Punching the keys.

Most of Edgar Allan Poe's minor essay "Marginalia" (1844) consists of the writer's verbatim notes in the margins of media publications he had collected. We circumscribers feel the need to get involved with the text in hand. Perhaps we are trying to limit the authority of the text through our active jottings. Or maybe, not wanting to talk with food in our mouths, we write down our observations to forget our own voice, thus making an author's ideas easy to swallow. Whether we are highlighting our approval, encircling differences of opinion, or trimming out the perimeter with asterisks, check marks, and brackets, one thing is certain: we make our marks outside the "official" printed lines.

In "Marginalia," Poe states (as an aside) that the reader "who reads really much, finds his capacity to read increase in geometrical ratio." Artists' books have always operated along the margins of the art world and media culture. To be taken seriously as visual literature, artists' books require more readers, researchers, and critical thinkers as well as better electronic resources that are by some means connected. An agreed upon set of terms would make this development easier. This knockout combination of blows was made by Johanna Drucker, one of very few heavyweights in the field, during a lecture entitled "Critical Issues/Exemplary Works" at last year's Book Arts Fair and Conference (Book Arts--The Next Episode, November 19-21, 2004) hosted by Pyramid Atlantic, a nonprofit contemporary arts center in Silver Spring, Maryland. Brad Freeman, well known as an exemplary book artist and the publisher of JAB, the Journal of Artists' Books, coordinated the Pyramid Atlantic conference.

JAB began as exactly what its acronym, in fighting terms, signifies. At first is was a "one-shot deal," a "poke at the sculptural book objects that reference the idea of the book but don't actually have any of the functional qualities of a book." (1) In the first issue (JAB 1, 1993), Freeman makes a clear distinction between "clever gimmicks" and projects that "use language, [where] the text and meaning is revealed over time, [that] utilize paper to support the language," citing the computer-driven kinetic sculptures of Janet Zweig as an example of work with real "book-like qualities." Certain people fought back. Book sculpture proponents sent heated retorts aimed at Freeman and Drucker's reviews and essays. Drucker, Freeman, and New York City poet Joe Elliot, later joined by Zweig and Cynthia Young, became JAB's editorial board, and published every angry reply, usually flanked with a follow-up response to continue the debate.

Drucker was the ringer, supplying a solid foundation of articles for JAB. Freeman states, "If I needed something written, Johanna could write it and would write it well." Strengthened by responses (including around three hundred individual and institutional subscribers, occasional production support from institutions such as the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University in Alfred, New York; the State University of New York, Purchase, where Freeman taught from 1994-99; and Nexus Press in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as many fellow book artists such as Phil Zimmermann and Clifton Meador [both JAB contributors]), Freeman sought to tell the world about "these people who are making books." With an interest and background in the documentary photography of Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and W. Eugene Smith, Freeman sought to "show things that are hidden from the rest of the world." His first book, for instance, was a documentary photo and story piece about a group home for people with multiple disabilities where he worked as a house parent in the early 1980s. When he showed the finished "artists' book" to his grandmother she said, "This isn't art, it's sociology." "She was right," Freeman jokes.

Over time JAB changed from a forum to expose the book art Freeman liked into a venue that recognized any serious, energetic, and thoughtful effort. Looking at JAB's entire ten-year, twenty-issue run, there is a visible expansiveness of design and content. Freeman designed and typeset a majority of the issues himself, but from the fourth issue on a sundry of offset and letterpress printers contributed covers.

JAB was designed to demonstrate the production values it upheld artistically, as well as challenge the annotated nature of an academic periodical. When handling a JAB, your fingertips tell you, "This is no common magazine." Most of the covers are printed on heavy, matte stock, and there is the occasional smear of oily ink or a slight indentation from letterpress type. In the end, JAB was something between a chronicle of critical theories and a jointly produced artists' book. This is not surprising given that Freeman, himself an offset printer since 1978, did most of the design and presswork. Known for his innovative printing techniques that utilized the offset press as an artists' tool--more than a device for mechanical reproduction--Freeman's response to the material journal makes it difficult to distinguish the art from the criticism. Which might just be the point.

As an independent publisher from the margins of an already marginal field, Freeman not only acknowledges offset printing and artists' books as tools "to show things that are hidden from the rest of the world," but also recognizes a variety of new tools: "With cameras in telephones and the Internet, these abilities are becoming more available." Although Freeman would like to have JAB in print on paper again soon, for the moment he is focusing more on users than makers. Thanks to Patti Belle Hastings, a book artist, designer, and longtime technical supporter of the publication, JAB will have an online presence starting in early 2006. Freeman is less familiar with Web design, but knows to make the Web site fast, easy to navigate and readable.

This subtle shift from production to usability, from makers to readers, may be the most constructive course for artists' books, considering, again, the punches thrown when Drucker contended that the field requires more readers, an agreed upon vocabulary to institute a canon, and linked resources in order to be taken seriously by the critical machine.

NOTE

1. All quotations in this essay are from statements provided by Brad Freeman in an interview conducted with the author via e-mail from September 10-November 9, 2005.

info

For more information about JAB see www.jab-online.net/.

see

To read Johanna Drucker's essay "Critical Issues/Exemplary Works" in its entirety see The Bonefolder: an e-journal for the bookbinder and book artist, (Volume 1, Number 2, Spring 2005): www.philobiblon.com/bonefolder/vollno2contents.htm.

RELATED ARTICLE: SELECTIONS FROM

JOURNAL OF ARTISTS' BOOKS (JAB)

1993-2003

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"What I'm saying is I think that it's a difficult but really exciting and interesting time now for artist publishing. I think that a lot of people who might have done books are doing CD's, hypertext things. With the computer it's viable to do different kinds of small editions because you're not having to pay for an enormous amount of prepress." This quote by Joan Lyons comes from an interview about the Visual Studies Workshop Press conducted by Brad Freeman on August 2, 1995, in Rochester, New York, in JAB 4 (1995).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Internet's proposed status as site of salvation--alternative or mainstream--has yet to be tested against the processes of history. As an extended public sphere the Internet is no different than the walls of the city, its web sites no different from the news kiosks designed for the distribution of Soviet publications in the 1920s or the stacks of newsprint papers available at the Laundromat, health food store, and Free Clinics where alternative press materials were distributed in later decades."--from "The Art of Political Ephemera," a review of two exhibitions by Johanna Drucker, in JAB 6 (1996).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Writers don't understand the materiality of the text in the same way that a letterpress printer/writer/artist will come to know a text when s/he sets the type. The printer/writer literally holds the text in her hands--quite often during the writing of the text. This typesetting while writing also occurs nowadays with page layout computer programs."--From "General Theories of the Artist Book: Ulises Carrion/El Lissitzky/Et Al" by Brad Freeman, in JAB 9 (1998).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"The Evolution of Books," compiled by Johanna Drucker, can be found in JAB 15 (2001). This chart's last entry is the year 2000, where it reads, "Electronic books in circulation."

Much of the imagery for JAB 20 (2003) comes from a book by artist Ruth Laxson called A Hundred Years of Lex Flex (2003). It was one of the last books to be published by Nexus Press before its closure in 2004. Brad Freeman had been the director of Nexus Press from 2000 to 2003. In this issue Johanna Drucker closes her piece "Thinking about Ten Years of JAB" in the following terms: "I see the price of alternative culture becoming very high in personal and economic terms. The space for free exchange of ideas and production of independent work is closing down, or maybe shifting to the Web. I won't stop making books. Nor will Brad."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]