A Bookish Day: from Incunabila to Explanatory and Expirimental

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Books. Returning home has been book-oriented, from going back to school and using its library to cleaning out my parent’s library at home. I found The Worry Book dusty and forgotten in my parent’s library, and brought it along with me today to share the still-charming 1960s text that classifies basic and “baroque” worries to a friend who would appreciate it.

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Then I sat in on my friend’s class in the Hargrett Library, where the University of Georgia’s special collections are housed. There a librarian showed the group  incunabula, book’s from printing cradle of the 15th century, moving chronologically forward to a gorgeous artist’s book published in 1990, Capriccio. Capriccio hearkens back to the hand-made quality of manuscripts but with modern content: poems by Ted Hughes and engravings by Leonard Baskin, all done with an eye to beauty and craftsmanship that transforms the book as conveyor of information to art object, in this 41st of 50 total copies.

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I am very much a digital native and minimalist in terms of possession. But despite, or perhaps because of that, I feel such a draw to these books-as-objects and the supposed permanence of the object, as opposed to the fleeting, unfixed nature of the web. This ambivalence splits many a modern mind, which has a desire of moving both backward and forward at the same time. (There is probably room for much BAROQUE Worry about the future of publishing in this.)

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However, I ended my day at a lecture by Mark Callahan of UGA’s ICE Conversation Series on Experiments in Publishing, dealing both with a range of contemporary efforts and Mark’s own conception of publishing as a vehicle for the next iteration of his AUX series. Neither basic or baroque worry came up at this talk. Rather, there was playful enthusiasm toward the new possibilities and understandings of how one can publish. Predictably, this centrally involved the internet as a medium of exchange, and self-publishing options, be it Pinterest or Twitter (although the example tended to be more interesting than that). But they also expanded the notion of what a publication could be – an event, a mixture of media, to a participatory creation. At any rate, the written word no longer need have the main role it once did.

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During the talk, I had an AHA moment when I saw an artist’s project very similar to one that I brainstormed with friends late one night this past weekend: the blank book. We were going to call ours: The Storehouse of Useless Knowledge. This artist has produced a high- and low-end edition of a white book based on Lulu’s material limitations of price and size. Now I will have the “baroque” worry of not saying my good ideas aloud, because they might take material form elsewhere. For more baroque worries, keep scrolling down.

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As a coda, in thinking of awesome bookish artistic projects, I recently came across Christina HartlPraeger’s Book of Meme which works as a book-as-object, functioning in a sculptural way as Tauba Auerbach’s RGB Colorspace Atlas does.

 

The Book is the Art


A great collection of art book images over at BibliOdyssey is inspiring. Pulled from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, the archive is searchable by medium, binding, or category. The example below is a Wizard of Oz pop up book. I never did do the pop up book I had wanted to, but some of the books in this collection are reviving that desire.


The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Robert Sabuda

Oh, For the Love of Art!

Artforum, when I picked it up in a bookstore the other day, immediately reminded me of a heavy Vogue issue. Both were thick with ads, and thankfully intelligent ones at that. Just as Vogue contains cutting edge photographs of high-end labels, exactly what people buy the magazine for, Artforum is full of attractive glossy spreads of gallery openings and artist’s work. Both blend the edge between content and advertising, and add a depth to the zines (at least in inches).

Artforum, ARTnews, and Art in America dominate the shelves, but in between them, even in chain bookstores (at least in New York city), you see the smaller volumes that exude individuality. The lesser-known art magazines are often the efforts of small groups of people who don’t have the same responsibility to cover the big stories. They can choose their content. Appearing sporadically and with varying production levels, often disappearing after a dozen issues, these are the art lover’s magazines, if only because they are clearly a labor of love by those that produce them.

The publishers who are able to sell a few copies express their individuality and ideology down to the typeface, and the design of the magazines is where the fun begins. They may not have Gagosian ads, but they do have vertical type and matte collages that beg to be ripped out and put on your wall. Their innovative design and unpredictable content are an adventure compared to the heavyweights. Truthfully, I’m envious! What a project–it tempts me to design an Art Ravels magazine, if only so I could lay out the pages.

Yet as much as I love browsing through the more off-beat art magazines when I see them, I always deliberate over whether they’re really worth the $10. On the other hand, I don’t buy ARTnews either. But were I to throw my $10 in the art publishing ring, I know which one I’d choose.