Correlations Catalogue 1

CORRELATIONS BETWEEN INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING & ARTISTS BOOK PRACTICE

VOLUME 1

VOLUME 1

C O N TE N T S

INTRODUCTION ESSAY: TIM MOSELY

Ink on paper: meaning made material

STEPHEN FOWLER

SARAH BODMAN

GEORGIA MAITLAND

DOMINIC FORDE

LOUIS LIM

CHRISTOPHER DAY

MARIAN CRAWFORD

THOMAS RAAT

ANA PAULA ESTRADA DE ISOLBI

THE CODEX FOUNDATION

Cosmic Forces Limbo

An Opened Letter Picturing the Island Memorandum

GM Future

Ramps, Pools, Ponds and Pipes New Reading Order

An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and More... <usus>, typography, and artists’ books

VOLUME 2 INTRODUCTION ESSAY - SARAH BODMAN “What if?” Books

NUALA GREGORY

MARK WINGRAVE

CATHERINE DE ZEGHER

BRUNO MUNARI

ERIN COATES

BRAD FREEMAN, AK MILROY & TIM MOSELY

JAN NOVÁK

ADOLFO ARANJUEZ & NINA READ

INDIGENOUS ACTION MEDIA

MICHAEL PHILLIPS

Exploded View

the (hemi)cycle of leaves and paper Kinesphere

DUST gamebook Accomplices Not Allies

A journey from one reality to another Seeking comfort in an uncomfortable chair Trumped up empathy Fragmented (# two)

The Democracy of Disease

VOLUME 3 INTRODUCTION ESSAY: MARIAN CRAWFORD

Print Mechanicals: Artist Books and Their Errors

SARAH NICHOLLS

BARTOLOEO CELESTINO

ROSE NOLAN

UTA SCHNEIDER & ULRIKE STOLTZ

BRUNO MUNARI

KATHERINE MOLINE & PETER HALL

LEONARD MCDERMID

LYN ASHBY

ELIZABETH NEWMAN

ANGELA GARDNER & CAREN FLORANCE

Wipe the Slate ENOUGH

Libro illeggibile Twelve Sea Pictures Whereof one cannot speak

Surface Phenomena (120416-150608) mindmap

Experimental Thinking / Design Practices Wall to Wall The future, un-imagine

C O RRE LAT IO NS B E T WE E N I ND E P E N D E N T PUBLIS H I N G & A R T IST S BO O K PRA C T I C E

To what degree can/does independent publishing‘s engagement with the field of artists book shape creative practice within the field, and inform the emerging critical discourse on it.

Within an Australian context artists books are commonly associated with fine arts practice and the aesthetics of autographic printmaking. The striated machine aesthetic of printed matter from the design, printing and publishing industries are far less prevalent. This point was highlighted

by Dr Amir Brito Cadôr (Professor of Graphic Arts at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) during his keynote lecture at the State Library of Queensland’s 2015 Siganto Foundation Artists Book Seminar. Cadôr’s observation was made in contrast to the Brazilian context of artists books, generally produced within the machine aesthetic of the commercial printing industry. He nominated the scarcity of accessible printmaking studios in Brazil as a significant factor for this quality.

The recently established Art Book Fairs at Sydney’s Artspace and the NGV have placed the Australian context under a new scrutiny, one that challenges both the “fine art” and “independent publishers” positions in the field. What these fairs make particularly evident within contemporary independent publishing practices is a highly intuitive engagement with printing that designers are pursuing in counterpoint to the tight space of commercial publishing.

This project was supported by the Griffith Centre for Creative Arts Research. It has generated a small collection of books that identifies intersections between independent publishing and artists book practices, and places both within the framework of print culture. Its primary outcome is the collection and a catalogue documenting the collection supported by critical essays by S Bodman, M Crawford and T Mosely. Initially shown in the “... & So” exhibition at Griffith Library QCA 2017 the collection will be toured nationally and internationally.

INK ON PAPER: MEANING MADE MATERIAL

TIM MOSELY

Ink on paper is fundamental to the printed mark. Common to the thirty books of this collection is that unique quality of printed matter; that is, the way ink sits on/ and/ or in the surface of paper.

Each of the artists, designers, or makers represented here has responded to this indelibly simple and inconspicuous aspect of print culture. Each of them relies on the aesthetic properties of the printed mark to bring texture and character to what has been for centuries that most common of things: the printed book.

The printed mark continues to be the primary means by which content is inserted into the medium of the book, and such content is generally only interpreted through the words and images conveyed by these printed marks.

The relationship between the printed mark (content) and the book (medium) was a key concern of Marshall McLuhan, who made evident that the effects of a medium more often than not remain obscured by the content placed in that medium. Few mediums demonstrate this more clearly than the printed book, employed as it has been for centuries to store its content of material language; that is, printed images and text. What has largely been obscured from the general public by that printed language—optically focused as we generally are on images and text—is that the material properties of the book are part of the vocabulary that a reader encounters. Even less considered has been that the material properties of the marks themselves are part of this vocabulary. Bruno Munari’s 1949 silver minnow, Libro illeggibile MN 1, now a classic, draws readers’ attention to a book’s material vocabulary. This small book contains no words or images (apart from the printed title and details on the cover). Its content is the coloured paper pages, every one except the last cropped in some way.

Reading this book does not require a recall of spoken language, it invites a response to the material properties alone: the colour pigment in the paper, the shape of the pages, the interplay of reflected colour as the pages are turned by the reader. McLuhan also identifies professional artists across all disciplines as those most able to perceive and utilise obscured vocabularies. The professional artists, designers, and printers exemplified in the collected books of this project use the vocabulary of the printed book in ways that reveal how much it still has to offer as a medium of creative practice.

The rise of digital mediums has played a significant role in making this creative practice obvious, in the emergence of what Ulises Carrión describes as “the new art of making books” in his essay of the same title. As the digital realm now readily stores knowledge, taking its content from the book as the printed book took from manuscripts, the interested public find themselves with more time to appreciate the material book. The new digitally literate public’s reception of material books is far less encumbered by the optic, the privileging of sight, and they are more receptive to developing a refined sensibility for the creative use of the book.

Consistent to all the books in this collection is that the material properties that convey meaning cannot be migrated to digital mediums. In its seventh edition, Munari’s Libro illeggibile MN 1 is now engaging a digitally literate public; however, its content cannot be migrated to the digital medium—its content is the material book. The horizon holds considerable promise for those writers, artists, designers, poets, and printers involved in this new art of making books, and as this collection exemplifies, in making meaning material. ink on and in the page How ink sits on or in a page can convey meaning at subconscious, preconscious, and conscious levels. Take, for example, Stephen Fowler’s book Cosmic Forces (2012).

Fowler’s interest in the unseen is powerfully conveyed by his use of ink in and on the paper of the pages of his book. Fowler dyed the pages of his book with a water-based red ink and then printed his images onto these pages using bleach as ink on a rubber stamp. The bleach print literally leaches out the colour of the page, leaving a double absence of the ink and the stamp,

an emptiness, a poetic metaphor for the unseen characters depicted. This part of the image lies ‘in’ the page and conveys what lies under or is hidden. The rest of the printed image, the ink, sits ‘on’ the page and conveys what we see or interpret of the unseen. While this printing strategy is a layer of meaning that needs to be unfolded for most viewers to fully appreciate, the aesthetic qualities that the process generates are unmistakeable. Absent is the impression or impregnation we expect of the printed mark; it is replaced by the soft and ill-defined edges that refuse definition, the very ghostly quality Fowler is concerned with. An innovative use of ink on the page is one of the characteristics that runs across the diverse artists book and independent publishing practices represented in this collection. Each of the authors has employed the relationship between the ink and the page or substrate to convey content through the process and/or the qualities of the marks generated.

The Codex Foundation’s CODE(X) + 1 (No. 4) (2010) booklet presents the typography and artists books of <usus>, Ulrike Stoltz and Uta Schneider. The book is beautifully printed, combining letterpress with offset printing, a duality reflecting the creativity of <usus>.

This pairing of artist and designer, present in both collaborators, traverses the autographic and the digital in their work. In this booklet, the material property of the page and the printing process are eloquently relied upon to convey content. The letterpress, forcibly impressed into the page’s paper body, sits below the surface and preconsciously conveys a sense of weight to the subject being addressed. The images, digitally processed to render shadows for the books, are offset printed; they literally and pictorially float on the surface of the paper page. The combined letterpress and offset (e.g., pages 10–11) materially convey an artefact elevated for the weight of its content and achievement, which is the very purpose of the booklet.

The floating image is also employed by Nuala Gregory in her catalogue/book Exploded View (2010). Having generated a series of stone lithographs and monoprints, autographic printmaking techniques recognised for the flatness of their printed marks, Gregory ‘reproduced’ her prints via offset printing, a derivative of stone lithography. The “phantom or fugitive quality” of the autographic prints, described by Peter Shand in the catalogue essay, is sustained in the flat offset fields of colour in the book; for example, page spreads 26–27 and 30–31. Gregory’s migration of abstract images across print mediums both sustaining and becoming more exemplifies the broader concerns of her art practice, a contingent rather than formalist abstraction.

These printed marks are reliant on their material properties for their conceptual intent. They could be migrated to digital mediums; however, in that space they become something very different. the colour of ink A distinct outcome of mechanical printing is a consistency of tone across broad flat areas of ink that also runs through the complete text block of a book.

Reminiscent of mono printing, though rarely achieved autographically, this machine aesthetic that mechanical reproduction renders is ubiquitous within commercially printed matter and it has become a transparent layer of the printed book’s vocabulary. As readers, we take for granted the crisp contrast between the white of a paper page and the black of an ink, a crispness that infers a clarity of meaning in the text and a contrast that printmakers for centuries have wrestled with to render tones of grey. These apparently featureless prints belie their making and perform a critical function of documentation: obscuring the manner by which the print

was made. Employing the highly refined process of colour separation and the aesthetic of mechanical reproduction to their fullest, Ana Paula Estrada has produced her book Memorandum (2016).

Informed by a strong photographic practice, Memorandum performs its documentary function through the artist’s sophisticated awareness of the syntax of the book’s vocabulary. Colour combined with the simple structure of a codex subtly shifts the reader’s sense of time and space and opens up the humanity of the people documented in the book. Smooth flats of consistent colour that background consecutive photographs of each sitter focus our attention on the figures. Estrada’s use of space, blank pages, and empty frames provides the reader time to consider the material vocabulary of this book. The book poignantly functions to gather memories, both the sitters’ and the readers’, and its material vocabulary articulately contributes to this function.

The reproduction of historic printed matter is sensitively addressed by Marian Crawford in her book Picturing the Island (2016). Colour and tone are conceptually employed to consider the complexities of cultural interaction between the hegemonic West and the Kiribati. A culture losing its fabric fades with the replicated photographs of its people, who, losing their islands, are left to rely more and more on the mediums of the very culture that consumes them.

Broad fields to fine markings of a consistent colour or tone running through the length or narrative of the book are also evident in this collection of books.

Achieved through mechanical printing, these readily breach the indifference of the documentary function as book makers choose the materiality of printed marks

to convey conceptual content. Sarah Nicholls only employs colour in her letterpress-printed information pamphlet Wipe the Slate (2015). Her concern is over the oppressive nature of a financial structure premised on debt, as exemplified by the ‘global financial crisis’. The absence of black and white in her pamphlet reflects Nicholls’s hopes, as does the multifaceted nature of her double-sided pamphlet. Letterpress itself is an anachronistic printing technique and conveys her rejection of the pursuit of economic over aesthetic concerns.

In the catalogue Experimental Thinking / Design Practices (2015), edited by Katherine Moline and Peter Hall, a thread of fluoro tangerine courses throughout the looseleaved book. At times, it floods double-page spreads; at other times, it’s restrained to fragments of text.

Its optic and spatial vibrancy consistently reminds the reader of the unity within the diversity of creativity celebrated in the book.

Colour is also a means by which Dominic Forde celebrates the first generation of Victorian skaters and their skating sites in his book Ramps, Pools, Ponds and Pipes (2015). In re-printing photographs from the period 1975 to 1985, Forde relies on low-cost printing and the unrefined nature of the book to echo the new sport.

A restricted colour palette of red, blue, and offwhite (i.e., low-cost paper pages), the use of a coarse dot screen to process the photographs, the rudimentary placement of images on the pages, the flat matte surface of the ink, and a very tactile book structure successfully combine to convey the rawness and experimentation of the sport at that time.

the substrate The codex and specifically derivatives of case binding still dominate book production. Variations are evident in this collection, such as Fowler’s Cosmic Forces and Rose Nolan’s ENOUGH (2016); however, the collection documents the unorthodox treatment of a book following its conventional production rather then divergent book structures. Catherine de Zegher’s book the (hemi) cycle of leaves and paper (2016) documenting Simryn Gill’s practice has had four holes drilled through the body of the book. This presents eight holes on every opened double page of the book and echoes the actions of insects on paper (leaves) present in the work documented. In a similar fashion, Erin Coates has drilled a single hole through the book block of her book Kinesphere (2014) and has bolted the book shut with a rock-climbing grip. This strategy extends Coates’s conceptual concerns of her exhibited work, asking the reader to become kinaesthetically or tactilely active to engage with her work. Both these books perform as catalogues for an exhibition and demonstrate what appears to be a growing strategy by artists and designers to tangibly extend the conceptual concerns of their primary body of work into a book. Of the thirty books in this collection, twenty-three are or resemble an exhibition catalogue and demonstrate a reliance on recognised publishing practices and interventions into the outcomes.

Sarah Bodman demonstrates this practice in her book GM Future (1999). Her spiral-bound book incorporates two types of pages: cut-outs from commercial publications replete with a mechanical print aesthetic and a heavy weighted paper on which statements replete with interventions into biological environments are

digitally printed. Bodman places these pages adjacent to each other and sets up an uneasy tension over the future of crop production. Intrinsic to the interpretation of the work is the mechanical aesthetic of the cutout pages as a reference to the unstoppable nature of human ‘progress’.

Michael Phillips extends these interventions to the printing process itself. In his The Democracy of Disease (2012), Phillips, worked with a commercial printer to salvage discarded offset printed proofs as his substrate papers to be reprinted for his own books. The final outcome conveys an unease that settles indiscriminately over the individuals documented in the book, an unease as consistent as the machine aesthetic of mechanical printing prevalent across the book.

First appearances of An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and More… (2013) by Thomas Raat are beguiling. Absent are any signs of a slick publication: the cover’s surface is matte, the book is simply bound, and, once touched, the pages recall the haptic properties of heavy newsprint paper. Its printed content, however, alters first impressions: broad expanses of clean flat colour, a pared- down typeface, and the book’s leaves reflect the ‘wrapped back binding’ of Chinese bookbinding. Raat’s intervention is with commercial publications.

His choices undermine the aesthetics of commercial production. Internally hidden in the book’s leaves lies deeper content. His curation of material elements harmonise to reflect the rarefied and often illusionary atmosphere of meaning and truth.

on the horizon At a point distant to most of the books that form the spectrum of this projects outcome lies Accomplices Not Allies (2014). This book was given to the collection by the Indigenous Action Media as a provocation, a call to readers for accomplices in indigenous struggles against colonisers. The book/zine is a loose-leafed collation of photocopies. Its confrontational content extends the long historical relationship between political activism and printed matter. Its ephemeral nature heightens the paradox that the ephemerality of mass-produced printed marks only serves to cement the political. That relationship between the autographic and the mechanically reproduced print is one of potential, not trepidation.

What distinguishes Accomplices Not Allies from the ephemerality of digital mass media campaigns is its materiality. The book’s dog-eared pages and its smeared printed marks are both material evidence of its circulation to this point. Ironically, by archiving the book in this collection, its call to action is muted rather than amplified, exemplifying the perpetual tension between the lived experience and documenting the lived experience. Meaning made material can only be interpreted if it enters the reader’s lived experience, the reader’s touch of material.

What becomes apparent in this collection of books is that the new art of making books—i.e., the book as a medium of creative practice—draws from multiple histories. These histories hold in common a versatile understanding of how ink sits on and in the page and how this material property of the printed mark can convey meaning beyond conventional interpretations. Dialogue between these histories can only enrich the varied creative practices engaged with the material book.

Cosmic Forces 2012 Stephen Fowler I made this book by printing a selection of my hand-cut rubber stamps. I stretched the paper and painted it with some very old antique red drawing ink, then I printed/ stamped it with thick strong bleach, oil and water-based ink.

stephenfowler72.blogspot.com (2012)

L A N D

limbo 2017 Georgia Maitland An artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book that records anonymous experiences of people displaced in detention in Nauru. Contrasted with the powerful but brutal statements are photo polymer prints of Tasmania, representing the vastness of Australian land. Packaged as if to be sent in brown paper, this reflects the place these people are exiled to: limbo.

www.georgiamaitland.com (2018)

An Opened Letter 2016 Louis Lim On a winter’s morning in 2011, I received a letter from overseas. Handwritten and the paper partly torn, the letter began ‘I am sorry…’. Swiftly scanning his words, I learned that he had been detained and was confined for five years.

louislzm.com

A N

Picturing the Island 2016 Marian Crawford My book ‘Picturing the Island’ takes the form of a collection of texts and images that by their proximity to each other present the Central Pacific island Banaba (once known as Ocean Island) as a recollection. This recollection grants these memories another moment of life.

from the State Library of Queensland’s Australian Library of Art blog (24 Oct 2016)

Memorandum 2016 Ana Paula Estrada de Isolbi Memorandum is a book that uses photography, oral history and collection material to recount stories. It is a project about things that were remembered, photographs that were carefully stored and conversations that must never be forgotten. This book is the outcome of a Siganto Foundation Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Books Fellowship at the State Library of Queensland 2015-2016.

EST

LBI

anapaulaphotography.com.au

GM Future Sarah Bodman

1999

GM Future explores some of the possibilities of genetically modifying nature. The book offers a series of examples from slow-growing grass to specially bred plants, and some of the consequences of these experiments. Texts are interspersed with pages collected from old gardening books, and therefore each book is a unique copy within the edition, as no two collected pages are the same.

balticplus.uk/sarah-bodman-gm-future-c21956/

Ramps, Pools, Ponds and Pipes Dominic Forde 2015 This book is a selection of images from the photographic archive of pioneering Melbourne skater Noel Forsyth. The images are grouped by the inventive locations used by the first generation of skaters in Victoria.

fordenicol.com/projects/ramps-pools-ponds-pipes/

New Reading Order 2016 Christopher Day Rather than seeking to communicate one reading, the artist asks viewers to interpret each image according to their own reading of it without the need to find clear rationale or logical reasoning. New Reading Order defies easy categorisation, presenting the viewer with images that sardonically resist glib understanding or summary appreciation.

Photo-collages sit alongside photographs.

Visual puns may be found. New Reading Order fosters a certain ambiguity through elements of surrealism and humour to form an allegorical vision with a sophisticated, nonsensical edge.

art.base.co/event/8003-christopher-day-newreading-order

An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and More…

Thomas Raat 2013 The essay by John C. Welchman featured in this book discusses how Raat’s work operates at the technical interface between abstract painting and visual construction and on the generic borderlines between art, design and the history of ideas. It discusses how his intervention precipitates a salient crisis in the signifying assumptions delivered to non-figurative compositionality in the mid-twentieth century and its later reassessments. Prompted by an ethos of design that fronts the inevitability of reading, Raat’s project asks how abstract signs have been organised as the future of a long and stealthy illusion.

www.onomatopee.net/project. php?progID=3e175661710434239cd1ee4f3ae9204a

<usus>, typography, and artists’ book the Codex Foundation 2010 <usus> does not design type, we design with type, and the medium we prefer is the book.

Contents and the text are already there, and the book designer has to work with these components in a way that the reader/ viewer is able to gain easy access to the subject matter.

codexfoundation.org/publications/monograph-series

AUTHOR BIOS SARAH BODMAN is an artist and researcher at the Centre for Fine Print Research, University of West England, Bristol, UK. Sarah is also Programme Leader for the MA Multidisciplinary Printmaking course at UWE, and the editor the Artist’s Book Yearbook reference publication, the Book Arts Newsletter and The Blue Notebook journal for artists’ books.

Her artists’ books explore the darker side of nature and human nature, and are collected by the leading collections within the field.

MARIAN CRAWFORD is a visual artist and senior lecturer in Fine Art at Monash Art Design & Architecture. She was recently awarded the Siganto Fellowship at the State Library of Queensland 2015/16 and has presented her creative works and writings publicly since 1996. Crawford’s works explore the relationships between the book, fine art printmaking processes, and the printed image in contemporary culture.

TIM MOSELY is a practicing artist whose creative output contributes to the fields of print culture, artists books and haptic aesthetics.

He is a lecturer in Fine Art at Queensland College of Art, Brisbane, Australia, where he convenes the Print program, the abbe events and dc3p. His work is held in prominent national and international artists books collections and has been included in significant survey exhibitions of the field including Behind the Personal Art Library: Collectors Creating the Canon, the Centre for Book Arts, NY, 2014. His current research draws on the autographic and the indexical nature of prints to address the role of touch in the reception and evaluation of art.

AC KN OW LEDGE M E N TS This publication was made possible with the support of the Griffith Centre for Creative Arts Research.

Designed by Emily Stewart at Liveworm Studio, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. www.liveworm.com.au Edited by Evie Franzidis.

ISBN 978-0-6483740-1-5 www.dc3p.com

S N O I TA L E R R O C NEEWTEB TNEDNEPEDNI & GNIHSILBUP KOOB STSITRA ECITCARP

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