A two-day conference at the School of Creative Arts, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.
Thursday 9th and Friday 10th July 2009
Speakers :
Emily Artinian - UK/USA
NPOV
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Following on from her Blue Notebook article about the artists book page on Wikipedia (Who cares where the apostrophe goes?), her 2008 lecture Wikipedia - the Oceanic Page, and also Francis Elliott’s discussion of Wikipedia at a UWE conference last year, Emily Artinian takes a closer look at how the artists book pages on this collaborative encyclopedia have evolved. There will be specific consideration of the site’s Neutral Point of View (NPOV) rule, the widespread phenomenon of wiki-vandalism, and the ways in which some instances of this may constitute artists book activity. The talk will include a live intervention with audience participation. Bring your digital spray paint.
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Kenneth Butler / Richard Cox - UK
Kenneth Butler in conversation with Richard Cox
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Kenneth Butler : Artist and Subject Leader - BA Art and Writing / Senior lecturer - Art and Theory, Cardiff School of Art and Design, Wales
Kenneth Butler is a London based artist with a wide experience of exhibiting, teaching and publishing internationally. His practice started out between painting and sculpture, and by the 90’s had shifted towards site-responsive experiments. Transferable skills gained through working in industry and through extensive research underpin his investigations in to language.
The trademark is to work from first principles so that the lived experience is exposed and jolts the respondent into an alternative reality that questions meaning itself. His multi-disciplinary approach combines rigour with humour. He challenges orthodoxy by combining drawing, writing, painting, collage, photography or installation so that simple ideas, objects and events are re-presented, opening up new perspectives.
Each work is but one temporary exhibiting space within a lifelong series of imaginary journeys. Some are extemporised in-situ, whilst others gestate over years in absentia; even though the idea may already be formed whilst there.
The speculative ethos is reflected in his teaching method, which encourages dialogue, the use of mixed media and practical approaches to realizing ideas in innovative and accessible ways.
Richard Cox : Senior Lecturer, Director Howard Gardens Gallery, Cardiff School of Art and Design
Richard Cox studied at Fine Art for 8 years moving to Wales in 1975. He has supported his work as an artist through teaching at various colleges, including the RCA and Pennsylvania Academy of Arts, and working as a visual arts organiser.
From 1983-98 he was a Visual Arts Officer at SEWAA and the Arts Council of Wales running the Artists in Residence Programme. He has undertaken residencies himself at Kunstakademeit i Trondheim, UWIC, Bemis Centre for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, University of Hijiyama, Hiroshima, Delhi College of Art and Rajasthan School of Art.
Since 1993 he has been working in collaboration with artists in India and is currently touring an exhibition of photographs, drawings and prints,“Subterranean Architecture. Stepwells in Western India”, to 9 venues in India and the UK 2009-10.
His work is held in 26 public collections in the UK and internationally, including the National Museum and Galleries of Wales The State Museum at Majdanek, Jawahar Kala Kendra, State of Rajasthan and British Council New Delhi.
website : www.richard-cox.co.uk
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Dr. Bibiana Crespo - Spain
Book Art: Changes and development in the 2nd half of the 20th Century: the 50s, - the 90s
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In order to understand the concept and evolution of the contemporary Book Art and to establish the foremost parameters which will shape the canon for the artists’ books in the 21st Century it is necessary to analyse the changes and the development that evolved during the second half of the 20th Century. The understanding of the evolution of this singular art form is the starting point of the artists’ creation in our current century.
Giving special attention to Spanish artists’ books of this period - I will also present books of the 50’s movements: CoBrA, Concrete Poetry, Letrism, Situationists, Nouveau Réalism; of the 60’s: Fluxus, Zaj, Pop-Art (Ed Rusha), Dieter Roth, Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham; of the 70’s: Conceptual Art, Italian Transvanguard, Marcel Brothaers; of the 80’s: Minimal Art (Sol Lewitt), German Neoexpressionism (Anselm Kiefer) and I will conclude with the Book-Art of the 90’s: Current Tendencies- Electronic Books and Net Books.
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Angela Gardner, light-trap press - Australia
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Angela Gardner uses her perspective as an artist, poet and publisher to look at the independent yet mutual role between artist and poet in collaborative projects. Grant funding from Arts Queensland, to produce two artist’s books The Twelve Labours, with etchings by Gwenn Tasker, and The NightLadder with linocuts by Lisa Pullen, has led to added perspectives regarding the meeting point between crafts people and artists.
Additionally the current and future publishing programme of small press publisher light-trap press provides examples of the relationship between text and image in a variety of differing contexts and scales through printed, digital and performative media. Publication and publishing have blurred boundaries, narrative is re-interpreted and takes on a multi-medial relationship. Angela will also discuss her solo practice in which she is less likely to work in editions and instead explores the visual language of writing and the possibilities of moveable type printing.
www.light-trap.net
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Katarzyna Bazarnik and Zenon Fajfer - Poland
Liberature: Literature In The Form Of The Book
The talk traces the development of liberature (from Latin liber, i.e. 'book'), a literary genre that integrates text and its material foundation into a meaningful whole. But it is the writer who intentionally shapes the form of the book to suit the text. The spur to propose liberature as a genre different from artists' books and concrete poetry came from a self-reflection on form, space, as well as the book and text as literary media, when we were working on our triple-volume book Oka-leczenie. Creative work and scholarly research was followed by practical activities: we founded the Liberature Reading Room and launched a publishing line in collaboration with Krakow publishing house Ha!art. The talk will be accompanied by a presentation of Fajfer's kinetic (electronic) poem “Primum Mobile”, the closing section of his new volume of poetry that problematises, inter alia, the relation between printed and virtual texts.
Katarzyna Bazarnik
Department of English, Jagiellonian University
& Liberature Reading Room, Malopolski Instytut Kultury
Krakow, Poland
e-mail : k.bazarnik@uj.edu.pl
Zenon Fajfer
writer, playwright, artist
Liberature line editor in Ha!art Publishing House
Krakow, Poland
e-mail : zenkasi@wp.pl
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Andi McGarry - Ireland
Artists Publications
The themes for my latest artists publications in film follow on from my artists publications in book form. Visualise an inky figure running through a landscape
On paper or in a movie. Exploit the differences…
Often I record a sound track or as I like to think - an audio narrative.
The movie camera encourages new and quick forms of landscape appreciation, combining well with the music. Results so far - encouraging. Developments include - Documentary films, and films of the book. The "publication" part remains the same in many respects, still conceived produced and marketed from/at source
- Ditto - these films -
Available for free via you tube.
The “cheap-multiple” has returned.
Artists Publications/movies hold distinct advantages - making something straight off the press and sharing with a “ready-made” audience.
Artists have at their disposal some of the greatest tools of mass expression ever created since the printing press arrived... Exciting times.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E63eENsjBRY
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seekers of lice - UK
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Why do the phrases bookart and bookartist seem to negate both words, as if the works produced are not real books and not real art?
“a number of pages attached to each other in some way” - Tate Britain’s definition of a book, from the website
“Since Duchamp, the artist is author of a definition.” Broodthaers
Confound and resist definition, including your own.
A discussion of artists' books from an artist's point of view, as a list of questions and statements following a sequence: bookartist//here; books//here; new technology; whose trajectory?; resistance; artists and critics; conclusion.
This will be read out whilst a slide show plays to form a parallel discussion, The images include work by Allan Kaprow, Lawrence Weiner, Martin Creed, Thomas Hirschhorn, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Broodthaers, Hans Peter Feldmann and Lois and Franziska Weinberger.
The desire is to place artists' books within the wider discourse of art.
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Kathleen Walkup, Mills College - USA
The Continually Emergent Artist’s Book
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One way to consider the trajectory of emerging formats in artists’ books is to examine where they’ve been. In the 1970s the several strands of conceptual art, letterpress craft, contemporary poetry, comics, little magazines and photography began to find some common ground in the output of many small presses in the US and the UK. These artifacts, which came to be called artists’ books or book art, were also affected by the major technological shifts in production that paralleled their rise. And, as the ground was shifting under the traditional form of the book in terms of conception and development, the gallery began to challenge the library as a space for viewing these works, thus complicating the already contested space occupied by this ‘new’ medium in all of its various forms. Technology pushed the form and format of the work, but so did issues about appropriate repositories for it.
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Julian Warren / Paul Clarke - UK
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Paul Clarke, member of The Performance Re-Enactment Society, and Julian Warren, Arnolfini’s Archivist, were both involved in curating the recent exhibition ‘The Cover of a Book is the Beginning of a Journey’ at Arnolfini. Drawing on examples from the exhibition, their paper, in the form of a dialogue, will open the work of the book to both the art event it documents and the actions it calls-for or produces. Book works, printed and re-printed as editions proliferate, are distributed and displaced geographically and exchanged between generations, questioning the artworld’s commodification of a singular, original object. This bears some relationship to ephemeral art and performance works, which are re-performed and repeated differently in various contexts. In response to, ‘Where do we go from here?’ we will discuss book works’ call to future action, re-making and re-performing rather than re-reading, opening the frame of book works to events that come before and after.
In its current constellation the PRS are Paul Clarke, Clare Thornton and Tom Marshman, with participants and guests.
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