The second morning session began with Michael Phillips speaking about the Role of the Autographic and Materiality in Prints. I found it interesting that an artist would choose to deliver a 'lo-fi' experience online with his art, in counterpoint to our HD world. In a similar vein, Monte Masi in South Australia has played around with Zoom to create a piece that explores and exaggerates common Zoom tropes and frustrations. Phillips sees the post in post-digital as an expansion rather than a return to pre-digital.
I was particularly interested in Caren Florance's presentation - as part of her research, she found that the increasing reliance on the web to record information renders it vulnerable to link-rot and content drift. This is of particular concern to historians as it makes it increasingly difficult to record the history of various groups. Florance, who titled her paper Augmented Materiality, Lost Reality, was focused on the history of printmaking and artists' books. She demonstrated the difficulty by looking at some websites, including the Libris Awards for artists' books, and Petr Herel and the Graphic Investigation Workshop. The Libris Awards, hosted by Artspace Mackay, was managed online this year and the judges found it impossible to judge the books without touching them. She notes that there has been no update to Catalano's review of Australian artists' books in 1983 and doubts that it is even possible now. Instead, she notes that is necessary to write smaller books whose histories are more locally focused and that it needs be done now or it never will be .
Paul Uhlmann discussed his art practice in Artists’ Books: Objects of Visible and Invisible Realms. He quoted Merleau-Ponty: Where are we to put the limit between the body and world, since the world is flesh? Taking inspiration from the German Romantics, he photographs the sky, particularly at dawn and twilight, both liminal times, and transforms these into his artists's books.
Marian Crawford considered the Archaic Stillness of the Book, which, to her, has an aura of tradition. I think I have heard Marian speak before at the ARLIS/ANZ conference in Melbourne 2012 - there was an exhibition opening, if I recall correctly. Marian uses a letterpress printer to create her artists' books. She quoted Gerhard Richter: 'now that we do not have priests and philosophers anymore, artists are the most important people in the world'. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but there was another quotation she used from Alberto Manguel from The Library at Night that I was more comfortable with (in that it sits more closely with my lived experience): 'the book itself is a site of new knowledge that lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in the object itself, but in the experience rescued from the page and transformed again into experience, ... in the reader's own being'. This quotation tied in closely with her idea of bookmaking and reading being a cycle. She finished by commenting if only we could put all these [artists'] books into the hands of the world.
The morning session concluded with a paper from Angie Butler from the University of the West of England Bristol. Similar to the papers presented by book artists the day before, this felt to me like a meditation on the process. Her paper title took its inspiration from Betty Bright: ‘Such works of handwork and hybridity remember the body. Heavy on this planet and in this space and moment, the book in hand completing the circle from artist, to press to reader, and completing us in turn’. She described letterpress printing as working with the framework of slow principles: the process requires the printer to slow down and focus on the task in hand.
The afternoon consisted of the formal launch of the QCA Prints Archive and the formal opening of the Artists Books Brisbane Event (ABBE) 2020. I won't be writing a separate blog post on those. Ross Woodrow, in launching the archive, noted that the history of printmaking could be divided into two eras: the era of the matrix and the era of paper. Paper including parchment and papyrus goes back 2000 yrs, but the matrix - in the form of stone and metal seals - goes back 5000 yrs and these ancient seals can still print and convey their information to us now. He also noted that print is bound up with materiality which holds meaning. Noreen Grahame, in opening the ABBE, told the story of an academic's first encounter with artists' books, initially declaring they weren't books at all, but he kept returning to them and eventually conceded that artists' books 'have something going for them'. Which seems a good note to end this post on.
