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dogsandcorsets · 13 years ago

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Intention and Delivery: A (contemporary and very select) history of art & writing

(The following article appeared in the curated section of issue 55 of TANK)

De Appel is an ‘internationally focussed’ centre for contemporary art established in Amsterdam in 1975, currently housed on the grounds of a former private boys’ school. Their activities range from on- and off-site exhibition, live performance events, book fairs and publications. De Appel also hosts a nine-month curatorial residency for approximately half a dozen selected applicants per year.

De Appel, which functions as a space for the research and temporary presentation of contemporary visual arts, faces a problem common to small-scale galleries and arts venues by not having the facility for the archive and collection of objects. Instead, the organisation collates, commissions, publishes and sells a range of artist books, monographs, anthologies, catalogues and journals. Since their first, a catalogue to the exhibition UNLIMITED. NL #1 in 1998, de Appel have published in excess of a hundred and forty books; including commission-based works from artists such as Louise Lawlor, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Olafur Eliasson and Thomas Demand.

All this begs the question: ‘Can art be published?’. Since 2007, de Appel have published F.R. David, a journal exploring the relationship between image and text, looking with a joco-serious sideways glance at how the word can function on the white rectangles of the printed page, alongside the white cube of the contemporary art gallery.

All art forms are a form of language, and this is the fundamental conceit that underpinned precisely what F.R. David sought to explore. Subject matter over the initial seven issues included the notion of idiolects and personal vocabularies (in the issue ‘A for ‘orses’), the circulation of storytelling (‘The Book of Intentions’); the tyranny of communication over today’s art world (‘Stuff and Nonsense’), and the compression of letter writing versus the redundant delivery of intention (‘With Love’). Taking newly-commissioned texts, art works and re-printed essays, F.R. David placed alongside the works of artists and writers such as Robert Smithson, Stuart Bailey and Liam Gillick pieces by figures including Charles Dickens and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The Netherlands in the early part of the twenty-first century was a hotbed for art and design publishing. At approximately the same time as de Appel was setting up its publishing imprint, two recent graduates of Dutch design colleges were looking to formalise the research they were conducting into contemporary graphic design. Englishman Stuart Bailey and American David Reinfurt in 2000 set up Dot Dot Dot, which ran until earlier this year.

Dot Dot Dot lost its specific focus on graphic design early on in its published life, morphing into an orphanage (in Reinfurt and Bailey’s own terms) of “true stories deeply concerned with art-design-music-language-literature-architecture and uptight optipessimistic stoppy/relevatory ghotswriting by friendly spirits mapping b-sides and out-takes…” It become clear at this point that artists and writers were not dealing with the creation of a strictly delineated art form (painting, sculpture, film, and so forth) and with one that could be translated across a variety of media, within the gallery and without. Dot Dot Dot became an international success, Reinfurt and Bailey moved operations (working under the combined name of Dexter Sinister) to New York City and in 2011 published the last issue of Dot Dot Dot and dissolved Dexter Sinister to form The Serving Library, a multi-media publishing platform with an associated programme of site-specific publishing-as-performance events.

Already mentioned has been The Netherlands and New York City; both cities have reliable claims to be the home of art writing (as we can assign with this, inadequate, nomenclature) but located somewhere in between is London. From their East London former-tenement office-stroke-studio, Book Works has been commissioning, printing and publishing high-quality contemporary visual arts since 1984, becoming recognised as a world-leader in the sector with seminal publications including Two Oxford Reading Rooms by Joseph Kosuth, Globexpander by Paul Etienne Lincoln and All Books by Gillick. Working in a part-time sales position at Book Works over a decade ago was Maria Fusco, an elfin Belfast native with a great story of having a bookcase fall on her as small child. Having imbibed books by osmosis, the written word is integral to Maria, who in turn is integral to this story.

Fusco edited in 2004, with co-editor Ian Hunt, the Book Works publication Put About: A Critical Anthology of Independent Publishing. The compilation acted as a state-of-the-nation address for the visual arts and its relationship to publishing. In addition, the book collected together a series of seemingly disparate texts, thematically linked by a concern that text on a page is unequivocally relatable to art (in the traditional sense) on a wall and can be engaged with and responded to accordingly.

(An aside, this was not particularly a revelation. Printed Matter is a New York-based organisation formed in 1976 and is the world’s largest non-profit organisation dedicated to the publication and promotion of artist’s books. Where Put About differed was in the resulting sea change that it instigated in the contemporary art sector. An encyclopaedia could be written on Printed Matter in relation to this topic however, for the sake of expedience, we will move on.)

In the middle section of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Book Works launched three sets of publications. The first was a bi-annual journal “For and about experimental art writing”. Just quite what art writing was at this point was fluid in any accurate description, however on the very first page of issue one (deliciously sub-titled ‘Linguistic Hardcore’) Fusco noted the importance of the ‘voice from the back of the room’. Using words as an intuitive method of exhibition, as opposed to use for definition and the rational comprehension of a topic, is vital to the life of The Happy Hypocrite and the tenets of art writing (whatever that is). Understanding the emotive power of words is also just as vital to impact of The Happy Hypocrite, with subsequent issues sub-titled ‘Hunting and Gathering’, ‘Volatile Dispersal’, ‘A Rather Large Weapon’ and the expositionary existential ‘What Am I?’

Within two years of initial publication Fusco had set up the MFA in Art Writing at Goldsmiths University (the only qualification in art writing in the UK, and one of the few Master of Fine Arts qualifications available in the UK also), instigated the Whitechapel Art Book Fair at Whitechapel Gallery (the only institutional art book fair in London), launched Volatile Dipersal: Festival of Art Writing also at Whitechapel Gallery (where, perhaps not coincidentally, Fusco was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence following its re-opening post-extension work), as well as a significant number of parley-based events at the ICA (during a period, it must be remembered, when the Live Art department at the venue had been forced to close by management due to, for the want of a more diplomatic term, lack of interest at a senior level).

The impact in the visual arts sector was undeniable and led to a spate of new publishing/curatorial imprints being formed, notably Four Corners Press, who in addition to publishing newly-commissioned (and sumptuously designed) texts also publish existing out-of-copyright books with newly-designed art work (highlights include Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a very worthy version of The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde), and Raking Leaves, led by former Book Works board member Sharmini Pereira, a curator specialising in commissioning artists from the Asian sub-continent to produce original art works in the form of limited edition books.

The future of art writing is still being written. The MFA in Art Writing is coming into its fourth year, and has already established an alumni organisation, Antepress, who have the regular opportunity to broadcast original works on ResonanceFM, as well as working with exhibitors such as Art on the Underground, South London Gallery, David Roberts Art Foundation and (naturally) Whitechapel Gallery, among others. There is one research student at the Royal College of Art, enrolled to the year-old Department of Critical Writing in Art & Design, studying the contemporary history of art writing; Stuart Bailey will this year begin a research degree at the Durham University on a similar topic. It remains a difficult thing to navigate a subject that has not yet reached an apex or any identifiable end point. For those critics and historians who are looking to document and analyse the phenomenon there is a rich vein to tap for ongoing content, and one that is constantly evolving in a self-reflexive analysis of its own.

The highlight of the year for artist’s books is the New York Art Book Fair, held annually by Printed Matter at MoMA P.S.1, New York. Appropriating the model of the art fair, here is a place for arts publishers of all kinds to promote and sell their wares. Further, there is dedicated space for events, launches, readings, seminars and the host of associated affairs that are commonplace among visual arts. Inordinately successful, the event remains, though, an art fair with all of its associated boons and constraints. Again, A Time Machine is Book Works’ addition to the growing pantheon of exhibition showcasing art and text. Playing with words is key to this show; a fluid touring exhibition, different from one space to the next. Opened at Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, in February this year, Part One featured Jonathan Monk, Slavs and Tatars, Dora Garcia and The Happy Hypocrite in a show that is based on the concept of raiding the archive and bringing the dead back to live. Forging a new direction in the practice that lies between words, images, books and associated ephemera. Reinventing itself for each new venue, working with a new set of artists each time, Again, A Time Machine is a journal made manifest. Self-reflexive, critical and evolutionary, Part Two ran at Motto Berlin/Chert between May and June with artists and writers including Maria Fusco, Stewart Home and Simon Fujiwara, and will next year tour Parts Three, Four and Five to The Showroom, London; Spike Island, Bristol; and White Columns, New York.

Now here is where it gets interesting: we take the written word for granted. Everywhere, we are surrounded by words. These words are transitory; the lifespan of a printed word is short and word meanings change generation-by-generation. Books, thought to be everlasting, are as ephemeral as the paper upon which they are printed. More books have been forgotten than have ever existed. Visual art is sanctified. Paint is a unstable material and yet millions of pounds are spent annually on the upkeep of historic works; Why? Because it’s art. Bring the word in the gallery and it is spoken once, uttered and, regardless of whether it was recorded or not, the memory of that breath remains – hanging in place. I am twenty-eight years old and yet I somehow have a very clear and distinct memory of Joseph Beuys at Whitechapel Gallery in 1972 and the moments he spent performing before leaving the gallery, getting in a cab and heading to the Tate Gallery for further performances. Still I am struck by its power. I cannot be the only one.

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