half‑sheet imposition, and bibliography magically disappears as a sub‑species of origami. Then a few months ago, Professor Portebois reiterated her invitation to me to "démystifier la bibliographie materielle" and to make my presentation uplifting and possibly "amusant." Our bibliographical reverie this afternoon will thus conclude "en beauté."

Having abandoned the complicated art of origami, I now regard this assignment akin to making a soufflé. The word soufflé is the past participle of the French verb souffler which means "to blow up" or more loosely "to puff up." A soufflé must also have substance. It can be savoury or sweet. As many of you must know, soufflé making, even for the masters, inevitably will have mixed results. It requires delicacy and a light and airy touch. To mix my metaphors even further, I suspect that Professor Portebois has a fondness for certain French wines. You know the ones. The fine wines from Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhône, and Champagne. They are delicious, subtle and deceptive, but let no one here be fooled about bibliography. Like economics, the dismal science, bibliography unfortunately has a reputation that precedes itself. When I read the classic introductions to bibliography by Fredson Bowers and Philip Gaskell 25 years ago, they were known to the students as "Boring and Ghastly."[3] The discipline requires absolute accuracy and rigour. Alas, we humans are frail and prone to error. The practitioners of bibliography are a serious bunch. As a rule they don't laugh. Those who know me know since I am a bibliographer that I haven't really laughed for a long time. If I do laugh on occasion, I can assure you that it is only a nervous reflex caused by reading too much of Stephen Leacock's humorous short stories;[4] so a word of caution about my remarks today. I suggest that as good historians, you put at least one hand over an ear to guard against the dangers of bibliography. Close both eyes if you must, especially if you nod off into slumber-land five minutes into this presentation. However, if I may retreat back into the safety of the kitchen and my mixed gastronomic metaphors, we must know something about the art of cooking, l'art du bien manger, before we can try haute cuisine.

I must pause here and embark on a series of mock apologies. First to Mary F. Williamson, a determined collector and researcher of Canadian cook books.[5] My second apology is to Leslie Howsam, who is both a book historian par excellence and an apparent expert on cookery books. I acknowledge her admirable discussion of Mrs. Beeton's Household Management.[6] Finally, Elizabeth Driver (I trust that she is not here), the author of A Bibliography of Cookery Books Published in Britain 1875‑1914, and Culinary Landmarks,[7] would undoubtedly hit me on the head with a frying pan. At the risk of getting egg on our faces, let us now venture boldly into the domain of bibliography.

To begin at the beginning, therefore, historians of the book should know that bibliography is both an art and a science, that it is a discipline unto itself and the handmaiden to other disciplines and that it has several branches. Practically all scholars at one time or another have engaged in the listing of books or publications. These are checklists with the bare essentials for matters of citation: the author's name, the book's title, and date and place of publication. This is known as enumerative bibliography. Of this kind of bibliography, Sir William Osler, the father of modern medicine and one of the greatest book collectors in his field, has written: "Not naturally dry, bibliography is too often made so by faulty treatment. What more arid than long lists of titles, as dreary as the genealogies of the Old Testament, or as the catalogue of the ships in Homer!"[8] When a checklist is arranged according to a plan or a classification scheme (author, subject, or date, for example), it is called systematic bibliography. Some enumerative bibliographies are also annotated. However pedestrian this type of bibliographical work might appear, it provides a fundamental support to scholarship. Historians should be aware that there are criteria for evaluating enumerative bibliography. They concern subject matter, scope, methodology, organization, the quality of annotations, bibliographic form, timeliness, and accuracy. There are good enumerative bibliographies and bad ones. In the worst case scenario, the compiler hasn't bothered to examine the citations. Here, perhaps we may pause and consider the immortal words of Carl Van Vechten's introduction to The Tiger in the House (1922), and I quote:

This bibliography makes no pretence to being complete. . . An exhaustive bibliography on the subject of cats would undoubtedly fill a very large volume all by itself. But this one is more nearly complete than any other which exists; as a matter of fact it is the only bibliography on the subject [of cats] that I know save Mr. [Percy L.] Babington's, which covers only a small and select private library, and which makes no mention of periodical literature.[9]

Alas, unlike Mr. Van Vechten, the great portrait photographer of the twentieth century, I'm not a great admirer of the feline species. I make no apologies. There are bibliographies, and then there are bibliographies. To conclude my short heretical discussion of enumerative bibliography, I refer to Ecclesiastes, although my recollection of the verse in question is admittedly suspect: of the making of compilations, there is no end; and such bibliographical investigation ultimately can be a weariness unto the flesh.[10]

Enumerative bibliography is akin to basic cooking. It is fried eggs done over easy, an omelette, scrambled eggs, or French toast. A good and wholesome breakfast no doubt. At best, when the criteria of enumerative bibliography have been accomplished to the highest degree - an annotated and illustrated bibliography of an important subject, arranged skilfully and easily accessible with multiple cross‑references - we may even hope for eggs Benedict, a hearty dish that can be mastered with patience and timing. But ultimately enumerative bibliography is not a soufflé.

Generally speaking, historians of the book want to know about the other type of bibliography, not the making of lists which has been conducted by all and sundry since the inscriptions found on clay tablets in ancient Assyria at Ninevah. I'm referring, of course, to what Professor Portebois has termed "la bibliographie materielle," what the Anglo‑American tradition calls analytical bibliography, a god‑awful name which almost puts contradiction to sleep. It is sometimes also called critical bibliography. Analytical bibliography is the study of books as physical objects, their history, appearance, and the influence of the manner of production on texts. Three recognized subgroups of bibliographical activity are within analytical bibliography: historical bibliography, textual bibliography, and descriptive bibliography.

Historical bibliography takes a broad view of printing and publishing. It is basically the history of the book but from a bibliographical perspective. You're all aware of the Adams and Barker model of book history, which criticizes Robert Darnton's communication's circuit.[11] In short, in one sense, one can claim that the publication of Lucien Lefebvre and Henri‑Jean Martin's L'apparition du livre inaugurated a new discipline.[12] But the practice of historical bibliography fundamentally challenges this understanding of the roots of the discipline. Before the inception of the history of the book as a recognized discipline, historical bibliography was widespread in the literature. We focus not so much on the impact of books on society and culture but the reverse of this. In other words, we tell the story of a book's publication in terms of a text's authorial genesis, development, editing, printing, production, marketing, and distribution to the public. Here, the physical book remains central to the story and not a by-product to be put aside or discarded once its impact is made on society.

Textual bibliography, another branch of analytical bibliography, sometimes called textual criticism, is indeed a discipline unto itself. It seeks to identify variations in a text and whether the author, editor, compositor, printer, or others are responsible for those variations. In the words of Sir Walter Greg - a bibliographical scholar practically unknown to historians of the book but who has had an enormous, and controversial, influence on the development of analytical bibliography - bibliography in this sense is the material science of the transmission of literary documents.[13] Admittedly, science is obviously too strong a word in this context. Textual bibliography is concerned with critical editing, the identification of relevant texts and the elusive search and establishment of an ideal text, whatever that may mean. Editors are familiar with the Greg‑Bowers' theory of copy‑text, whose purpose is to produce a single eclectic text combining early accidentals and late substantives inextricably tied to the concept of authorial intention. This editorial theory still has its defenders, though it is much in retreat these days. "The great Demiurge behind all this editing seems to be Mr. Fredson Bowers of the University of Virginia," so wrote the literary critic Edmund Wilson in October 1968. Scholarly editing and its funding, he complained, were controlled by the Center for Editions of American Authors. Wilson called Bowers an impassioned bibliographer. "I have been told that his lectures on bibliography are so thrilling," Wilson stated, "that young students often leave them with no other ambition that to become master bibliographers. But I have found no reason to believe that he is otherwise much interested in literature."[14] A cheap shot to be sure, without a true understanding of the central issues of scholarly editing.

The debates in editorial theory are much more complicated than Wilson's scornful send‑off. They touch on the alleged difference between accidentals and substantives, printer's practices, authorial intention over time, texts and their contexts, whether editing is a process and not a product, and texts ultimately being unstable and multiple. In the era of cyberspace, moreover, texts are fleeting. They are songs in the wind, ever-changing and ephemeral. On the one hand, all of this seems quite remote from our ordinary understanding of bibliography and even further from the history of the book. Who really cares if an author deleted commas along the way, changed a few words, added sentences, or discarded a chapter under the influence of his prudish mother‑in‑law or a captious editor? On the other hand, the nature of authorship and texts, I would maintain, is at the very heart of the history of the book. We cannot understand, for example, the heated arguments about the status of James Joyce's Ulysses[15] without a firm grasp of textual bibliography. Textual bibliography also relates to the debate about books and authors with overlapping themes raised by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Not all texts are the same, and the task of the textual bibliographer is to investigate and assess those texts critically.

Descriptive bibliography, the third sub‑group of analytical bibliography, is the close description of books as physical objects, recording size, format, binding, and so on. Depending upon the type of imprints described, it may include descriptive elements such as typography, paper, and ink. There are established protocols for descriptive bibliography. G. Thomas Tanselle, for example, has written a series of lucid articles on these subjects, and in particular he has put forward a model of bibliographical description.[16] The model is much in use, although there are variations in these kinds of bibliographies in the presentation of data elements and description. There are descriptive bibliographies of an author's canon, descriptive bibliographies of a set of imprints specified by time, place, subject, or publisher, and even descriptive bibliographies of one book. The bibliographer is required not only to be comprehensive and accurate, but to describe books physically, all editions and sub‑editions. Descriptive bibliography becomes a high‑wire act when bibliography is not just physical description for the sake of description but includes publishing history based on an array of primary sources and archives, all succinctly presented. Here, bibliography becomes an art form, and the results are true monuments of scholarship. In our parallel universe of the kitchen, we have moved beyond the la cuisine bourgeoise into the realm of haute cuisine.

So, what does the historian of the book need to know about bibliography? By now you are either fast asleep or perhaps you have removed your hands from your ears in the hope of salvation. Dare, I believe, that some of you may be hungry for more? Ladies and gentlemen, in my view, the history of the book as a discipline at this time is entering a new phase. The last ten years have witnessed an extraordinary burgeoning of the discipline. Its popularity and the number of studies undertaken force us to take stock of what the historian must have in his or her arsenal. The historian does not have to be a bibliographer. However, it is not good enough to admit bibliographical naïveté or to distance oneself from bibliography as an irrelevant field of study. We have had competing models of what book history is. We have had debates about the divergent approaches of analytical bibliography versus l'histoire du livre.[17] The debate of the ways of the historian as opposed to those of the literary critic also looms in the background. The inspiration of Bourdieu and Derrida or the influence of literary theory, such as post‑modernism, is like pyrotechnics; they produce "ouus" and "ahs" of exploding colour, pushing the discipline into various directions.

If we have learned anything about these debates, incursions, and fireworks, perhaps we understand that there is no one way of writing the history of books. The historian will use different approaches at different times, depending upon his or her purpose and intended audience. As historians, we presume that history must be based on a variety of primary sources: archives, oral testimony, newspapers, journals and magazines, and of course, books. To slight books as primary evidence or not to understand them physically undermines the basis of our work. In this respect, I must express my disappointment with the short shrift given to the study of bibliography in David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery's Book History Reader and Introduction to Book History.[18] The former is slated for a revised edition with the inclusion of the Adams/Barker model of book history and Fredson Bowers's essay, "Bibliography, Pure Bibliography and Literary Studies."[19]

Let us return to our bibliographical soufflé. The main ingredient of our soufflé is books. Like the chef who separates the eggs, beats the egg whites, gently folds in the whites into the yolks, and adds seasoning, we must know how to analyse books and how to examine them. "Every book presents its own problems and has to be investigated by methods suited to its particular case" - so wrote Ronald B. McKerrow almost eighty years ago in An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students, a classic work that I highly recommend. To quote McKerrow further:

And it is just this fact, that there is always a chance of lighting on new problems and new methods of demonstration, that with almost every new book we take up we are in a new country, unexplored and trackless, and that yet such discoveries as we may make are real discoveries, not mere matters of opinion, provable things that no amount of after‑investigation can shake, that lends such a fascination to bibliographical research.[20]

In this respect, the historian must have an understanding of fundamental concepts about books: edition, impression, issue, and state. En français-édition, tirage, émission, et état. When terms such as these give us trouble, then we must have basic tools at hand, such as John Carter and Nicolas Barker's ABC for Book Collectors, Glaister's Glossary of the Book, Roy Stokes's A Bibliographical Companion, Michele P. Brown's Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms.[21] There is an apocryphal story of Fredson Bowers going to a rare book library in search of incunables. The librarian told him that unfortunately, no such collection was available. When Professor Bowers expressed his surprise and disappointment that the rare book library contained no books printed before 1500, the librarian tried to correct him. The library did indeed have many books from that early era of printing, but to the librarian's knowledge, none of them appeared to be incunables. If there is a moral to this Bowers parable, it is that there is a distinct vocabulary about books as physical objects. We must know what we are talking about even when these terms become blurred in their common usage. Otherwise, we will become like the unhelpful librarian who cannot tell the difference between an incunable and a brick.

In addition to being familiar with the vocabulary of the book arts and bibliography, the historian of the book should know about the evolution of scribal culture, the print industry, and the facets of publishing: how books are written and made and how they come into the hands of the public, including authorship, production, and publication. Sir Walter Greg put it this way:

The bibliographer will probably not cover the whole field, for it is a large one, but he will require an intimate knowledge of certain parts and some familiarity with the paths that lead from one part to another, if he is to be any good in his subject. The expert in typography is unlikely to be also a skilled paleographer, but he will require some knowledge of the handwritings upon which various types are based. Both alike will need some familiarity with the history of paper‑making, though they will probably leave the closer examination of water‑marks to a specialist. What is important is that every serious bibliographer should have some general plan of the subject in his mind that will, so to speak, enable him to find his way about, and to understand the advances made in other fields and the possible light they may throw upon his immediate studies.[22]

Now, Greg does not expect us to be an expert on the entire field of book making. What he is saying is that if one is a medievalist, for example, then in addition to knowing about the function of medieval manuscripts and their typology, one must understand the structure of medieval books and the materials and techniques of manuscript production (papyrus, parchment, rolls, the codex, paper, ruling, pens, inks, pigments, scripts, illustration, design, and bookbinding). In other words, the medieval book historian will know about the use of books in the Middle Ages, their context and significance for a variety of purposes, and perhaps the arrangements of texts within books: books for the clergy, for kings, for students, for aristocrats, for women, for collectors, and for the secular public. The bibliographer asks the historian to look closer at the medieval book as a physical object. Here, I have focussed my discussion on the medieval era, but one could make a similar argument for the beginnings of printing in the fifteenth century, the extraordinary technical developments in the nineteenth century, or the book in the current digital age. In short, besides specific works relative to an historian's particular interest, the historian of the book should be familiar with general histories of the development of printing and the allied trades. Steinberg's Five Hundred years of Printing and Twyman's The British Library Guide to Printing are required reading for all of us.[23]"

[W]hat the bibliographer is concerned with is pieces of paper or parchment covered with written or printed signs. With these signs he is concerned merely as arbitrary marks; their meaning is no business of his." Some of you will recognize this startling quotation about the limitations of the bibliographer's sphere of activity. More than seventy years ago, Sir Walter Greg made this statement in his presidential address, "Bibliography - An Apologia," to the Bibliographical Society.[24] It has haunted the study of bibliography ever since. Greg's intent was to separate form from content so that bibliography would not become enmeshed within the vagaries of literary appreciation. He had dreams that bibliography would become a science. "Books are the material means by which literature is transmitted," he claimed.[25] True enough. By the mid‑1980s, when D.F. McKenzie gave his Panizzi Lectures at the British Library, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, McKenzie hinted at a paradigm shift in the study of bibliography: "If a medium in any sense affects a message, then bibliography cannot exclude from its own proper concerns the relation between form, function and symbolic meaning." For McKenzie, "bibliography is the discipline that studies texts as records forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception." Texts include "verbal, oral, and numeric data, in the form of maps, prints and music, of archives of recorded sound, of films, videos and computer‑stored information."[26]

There are the bibliographical purists of the old school such as G. Thomas Tanselle who in a recent issue of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America consider McKenzie's interpretation of Greg to be taken out of context. Tanselle pronounces McKenzie's general point of view "comprehensive and enlightened." He also damns McKenzie's writings for "many imprecise and incoherent passages": "His indefensible denigration of analytical bibliography, present in some of his most widely read essays, has exerted a regrettable influence that extends from Gaskell's New Introduction to some of the ongoing multi‑volume national histories of the book."[27] In his ground‑breaking article, "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices," McKenzie goes further and takes bibliographers to task for making unwarranted generalizations based purely on the physical examination of books.[28] The criticism has unsettled Tanselle who believes that actual books constitute the evidence whereas printers' and publishers' records contain statements about books. Whenever information in the bookmaking process conflicts with the archival record, the former must take precedence, he has maintained.

It seems to me that there is a false dichotomy here. The wise bibliographer should know the limitations of empirical evidence in the artifact and when it is necessary to seek other relevant sources of collaborative information. Tanselle himself has argued that bibliography and the ways of history are not in opposition but complementary to each other. "The two are logically one," he states. "All scholars of the history of books, whether of the French or of the Anglo-American school, are historians. Analytical and descriptive bibliography is history. . ."[29] However, the bibliographer is not just a person who describes books. He or she is a forensic historian of books. Books as physical artifacts can tell us an enormous amount in the same way that a crime scene is analysed by a detective or a corpse is subject to a coroner's inquest. The duty of a bibliographer is to describe all imprints of an author or subject matter accurately and comprehensively. In the case of descriptive bibliography, the description focuses on separate editions, issues, and even reprintings with lesser description given to publications in other formats. But description for the sake of description is like building a house and having no one living in it, cooking a gourmet meal without eating it. How much richer a descriptive bibliography becomes when description is combined with relevant historical research. Sometimes descriptive bibliographies of this nature are called bio‑bibliographies or bibliographical histories. The bibliography is akin to a soufflé. It has substance. It is complex and wonderful, a work of scholarship, a work of art.

So there is a need for historians to appreciate bibliography and a need for bibliographers to appreciate history. If one takes a quick look at the most recent issue of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, my point will be driven home. There is an article by Andrea Krupp, "Bookcloth in England and America, 1823‑50," and an article by Alistair McCleery on the 1932 edition of James Joyce's Ulysses published by Odyssey Press.[30] The former highlights 222 grain cloth patterns of nineteenth‑century books from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Krupp has created a visual database of these cloth patterns. Although her research focuses on the artifact, she states: "Primary source material that would provide documentary evidence about the manufacture and use of bookcloth during the first decades of its existence, such as advertisements, patents, and publishers' and binders' records, remains scarce."[31] For his part, McCleery surveys the claims of bibliographers and textual editors as to the status of the 1932 edition of Ulysses. He then uses a number of archival sources to good advantage, chiefly the archives of Stuart Gilbert, the book's supposed editor, to question the edition's textual authority.

In the last twenty years, the history of the book has expanded almost uncontrollably. In contrast, the study of bibliography has barely held its own in English departments and schools of library and information science. There are notable exceptions, of course. At the University of Toronto, bibliography continues to flourish. At the University of Virginia, the Rare Book School, Terry Belanger's independent institute, offers thirty, five‑day non‑credit courses.[32] Many of the courses are directed to antiquarian booksellers, collectors, conservators, teachers, and students of the history of the book. In France, Neil Harris of the University of Udine has offered an iconoclastic course on analytical bibliography at the École de l'Institut d'histoire du livre at Lyon.[33] The Bibliographical Society of Canada is hoping to revive the Canadian Institute of Analytical Bibliography next summer at the University of Toronto (unfortunately, the course was cancelled due to lack of enrolment).

Like any discipline, bibliography has a knowledge base and core skills. To go back to the beginning of my paper on bibliography and origami, it is not necessary for the historian of the book to memorize all the formats of paper folding and the directions of chain lines and wire lines and the corresponding position of watermarks. But the historian should have the smarts to know that format in the hand‑press period can easily be verified in a number of sources, such as Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography.[34] There are some things that can be taught and some things that can't be taught. At our conference last year at the University of Western Ontario, Germaine Warkentin's inspiring key‑note address was a personal journey into the bibliographical imagination.[35] A true bibliographer needs to combine a love of books with textual scholarship. My reference here is to D.C. Greetham's book of the same title Textual Scholarship: An Introduction,[36] required reading for all textual scholars. Yet there is no quick route to textual scholarship.

Let us now sit down together at our bibliographical banquet. A soufflé does not rise twice so it is best that we savour it while we can. "Kings wait for soufflés; soufflés do not wait for kings," August Escoffier once observed. Even more pertinent to our discussion of the relevance of bibliography to the history of the book is James Beard's comment that "The only thing that will make a soufflé fall is if it knows you are afraid of it."[37] I hope that you have enjoyed my eccentric bibliographical discussion of soufflé-making this afternoon. If I may borrow the last line from Julia Child's TV show, The French Chef, I will conclude by saying, "Bon appétit."


Notes

[1] This paper was delivered on 30 May 2006 at the conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture held under the auspices of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at York University, Toronto, Ontario.

[2]The Anatomy of a Book: Format in the Hand-Press Period with Terry Belanger (New York: Viking Productions, 1991). 1 videocassette (30 min.).

[3] Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949); Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

[4] I have the dubious distinction of being the author of A Bibliography of Stephen Leacock (Toronto: ECW Press, 1988; second edition is in electronic form on CD published by the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box in 2004). To make matters worse, I have edited three other books by Leacock, Canada's premiere humorist: My Recollection of Chicago and The Doctrine of Laissez Faire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Literary Texts, 2002); and Gone Fishing! (Shelburne, Ont: The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007).

[5] Mary F. Williamson is the co-author of Art and Architecture in Canada: A Bibliography and Guide to the Literature to 1981/Art et architecture au Canada: bibliographie et guide de la documentation jusqu'en 1981 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). Her personal collection of Canadian cook books prior to 1950 and nineteenth-century American and British cookery takes up more than forty feet of shelving.

[6] At the SHARP conference in 1997, Howsam delivered a paper entitled "Mrs Beeton's Household Management: Towards the History of a Book." See also her article on Beeton, "Food for Thought," Rare Book Review 31, 3 (April 2004): 32-4, 36.

[7]A Bibliography of Cookery Books Published in Britain 1875-1914 (London: Prospect Books 1989); Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825-1949 (in press).

[8] Sir William Osler, review of Essai de bibliographie hippique by General Mennessier de la Lance, facsimile in Sir William Osler: An Annotated Bibliography with Illustrations, eds. Richard L. Golden and Charles G. Roland (San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1988), 9.

[9] Carl Van Vechten, The Tiger in the House (New York: Knopf, 1920), 1.

[10] Ecclesiastes 12:12. "Furthermore, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

[11] Robert Darnton, "What is the History of Books?" Daedelus 111, 3 (1982): 65-83; Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, "A New Model for the Study of the Book," in The Potencie of Life, Books in Society: The Clarke Lectures, 1967-1987, ed. Nicolas Barker (London: British Library, 1993), 5-43.

[12] Lucien Lefebvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L'apparition du livre (Paris: Éditions A. Michel, 1958). Translated by David Gerard into English as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 (London: N.L.B., 1976).

[13] W.W. Greg, "What Is Bibliography?," and "Bibliography - An Apologia," in Collected Papers, ed. J.C. Maxwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 83, 241. See also G. Thomas Tanselle, "Bibliography and Science" in his Selected Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville: Published for the Bibliographical Society of Virginia by the University Press of Virginia, 1979), 1-35.

[14] Edmund Wilson, The Fruits of the MLA (New York: New York Review of Books, 1968), 17.

[15] See John Kidd's criticisms of Hans Walter Gabler's Ulysses: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage Books, 1986): "The Scandal of Ulysses," New York Review of Books, 30 June 1988: 32-39; and "What Ulysses Requires," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 87 (June 1993): 187-248.

[16] G. Thomas Tanselle, "A Sample Description with Commentary," Studies in Bibliography 40 (1987): 1-30. See also his Introduction to Bibliography: Seminar Syllabus (Charlottesville: Book Arts Press, University of Virginia, 2002), especially the section devoted to descriptive bibliography (167-80).

[17] One of the debates, "The Confluence of Bibliography and Book History: Whither the Debate? A Canadian Perspective," occurred at the SHARP conference in Halifax on 15 July 2005. The participants of the debate were Leslie Howsam, Carl Spadoni, Richard Virr, and Yvan Lamonde.

[18] David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, The Book History Reader (London: Routledge, 2002); and Introduction to Book History (London: Routledge, 2005).

[19] Finkelstein and McCleery, The Book History Reader. The second edition was published in 2006.

[20] Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 5.

[21] John Carter and Nicolas Barker, ABC for Book Collectors (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2004, eighth edition); Geoffrey Ashall Glaister, Glossary of the Book (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979, second edition); Roy Stokes, A Bibliographical Companion (Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press, 1989); Michele P. Brown, Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms (Malibu, California: J. Paul Getty Museum in association with the British Library, 1994).

[22] Greg, "What Is Bibliography?," 79-80.
[23] S.H. Steinberg, Five Hundred years of Printing, fourth edition (New Castel, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1996); Michael Twyman, The British Library Guide to Printing: History and Techniques (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

[24] Greg, "Bibliography," in J.C. Maxwell, Collected Papers, 247.

[25] Ibid., 241.

[26] D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986), 2, 4.

[27] G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Work of D.F. McKenzie," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 98, no. 4 (December 2004): 520. In this context, Tanselle's reference to Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography probably refers to Bowers's harsh book review, "McKerrow Revisited," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 67 (second quarter 1973): 109-24.

[28] D.F. McKenzie, "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices," Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969): 1-75.

[29] G. Thomas Tanselle, The History of Books as a Field of Study (Chapel Hill: Hanes Foundation, Rare Book Collection/Academic Affairs Library, The University of North Carolina, 1981), 5.

[30] Andrea Krupp, "Bookcloth in England and America, 1823‑50," and Alistair McCleery, "The Reputation of the 1932 Odyssey Press Edition of Ulysses," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 100, no. 1 (December 2006): 25-87, 89-103.

[31] Ibid., 26.

[32] See the website for Rare Book School at the University of Virginia: http://www.virginia.edu/oldbooks/.

[33] See http://ihl.enssib.fr/siteindex.php?page=134. Harris's course consists of eleven sections: from evocative definitions of bibliography to "thematic vocabulary relating to technical problems in early printing together with bibliographical methods and instruments employed to solve them."

[34] Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography.

[35] Professor Warkentin's talk was entitled "The Bibliographical Imagination." She informs me that it is part of a larger work on bibliographical scholarship and research.

[36] D.C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York: Garland, 1994).

[37] My source of these two quotations is the Web site at http://baking911.com/, specifically http://www.baking911.com/howto/souffle.html. (This link is accessible only to members of the site.)


above copied from: http://www.ucalgary.ca/hic/issues/vol7/4

Development of the Artist's Book, Peter D. Verheyen

Written by Peter D. Verheyen
for FIA 610, Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University April, 1998

What is a book? An artist's book? A livre d'artiste?

What is a book? Traditionally the book form has been associated with the codex, a textblock of folded signatures, sewn to some kind of support with a cover. Although this structure (with some variations) has existed for over a thousand years other forms have come to be called books as well, including clay tablets, scrolls, petrogylphs and, now, some argue computer files as well. Illustrations have been a part of "books" almost from the beginning being used to illustrate the text and depict events or places or people... within, the Nuremberg Chronicle being an early example of this. The illustrations were not, however, meant to be seen as art. William Blake (1757 -1827) changed that with his artists' books, among them The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence. In these, Blake wrote the text, made the etchings of the text and illustrations, printed, and then hand-colored the pages. The only thing Blake did not do it seems was bind them. Blake was far ahead of his time. The artist's book did not reappeared until this century and was adopted as a format by the Futurists, DADA, and the Constructivists among others. The livre d'artiste which co-existed with the artist's book, was similar yet also very different.
Livre d'artiste vs. artist's book:

What is the difference between an artist's book and a livre d'artiste. Johanna Drucker in her work The Century of Artists' Books draws a very clear distinction. According to her, the livre d'artiste came into being as a publishing enterprise initiated by such figures as the Parisian art dealers Vollard and Kahnweiler who saw a business opportunity in marketing deluxe editions illustrated by recognized or upcoming stars in the fields of visual arts or poetry, among them Chagall, Picasso, Apollonaire, Matisse, Miro, Ernst. This was a distinctly French undertaking with no real parallels in the United Kingdon or Germany.

While deluxe editions were not unusual at the time, the idea of merging them with the fine arts was. These editions were generally released unbound, essentially as a suite of prints or at best very simply bound. The buyer would then take them to their favorite binder designer such as Bonet, Creuzevault, or Legrain. These "collaborations" were nothing short of breathtaking.

To Drucker the livre d'artiste stopped just short of being artist's books by "stopping just at the threshold of conceptual space in which artist's books operate." This is because it is very rare to find a livre d'artiste which "interrogates the conceptual or material form of the book as part of its intention, thematic interests, or production activities." To Drucker, these livres d'artistes seem to be "embalmed" in excessive production values, with a very stiff relationship between the text and images which seemed forced into an outdated structure or format.

The main distinction between the livres d'artistes and the artist's book is that the former were almost always initiated by the publisher with often little or no relationship between the artist and writer. The binder was only an afterthought, though a significant one as it now turns out. By contrast, the artist's book is understood to be the work of one individual or a collaborative effort. In either case, it is conceived from start to finish as an integrated unit. The motive is also quite different. While the livre d'artiste was created as a financial venture, the artists' motives are more likely to be to make themselves heard or to share a vision. Making money is nice, but not the reason for creating the work. The artist's book is by nature, and for the reasons just mentioned more likely to be non-traditional in format and structure. In fact, it is almost expected that artists deviate as far as they dare from the traditional form entering into the realm of sculpture. Indeed, most of the creators of artist's books are not tied to anyone discipline in particular. Some are primarily printmakers but most are not and bring a very broad background to their "books" (I use that term loosely). As opposed to the livres d'artistes these are more than likely to be unique objects and as such are more closely allied with painting and sculpture. Technically, they are created using a variety of techniques, employing fine printing as easily as xerography.

Another category which falls somewhat between the two is the fine press artist's book. This category is generally more closely allied with the livre d'artiste in that it is an editioned work. While some fine press artist's books are the work of an individual, more often than not working in close collaboration, an author, artist, printer, binder. On a more commercial level the 1920's - '40's saw a number of artist's books released by major publishers. Featured are the work of Lynd Ward who published several novels in woodcuts, John Vassos who took to offset, Rockwell Kent and others. Zines, issued by micro-presses in small or large editions, regularly, or just once, fit in this category, with the difference that the production is often less elaborate and refined, but also more experimental in content and concept. They are a way for the artist to reach a wide audience without great expense, similar in many ways to the Dada publications.
Importance of structure to the artist's book:

In contrast to the livre d'artiste, the artist's book is likely to make the structure of the book an integrated part of its overall design and concept. How the "book" or object is assembled is as important as the contents of the book, if any. It is quite common for "book artists" to create "books" which are no more than finely engineered works of paper, often highly complex, which contain no text and only the faintest hint of "bookness" (a term coined by Philip Smith a British fine binder who came to binding by way of painting). The structure determines how the "book" is read, and influences how the "reader" interacts with it. Pages can open up from both sides and panels can be hinged along different sides making the viewer unfold the structure as they "read" it. Pop-ups can reveal hidden aspects. By slightly changing a series of illustrations animation can be created as the "reader" flips through the pages quickly. Through the use of transparency, an image can evolve and de-evolve as the "pages" are turned. The possibilities are almost endless, and one innovation leads to another. In the process the "reader" becomes increasingly drawn into the object as they interact with it. This idea of the importance of structure is explored in detail in Keith Smith's book Structure of the Visual Book..
Significance of the illustrator to the book:

In the text to the MOMA exhibition catalog A Century of Artists Books, Riva Castleman breaks down the relationships of the parties as: artists with authors; artists as authors; artists for authors; and artists without authors.

Artists with authors represents the livres d'artiste where the artist and author are brought together, the artist's role being to embellish the words of the author, just as it the typesetter and designer's role.

Artists as authors refers to artists who decided that they wanted to express themselves in words as well as images. With Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Duchamp this was very successful and their works helped define their movements (Bauhaus, Constructivism, Dada). Others such as Miro, Leger, and Matisse were more than capable of putting into words the expressiveness of their painting.

Artists for Authors is much like the first category except that the pairing of the two is often more remote. While, as with the first category, the two parties may know each other and exchange ideas, here more often than not the artist was commissioned, or chose to illustrate an earlier text. Artists, however, could also take existing texts and use those as the basis for new works. An example is Tom Philips' treatment of two works. The first, entitled A Humament, was derived from a text (The Human Document) which Philips bought at a flea market for 2 shillings. Through overpainting and other alterations of the text he created a new one. Philips also treated Dante's Inferno as well as translating it.

The final category, artists without authors, this is where, according to Castleman, the origins of the modern artist's book can be found. Grosz's Ecce Homo and El Lissitzky's About Two Squares are examples of this as is Frans Masereel La Ville and some of Lynd Ward's work such as Gods's Man. Edward Ruscha is credited with setting the pattern for the modern artist's book with his 1963 work Twentysix Gas Stations, a work in which he juxtaposed the images of gas stations, chosen for their similarity of appearance and function with a blank facing page.

The Fluxus movement, founded at the same time, was a collaborative international movement which created a large body of work in the form of printed cards, broadsides, booklets, often boxed together in a "neo-Dada" manner. This movement led to the explosive growth of the artist's book movement in the 1970's and '80's which was inclusive rather than exclusive, with easy to acquire works of art.
Future of the artist's book and trends:

What is the future of the artist's book? The past twenty-five years, especially the past fifteen have seen an explosive growth in the number of artists creating "books" and the acceptance of the format along with other more "mainstream" forms of art. Exhibitions are becoming increasingly widespread and "the book" as concept is being taught in a number of art programs. Printmakers are still making prints and many of these will still end up in "book" form. What is being lost is the art of the craft of fine bookbinding. Those who are teaching in the programs do not have the skills to pass on the finer points of binding, and those in private practice can't afford to take on apprentices for the most part. Perhaps the end of this century will see the end of the finely bound book. When one looks at what artists consider "books," it becomes clear that the term is being used to describe sculptures and wall hangings. These may be derived conceptually from "the book," but that does not make them a book, nor does it make them any less a work of art. Likewise a piece of granite, carved and polished to look like a thick sewn signature is not a book. It depicts one, but that does not make it one. Duchamp may have said that "it is art because I say it is," and in his case it may well have been, but it is all to easy to extend to "it is a book because I say it is." While other forms may transmit information, like clay tablets, scrolls, or graffiti on a wall, that does not make them books.

As technology has advanced, bringing with it new means of producing and creating texts, and illustrating the "book," the very concept of the "physical book" is changing. With the advent of the Web and it's ability to hyperlink to other parts of a document or another document altogether, the book need no longer exist as a physical artifact. Janet Maher, a professor of art at Loyola College, created a work entitled ALPHABET which exists only electronically and is composed of a series of animated images which flash a text, depicting the alphabet across the viewer's screen. Is it a book? I'm not so sure, but it is art. As programs grow in versatility and ease of use, we can expect increasing artists to chose this as their medium.

I'd like to close with Philip Smith's statement on "bookness" which sums up, in my mind, the book form. While the boundaries of a form must be explored, a commonly agreed upon vocabulary is important for an understanding of that form as well as any discussion of it.

"Bookness: The qualities which have to do with a book. In its simplest meaning the term covers the packaging of multiple planes held together in fixed or variable sequence by some kind of hinging mechanism, support, or container, associated with a visual/verbal content called a text. The term should not strictly speaking include pre-codex carriers of text such as the scroll or the clay tablet, in fact nothing on a single leaf or planar surface such as a TV screen, poster or hand-bill.

"Bookness" is however being stretched to include forms which carry a digitalized or electronic text such as a CD, a hard disk or a microchip, or miscellaneous forms such as spirals of paper with continuous text, or pyramids, dodecahedrons and other geometric multiplanar forms (which could also have text inscribed on them). I would not describe all these things as having the quality of bookness or being strictly covered by the definition. A blank book is still a book, but a blank do decahedron or unmarked spiral of paper is not a book, it is a dodecahedron etc. A text is a text and not a book, but any other object one likes to imagine may perhaps be its conveyance. A text can be inscribed on anything but this does not make it a book, or have the quality of bookness, even as a scroll retains its scrollness without any text on it. A teddy bear with text on it is not a book! The book is not the text, although it is traditionally associated with it, and these two elements appear often to be mistaken for the same thing. The book is the hinged multiplanar vehicle or substrate on which texts, verbal, or tactile (the latter would include braille and other relief or embossed effects, found objects, pop-ups) maybe written, drawn, reproduced, printed or assembled.

The large imposed sheets on which texts are printed before folding into quires or signatures are not yet in book form (the qualities of bookness have not yet been imparted to them); nor to microfilm or microfiches by which book texts may be scanned be described as having bookness. They would be considered in the single planar form as on a video monitor (or a painting for example), but when the same text is arranged into book form it then taken on the qualities of bookness. It is questionable whether something becomes a book by being called such. The notion that an artist may call anything he likes a "work of art" or a "book", because he says so, is the extreme of sloppy thinking and contravenes everything we regard as leading to truth, notwithstanding Marcell Duchamp!

In a story by Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451, there is a group of people who, in order to save them, memorise books, and are called "walking books"! Other similarly claimed substitutes abound in so-called book-artists' jargon, but the memories of books are not yet in book form, and so cannot be called books or have bookness. One could say however that a pack of Tarot cards does have bookness. It functions as a working group of loose-leaf planar surfaces with related images conveying textual matter in pictorial form. Traditional knowledge has it that the Tarot is in fact a philosophical treatise. The planes of a book have a necessary relationship or they simply become a collection of arbitrary planes for which a book format is not essential for the conveyed meaning. Many arbitrarily devised objects such as chewed or dissolved texts in bottles, etc., may or may not be art objects, but they are not objects with bookness. The book-maker's art should be distinguished from the art-maker's book. The book is generally thought of as a compact, conveniently portable mobile object (although there can be giant books, made of any material). The book, as book, has multiple planes because all the text or material it contains would be too unwieldy in a single planar form. There are book-like objects or appearances and object-like books, but that is a different story."

Bibliography:

* The Ardent Image: Book illustration for adults in America, 1920 - 1942. Toledo, OH: Ward M. Canada Center, The University of Toledo, 1995.
* The Art of the Book and the Book Arts Press. Upper Arlington, OH: Logan Elm Press & Papermill, 1994.
* The Book as Art: Modern illustrated books and fine bindings, part 1. New York: Sotheby's 1995.
* The Book Stripped Bare: A survey of books by 20th century artists and writers. Hempstead, NY: The Emily Lowe Gallery and Hofstra University Library, 1973.
* Castleman, Riva. A Century of Artists Books. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994.
* Polnische Buchkunst der Gegenwart. Warsaw: Verband der Polnischen Bildenen Künstler, Bezirk Warschau, 1996.
* Dressing the Text: The fine press artists' book. Santa Cruz, CA: The Printers' Chappel of Santa Cruz, 1995.
* Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists Books. New York: Granary Books, 1995.
* The New Bookbinder. London: Journal of Designer Bookbinders. Various issues.
* Ray, Kevin. Una Selva Oscura: Tom Philips's Inferno. St. Louis, MO: Special Collections, Washingotn University Libraries, 1997.
* Smith, Keith. Structure of the Visual Book, 3rd ed. Rochester, NY: Keith Smith Books, 1994.
* Smith, Keith. Text in the Book Format. Fairport, NY: The Sigma Foundation, 1989.
* Smith, Philip. Designer Bookbinders Newsletter. London: Summer 1996. Letter to the editor.
* Trusky, Tom. Some Zines 2: Alternative & Underground Artists & Eccentric Magazines & Micropresses. Boise, ID: Cold-drill books, Department of English, Boise State University, 1996.
* There are also an increasing number of resources relating to this subject on the Web. Links to most of these can be found at

above copied from:

Artists’ Publications, Andi McGarry

BACKGROUND
The title of my talk is Artists’ Publications. I'd like to start by giving a bit of
background about myself and my activities. In 1986 I formed the Sun Moon and
Stars Press having graduated from Brighton two years previously. I’d fallen in love
with a girl who lived in Wexford and I spent a long time trying to convince her of my
intentions. This involved a lot of travelling back and forth to Ireland and eventually
moving over. During that summer Id been working on a fishing boat in the Irish sea
and had produced along with a few boxes of fish - a catch of poems. My first book
was born -Rhyme of the unseasoned mariner. I made the book by hand physically
typing each copy then hand painting each illustration and stapling the spine. I had
worked up a master copy from which all the books were subsequently generated- a
bit like a mad monk. Each copy was a version- similar but different to every other
version. A unique edition in fact. Making a copy from the master copy was a method
that worked for me. This set up the modus operandi for future sun moon and stars
press book production.

Between 1986 and 2007 I produced 180 titles using this method. My mission
statement in 1986 was to "Circulate Organic Ideas" - what I meant by that was I was
going to produce books with my take on things, made in such a way that the
evolution of the works and Ideas and means of production would all be connected via
strong themes and a recognisable house style. I was the most cookie publishing
house that I knew.


WHY PUBLISH AT ALL?
I wanted to test the water -I felt I was on to something and using the book form
seemed appropriate. I received some interest in my publications via reviews
particularly Stephanie Brown's column in Artists’ Newsletter, there were also cheques
in the post and publicity. This was great encouragement and feedback. I decided to
explore other Ideas in book formats. I quickly established certain themes and styles
in the books.

The books featured figurative scenes with words tumbling alongside. Words of a
poetic nature - but not necessarily poems. Images and words combined sometimes
a little haphazardly. Juxtaposed maybe.

My books were certainly recognisable - the papers I used I tore down from big
sheets creating a characteristic (a false deckle I would call it) Hand typing and writing
the words ensured plenty of typos and spelling mistakes.

For me the content and the format of the publication are all parts of the same circle.
In book terms "Totality" in the words of Keith Smith not just the content, binding,
paper, covers how it moves everything and I would even include the marketing in
that.

Being in charge of the totality of the book was essential in my book making
activities. In most of the 180 titles created I was the Author illustrator poet
bookmaker.

Being involved in all stages of production in the commercial book world is unusual.

Organising a book is a bit like organising a film there are many parts elements that all
need to come together to make it work as one. I like putting a thing together.

When I started making books they were priced at £2 each. Today they might be £50-
£300. My anvil has been constantly clanging with new Ideas and a hotly forged book
can sometimes made within hours of the inspiration happening. I revel in this idea of
"speedy production”, no queues or waiting in lines, I had recipes sorted for" Insta-
book cooking. ”Speedy books" in the words of Radoslaw Nowakowski. Sometimes a
book would grow out of several different experiences over a long period.

CONTENT
The figurative elements would usually be some form of depiction of humans in the
landscape and this remained fairly constant through the years- inky figures in
landscape paddling boats across a horizon, or jumping cracks on the Burren, maybe
figures in love running and leaping with fiery desire. These figures have been
teeming through the pages gallivanting cavorting singing dancing and drinking and
dishing out kisses via twists and turns just as in life. My narratives have twizzled
around these figures never shy of poetry or humour.

The themes and Ideas bore some resemblance to my situation, the current
landscape, the state of mind, they might loosely describe events they are often
disguised with a little poetics, or a little invention for flavour or spice.

MARKETING WORK
Via the Wexford Artists Book exhibition which I conceived and co organised for 10
years I was able to see a lot of Artists Books 1st hand. This exposure had quite an
influence and effect on my practice and my continued involvement in Book
arts. I also went to lots of Artists book fairs in London-I liked the fact that my own
works were nicely different from most other makers. I took a stand at Frankfurt
Bookfair in 2000 and also went to Seoul in Korea. Selling work behind a table is quite
hard, but marketing/networking is an important part of the process and at the end you
see a work go all the way thru from Idea to sale-You certainly need a hard head and
be in for the long haul.

Such testing encounters really do call into question why an artist would go to such
lengths to publish at all?
I think it comes with the territory, it’s a part of their remit, part of their artistic licence,
like lettered rock they will strut their stuff - because they need to/ want to /have to.
Exhibitionists is a word containing exhibition. We need to show others fellows
strangers colleagues- that we are alive and kicking- Did I show you this yet?
Exhibitions are often called "Shows" and it is the showing that the other magic
ingredient is finally released and realised - when the people see the creation.


SEA CHANGE
In 2007 several things occurred which changed the way I was publishing, what I
published and how I published it.

Sarah Bodman had sent me a questionnaire asking me amongst other things
"Did I think computers would impact on the way I produced work?" the Luddite in me
chortled as I picked up the quill pen to produce another hand made copy.

Then I won a folkatronica bursary with Visual Arts Ireland, this enabled me to run
some Ideas in a DVD Video format and produce a DVD with a soundtrack. The DVD
featured lots of underwater imagery and was also turned into a book- but this got me
thinking - making movies was such fun, and there were a host of new challenges.

Simultaneous acquisition of a laptop and a digital camera allowed me to explore the
possibilities of movie making using a simple editing programme (movie maker) it had
all become possible. I began making movies at a feverish rate.

A trip to Geordie land for a birthday to go play with the old band, stirred up longings
for music making. On my return to Ireland I said to my partner "I wish there was
someone here to make music with." The next morning as the fates would have it a
guy approached me asking would I like to form a band to do a benefit. Working with
other people making music has all kinds of bonus features - a perfect antidote for
isolationists, as collaboration is the order of the day - and the house is filled with
music

With in a year, and after several band reformations, recording music, coupled with
movie making, creating soundtracks, editing the film and producing DVDs, and then
publishing them- sun moon and stars press films swung into production and
has produced 30 DVD films to date. Visual Publications in the form of DVD movies
opens up whole new area of possibilities.

NEW OLD THEMES
In my films I often use myself as the figure running through the landscape. Further
collaborations are required in movie making finding a good cinematographer for
example. The figure moves through animating the landscape providing a focus.
Running jumping leaping walking. There are still elements of fun humour and like all
good artists books - surprises. My ideas always want to be blurting our side outdoors
taking you some place you didn’t quite expect.

The movie camera allows for a different kind of landscape appreciation, via editing
and with inclusion of sound track the synthesizer makes an entirely new form of
artwork. I want my films to retain a notebook scrapbook journal feel. In my film" flag
man" it was the soundtrack that I decided upon first- we then went out and filmed the
Ideas that came from those words. I think of the music as an audio narrative- in lieu
of acting and drama perhaps.

I have published a number of films on you tube and as an outlet you tube and similar
sites are an interesting starting point. The work is available for free - thus the return
of a kind of cheap multiple.

I love seeing my work on a big screen too at festivals and in new situations, there is
lots of potential for these visual publications-and this makes the making worth while.
Its great to follow a thing through from Idea to consumption.

My most recent film Gone in 38 seconds was a commissioned documentary
film featuring a guy who bought his partner a double-decker bus, the shortened
version you will see contains lots of the elements of fun and landscape which interest
me.
I intend to develop my interest in documentary films as a route for uncovering other
ideas.
In September 2009 I am co organising 1st Wexford ~Independent Documentary Film
Festival - which will take place in the village where I live.
I am delighted in the films and what is now possible with simple equipment. These
are indeed exciting times for artists to be publishing in.

Andi McGarry 2009


The above copied from: http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/contrad09/andim.htm
This location also has an audio copy of the above as a talk.