JAB41-45 | Jabartistsbooks

JAB41 – JAB45 on this page, keep scrolling down.

JAB41

JAB41, spring 2017, was offset printed on the Heidelberg GTO (eine farben) at the Center for Book, Paper, & Print / Columbia College Chicago by BF.

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INTRO

Felipe Ehrenberg designed the cover of this issue, appropriately, because of the essay by Mila Waldeck published here “Perfect Unbinding: The Production and Circulation of Beau Geste Press Editions,” which offers a detailed history of BGP, founded by Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion (seen here on the right). As Waldeck demonstrates in her essay, Helen Chadwick, David Mayor, and Takako Saito were also founding members of the collaborative BGP in 1971. Beau Geste Presse produced many landmark artists’ books including work by Ulises Carrión, Carolee Schneemann, Ken Friedman, Cecilia Vicuña, and many more. One thing that connects BGP with JAB is that we both produce—design, print, distribute—the published work, and this hands-on quality contributes immensely to our conceptualization of the book as art.
The Books Reviews section includes reviews of fourteen artists’ books. I wish there could have been more reviews of the many books sent to JAB but lack of time and finding good writers unfortunately limits this activity.
Nine artists’ books are inserted with this JAB. Including artists’ books has been a growing trend with JAB and . . .

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"PERFECT UNBINDING:

THE PRODUCTION AND CIRCULATION OF BEAU GESTE PRESS EDITIONS"

by Mila Waldeck

In the 1970s, the publishing house Beau Geste Press produced and distributed a diverse range of artists’ books within a significantly international group of readers and contributors. As much as possible, the press aimed at not interfering with the contributors’ works, as publishing was associated with artistic freedom. This study focuses on the creation and circulation of Beau Geste Press editions, asking to what extent the printing process was embodied in the artists’ authorship. Primary sources of the Mayor / Fluxshoe / Beau Geste Press collection held at the Tate Gallery Archive indicate that the press and its contributors worked collaboratively, hence the printing process tended to be integrated in the published artwork. The role of the author and the publisher were less central and leading at Beau Geste Press, compared to other publishing models from the history of books. As a publisher of artists’ books, Beau Geste Press worked in the intersection between the art world and the publishing channel, yet the assimilation of the editions is different in each one of these spheres.

Before and after Langford Court
The publishing house Beau Geste Press was founded in 1971 in Britain and issued approximately seventy-five titles 1 in five years. Its name is a reference to its first printing machine, a Gestetner mimeograph duplicator which, conversely, was also called “Beau Geste.” 2 This is indicative of the key role of the printing process at the press, whose history can be schematically divided into two phases due to differences in organization and production along the years. The literature on the press has underlined its connection with the Fluxus group, as well as the international artists’ network involved in its editions, particularly in the magazine Schmuck, one of its most well-known titles (Conwell 2010; Debroise and Medina 2007; Gilbert 2012). Throughout different analyses articulated in this literature, the organization of Beau Geste Press as a community of artists has been commonly emphasized.

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Artists’ Books inserted in JAB41

• Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene

– Phil Zimmermann

• I’m about to “read” a PHOTO book

– Doug Spowart

• our PHENOMENAL world

– Kevin Riordan

• A’s Rosen War

– Alan D. Caesar

• Diffract

– AK Milroy & Brad Freeman

• trumped up empathy

– Tim Mosely, AK Milroy & BF (we ran out of copies so there might not be one)

• NANCY REAGAN IS KILLING ME

– Charles Long

• Accoutrement

– Stephen DeSantis

• breathe

– Levi Sherman

• • • • •

Table of contents

• From the Editor

• Perfect Unbinding: The Production and Circulation of Beau Geste Press Editions
– Mila Waldeck

BOOK REVIEWS

• Blurred Library by Tate Shaw
– review by Johanna Drucker

• breathe. by Levi Sherman
– review by Charles Long

• Pyrolysis by Carley Gomez and Levi Sherman
– review by Ian Kerstetter

• A Year Or So by Karol Shewmaker
– review by Willa Goettling

• Nine Artists’ Books published by Éditions Incertain Sens
– review by Isabel Baraona

• Secrets Inside Shadows by Julie Nauman-Mikulski
– review by Rebecca Hill

• • • • •

breathe. by Levi Sherman
review by Charles Long

Eleven is the number of pages in Levi Sherman’s 2014 zine breathe. It is also the number of times a man named Eric Garner told NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo that he couldn’t BREATHE on July 17th, 2014. Eric Garner died as a result of that long prohibited chokehold, his chest being compressed by three of officer Pantaleo’s accomplices on his back and what I’ve heard described as ‘poor health’ due to his weight. I find Sherman’s zine to be compelling in its execution, hauntingly poignant in its ephemeral nature and at the same time I’m troubled with the ramifications of it in hindsight. It simultaneously invigorates a passion for the democratic multiple within me, while causing me to wonder if something this fleeting can ever truly hold the impact that police violence has on Black life in the US. Overall it stands as an engaging example of what book/print artist can manufacture as a result of the often convoluted stories that make up our shared existence, while making me question our role as makers in commenting on them.
The zine opens with a video still of Eric Garner being choked by Officer Pantaleo in the first two panel spread, the following panel zooms in closer on Mr. Garners’ face and the Mr Pantaleos’ chokehold, the fourth panel a pixelated focus on Garners’ face strained with Pantaleos’ arm around his neck. In the next series of shots we are again zoomed out to see Mr Pantaleo still choking Mr Garner who is now on the ground as three other officers surround him on all sides.
The next shot zooms in closer until we arrive at the final image in this triptych where we see Garner on his side with his hand palm up, out stretched towards us almost pleading with us to help him up.
The next series of images returns to Garner’s hand, here we encounter the first text “He,” the next panel more zoomed in reads “They,” the next zoomed in even further reads “You” until we arrive at an image clearly focussed on the hand that reads “We.” On the final page of this side we are left with a completely blurred landscape, where we can barely make out the title breathe.
As we move to the other side of the zine we are confronted with blurred text that through the pages begins to clear up to finally read “I can’t breathe.” On the back cover we find a colophon where Mr. Sherman states “In memory of Eric Garner. In response to the continuation of racist violence in the U.S. and around the world.” This is the first and only indication we get towards maker and subject matter, up until this point there seems to be an implied assumption that we are familiar with the incident being discussed in the zine.
Sherman’s handling of the video stills and “I can’t breathe.” verbiage in combination with the structure works excellently to convey the last moments of Eric Garner’s life. Also his use of the He, They, You, We text seems to implicate us all and call into question if he can’t breathe maybe we can’t either. This drawing in of the reader via text and image zooms is a clever device of the zine and it’s tiny size really lends itself to being passed from person to person very readily. It is in all these ways I find breathe. to be successful but some of these same points on further investigation trouble both the viewer and maker in me.
The colophon states “In memory of Eric Garner . . . ” which for me is only half true, this zine seems to speak more to the memory of his death and less about the man himself. The zine tells us literally nothing about who this man was, the why of his depicted circumstances and nothing about the surrounding cast of players that are implicated in the imagery. Personally I am/was familiar with the case and know that Mr. Garner was being arrested for selling loose cigarettes that day on Staten Island, however while writing this review I had to look up the actual date and Officer Pantaleo’s name. So what does it mean to create memorial objects that in and of themselves may fade or disappear like our memories, particularly when we are discussing ideas of police violence and racism.
As an artist I’m particularly interested in practices that allow for my own processing of world events to become public information and for my works to be as widely available as possible.
I believe that on this project Mr. Sherman attempted to process the impact of killings of Blacks at the hands of police in the U.S. and abroad, but breathe. in its miniature size and lack of background information seems to minimize the impact of Eric Garner’s death. If our goal is to cause our readers to memorialize things what does it mean to make ephemeral objects that in and of themselves are meant to be fleeting?

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Felipe Ehrenberg, JAB41 cover

from left to right: Bernadette Panek, Martha Hellion, & Felipe Ehrenberg
at the conference Perspectivas do Livro de Artista,
Escola del Belas Artes da UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2011
photo–BF

Charles Long, Nancy Reagan is Killing Me, 2016

Mila Waldeck, "Perfect Unbinding: The Production and Circulation of Beau Geste Press Editions"

Levi Sherman, breathe. 2017

Helen Chadwick and David Mayor.

Door to Door (first and last spreads), 1973, 16 × 20 cm. Beau Geste Press.
Image reproduced with permission of David Mayor.

General Schmuck , 1975

Magazine spread by Jarosław Kozłowski

General Schmuck was compiled and arranged by Felipe Ehrenberg and David Mayor.

Layout work and platemaking completed by David Mayor.

Printed and bound by Takako Saito. 21 × 29,5 cm. Beau Geste Press.

Source: The British Library. Image courtesy of Matt’s Gallery and Jarosław Kozłowski.

some of the artists' books in JAB41

top: Phil Zimmermann, Anthropocene

bottom left: Kevin Riordan, Our Phenomenal World

bottom center: AK Milroy & BF, Diffract

bottom right: Alan D. Caesar, A’s Rosen War

Phil Zimmermann, Anthropocene

Stephen DeSantis, Accoutrement

Doug Spowart, I'm about to 'read' a PHOTO book

Book Reviewers

Johanna Drucker Charles Long

Ian Kerstetter Willa Goettling

Isabel Baraona Rebecca Hill

JAB42

JAB42, fall 2017, offset printed on the Heidelberg GTO (eine farben) at the Center for Book, Paper and Print / Columbia College Chicago by BF.

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Table of Contents

• Betwixt & Between

– <usus>: Uta Schneider & Ulrike Stoltz

• Memorandum: From Concept to Publication

– Ana Paula Estrada

• Handling Folds: An Intimate Encounter

– Bridget Hillebrand

• A Lively Phantom

– Marian Crawford

• Weaving the Archive: Some Notes on the Artist's Books of Louise Bourgeois

– Márcia Oliveira

• • • • •

Inserted Artist Books

• The Past is Better Than the Present and the Future is Nowhere

– Chris George

• The Walls are Talking

– Rick Rowland

• Paper Architecture

– Karen Wirth

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JAB42 cover, AIC, BF

DRP at AIC

BF–photo

<usus>: Uta Schneider & Ulrike Stoltz

"betwixt & between"

left: Ana Paula Estrada

"Memorandum: From Concept to Production"

right: Dr. Bridget Hillebrand

"Handling Folds: An Intimate Encounter"

Three artists' books in JAB42

Karen Wirth, Paper Architecture

Rick Rowland, the walls are talking

Chris George

The Past is Better Than the Present and the Future is Nowhere

Rick Rowland, the walls are talking

Chris George,

The Past is Better Than the Present and the Future is Nowhere

Karen Wirth, Paper Architecture

JAB43

JAB43, spring 2018 was offset printed on the Heidelberg GTO (eine farben) at the Center for Book, Paper and Print / Columbia College Chicago. The paper, as per usual, is Mohawk Superfine.

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JAB43 contains a combination of writing about artists' books and actual artist books. This issue includes to artists' publications made especially for this issue: Isabel Baraona's untitled (or not) Song of Myself and WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE by Judy Barass.

Isabel Baraona (from Portugal) spent two weeks here at the Center for Book and Paper on a residency in early 2017 with the express purpose of working on a book for insertion into JAB. Her idea was to have excerpts of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself printed on small sheets that would be inserted between the bigger pages of (enlarged) letterpress cuts that she had chosen from our vast collection. (see photo on right) The cuts have an American tenor and Baraona's interleaving of Song and the enlarged cuts offers her impression of American culture. (There may be a similarity between this method of re-purposing and the Gysin/Burroughs' cut-up process. See Marianne Dagos's essay "The Artist's Book as Third Mind" starting on page 3.

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Table of Contents

• The Artist's Book as Third Mind

– Marianne Dages

• The Knowing of Artists' Books

– Monica Carroll and Adam Dickerson

• Bea Nettles:

Performing Identity through Mystical Storytelling

– Melanie E. Emerson

Book Reviews

• Inland Sea by Mary Clare Butler

– Rebecca Hill

• Pequenas Estorios by Isabel Baraona

– Willa Goettling

• The Blind Man 100th Anniversary Facsimile Edition, edited by Sophie Seita, published by Ugly Duckling Press

– Rebecca Hill

Artists' Books that are a part of JAB43

• Untitled–Song of Myself–Walt Whitman

– Isabel Baraona

• With God on Our Side

– Judy Barass

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From "The Knowing of Artists' Books"

by Monica Carroll and Adam Dickerson

One and the same thing can truthfully be described in several different ways. So, with artists’ books. An artist book can be described as a material object, possessing certain characteristics —as being of a certain size and shape, made from such-and-such materials. An artist book can be described as the product of certain processes undertaken by the artist —something created by doing such-and-such. An artist book can also be described as an aesthetic expression —perhaps of urban alienation, of a search for narrative meanings in a life, of an exploration of spatial or haptic possibilities, and so on.

If we examine the critical literature, we find these three modes of description are the dominant ways of talking about artists’ books. As they are alternative ways of talking about the same thing, we are not forced to choose one mode over another —that is, it is not as if the truth of one mode of description means that the other modes are false or inapplicable. However, it does seem likely that the mode of description that is given priority, or predominates, will tend to have an impact on such things as book artists’ self-conceptions, on the kinds of artists’ books that are made or held up as exemplars of the form, on thoughts about the value of artists’ books, their relationships to other art forms, on the role of the reader, on the ways that artists’ books should be exhibited, and so on. That is, the mode or modes we choose to describe artists’ books matters.

In this paper we propose another mode of describing artists’ books —or, equivalently, an alternative way of conceptualising such works. We propose a mode of description that foregrounds the epistemic roles or epistemic properties of artists’ books.

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Marianne Dages, "The Artist's Book as Third Mind"

Isabel Baraona (solid blue shirt) JAB artist-in-residence
Kate Morgan, Print Production Fellow
Vandercook No. 4, Center for Book & Paper, 2017, photo–BF

Isabel Baraona, Untitled–Song of Myself–Walt Whitman, 2017

Judy Barass, With God on Our Side, 2017

JAB44

JAB44, fall 2018, and the two included artist books were offset printed on the Heidelberg GTO (eine farben) at the Center for Book and Paper / Columbia College Chicago by BF. The paper (as per usual) is Mohawk Superfine.

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Table of Contents

• JAB44 Introduction

– BF

• Photograph—Mary Clare Butler’s ABD 360 offset press in action, August, 2018, Chicago (see below)

• Lessons Learned to Pass On: Mentors and Curators
– Johanna Drucker

• About the Intellectual Reproducibility of an Artist’s Book: Methodological Considerations and Generative Properties
– Claire Gauzente

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ARTIST BOOKS included with JAB44

• JAB HATCH

– Celene Aubry, BF, April Sheridan, and the printers at Hatch Show Print

• The Fall

– Johanna Drucker and BF

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INTRODUCTION

In her essay “Lessons Learned to Pass On: Mentors and Curators” Johanna Drucker examines some issues surrounding the identification and acquisition of artist books especially in relation to collections and exhibitions by focusing on the groundbreaking work of Clive Phillpot and Judith Hoffberg starting in the 1970s. She also writes about (among other things) the mentorship genius of the bookdealer Tony Zwicker who had a profound effect on many book artists, including myself.
Claire Gauzente, in her text “About the Intellectual Reproducibility of an Artist’s Book,” writes about the possibility of intellectualy reproducing an artist book based on “ . . . reading about the processes, schemes and documentation pertaining to the making of the [pre-existing] book . . . ” This highly speculative essay provides ways of thinking about creativity and production that may provide guidance for book artists.

TWO ARTIST BOOKS WITH JAB44:
JAB HATCH and THE FALL

JAB HATCH
The colophon was originally printed on the inside back cover but the overprinting obscured it to the point of illegibility. Oooops—reprinted here:
COLOPHON - JAB HATCH
The outside cover consists of make-ready letterpress printed at Hatch Show Print during 2016. Each cover is unique and represents some of the many posters designed and printed at Hatch.
On the front cover, the title JAB HATCH, was letterpress printed at the Center for Book, Paper & Print / Columbia College Chicago by April Sheridan and Brad Freeman in February 2017. The woodtype font is Streamer No. 21 made by William H. Page—based on the face Unique. Thanks to David Shields for this information. http://www.woodtyperesearch.com/unique/
The text block consists of set-up sheets from past JABs overprinted during the previous few years and then overprinted again with photo/images of Hatch Show Print and from a film of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s Space Light Modulator at the Art Institute of Chicago. The inside cover, with photography and design by BF, was offset printed on the Heidelberg GTO (eine farben) in CMYK at CBPP. The paper is Mohawk Superfine ultrawhite smooth throughout.
In order to be more precise about the production of JAB HATCH some amendments to the colophon include:
• After the initial CMYK printing of the front and back inside cover, green and purple spot colors as concentric circles and a gradation of tone were overprinted—the plates were double-burned which added an interesting fading affect.
• I created the concentric circles/moire patterns in Photoshop—kind of a printer’s joke and an imagined merging of letterpress imagery with offset and computer technology.
• The lined, ledger-like paper is Monadnock Dulcet that was printed as part of a previous artist project which didn’t pan out.
• Some of the overprinting images are from photos taken in my studio, backyard, and living room.
• How did the collaboration between JAB and Hatch Show Print come about? As stated on the inside front cover of JAB HATCH, “April said if you’re going to Nashville you should go see Celene at Hatch.” At the time (January 2016) April Sheridan and I were colleagues here at the Center for Book & Paper, and Celene Aubry used to print in our letterpress studio until she became the shop manager at Hatch Show Print. When I was in Nashville for the College Book Art Associatioin meeting in January 2016 I visited Hatch and Celene gave a tour of the facilities. And of course it occurred to me that a JAB/HATCH collaboration would be cool—luckily Celene did too. The printers at Hatch spent a year overprinting on cover sheets I had sent to them for this purpose. Set-up sheets generally have an appealing visual quality with all sorts of random overprinting, so this was done on purpose with the idea that eventually they would become the cover for the collaboration. After the year of overprinting the covers were sent to Chicago and April and I (as stated in the colophon) printed the JAB HATCH title, first in letterpress and then in offset.
• Celene Aubry wrote "A HISTORY OF HATCH SHOW PRINT" which was printed offset, silver ink on black paper, and then the pages were inserted between the larger pages.
• The original letterpress printing of the title on the cover didn’t work out as well as planned so I offset printed a black background on top. Then I scanned the title we had letterpress printed and offset printed the title ON TOP of the letterpress version. If you look closely the punch of the letterpress can be seen—slightly out of register with the offset title.
• In response to the Hatch letterpress overprinting on the cover (so luscious!) there are various combinations of random and planned offset overprintings in JAB HATCH.
• Binding by the amazing Mirjana Ursulesku and BF.

THE FALL
Text composed by Johanna Drucker through compression as derivatives from two different sources: news stories between November 8, 2016, the day Donald Trump was elected, and April 25, 2017, three months into his presidency, and from Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 1, published 1776. The text in this book is derived from the Gutenberg online file which is identified as written in 1782 and published posthumously in 1845 with notes and revision by Reverend H.H. Milman. Source text is: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/731/731-h/731-h.htm#link2HCH0001 The contrasts and comparisons are obvious.

Design, photographs, digital collages, and production—Brad Freeman. Offset printed on the Heidelberg GTO at the Center for Book, Paper & Print, Columbia College Chicago, in spring & summer 2018. THE FALL is published as an insert with JAB44 (fall 2018).

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BF–JAB44 cover

Mary Clare Butler–Fata Morgana Press

ABDick 360 offset press in action

Chicago–August, 2018

JAB HATCH, cover, variable edition

Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman, The Fall, 2018

JAB45

JAB45, spring 2019, and the eight inserted artists' books were offset printed on the Heidelberg GTO at the Center for Book, Paper & Print / Columbia College Chicago by BF.

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Cover–JAB45

The cover was letterpress and offset printed at CBPP–the woodtype is from the CBPP collection. The concentric circles were created in Photoshop and the yellow background was created from a photo of sand.

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Table of Contents

• JAB45 Introduction

– BF

• Book = Book

– Debra Riley Parr

• Smelling Paper & Ink: The Fragrance of the Medium

– Debra Riley Parr

• Exercise 1 (artist intervention)

– Claire Yspol

• Call and Response: Teaching Artists' Books at the Joan Flasch Artists' Books Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

– Doro Boehme and April Sheridan

• Augusto Mora's Graphic Novels

– Brad Freeman

• Artists' Books in the UCLA Arts Library:

A Personal Journey of Learning and Rediscovery

– Robert Gore

• Formation: Guild of Book Workers Traveling Exhibition

– Neill Herring

• Exercise 2 (artist intervention)

– Claire Yspol

• Some Artist Books by Thomas Sowden

– Debra Riley Parr

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Artists' Books Included with JAB45

• H. Sapiens

– Clyde McGill

• Einstein's Swan: The Professor's Lecture

– F. Deschamps

• THIRTY-SIX VIEWS OF #MTFUJI

– Thomas Sowden

• ink blot bug book

– Clare Day

• Natural Selection or Everything You'll Never Know

– Hazel Grainger

• william points

– Matthew Robertson

• river mouth (a handbook)

– Martin Thomas

• concerning roundabouts

– Conor Wilson

• • • • •

"Call and Response: Teaching Artists' Books at the Joan Flasch Artists' Books Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago" (an excerpt)

Doro Boehme and April Sheridan

Overview

The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, housed within the Flaxman Library, is an instructional collection of over 12,000 artists’ publications that fall under the broadest possible definition of the term. Located a mere stone’s throw north of the former JAB headquarters, if you can throw hard, it welcomes any patron walking in the door unannounced and at no charge. The six thousand visitors per year run the gamut from unsuspecting high school students seeking inspiration for a zine project to users with extensive knowledge of the field and who are coming to us with a specific research focus; the material we have amassed over the past half century informs both of them. Our goal is to provide a representative overview of past and current production in this ever-expanding and prolific area of artistic output and to exemplify a variety of media platforms; it is not to build a comprehensive archive of any single press or publisher or to collect the work of any individual artist exhaustively.

Since the late 1960s, when library staff first acquired titles from reputable publishers such as Something Else Press or the likes of Hansjörg Mayer, the collection has grown consistently and rapidly. Expanding on its geographically narrow North American and Euro-centric core of titles, acquisition endeavors over the last decade have included artists’ publishing initiatives from other parts of the globe. The collection now has works in about 65 languages. Being one of several special collections and archives on SAIC’s campus, the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection allows visitors to interact directly with works of art. The output by faculty, staff, students, and local practitioners is as cherished as, and resides in parity alongside, the work of internationally known artists such as Kara Walker, Christina de Middel, Alec Soth, Yinka Shonibare, Roni Horn, and Dieter Roth.

• • • • •

"BOOK=BOOK" (an excerpt)

Debra Riley Parr

What if a book could just be a book? Other ways of asking the same question might be to speculate what specifically is needed in order to call something a book, or, when is a book properly a book? What is absolutely necessary for “bookness” to be established? What is the medium specificity of the book? (2) Does the attentiveness of artists toward the form of the book signal the end of the form or an expansion of the field? Does this concern with a pointed self-consciousness align with other aesthetic imperatives at the time the artist’s book emerges as a site for artistic inquiry and labor? These remain vexing questions, even now after more than a century of artists’ books, since the definition of the book as a form is inextricably tied to its history as a vehicle for storing communications of all sorts, including information not entirely suitable to the form or to the medium. (3)

These questions hover over Book = Book, an exhibition on the artist’s book qua book that Brad Freeman and I curated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection in the Flaxman Library in March, 2018. (4) While the current moment is decidedly post-medium, and has been for a while now, our selections for the exhibition seen collectively manifest a desire in this post-medium context to see the book as a medium, as material, and as a structure. The selections demonstrate and even insist on the medium in clever, compelling, and at times in funny ways, as in Joan Lyons’ and Philip Zimmermann’s book Spine (1979). (5) Lyons admits, “We used every book-related bad pun and miserable metaphor we could think of.” (6) The word “spine” obviously refers to the backbone, that bony support of vertebrate bodies. It also refers to the critical juncture at the outside edge of a book where pages are gathered and bound. Functionally in most books the spine provides an anchor, but also a hinge, allowing the pages to open and close. Spine, however, is hilariously spine-less; it does not have a spine, but is rather an unbound book—a tabloid, really—of four folded full sheets of 11×17 paper offset printed on both sides. (7) Seen in another way, however, Spine does indeed have a spine, in its title, and in that it includes the word “spine” along with an image of an x-ray of a human spine, bringing attention to the potential connections between the book and the human body, but also to a playful sense of semiotic slippage. Printed in an edition of 400, on the occasion of an artist’s book conference at the Visual Studies Workshop, Spine catalogues—in primer-like fashion—other parts of the book: the dust jacket, gutter, fly leaf, end paper: a witty naming of parts, and a reminder, of the flexible medium of the book, with spine or without.

Footnotes

2. See Clement Greenberg’s concern with specificity, and the conditions under which a painting becomes an object, in “Towards a New Laocoön,” Partisan Review, July-August 1940, and in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review, Fall 1940.
3. See Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, New York: Granary Books, 1995.
4. https://flaxman.omeka.net/items/show/201
5. The books that appeared in the exhibition include:
• Isabel Baraona, Pequeñas Estorias, 2017.
• Isabel Baraona, “Untitled,” Journal of Artists’ Books 35 (JAB35), 2014.
• Fortunato Depero, Depero Futurista / The Bolted Book [facsimile], Thames and Hudson, (1927/2016)
• Helen Douglas and Zoë Irvine, Illiers Combray, Yarrow, Scotland: Aeolus and Weproductions, 2004.
• Helen Douglas and Telfer Stokes, Chinese Whispers, London: Weproductions, 1976.
• Helen Douglas and Telfer Stokes, Clinkscale, Yarrow, Scotland: Weproductions, 1977.
• Helen Douglas and Marina Warner, A Venetian Brocade, Yarrow, Scotland: Weproductions, 2010.
• Johanna Drucker, The Word Made Flesh, New York: Granary Press, [facsimile], 1989/1996.
• Roni Horn, Index Cixous: cix pax, Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2005.
• Katja Khramova, Hört mal her! Ein Gedicht von Wladimir Majakowski (Listen over here ! A poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky), Halle, Germany: Katja Khramova, 2014.
• Kim Sooja, Hari no onna = Needle Woman, Kitakyushu, Japan: Center for Contemporary Art, 2000.
• Joan Lyons and Philip Zimmermann, Spine, Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop, 1979.
• Stéphane Mallarmé, “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard” [facsimile], Seattle: Wave Books, 1897/2015.
• Vladimir Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky, For the Voice [facsimile] Cambridge: MIT Press, 1923/2000.
• Suzanne E. Pastor, Untitled, 2003.
• Klaus Scherübel, Mallarmé, het boek, New York: Printed Matter, 2004.
• Joan Wolbier, Arachne / Amaranth, True Grid Editions, 1983.
6. Joan Lyons, https://joanlyons.com/spine.html
7. See http://www.spaceheat.com/books/spine for a brief description and video of the book by Phil Zimmermann. The book was offset printed by Tom Sullivan on the occasion of the 1979 Independent Publishing Conference at the Visual Studies Workshop. It sold for $2.50.
8. For an extended essay on the post-medium condition of Broodthaers’ film.