Artists' Bookworks

Summary: A university printmaking teacher shows students special collection of books sometimes called Artists' Books. The books feature the use of printmaking in their creative design, illustration and uses of traditional and new technologies. 4701 Words. 21047 Characters. 8 Pages.

Bill Ritchie as narrator: This is Bill Ritchie. You are about to hear the soundtrack from the videotape, "Artists' Bookworks." The video tape shows Sandra Kroupa and myself at the rare books collection at the Suzallo Library in Seattle. We're joined by Mare Blocker; she's one of the people whose creative, one-of-a-kind books are in the collection.

We're speaking to a group of students who were taking my printmaking classes when I was a professor on the campus at the University of Washington. The video was recorded in 1984. Now, here's the soundtrack from the 30 minute, color video, "Artists' Bookworks."

Bill Ritchie: Okay I want to start my formal speech by welcoming you to the conference room here at Suzzallo Library to look at these examples of the Artist's Books. Sandra Kroupa, here, is the librarian, who maintains and catalogs and even buys these books to build a part of the rare books collection that addresses interests of students of contemporary art.

Sandra Kroupa: The rare book collection is a non-browsing and a non-circulating collection, which means you can't actually just walk to the shelves and take things off, so this is an opportunity for you to see a little bit of the kinds of the thing that we collect. We collect a wide variety of materials, but we specialize in modern book arts.

Bill: We have a special guest with us. Mare Blocker, who's one of the really quite a few book artists in Seattle. But Mare Blocker is an interesting individual, because her history, as I understand it from our short acquaintance, is really in ceramic art. Mare, would you mind coming over here and introduce yourself and also see if you can tell us how you got in to it?

Mare Blocker: I sort of stumbled into book arts because it was connected with a textile degree that I was working on. I was getting into ceramics and textiles. I stumbled into it, and I hated bookbinding to begin with and then I just started making more books and I sent one out that is similar to this one to Chicago Art Institute, a show that they were having in eighty-one.

I came down here more on my own, then I started bringing stuff to Sandi to have her look at it to buy. Sandi talked me into buying a press. It is hard for me because I'm not the buying type. Then things started to balloon. Then I got a rabbit, because Sandra had one!

Bill: I heard you mention "laying flat" several times and also the notion that it should be protected. Does this suppose to lay flat or do you like it to stand up? Wel--I suppose that you are going to tell us that we could have it any way we like it?

Mare: No I prefer to have it standing. The reason is started, well first of all I like the format of this folding idea when I started making these recording books. I have collected beads and little trinkets and stuff since I was really tiny. I always liked to put those things in my books and spread them around. I think that this kind style of binding, well it doesn't really protect these beads when they shut but it is flexible enough so that it doesn't crush them really. When it goes in its Library of Congress case.

Bill: Where is this Library of Congress case?

Sandra: It's promised. Yes, it's promised. This one is my favorite one of those three, I think.

Bill as narrator: Whenever you hear music on this audio tape of a soundtrack video, it means that the video is showing a book. On the screen now you would be seeing "Triangle Box", an art work, a book work, by Sandy Ludberg. Now, back to the soundtrack.

Bill: Well, I came to Sandra, as I remember the first reaction to my question, "Do you have artist's books?" Was, "What do you mean by 'artists book'?" So then I fished out this article [Ulises Carrion, "Artists Bookworks" 1981] and then I said, "See, its in print. There is such a thing as artists books!"

She said, "Well, okay. But what makes that different." And so this discussion goes on and on in the meantime we had speakers come in through her connections with the Northwest Book Arts Guild.

Yet there is another audience for those, for the subject of binding coming from the artists--the artists you see downtown in the art galleries. We were able to establish that she really should fish around and find these special books for the students in printmaking. That's why you're here today.

But you have to be conscious of the book and its place in the artist's field. If possible even take it further, because the equivalent of the book in the future--this is futurism now--will take the shape of the electronic form. This I guarantee will happen.

Sandra's role in all this--not to prevent it--she's not interested in preventing that; she's interested in seeing that this tradition be maintained. The trick as we are all interested in is how to maintain traditions of the arts in the face of change in technologies.

Sandra: One of the things that is important in the books that we got out is that I continually want to be conscious of is that, as a printmaker, frequently what you'll make is multiples to hang on a wall somewhere, maybe in groups, maybe singly, that people have to go and approach. There's usually something between them and the print, glass or Plexiglas or something.

The person that made this piece (she is holding a book for the audience as an example) actually allows you to turn the pages and change the arrangement, to some extent, of the pages and what it wraps around. You have a personal feel of what is happening to the person who is actually is using your book.

I think that seems to be what a lot of the book artists I know like about the book format. It is something that gets closed up and is kind of secretive and it can be opened up and manipulated in some way and it is a very personal object. But you can still make more than one of them.

Bill: The first entry that a lot of students make into this is coming from the art school. The art school calling itself the visual arts school, is through the illustrations. Most of the people represented in this group are basically printmakers. We're talking about people who are doing wood engraving, woodcuts, etchings, a little bit of silk-screen work - [though] not a lot.

On the subject of illustration, this book is an example of etched plates which were printed relief. That's come up a couple of times in the etching class already. That the etched plate needn't be printed in intaglio, as most etchings are printed. This etching is printed in relief.

One reason is that most common typography is printed relief, so it is easier to print a plate along with the typography in the same press, whether than having to separate the two printing processes. Here's an etched plate, printed relief.

One of the subjects that has come up over the last week, that I've been stressing is, that the way a plate is made by etching or engraving doesn't necessarily mean that you have to print it in intaglio. Plate making and print making are two separate fields, even . . . they could be done by two different people. The etcher can make the plate, the printer can print the plate. Or you can be "schizophrenic," Tuesdays you make plates, Wednesdays you print them.

Sandra: Because to some extent, if you're a printmaker and you're making images and you have to go to someone else to print words--if you want words to go with it--you have to have a collaboration, which can sometimes be very profitable.

Bill narrates: Now on the screen are the words, "These artists collaborated to create the artists book, 'The Seminary' Dennis Evans, Keith Beckley and Jeffrey Bishop." Mare tells how she got involved. Then you would hear Dennis, Sandra and Keith describe their book and the installation of which the book was a part.

Bill to Mare: I think it is interesting that you're the binder who's going to put together that book called "The Seminary." Can you tell how you were approached and what you found it to be and how it turned out?

Mare: Well...Dennis, I guess Dennis talked to you about trying to find a binder and then he went to Sandy and she suggested three people. I went to Dennis's house and saw the project and I talked to him. He wanted just a binding. I talked him into letting me design a case for the binding as well as doing the binding. The case that I've designed is in the shape of the floor plan for his piece.

Video cuts to interview of Keith Beckley and Dennis Evans by Sandra Kroupa. They are seated around a low table, the artists' book open in front of them. Dennis Evans is speaking first.

Dennis Evans: Three of us, Jeffrey Bishop, Keith and myself did a huge environmental installation, that was 40 . . . took a room 40 foot square to show it. It was shown in Bellingham, at the Whatcom Museum. This thing is a companion to that piece.

To us it acts like an illuminated manuscript which is a companion to a cathedral or like the plan of St. Gall . . . that book that they published. This is, in our own 1984 way, is the plan of "The Seminary," which we did. But it was more than a building in this thing that we built. It wasn't just an architecture thing.

It's about words and about the origin of words and the place where words originate, then are transplanted out. It's also based on the notion of a seminary as a place of propagation and trans-plantings, so we use gardens as a motive. And we set up a . . .

Sandra: I like the use of words that I hear. It just makes a lot more sense.

Dennis continues: This is the plan of the actual building. And each of the four axes where gardens . . . were little gardens. A lily garden is the entrance. The rose garden was place of sort of insemination. The violet garden was a place where the words clipped from their stems. The iris garden was a place of death. It works on sort of a seasonal thing.

Keith: The book opens up to sort of eco sort of an architectural structure of the piece. These walls . . . the text was blown up to giant screens, letters this high. This glass bead, so when you walk buy it it shines out on you and fade. (Dennis interrupting, aside to Bill, who is off-screen, "Hey Harris, Glass Bead Game, remember?)

Dennis: Also the box is the plan of the thesis too. Actually Mare contributed to us a lot. She looked at the piece. This is the text, sort of THE text in capitol letters that ran through the piece.

Sandra: How many copies of this did you make?

Dennis: Ten. Now the way these pages are redone is that these pages were, the black outlines were all silk-screened and then they were all hand-drawn, hand painted inside, so each page is reasonably unique, in that to a certain extent.

Sandra: Again since that is where my orientation is, I really look at how the binding works through this, so many cases, when artists use single sheets like this, it doesn't work. But I like the way they are sewn in signatures with the stub, I don't find the stub at all a problem. But it really adds weight to the book for it to be bounded.

Dennis: Each of us did a certain element. Keith dealt with all of the elevation pages. So all of these are all his. He did all four gates. I did a page that dealt with more of the metaphysics and the words business that dealt with that particular garden, for instance this is my page. Then Jeffrey did an interior . . . I'll get that in a minute.

As a companion this is sort of a direct relationship in terms of the kinds of things we individually focused on the sculpture piece. We do our essentially the same type of thing in terms of the book.

We've gone through the Lily gate out into the rose and then going into the building you had to go back into the center core, and so the same way with the book. This leads you to the center of the book--our little centerfold--which is a water color, that Jeffrey Bishop did. Then again we screen printed our text on his paper before he started water coloring. So all of the words came leaking through the architecture and the form.

Sandra: That's a very striking piece. That's really nice.

Dennis: This is the violet gate and the door was actually shaped like it was a little scary going through it. It was a place where the words are violated. The stems are cut. It's a place where you cut the flowers and separate them from the roots and they begin to act on their own out in the world.

This concludes the studio showing of these artists' book, and the video scene returns to the Suzzallo Library and the Rare Books Collection.

Sandra: . . . a tiny bit of historical background in this. Modern fine printing and the book arts have been around for a long time, but the primary person responsible for, oh sort of reinventing the wheel, was William Morris, around the turn of the century, who, after the 1800's--when book production went to quantity other than quality--by the 1870's he got pretty disgusted with that. He decided that he would go back to the traditional form of the book which was on handmade paper and hand printed with fancy designs.

He actually commissioned for the first time to redo these kinds of formats. This is where this collection has started. So we start with traditional fine printing examples from the turn of the century. I think what is very interesting about the collection here is that it is constantly being added to.

Then, on this table, there are basically some of the things that today seem like the right things to get out. We have maybe twenty-five hundred books in this collection. Most of these things people have been trying to develop a book that would last a long time. If we're lucky the book would last a hundred years.

A hundred years isn't really a long time in the greater scheme of things. This collection--the rare book collection--as well as containing these kinds of materials, contains Babylonian clay tablets, pieces of papyrus, books from the first 50 years of printing from 1450. Medieval-style manuscripts that have lasted a long time.

I would like to see these books last that long so that somebody coming five hundred years from now, will at least be able to see that somebody cared.

Like Bill, I, too, think that computers would take over a lot of the book format. I think I'm less enthusiastic about that then he is. What I'm concerned about is that this style of book will go away. We will not have that.

I look to printmakers, really, and the people who are artists to save the book from destruction. I will think that we probably won't buy paperbacks anymore. You won't need to, but I don't think anything--whether its computer or video tape or whatever--would ever replace the physical feeling of holding a book that's on handmade paper and being able to turn the pages by yourself.

I think it is a very personal experience. I think that is what the responsibility and the role of the library is to provide you and anybody off campus, and pretty much anyone in the world who can use this collection with that kind of opportunity.

Bill: If your curious about techniques of these books, most book artists and publishers are so proud of how they got this done. That they will include somewhere in the book, a whole paragraph, about the techniques. What kind of paper its printed on. What kind of twine is used in the binding and so on.

Look in the back and sometimes the front for some kind of explanatory paragraph. Screen print, as Sandra mentioned, hasn't been used very much. There are a few silk screen students in the class. This is one of the first that came into the collection that uses screen printing.

Another kind of process, let's sort of leap into the future a little bit, is the use of the computer. I did this book myself, this image on the cover, is printed by a jet ink printer. The jet ink printer is driven by a computer. The computer was driven by me, the human being, having drawn this image from a series I call "The Handmade Dog."

The pages inside, which are the display, which look like their inside are really black and white copy prints done on a Ektragraphic machine, an electric--like a Xerox machine. So you have your essential images that were created by computer and an artist, which eventually will become a book.

One other book that I want to mention in the spirit of electronics, this book over here that is called "Graphic Video." This is from the addition of 18 books created several years ago by six people, myself included, Kurosaki from Japan and four students. It was a quick intensive, summer workshop called "Graphic Video" and the thesis of the workshop was that there is a relationship between printmaking and video.

The students did video as an art form and creative graphics from those experiences. The book that I have here is one of 18 copies, which tends to bring all that together. This is silk screen monotype on the cover, photo silk screen for the typography and on the inside a rather temporary printing process called "Diazo" or "Brown Line."

On the inside reading in one direction as the text points out that in that direction or in that visual works of six people. As you open this book, you'll see visual works done in some tradition of graphic. Here we have black and white Xerox, a color Xerox addition, here we have brown line print with hand coloring and video images. Here we have silk screen with, we call it "tipped in," glued in pictures from colored Xerox. The color Xerox comes from pictures from TV screens.

So you see that there is a constant interplay (I think the word is) between the video and the graphics tradition, so its called "Graphic Video." This is my own section that we are seeing here, right now.

Now that's the end of the book, but look what happened: (Bill tries to repeat what he just said, word-for-word) This is from the addition of 18 books created several years ago by 6 people, myself included appeared Kurosaki from Japan and four students. It was a quick intensive, summer workshop called "Graphic Video" and the thesis of the workshop was that theirs a relationship between printmaking and video.

The students did video as an art form and creative graphics from those experiences. The book that I have here is one of 18 copies, which tends to bring all that together. On the front you have photo silk screen as the typography and in this case handwritten calligraphy by Akira Kurosaki, which, I may need to be corrected, but I think it says "Graphic Video."

On the inside you have the text. The words in other words by these individuals, so as you look through the book and find the words that the students, and myself, and Akira, decided were fit statements to make about the relationship of the interplay of the video and graphics.

Here's an article that I wrote, using colored Xerox images taken from slides of the work sections of the video art class. We have silk screen, hand written, template and stencil techniques here. One of my favorite parts of this collection.

Sandra: I've always wanted to point out the different formats that are here. Like the kind that they always used in the book trades now is the accordion books. Books that are folded up of some size, depending on what kind of paper you have. And then not sewn but sometimes pasted or glued together. You can make an infinitely long accordion and then just fold it up sometime and not doing anything more then that.

Other times folded up and put in some kind of container. This is one of the things that, hopefully, this collection can offer you as printmakers as ways to develop how to put your prints in some kind of order or book format. You may not want to learn how to bind, you may not want to learn how to produce something really elaborate.

You may in fact want to do something elaborate using the same format, by a book artist who is a printer and a paper artist. This is pulp paper, different colors of pulp paper layered on and then, by using the vacuum table, these forms are created. But it is still the same basic style of accordion format and you can fold this up in a number of different ways.

Another Asian-style of binding which is called the side sewn binding, which is the simplest form of binding. Where you just, on one end, simply sew down these pages.

Bill: Would you explain what a "chap book" is?

A chap book usually mean--when most people use the word chap book--what they mean by that is a small, usually bound-in paper, a small book that can easily be held in one hand, that is generally one signature. A signature being a single piece of paper which has been folded-up four time, six times, or even eight times depending of the size, how many folds you get out of that piece of paper.

Sometimes there are sewing in the middles so that the cover and the papers stick together and other times it doesn't have to be.

Or the "broadside", which is called the "broad sheet" in England, used a single-sheet printed or illustrated on the one side and the inside, usually the next question is "what makes the difference between the poster and a broadside?" I don't really know. I don't know where "poster" came from. Posters tend to be considered very cheap. A thing that you can hang outside and if they get wet you don't slash your wrists. Broadsides tend to be a bit more expensive and you wouldn't consider pasting it up with rubber cement outside.

Bill: One of the things I want to mention too in terms of broadsides is that the publication of this thing--which to me looks like just a print that I might see in a print exhibition-- is classified here as a broadside and its technique is offset litho.

So, by introducing the concept of the broadside or the book is allowing artists like yourselves to go into areas of printing which haven't been recognized as valid art technique such as offset printing. Offset printing is one of the most fascinating printmaking processes going today. You see by entering it by what you are calling "broadside" you then validate yourself with the history of art and the book and broadsides and whatever, but you are using new technology in the offset litho.

I want to mention too the notion of the bound book version verses the unbound, or the paginated book verses the un-paginated. Mare's book is a fan-fold and I think she has done what I think is called case bound, am I correct, Mare?

In other words, other pieces--this isn't one of Mare Blocker's books-- this is Suzanne Ferris', but these pieces all lift out and probably could be mixed up in the case. This is interesting 'cause it can mean that there is no limited sequence in which the owner, the "looker" of the book, used--to see these things--so that sequences changed.

Whereas in a book, which is bound on one edge, you must look at this way, or you feel like your going to the middle or to the end of the book. There's this implied structure, I guess, in a bound book, whereas in an unbound book there is less than an applied structure.

Things like that can fascinate you as a visual artist who might want to rearrange the sequence in your experience in your art so binding verses non-binding, broadsides, chap books and all these all imply some sort of attitude toward the work.

Sandra: I do remember something like that, but I forgot: Book handling. Anything that's too big to be picked up and held in one hand and be supported by both covers is too big to be picked up, you should rather put it on your lap or leave it on the table. Even though it is much easier to find illustrations that may be the thing that your most interested in, by leaving through it as if it were a Sears catalog, you know, like phone books, scrap books.

So the best thing to do is to turn the pages from the center of the page either individually or in large groups. But not sort of thumbing through them. Books are pretty sturdy, if you treat them nicely. The hinge is the weakest part of the book and if you flop the covers around they fall off pretty easily. You can see this in the main collection in all the branches, you find a lot of books that are just barely together.

If you're interested in things like techniques of how to do things--paper-making, marbling, letter-press printing--I'll be happy to talk to you about any of it. Most of the pieces are the things that we acquired very recently. They all have stories behind them. Probably, if your interested in who did them and why, I might know that. Beyond that you can probably go around and look at things.

Bill: With those words, I want to thank you Sandra for your dialogue here. The videotape is continuing, but I'm going to stop our presentation and ask you to continue your browsing and enjoy the collection.

Bill narrates: You have been listening to the soundtrack from the color video tape made live at the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington.

My name is Bill Ritchie and I founded a company to make it possible for you to order this tape as an individual. In a moment I'll give you the address to write and a telephone number.

This tape was co-produced by myself and IMS TV of the University of Washington. Music was contributed by Norman Durkee. You'll see many other names of many others who helped illustrate Artists' Bookworks and the audio visual crew, who recorded our visit that day.

Now here's my address: Ritchie's Video, 500 Aloha #105. Seattle, Washington, 98109. Telephone (206) 285-0658. The video is also available with Japanese soundtrack. My name is Bill Ritchie and I thank you for listening.