Assembling/Reassembling, Why Books NOW?

Alexandra Grant  I think the haptic—the idea that we love the touch and smell of the ink, of the paper, how the binding, the cover, texture is so important. But I also think that we’re living in a culture where there is publishing and sort of editioning of things that are happening through social media, but they always are a return in a way, you know, that here are people on Instagram and they’re thinking in relation how is this text or this code or these emojis going to work in relation to this image. There are people publishing as NFTs and some of them are making windfalls and some people are exploring different ways of embedding information with these digital images. I think there is definitely a relationship to publishing that is happening even in technology. We didn’t even go into this, but the idea of the multiple and reproduction and the original and all these questions, I think the technology leads us back to the book, it takes us away from it, but we come back to it in part because, not to come back full circle, but because books still are those seeds, those plans, that site of investment into the most compact space of a whole world that we wish to see built.

Johanna Drucker  Lovely. Okay, here’s a question for you. Could Tia, Susan and Alexandra talk about their process as artists who work with the book as form? So, this is a nice segue, actually, from what you all were just saying. So, what aesthetics and techniques do you use and why do you want to transmit with them? In other words, how do those choices about the format, the medium and technology, how do those factor into your convictions about the book? It’s really more to you as artists to talk about your processes.

Susan Sironi  If I start a book that is very intricate, in order to cut through it, I have to understand it 100 percent, I have to know every page. So, if I want to engineer a collage-like element into it, I can scan it, I can do it in Photoshop, I can practice with multiple copies. So, if I choose a book, its physical form is really important to me and how I go about understanding sequences, where text and images go. That will determine on what books I select. So, for me it’s just kind of understanding of having done something to know what processes I want to use in the future.

Tia Blassingame  I’m happy to pick up. So, for me each book is different of what it kind of wants to be and how I want you to—what your relationship would be to the book. So I have a piece, “Harvest,” that I wanted there to be some physical relationship and movement between you and the book and so having you have to move back and forth, so front and back and then kind of side to side with the book, so decisions around the size of the type—some of it is challenging to read, so you have to move in, but to turn the page, you have to move out. There’s a sound aspect, too, that plays off that as well, so I think each one is different. And I always try to build in something for myself that isn’t going to be apparent to the reader or anyone within the process. I really like process particularly because this subject matter can be very challenging, so I need a lot of time to process the subject matter in my decisions as well. So, I seem to be drawn to print making processes that are super drawn out to give me that time and space and even to have kind of like a sound aspect within that as well, so something like etching and that mark-making and so the rhythm of that mark making is kind of for me to sort of chill me out and let me kind of meditate on the subject matter. But I would say each project is very different and that’s primarily because each one has a different way that I’m looking for you to physically interact with the piece.

Alexandra Grant  When I was a graduate student at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, my arts education experience, I think like many young artists, was to be given an empty white box and then [was] sort of left to my own devices. And I had this question in my mind which was, “What will I care about in five years, ten years and twenty years and how can I figure out what that will be when no one is looking and when everybody’s looking?” And I sat in the studio and I really, I looked at the other students and I took the classes and what I realized that the thing I knew I would do that I had loved to do my entire life until graduate school was that I loved to read and that I wanted to imagine in that space of artistic practice is being a reader who then responded initially through painting and that has grown over the years, but to writers I admired. And it began with writers I didn’t know and then went on to be with writers with whom I’d collaborated. And then out of that grew the invitation to make artists’ books first for me and then the joy, the real joy, of working with other artists, right, and bringing my life experience to give the permission that I had been given to other artists and that incredible creativity that comes when you’re working with someone else. So, for me, I’m not sure if this is really answering the question, but it’s that how is reading, the dignity of the reader at the heart of the imagination. And often I’m just so touched by the idea that writing —it gets back to the biblical sense in the beginning was the word that the word is transformed when embodied. I often work with groups of people, and I do an exercise where I have everyone in the room draw a frog and then everyone has to show their frog and every frog is so different. So, when we think about like that if each one of us has a completely different frog inside then how are we even able to communicate in a sentence, like each word, if we embody it so differently? So, I guess it’s a complex and simple answer, that I keep returning to reading and that my source for any project comes from finding a process, finding materials, if there’s another person involved, finding the equal footing to be in exchange with that person around a passion for the written word and for the narrative, for the story.

Marcia Reed  It’s funny, I love reading—I mean my name, we just spelled one letter is wrong— but I actually love the idea of combining visual reading with reading text and that is maybe one of my favorite things about artists’ books is that they put that together also with format, so you’re reading in a different way. But I guess because I am an art historian, I think visual reading is really important as well as text.

Johanna Drucker  Yes, I think that’s really crucial, and, again, I think it’s one of the things that makes artists’ books somewhat problematic in terms of where they sit. It’s like, “Do they belong in the library?” or, “Do they belong in the museum?” or, “Do they belong in the gallery?” and if you put them in a case, you can’t read them. I would think as a curator Marcia, I’m also thinking about the dilemmas that you have when those people come to bring those books full of sand and <laughs> you’re like, “Well what happens when all the sand runs out, is it still the same book?”

<overlapping conversation>

Marcia Reed  I was trying to figure out, Alexandra, which one it was because we actually have several, we have “Holton Rowers” and we have a bunch of them. <laughs> But that’s part of the thing that somehow you have to allow that to happen. We have James Lee Byar’s book which is just filled with sparkle confetti and the experience of that book is, “Oh my god, it’s all over me.” And how could we allow that to happen in the reading room?

Johanna Drucker  Exactly. And then the books that self-destruct. Let’s see. The audience is interested in—well there’s a question about audience, how important is it to think about your audience when you’re making the work? It’s a fundamental artist author question, but do you all have thoughts on that?

Tia Blassingame  Oh my god, I haven’t been teaching for a semester, so I’m off. This is going to be how my fall is going to be. I apologize. For my own work, I think about this a lot like my target audience and who that is and how are they going to approach the work, is it going to be too precious for them to even want to touch it and things like that. So, I think about this a lot, and I have multiple audiences that I’m trying to reach. But in the end maybe the audience is anybody and everybody because you never know who’s going to see your book as appealing or curious. I also think a lot about those different types of target audiences and how far they’ll go in the book. I want them to go all the way through and through that journey, but they’re probably not because there are works that deal with issues of race and that’s challenging and most people want to avoid those conversations, right? And so, if they only get two pages in and then hands off, I still feel like I’ve had some impact on them and that they can move away from that experience and still be having a conversation about the subject matter even if it’s just, “Oh, I interacted with this book and it was kind of weird,” I still think I’ve reached them in some manner.

Johanna Drucker  Alexandra, you work as a publisher also, not just as an artist, and your relationship to books has involved a great deal of publishing decision-making, and I wonder if you think differently about audience when you’re thinking about publishing versus your own creative practice.

Alexandra Grant  I mean audience is such an amorphous, it’s an amorphous word, I often find that the audience is defined—you only define it after you’ve found them, right, so <laughs> they’re the people who love what you do. You know, one thing I mentioned that we published “The Words of Others” for REDCAT for the Getty’s PST Los Angeles Latin America and for me that book was such an extraordinary work, it was a nine-hour play, it involved three years of translation and research to find the sources, there were 200 sources collaged into this sort of found work. And what was interesting about the book is that the show that Ruth Estevez-Gomez curated was around the artist’s book and the exhibition catalog had a publisher, but the actual artist’s book that Leon Ferrari had—his family had allowed the team to translate into English for the first time didn’t have a publisher. And so, I thought, this question of audience came up for me then. It was like, “So there’s an audience for the secondary materials around this artist’s book, but there’s no publisher available for the artist’s book itself.” And we were able in our first year as a publishing house to step in to fill that void. And then it became up to us to find who the audience for the primary source was. And so, I found that a fascinating question around audience and distribution and publishing at a commercial level and then also this void, right? Someone said earlier that artists’ book are almost like—where do they fit? I love this question, “What are they, is it like a verb or a noun?” and none of us know and yet it’s everything, it should be in a library, it should be in someone’s hand, it should be in a Plexiglass. And so that question of our particular concern for this artist’s book is that it’s better almost not to know who the audience is, it’s better not to plan it out but that there are other likeminded people who one will identify. And that for me, the learning around “The Words of Others” really made that clear that a mainstream publisher wouldn’t want to get involved because of the fear of not knowing who the audience was. And so, the fearlessness of being an artists’ book publisher involved, “I don’t know, but I can’t wait to meet them.” <laughs> And I hope that we’ll be able to not only be good family to this book, but provide a family of other books that are bit orphaned—we take on a lot of orphaned books at X Artists’ Books, where someone will say, “Oh, I’ve been working on this for so many years and it’s been rejected 17,000 times.” And we didn’t know, we did a book with George Herms and Diane di Prima, it was the last or second to last book before Diane passed away and George said to me one day, “You know, we waited for you for 50 years,” and I said, “Well I wasn’t born.” But that idea that often with these very heterogeneous projects that don’t fit any neat hole, that we don’t know who the audience is. And actually, I feel wonderfully comfortable with it to be delighted when I meet them.

Johanna Drucker  I think what you’re saying also resonates a bit with what Marcia was saying earlier about books have long lives. They live longer than we do, and they find other audiences, completely unexpected audiences, and get received again and again in completely different cultural moments and historical frameworks. Susan, I want to give you a chance if you had something you wanted to say about audience for your work because, again, it’s got a somewhat different trajectory.

Susan Sironi  Well the first impression was that if I cut a book that’s very popular like say, “Alice in Wonderland” with the original illustrations, people who are familiar with that book, if I cut it up, they’re either going to love it or hate it because they’re going to feel like I’ve either trespassed or I have now enhanced—or they love the illustrations. So, I know that if I put something recognizable out, there’s an audience, but I don’t know how it will respond. So, I have to just kind of keep turning inward and say, “What do I need to say?” My books are going to be pretty selectively viewed through galleries and exhibitions, so I don’t see—my work doesn’t translate well online or in any other kind of form, so my audience is going to be someone who goes to see them, they will never come to them. So, it kind of puts the burden back on me, on making sure that my message is personal enough, but at the same time doesn’t alienate by being too personal.