ARLIS/ANZ 2020 Conference Morning Session 2

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.

ARLIS/ANZ 2020 Conference Day 2 Morning Session 1

The morning sessions kicked off with a pre-recorded keynote from Sarah Bodman from the University of the West of England. She showed us a number of the activities undertaken at the Book Arts Centre there, the collaboration between artists and libraries and even, to my delight, showed some artists' libraries I wasn't familiar with. These included Heide Neilson's Outernet Library Branch, the Bristol Art Library, and Cathey Webb's books of found poetry, extracted from library shelves, reminded me of Ash Tower's Postcards from the Bibliopolis, created from found objects from the shelves of the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide. A similar theme was using post-it notes found left behind in library books to create cushion designs.

One activity in particular, an exhibition for World Book Night, showed artists respondings to books, short stories, and libraries. This year's theme - chosen before Covid-19 hit - was Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? This turned out to be a presicent choice. WBN2020 invited artists to contribute postcards on the theme - reminiscent of the Royal Academy's postcard fundraising exhibition (and Adelaide Central School of Art's Wish You Were here annual postcard fundraiser). Coordinator Linda Parr has also issued a call for participation in a Republic of Postcards, on the theme of Perec's Postcards, inspired by Georges Perec's postcard messages in 'Two Hundred and Forty-Three Postcards in Real Colour'.

Margaret Warren from the State Library of Queensland then spoke about the SLQ's digital strategy which aims to think, act and be digital. She showed several examples of this such as the Corley Explorer - an amazing collection of photographs taken of houses in Brisbane and other parts of Queensland - which one can explore and add information to. She also talked about how they chose to abandon the ubiquitous search box in favour of other methods of exploration for their digital copies of the The Queenslander magazine. Other projects included the development of a voice-activated Anzac Stories app, which was accelerated by Covid and was used 15,000 times in the lead up to Remembrance Day this year, and a voice-activated Baby Stories and Rhymes app which, she's been told, is apparently very popular with parents when driving. Overall, the success of their strategy is that it doesn't feel like a strategy anymore but simply business as usual (whilst not ignoring the physical, rather leveraging both together).

Steven Miller from the Art Gallery of New South Wales then talked about the AGNSW's response to Covid with the Together in Art website. All departments of the gallery were involved and they deliberately chose not to recycle existing content but to create new content (loved the isolation mullet post). They also supported artists who were badly hit by Covid by commissioning new works. The staffg at AGNSW has found the Together in Art website to be transformative and the director of the AGNSW, Michael Brand, described it as a circuit-breaker.

Simon Underschultz from the National Gallery of Australia described how they set up a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Early in my experience as Wikipedia editor, I attended an edit-a-thon that was organised in Adelaide to learn about Wikipedia editing and it was disastrous - I knew more about it than the person who was supposed to showing us, so I know first-hand that they are difficult to organise. The NGA's edit-a-thon was organised in conjunction with Art+Feminism, Wikimedia Australia and the Know My Name initiative at the NGA and was scheduled for International Women's Day. Crucial to the success of the edit-a-thon was the fact Simon organised and prepped materials for volunteers to use in their editing - a great idea.

Of course, the aim was to focus on notable Australian women artists and what constitutes notability is a hotly-debated topic amongts Wikipedia editors. It is vitally important to ensure that every statement in a Wikipedia article is supported by a citation drawn from secondary and tertiary sources. To capitalise on the energy created by the edit-a-thon and not have it dissipated by the lockdown, the NGA created an NGA Wiki club - this is a terrific idea and I'll be following up with Simon to join as I write articles on South Australian contemporary artists. The results from the Wiki club are impressive: 

• 27 editors
• 16 articles created
• 128 articles edited
• 1.4k edits
• 57.8k words added
• 722 references added

David Dellafiora and Susan Hartigan talked about the Field Report. The Field Report started off as a way for unemployed artists to fill in some of their time by creating and swapping artworks, notably in the form of artists' books. This has now become an annual publication. As an assembling publication, it is related to zines and to APAs - Amateur Press Associations (I called them Amateur Publishing Associations in my tweet). It is also related to mail art and postcard art.

As a follow-up to Megan Lott's paper that she presented at ARLIS/ANZ's 2018 conference, Tara Marhajan of Rutgers University Special Collections presented a paper on how they draw upon material in the archives and special collections to create materials that can be circulated and given away to students. Starting with a Rutgers University version of Monopoly held in the archives, they created a copy of the board game in a pizza box which students can borrow - and this inspired one of their professors to create an assignment getting students to make board games out of / in pizza boxes. They also make badges, zines, colouring books, and puzzles to give to students and, during lockdown, put some of this material online. It allows them to promote the archives and special collections to students and brings them into the library and archives. They create postcards as a welcome to students and encourage them to complete and address the postcards which the library will then stamp and post for them. This has proven very popular with students. As a fellow Arlisian put it, archive goals.

The morning session chair, Tim Moseley from QCA, noted, to his surprise and delight, a resonance between art librarians and book artists. Well, we are a natural fit.

ARLIS/ANZ 2020 Conference Day 1 Afternoon

The theme of the afternoon session was Artists' Books: identity, memory and narrative. This session entailed three artists and one collaboration discussing how they develop and make their artists' books. Darren Bryant creates artists' books by screen-printing representations of half-tone dots on pages from children's encyclopedias, which he then folds geometrically to transform these old pages into non-linear narratives, raising questions of authenticity (he cited both Walter Benjamin on reproduction and critics of Benjamin ), nostalgia, and in particular, aura.

Annique Goldenberg (whose work Enforced Austerity is ARLSI/ANZ's conference logo for 2020) talked about the long process of transforming materials gathered from different places into artists' books. When it goes online, this will be one to add to your viewing list as it is difficult to encapsulate.

Ana Paula Estrada described how she processed the pain and memory of a breakup by transforming her husband's clothes into a book and then discussed how she has had to transform her current practice into digital artworks due to COVID-19. 

Grief was also the theme of Louis Lim and Beth Jackson's paper. Taking their own grief and expressing it through poetry, Polaroid processes, drawing upon separate cultures and creating books from these. This will be another to add to your viewing list.

The remainder of the afternoon has been given over to exhibition tours for onsite participants and a Zoom meeting for online participants.

ARLIS/ANZ 2020 Conference Day 1 Morning

 The theme of this year's conference is reimagining the material: artists books, printed matter, digital transformation, engagement. The Queensland chapter has managed, despite Covid-19, to put together a conference with both onsite and online options - I opted to attend online. Despite a hiccup in the livestream during the keynote (and a mixup in slide), this so far seems to be going well. It's definitely easier for me to tweet during the conference, though not as easy to add images to my tweets.

The opening keynote was delivered by Fiona Foley, a Badjtala artist and academic, from K'gari (Fraser Island to us white folks). It was fascinating. Foley's family has a long tradition of writing and publishing with her uncle, Wilf Reeves, publishing the first Indigenous children's book in 1964 - The Legends of Moonie Jarl. Foley showed us some of the pages and the illustrations are incredibly beautiful. Her mother, Shirley Foley, spent twenty years putting together a Badtjala-English word list. Badtjala can be considered an endangered language as only older people now speak some of the words. Foley herself has written several books (her latest book is Biting the Clouds - see image below) and she has undertaken considerable historical research to uncover the history of the Badtjala people but also other Aboriginal nations in Queensland. This research is also critical to her art practice.

Her keynote was titled Lifting the Veil on Aboriginal Knowledges, and she lamented the absence of not only of critical race studies in our universities but also the almost complete absence of anything to do with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in our education system. As she said, ignorance is no longer an excuse and it should not be up to our Indigenous to teach and embed this history in our curricula. In her paper, she mentioned several important historical works that influenced her and I'm looking forward to getting these references.

As an aside, she gave a shout-out to the effort to save the printmaking studio at Queensland College of the Arts, which is under threat of closure.

The first session after morning tea was themed Reimagined Collections and Archives and featured papers from Eric Riddler of the Art Gallery of New South Wales on the digitisation of a major slide collection and its uses, Keri Klumpp of the University of Queensland on the digitisation of the Daphne Mayo Archive and how it was being used in research, Jacklyn Young from QAGOMA on the Peter Tyndall/Robert MacPherson Correspondence Archive and its use in exhibitions, Tim Mosely from the Queensland College of the Arts and his explorations of the haptic in his art practice and whether it would translate into a digital collection, and Russell Craig and Therese Nolan-Brown on the development ot the Queensland College of the Arts Print Archive.  

The variety of materials and uses explored in these papers was fascinating, covering digital and material, sight and touch, art techniques and research methods. Unfortunately, due to technical issues, I missed the first part of Eric's paper and will have to watch it in full after the conference when it's made available online. 

The second session was devoted to artists' residencies in libraries and covered the Printer-in-Residence program at the University of Sydney Library, using an antique Albion letterpress printer, Clyde McGill's meditations on material space, including looking, listening, and walking, and Seth Ellis's work in identifying hidden historical sounds in the State Library of Queensland's collections and finding ways to describe it so that it can be found by users.

Each residency was very different from the other, with very different outputs. Although the first two did produce artists' books, the Printer-in-Residence program also produced posters and McGill produced a kind of visual authority by overprinting old cataluge authority cards with images.

The morning sessions covered a wide range of topics: memory, history, touch, sound, materiality, space, production, different ways of marking our presence in this world and saying something about it. It was a very good start to the conference.