Documenting Artists' Books

After a recent embarrassment of handing out a business card to a friend and gently being asked why my website was almost empty, I resolved to spend some time bringing it up to scratch (i.e. adding at least some coherent content to it!).

Original - Cover

Original - Interior

Starting the process I soon remembered why I had given up months before. Building a website and adding content in a straightforward, appealing way is quite a challenge and central to that challenge is taking clear documentation. I overcame the problem in quite a straight forward way, so I wanted to talk about it here. I'll use the example of an artwork called 'Between the Lines'.

The two original photos (above) were taken with my smartphone from the slightly battered proof copy that arrived from the printer. It was hasty because I wanted to get the photos on my website in time for them going on sale at the Whitechapel Book Fair. Shamefully I've been using those photos ever since!

One simple way of establishing how I wanted the new documentation to look was by addressing what I didn't like about the old photographs:

• Both of my original images were cropped and didn't give a true impression of the cover design or the page layout. I had originally taken the photos like this in an attempt to make them look visually interesting and (particularly regarding the cover) to hide the roughness of the book itself. As the book is merely documentation, I realised that clarity was more important than visual interest, so documented the cover and pages in their entirety and from above.
• Both images are different sizes (one square, the other rectangular), so they looked uneven next to each other. The simple solution to this was to choose a standard size - making them square meant that I didn't have to remember what ratio I had picked.
• Using my smart phone camera meant that the colours were very uneven. The simple solution to this was to use a better camera.
• The background didn't match other documentation, so I opted to pick a particular shade and use that across all my documentation.

Strange how these things sound so simple, but had never really occurred to me before. So I set up a little studio in my front room and took some photos with my compact camera.

Using this set-up the only two elements that I needed to control were the background and quality of the image. These could be done together in Photoshop. All I had to do was to separate the book and the background and work on them separately.

For the book element I improved the contrast and changed the colours slightly to match the original. For the background I increased the contrast so that the paper textures of the background disappeared, but the shadow stayed. I then filled the background with a specific shade of the grey that provided a contrast. Noting down the details of the shade of grey were important, as I then used the same shade on all subsequent documentation. The finished images are here:

New - Cover

New - Interior

Below these are other books that I documented using the same technique - I hope it gives you an idea of how straight forward the process can be.

Mrs Dalloway Variations

Mrs Dalloway Variations

[Chris]

→ some books I wanted to buy: Anouk Kruithof, Elisabeth Tonnard, Horses Think Press

This was a busy arty weekend in London -  Art16, Photo London and Offprint happening all at once! As a restult, George and myself went on a stroll around town, which included visits to Oliver Wood Rare Books (beautiful books by Daisuke Yokota), Parafin Gallery (got a copy of Michelle Stuart's catalogue), Peter Harrington on Dover Street (a fascinating exhibition of travel and exploration books), Photographers' Gallery (got a copy of Erik Kessel's "Brussels Beauties") and - Offprint, where I found those three books, which I wanted to buy very much (but I did not). 


I.

Becoming Blue
Anouk Kruithof 
2009
20,5 X 27,5 cm, paperback, 102 pages
ISBN 978-3-86895-024-3


 
Blue has many connotations: it is the colour of Virgin Mary, conservatives and melancholy. Photographer Anouk Kruithof exploits the latter one in her book of portraits, as she plays with the tension of the disrupted calm and stillness. Kruithof catches her subjects unawares to project an image of surprise. Dressed in blue and posed against a plain blue background, the subjects are caught by the camera at a moment when they least expect it. The books is effectively pasted with blank spreads of light blue slowing down the rhythm into a meditative flow - a very cinematic experience.


II.

The Lovers
Elisabeth Tonnard
2015
Edition of 100. Digital print, 24 pages.

What this book does well, is reconsidering the value and the meaning of decontextualised object, though interpretative possibilities of the photographs isolated in (and from) space and time. This book is based around screenshots made while watching ‘Discarded: Joachim Schmid and the Anti-Museum,’ a video about Joachim Schmid’s work, realized by the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2014. At one point in this documentary Schmid is at a flea market in Berlin, looking through a pile of junked photographs. For a brief moment his perusal and the movements of his hands caused the stack to tell the story captured in the book. It's minimalist look and spacious layout place images into a void, open for new stories and relationships.

III.

Visitor 
Ofer Wolberger
7.8 x 11.5 inches (198 x 292 mm), unbound, soft cover
Printed in black and red ink, risograph
56 pages, edition of 200

 

all Visitor images are from Shane Lavalette

Another recontextualised portrait comes from an ongoing project Visitor, which uses images made in the lobby of one building in midtown Manhattan. The project takes as it’s ‘found’ material the crudely made and heavily pixelated visitor badges that are made when an outsider intends to visit a company or person within an office building. All the Visitor portraits depict the same unidentified woman in an array of poses and with a wide variety of facial expressions. The images appear voyeuristic and strangely intimate while referencing the look of video surveillance footage.

Egidija

GUEST POST: Becoming The Book (Chloe Spicer/ObjectBook)

Becoming The Book

My work, as a bookish artist and time spent working/lurking in libraries can be summed up with this primary objective: I want to become a book. 

Still from 002 is The Book (installation), 2015

I’m not exactly sure what that means yet. I think people imagine that I’m envisaging wrapping myself in a large fold of red leather, and will spend a few years lying on a shelf somewhere quietly cultivating a dusty aroma. Sure, actually that sounds like great fun, but I think of being or ‘becoming book’ as a sort of spiritual practice or human evolutionary plan which is beyond, but intrinsically linked to, the codex. I want to be a book, but I want you all to be books too.  

Books for the Body I, 2015 (Digital Print)

A universal accessibility for The Book

Although sounding slightly dystopian, my latter aim is not entirely selfish. Books have huge accessibility problems: I love books, but they hurt me. They play hard to get. I can forgive the paper cuts, but it seems particularly cruel as a bibliophile that I experience painful visual disturbances when reading - text literally dances on the page.

This is an interesting symptom of my neurodiversity, but there are countless other differences in eye sight or physical ability and neurological diversity that can make reading a book bloody hard, before we even consider the need for education and access to books themselves. It seems quite remarkable that any of us can nestle into that cosy armchair with the fireplace, slippers, cup of cocoa/glass of whisky and a good read. There must be a better way. What can the book of the future do to address these issues? Can there be a universal accessibility for the book?
 

Raver at The Library Rave, 2015

Books as multisensory experience

Books have special sensory power. In order to read a book, and to decide that it is worth the effort, I really need positive tactile feedback.  They need to be against my skin, in fact even that seems like a cop out – I need books under my skin, to absorb the content and bookish ‘essence’; e-book screens are entirely unfit for purpose.

I’ve learned that despite my love for diversity, I am not an inclusive book lover. There are many books that just aren’t book enough for me: e-books, textbooks & magazines – anything that doesn’t feel good hasn’t got a chance. Books need to offer a sensory experience.

The Library Rave, 2015

Seeking a universal and multisensory accessibility whilst holding onto the tactile nature of books is the keystone of my practice. This is a lifelong research project, which I develop through participatory events, workshops and installations to explore human experiences and requirements of books, and to pilot my methods of becoming book. I live for the stories that appear out of these interventions. I’ve met people who confess to having compulsively nibbled the corners of pages as a child or who fell in love at a library self-service machine, this all seems desperately important somehow.

 
So what would this bookish future look like? 

How will we become books? Crude methods like immersing in shredded Book Baths (2010) or wearing Book Art Hats (2014), which toyed with absorption through bodily contact (if we place books on our heads, will some of the knowledge fall out?), have evolved into practical bio-tech solutions like DNA as Data Storage (2015) where I considered rewriting the body’s junk DNA with books. What would it mean to use our bodies as data storage devices? Could the volumes we embody subconsciously provide wisdom or alter our characters? Families could choose to take responsibility for the storage of particular genres of books. On having children, these libraries would merge, and grow with each generation, eventually becoming a global genetic library.

The DNA method is universal, but a tad disconcerting which leads us to a more palatable solution: Edible Books (2015) - rice paper books printed with edible ink/pens and bound with strawberry laces, or as in Books for the Body (2015) miniature leather bound books. Digesting information is a popular and accessible way of becoming a book (if you eat seeds a tree will grow inside you…), although its unclear how the digestive system would allow for retention of information.

BYOBBBBBQ (Bring your own book book burning BBQ) (2015) is a ritualistic ceremony for books which have come to the end of their lives. I believe that when you place a book in the fire, the text rises in the smoke, which participants then inhale (or consume by cooking over the ashes) enabling the books to live on within them. This follows the eastern worlds insight into text burning as a spiritual act, rather than one of censorship.

The Library Rave (Image credit Mindy Lee)

 
But in looking for a multisensory accessibility The Library Rave (2015) offers the cumulative method: an audio book silent disco, offering a bookish experience for all the senses (Join the rave at the BALTIC Book Market June 18-19).

Dance round the library to the bookish anthems of Fahrenheit 451 and The Library of Babel over music, as you rave with books and handheld disco light. Wear your entry wristband, drop an e (book), and maybe just maybe we’ll all become books by way of sensory overload.

Image credit: UAL

You are invited to join Object Book 26th May for a tempestuous evening of cocktails, cinema and books:

Book Flick Nights: I’ll Drown my Book.
Celebrate Shakespeare400 with book art workshops, literary refreshments and a bookish screening of an art-house take on The Tempest.
The Colour House Theatre, London SW19 6.45pm £12/£10 [goo.gl/TlV8gG]
 

Facebook.com/ObjectBook
@Object_Book
ChloeSpicer.co.uk
@ChloeSpicerArt

→ intimate and cathartic is the constellation of cancer

Speaking in Tongues: Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking (2015) by David Paton

"Intimate and cathartic" refers to both: the process of making a book and the process of reading. Book as an object encourages intimate interaction between the maker and the object, the object and the reader. Art as an activity veers towards the cathartic experiences between the artist and the object; the object and the viewer. Adding to that a medical context, results in Medical Humanities and an approach to art, which considers artist’s books as a tool to aid healing and facilitate communication between doctors and patients.

Test Day II (1999) by Martha A. Hall

 
I was honoured to co-organise with Dr Stella Bolaki Prescriptions exhibition, which is now open until August 14 at The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, Canterbury. The exhibition is part of Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities project by the University of Kent’s School of English. It was originally structured around a set of Martha A Hall’s books, which she created from 1998 until her death in 2003 to document her experiences with breast cancer and interactions with the medical community. To extend Prescriptions further, I initiated an open-call, which resulted in over 200 artists worldwide submitting nearly 250 works, of which 88 bookworks were selected as a curated Medical Humanities artist's books collection, reflecting on the themes of illness, grieving, disability, mental health, surgery, birth, aging, recovery, history of medicine, treatments and wellbeing. Once the exhibition is over, the collection will be housed at University of Kent’s Library's Special Collection.

View of Prescriptions at The Beaney, Canterbury.

Illness, healing, grief are intimate processes. Like Martha A Hall, a number of Prescriptions artists have responded to their conditions by making books: some dealt with  their own diagnosis, others dealt with the grief at the illness of a friend. Like Martha A Hall, 25 of the participants have cancers, of which 11 are breast cancer patients and further 4 are friends or family of a breast cancer patient. 


→ 

Cancer is one of the twelve constellations of the zodiac. Its name is Latin for crab and it is commonly represented as one. Its astrological symbol is ♋. Cancer is a medium-size constellation with an area of 506 square degrees and its stars are rather faint. Cancer is the dimmest of the zodiacal constellations, having only two stars above the fourth magnitude.

Cancer is frequently represented as a combination of five stars. 


 
1. Lizzie Brewer

The first star in my Cancer constellation is Lizzie Brewer. Lizzie's work Prescriptions is a set of embossed prints, which reflect on the amount of pills taken during the five years of her breast cancer treatment. Each tablet is one little step towards healing: her work shows a long journey. Repetition is what stands out in Lizzie’s work: tablets look the same, pages look the same. There is meditative quality to an ongoing expanse of sheet after sheet after sheet. Other then details of her surgical report there are no other texts and there are no images. The person behind this data is very much absent - repetition hides her like a smokescreen.


 2. Carole Cluer

Carol Cluer was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. Unknown is another seemingly detached work, which hides individual well behind volume, number and data. Carole considers the number of people diagnosed with breast cancer in the same year as her. Based on the measurement grids and tattoos used when you have radiotherapy, she had drawn a grid by dragging a fine gold wire across paper, so each dot represents one person - anonymous person - like herself. The books consist of pages and pages and pages of identical looking hand drawn grids: simple to look at, but exquisitely executed. If Lizzie’s work zooms into individual’s experience, Carol’s work zooms out to globalize it, by re-contextualising herself into the worldwide stream of data. 


3. Carol Pairaudeau

 

If individual is hiding behind the data in two previous two works, Carole Pairaudeau puts herself right into the center of her book. Not only is the work presented in a hospital sample bag with Carole's name printed on it, her book is a concertina, showing her scar and bruising on one side and words (about healing of the scar) on the other. The photo images of bruised skin are otherworldly in their blues, greens and purples. Their beautiful and painterly quality contrasts with their painful origin. The text complements images: it transports reader through stitch to fade of the scar in three concertina folds, producing six steps. Like in Lizzie’s work, Carol’s work is about time and healing. The steps might be bigger and may take more time of complete, but the work feels cathartic and emotionally true.

4. Ruchika Wason Singh
 
Ruchika Wason Singh builds her book as a journey of acceptance at the loss of her breast. Physical and emotional healing is replicated in her creative process. Ruchika paints breasts and tears them into pieces, which she then restores by painting onto them. She resurrects the breast visually as she completes her inner transformation into an honest acknowledgment of her situation. Ruchika then pastes images onto sheets of paper to form a book, which further contributes to the idea of archiving the experience. Her set of collages is loosely held together by fabric, resembling bandages. The cover image is a stitched scar. The book is wholesome, bold and honest. Ruchika’s work elicits anguish and grief that feel resolved as the book is closed.


5. Mara Acoma

A photo book by Mara Acoma documents her own experience of having her mother diagnosed with breast cancer. The work, Mara says, allowed her to demystify her own emotional journey. She is using the visual language of near death experiences and folklore surrounding ghosts. The images are dark, produced to the backdrop of gothic sets of crumbling castles, gloomy forests, abandoned hospitals and misted up windows. A lone ghost of a heroine is moving from one location to the next across sprawling spreads of large size monochromatic photographs. Those imaginary locations represent her mental states, which - like Lizzie’s tablet’s or Carole’s bruises - are steps towards emotional healing. 


→
 

Intimate and cathartic is a diary for the writer, as it is for the reader. The books above are diaries in the most generic sense of the word. They are non-verbal diaries. Their authors reach beyond language to say the unsayable. The (almost) lack of language evokes universal readability of the artwork, which in turn, resonates with universal concerns of understanding illness and understanding healing as a process.













 



[Egidija]

GUEST POST: Code-X as network (Danny Aldred)

Fig 1.

Code-X, re-mix of old and new

“If that person declares it a book, it is a book! If they do not, it is not. Definitions are not ageless laws, but current understanding. They grow with usage through insight and error. We extend our knowledge, as well as our false assumptions, and both of these change the way we think. Our definitions evolve, they are not cut in stone”Keith A. Smith

The Code-X project was conceived as an anthology of the current transforming of the book form and was edited by Danny Aldred and Emmaunuelle Waeckerle. The project was initiated by Book—Lab ₁ and published by BookRoom_2, it was launched at Printed Matter New York in November 2015. This text sets out to unpack some of the workings of the Code-X project in relation to past, and current forms of artist book publishing.

Context and post digital

The paper umbrella was torn apart in 2010 by the digital fall out of 0 & 1s. In the past we could take shelter from the everlasting outside chaos from inside the umbrella (the book) and this could be seen as a protective dome, or a vault as described by D.H. Lawrence. It’s a place where we validate and assess the external as we navigate through our own landscape, but now the tipping point has been breached as we drown in all bits digital₃. Within a context of immersive digital experiences the digital becomes meaningless as everything is touched in some way by screen and pixel. We stream, watch and listen via online networks; even the printed page is constructed through a portable digital file (PDF). Post Digital is a recognition of digital technology as part of everyday life and not a revolutionary phenomenon and was coined by Cascone in 2000 in his essay ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’. But it was Alessandro Ludovico’s book, ‘Post-Digital Print - The mutation of Publishing since 1894’ (Published in 2012) that really informed the early stages of the project ₄, and the Code-X project grew from an interest in looking at this digital shift framed around artist books. The name Code-X makes references to both the analogue codex form and digital code.

Fig 2.

Working processes and production

Networks were brought together in the making of the Code-X project. Book—Lab and BookRoom came together sharing communities of practitioners and offering something that the other could not. BookRoom took the lead in driving the editorial aspects forwards as well as design editing; the challenging task of adapting Book—Labs ambitious design to the various content formats (interviews, essays, image and text narrative). Book—Lab working closely with design studio 3015₅ had a fairly clear vision on how the design aspects of the project should work. The original intention was to offer something in print that could not be produced digitally and, after several meeting with the Dutch printers lecturis it was decided on using an unconventional approach where the pages unfold as one continues strip bound with an Otto style binding. The final printed bound pages were then machine kiss cut afterwards leaving folded inserts to reveal the colour contents. The usual full colour litho printing process (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) was disrupted by adding a percentage of fluro inks into the cyan and yellow print drums. This created a slightly psychedelic affect across the full colour images, similar to that seen within the San Francisco Oracle publications from the 1960’s, which were noted for their experimental multicolored design_.

Fig 3.

Finitude, sequence and self-reflexivity

The meta focus of the book as a physical form maps against approaches by several 20^th century book artists, in particular Dieter Roth₆ where he used the basic codex DNA for the basis of structural investigation into sequence, binding and page size. Within code-X the turning of the page becomes a physical, sculptural element rather than an incidental activity and linear sequence becomes specialized across the format of the pages. The format engenders upon the reader physical contortions to navigate and examine the content, in this way making references to itself as a form, an object, and its own process of enunciation_.  This metacritical aspect is perhaps important with a book about publishing but it’s the playful and performative aspect that makes it engaging within Code-X. References to the digital are found throughout the pages, layered imagery page numbering that references time and not pagination. Glitched imagery has been used as cover patterns, the intention here was to create a modern equivalent to marbling, the original content that made the glitches were the source imagery of book submissions.

Fig 4.

Collaboration, and the network

Networks rely on the collective strength; we are stronger together as the saying goes. But is collaboration better that competition? The sharing and opening up of data is something that we are seeing more and more with open access, and we build new things upon the histories of the past. But in my view competition stifles creative practice. It closes off networks and creates an atmosphere of comparison and secrecy; these are never good ingredients for explorative creative practice. Indeed many designers and artists working within the fields of self-publishing prefer localized production over mass commercial publishing ventures and we have seen a huge popularity in such forms of publishing referencing the countercultural underground presses from the 1960s. Graphic designer Ellen Lupton points out “Publishing books has become the site of heated social activity, as seen in the rash of book fairs and short-run publishing houses worldwide”₇. Risography is one printing medium that has really helped shape the self-publishing scene over the past decade. Risograph was developed in Japan in the mid 1980s for large print runs for small organization and has quickly been taking on board by book artists and self-publishers due to its cheap and easy set up costs. We have seen in recent years a renaissance in this form of print production due to the Internet and a global network of users keen to share work and knowledge, but also fueled by the do-it-yourself culture evident everywhere like Etsy and Creative Commons. We have seen this DIY movement before within Punk culture from the 1970’s, back then made visual by the Xerox or Photocopier machine. The Xerox machine allowed for quick and easy scanning of existing imagery and allowed complete freedom of expression. Underground networks grew from the circulating Xerox fanzines, like the tentacles of Architeuthis slowly wrapping around its prey. Fanzines have played a key role in the evolution of alternative printing and self-publishing history.

Fig 5.

Code-X

The Code-X project linked some of these early forms of self-publishing by taking a sample of what’s happening within the world of artist book publishing today in relation to what it once was. Twenty-six contributors Give an account of or reflect upon their work from analogue production to digital experiences. The project constitutes a timely survey of this new chapter in publishing looking at a range of innovations and alternative approaches but also looking back at pre-digital strategies and examining some of the benefits and limitations of digital publishing. Code-X represents a pause and a reflection on past, to post digital that fully embrace the ideas of making and connecting (Making is connecting ₈). The project is an important and timely assessment of what publishing actually could be today in a post everything media landscape.

Featuring essays, interviews and works by;

Delphine Bedel, Simon Cutts, Sebastien Girard, Hans Gremmen, Andrew Haslam with Rose Gridneff & Alex Cooper, Alec Finlay with Ken Cockburn, Alessandro Ludovico, Silvio Lorusso, Katharine Meynell with Susan Johanknecht, Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine, AND Publishing, Colin Sackett, Jodie Silsby, Paul Soulellis, Stefan Szczelkun, John Warwicker (Tomato), Eric Watier, Maria White, Beth Williamson, David Lorente Zaragoza.

276 pages. RRP £20.00 – ISBN 978-0-9576828-3-2

available online here

Notes:

[1] Book—Lab is a multi-disciplinary research lab initiated by Danny Aldred in 2013 to explores new connections between Design and Technology with a focus on communication in book form. The lab is based at Winchester School

[2] BookRoom is a research group and publisher, based at UCA Farnham and led by Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, to support artists and researchers to engage with critical production, debate and dissemination of page and screen based works, and disseminate resultant knowledge through publication, conferences, exhibitions. www.thebookroom.net

[3] The digital shift is discussed within the book ‘The Digital Turn, Design in the Era of Interactive Technologies’ Published by Park Books 2012

[4] Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print is available here as PDF download: http://monoskop.org/images/a/a6/Ludovico%2C_Alessandro_-_Post-Digital_Print._The_Mutation_of_Publishing_Since_1894.pdf

[5] Studio 3015 is a creative and educational space situated within Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. www.studio3015.com

[6] Dieter Roth (April 21, 1930 – June 5, 1998) was a Swiss artist best known for his artist's books, editioned prints, sculptures, and works made of found materials, including rotting food stuffs.[1] He was also known as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot. Source 2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Roth

[7] Ellen Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. www.elupton.com

[8] Making is Connecting is a book by David Gauntlett, in this he argues that through making things, people engage with the world and create connections with each other, both online and offline.

www.makingisconnecting.org

Illustrations:
Fig 1: Code-X

Fig 2: Post-Digital Print Alessandro Ludovico

Fig 3: San Francisco Oracle

Fig 4: Danny Aldred - Glitches

Fig 5: punk zines - from bedfordandbowery.com
          CANYON, Dan Wilton / Josh Jones – DITTO Press

Danny Aldred's practice centres on publishing as creative practice with a
focus on artist book projects. His work has been chosen for numerous
international exhibitions and publishing projects within the UK, Germany
and the USA. Several recent artist book projects include 'woods for the
trees' published through Entbergen press and the 'glitch series' using the
Jacquard loom. Both project's mix old and new forms of technology.