To The Power of Three - Part One

Linky Day

Ok, so its been a very linky day. My colleagues on the MA have set up a Facebook page where we can discuss stuff and post links etc.. to each other and others. Might be interesting to dip into for anyone interested in Book Arts...

click here to visit the page; please do 'like' it if you want to keep up with the many linky posts!

Summer seems to be turning into a distant memory; here is a pic from the mini heatwave we had at the very beginning of October, seems like so long ago!

Right, time for more studying, thinking, reading, and writing....

South London Gallery - Fax - A Review

The South London Gallery is right next door to my new University home and it has many great aspects. Not only does it have some very intriguing exhibitions, but it has a fantastic bookshop and extremely nice cafe. I have a feeling I will be frequenting that airy but cosy cafe alot during this year; the food is just wonderful and the staff are so friendly!

There are two exhibitions on at the SLG at the moment but I'm only going to talk about the one upstairs, above the cafe. 'Fax' is part of the show called Independent Curators International Presents Fax and Project 35 - for now I am most concerned with 'Fax'. The below piece of text was copied from the ICI website and describes the premise of the show:

"FAX is an evolving exhibition that started in New York in 2009, and continues to be reconfigured, expanded, and localized as it is presented—often simultaneously—in venues worldwide. FAX invites artists, architects, designers, scientists, and filmmakers to think of the fax machine as a drawing tool, resulting in an exhibition concerned with ideas of reproduction, obsolescence, distribution, and mediation. Through the infinitely reproducible, yet erratic outcomes of producing works via the fax machine, this show displaces traditional notions of the hand that are still commonly associated with the medium of drawing, and instead foregrounds drawing as a generative process."

The exhibition as it stands in the SLG has a certain intrigue as you enter the room, drawing you in to survey the walls bedecked with reams of A4 paper facsimiles, and the table in the centre of the room with a fax machine atop it and open file binders filling the rest of the surface. [you can see more images here] I, of course, am drawn first to the table and the binders; flicking through them is satisfying, like being let loose in a room full of archival material. 

The retro feel you get from seeing piles of faxes with their distinct headers and footers, reinforces that feeling that this could be items within an archive; old material kept in binders, and yet the binders are new and the plastic wallets that hold the papers are not archival. This ongoing collection of faxed drawings is slowly being curated into files, book-like in their structure, each new artist starts their fax with a section heading, declaring who they are, the title of the piece if there is one, and any contact info; these sections are like chapters building up the narrative of this almost obsolete method of communication. The narrative is disjointed though, some of the artists have quite obviously played on the ephemeral nature of the fax, focusing on the mistakes that can occur, the black and white basic reproduction of the sheet placed into a fax machine, errors that are very similar to that of the photocopier. This play with facsimile hiccups is present in several 'chapters' dotted around the exhibition and for me this provides a kind of narrative that I look for within an exhibition of this kind. 

Visually the room is interesting, despite the very black and whiteness of the work. The room itself has a large window and 3 usable walls, it reminds me of an office space within a converted town house, quite apt for this show I think. The table in the centre looks like it was made especially for the show, bare wood, resembling a drawing or designers table, at just the right height for comfortable viewing of the files. Some of the 'chapters' are pinned to the walls with clear cork board pins, the pages are displayed in varying arrangements, sometimes the artist has given specific direction to how they wish the pages to be hung if their work ended up on the wall rather than the binders. One section runs from near the top of the wall downwards to the floor and carries on along the floor towards our feet; some seem set out in a storyboard fashion while others are just left to right sequential. This variation gives the impression of a kind of research room, perhaps an editorial design office where chapters are pinned up in random ways to help the editor find links and threads of narrative which might determine an order to the whole book. This thought leads to imagining the room as the book, the container of pages of information; the curator(s) as editor. 

Overall I am most interested with the idea of the exhibition, the way it has been assembled, the curation of it rather than the actual content of those sheets of faxed paper. Some of the works I enjoy thoroughly but you have to wade through the ones that seem like scribbles made by an artist who hasn't really had time to engage with the subject of the show. I suppose large group shows are always going to have elements of them that one does not like or understand, and with over 300 artists involved with this project to date that's alot of potential for running into artists whose work does not hold your interest. 

Ephemeral Pamphlets

In particular the religious kind. You know the ones. Fanatical religious groups who produce badly made leaflets, with bad imagery, that get thrust into your hands as you leave the train station, or that get put through your letterbox. They are a form of ephemeral information distribution that almost everyone is familiar with.

I've had this particular one for a while. It was in my studio, thrust into the hands of my studio-mate sometime in the summer, and has been sitting around for a while. I haven't actually read it, I was more intrigued by the design of it. The proclamation on the front along with the terrible and somewhat scary image. The paper used and the format of the folding. It is giving me an idea....

Palimpsests and Traces [of Conservation]

I have been thinking of the palimpset as a book structure on and off for a year or so; I even considered it to use and research as part of the BAO edition 2  project but I pushed it aside for later. I think that maybe later is now. I have just stumbled across these conservation videos from the Walters Art Museum about the 'Archimedes Palimpsest' which just intrigue me so much. And it is not just the sight of such an old tome that excites me.

This video below has a particularly interesting part at the end where she is using clear plastic transparency paper to mark off where the previous binding holes are. This as a form of mark-making very much speaks to me. It reminds me of the aesthetics of the contents page I made as part of the Robinson Papers; traces being traced to form a disembodied record; perhaps this is something that I need to take forward.

This video here also shows the same pen on transparency technique; mapping the damage to the manuscript. Maybe I need to talk to someone on the Conservation MA about this technique; find out more about it.

There is also this video on Vimeo which shows the pen to transparency technique more clearly. Aren't books fascinating?!

this is a picture of the 'contents page' of The Robinson Papers

A New Beginning

So as most of you readers know I am embarking on a postgraduate MA course in Book Arts at the University of the Arts, London (Camberwell College) - It started this week and the past few days have been filled with new things. Meeting new people, new routes through London, navigating new buildings and discovering new cafes (very important!), being given so much information about the coming year that my brain hasn't quite been able to take it all in yet.
Yesterday all the visual art MA students, full and part time, met. Amongst the part-timers on my course I finally got to meet an old internet friend! Mandy (aka Feltbug) and I have been 'contacts' on Flickr for what must be years and it was so good to meet her yesterday and know that we will be following this course together. Check out her work, its very interesting.

So anyway, new starts. The picture above is of my new backpack (a must have when potentially travelling to and from college with a laptop and books); it looks so cool, I just hope it lasts for a long time. The image below is of a book I am reading at the moment which I picked up from the South London Gallery's bookshop, and the two mini sketchbook/notepads I bought from the university's art shop for a bargain price of 40p each....

Right, so now I am planning a trip to a private view tonight with my new classmates and also want to go to the uni library to discover the wonders within... busy busy...

Copying, Re-editing, Re-writing, Rote

The work for Al-Mutanabbi Street has developed; hand-copying, rote learning, the act of re-producing data is in itself a very interesting process for me. The things that get left out, the mistakes, the way the eye sees and transmits this information into something else, suddenly become of interest. The why? of copying something by hand in this technological age, and then the why? again of using a method of reproduction to make more.

 It is a simple idea, not a beautiful one, but it is a something I want to follow through. The Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition project has seen so many beautiful broadsides and artists' books made, but I have been interested in producing something that speaks of what you might have found on that street before the bombing started; pirated copies of books, cheaply photocopied pamphlets, democratic multiples of literature that was perhaps banned, or even literature that wasn't, but produced cheaply so that distribution could be wide spread. Also stationary, pens, paper, exercise books for school boys to use for their homework. 

Using a school handwriting pen and 3 cheap exercise books and print outs of the first 3 pages of google search results using the search term 'Al-Mutanabbi Street'. I am searching google web, google books and google scholar; one for each exercise book. When this is done I will bring them to another form of reproduction; the photocopier...

I forgot to say (for those who don't read the bookartobject blog) that I did two write ups of my trip to the London Art Book Fair; you can read all about it here for Day 1, and here for Days 2&3. It was great this year, so much going on with lots more interesting talks alongside, also lots of local bookshops and galleries were putting on related shows so it was a wonderfully packed weekend. Hopefully next year is just as good; it's on the up!

Sara MacKillop display at Donlon Books