One of my favorite blogs ever is the CONVIVIO BOOKWORKS blog. I love these guys, the work they make (so unlike mine, but so attentive to details and so crisp and clean in its letterpress work.) I love the letters they send out every once in awhile….just talking about what they are doing and why – and telling stories about their lives and work. I have never met them, but they have answered every email I have ever sent them, quickly – and as if I am a long lost friend that they have just been waiting to hear from. This is from an email I saved – because I love the phrase in bold -
We also just got a fresh supply of Shaker Herbs in for the Convivio Book of Days Catalog… The house smells just like the Herb House at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in Maine. Smell, great portal to memory.
This is a link to their latest project it…
http://www.conviviobookworks.com/pages/Works%20on%20Paper.html
This (in a very round about way) does bring me back to Tara’s blog and to Keith Smith.
Tara’s blog reflects her interests re: ideas and text. Even in her blog itself – there are not a lot of images …. and this is not a criticism …. because there are alot of ideas and thinking going on. She is honest – very honest. And she isn’t afraid to put herself out there and get messy with her thinking. I love this. It is where some hard work gets done and where some discoveries get made.
Text has played a major role in each of her projects this semester…the two she has finished as well as the one she is working on now. I have encouraged her to go back and read what Smith has to say about text – and I am going to share some of his thinking (and my own) here.
Smith outlines the ELEMENTS of the book….
the binding (the binding determines the type of book)
the pages
text and/or pictures
turning pages
display
He continues, “Like the formal elements within the single picture, the elements of the book function work in union to create the book. Each element must be conceived as part of and helps determine the other elements.
Picture, and/or text must be incorporated into the pages. If a writer hands material to a publisher, it is merely stuck into pages as convenient packaging.
Words should not be housed, but revealed by the (book) format.”
Let’s look at it another way as well….a book houses content…but in the genre of bookart – the book becomes the content as well. (not just the packaging).
Thomas McEvilley – in a riff on Wallace Steven’s 13 Ways of Looking at A Blackbird, wrote about 13 ways that we determine content in looking at art work. Very applicable to looking at our books – and in thinking about the elements of these final projects. The ( ) are my questions/comments to you.
1. Content that arises from the aspect of the artwork that is understood as representational. (DO we see nature based on how we have seen it represented in art?)
2. Content arising from verbal supplements supplied by the artist. (Title, what the artist says/writes)
3. Content arising from the genre or medium of the artwork. (How do we come to a painting vs. a book? How is a digital book different than a physical book – aside from the obvious?)
4. Content arising from the material of which the artwork is made. (When, for example, a jeweler works in some other medium than gold, because gold mining is damaging to the environment and does not return profits to the miners themselves.)
5. Content arising from the scale of the artwork. (Especially relevant for land art, earthworks. What about works at the nanoscale?)
6. Content arising from the temporal duration of the artwork. (Virtual work, Film, video, performance, music?)
7. Content arising from the context of the work. (Such as site specific work)
8. Content arising from the work’s relationship with art history. (A piece that specifically references something that came before it. Altered books in some cases – look at Smith’s examples of altered books made using Jansen’s History of Art.)
9. Content that accrues to the work as it progressively reveals its destiny through persisting in time. (Duchamp added content to the Mona Lisa – altered books, again)
10. Content arising from participation in a specific iconographic tradition. (Certain colors or forms, or even subjects, have a particular meaning (very similar to context)
11. Content arising directly from the formal properties of the work. (A Pollock drip painting asserts flux and indefiniteness of identity as qualities that can be found in the world.. Sherman photographs for a certain period formally reference 50′s film stills)
12. Content arising from attitudinal gestures (wit, irony, parody, and so on) that may appear as qualifiers of any of the categories already mentioned. (for eg., Natural Born Killers, which tells the story of a pair of mass murderers while parodying various media forms like TV sitcoms…)
13. Content rooted in biological or physiological responses, or in cognitive awareness of them. (Sexual arousal, disgust, visual responses like persistence of vision (when you stare at an image composed of complements and then look at a white wall and still see it, but with colors reversed) op art)
In making this book I struggled with paper weight and paper color. I am not a fan of yellowish looking papers which was the choice for the first book, so i chose a whiter paper. This paper was a heavier weight and in turn created some issues with the smaller books fitting in the case. The content in the book is somewhat mysterious and isn’t very literal but follows along with common numerology symbols that have been used for the numbers 1-4 over the centuries. I really did enjoy making the content for this book, it was probably my favorite part.