Collaborative Ty/Opography

Brad Freeman and met in the spring of 1990 while he was director of the Offset Artists' Books Program at Pyramid Atlantic in Washington, D.C. I had received a grant to produce my book Simulant Portrait (1990). It was one of my first opportunities to work in offset printing, a medium with which I had far less familiarity than letterpress, but in which Brad had developed conceptual and technical skills as an artist. The project brought us together in a professional relationship that quickly made me aware of the ways in which our individual abilities and sensibilities meshed. The experience also sensitized me to fundamental differences in our working methods. Since then we have collaborated formally and informally on books and articles, the editing and publishing of JAB: The Journal of Artists' Books and in curating exhibitions. Brad is primarily a visual artist and I think of myself primarily as a writer, but disciplinary lines are frequently crossed in our work.

It was clear to us from the outset that we were both committed to a critical apperception of contemporary life from an individual, subjective point of view premised on the idea that fine art provides an essential alternative discourse to mainstream dominant culture. What drew us together is a similar sharp edge to our work. One of the things that struck me when I began to work with Brad was that he actually read the entire text of Simulant Portrait while printing it and engaged with the science-fiction and biographical tropes that motivated its investigation of the problems of creating a feminist subjectivity.

Both of us perceive the complex density of the book form as a means of communicating intimately through a book's dynamic properties as experienced by an individual reader or viewer. My tendency is to work through a project to a nearly complete mock-up before I begin printing; Brad is far more sensitive to the printing process as a way of thinking creatively as his project progresses. Whether working in letterpress or on a computer for digital pre-press, I will change the text on a piece to make it fit the space, give it a particular visual shape or, in the case of letterpress, accommodate running out of certain letters as I am setting the type. This approach reflects the fact that I have a layout in mind and that much of my bookwork is format-driven. However, have watched Brad entirely rethink a page after it has been printed and come up with a printing solution (another plate, halftone screen, color area or pattern or other application of ink) that pushes the sheet in a completely new direction. I watched h im transfer this sensibility to the production of his book MuzeLink (1997), an extensive project, almost monumental in scale that was not entirely laid out in advance of production. Much of the book's final appearance is the result of Brad's continual rethinking of the relationships among the elements in the book that only became apparent as he was producing it. He would sequence photographs in a section, sketch them into the dummy, then project forward for a few days, letting the next sections emerge schematically. In some areas, whole sequences were worked out while the intermediate pages were still blank. He was also able to introduce events that occurred in his life into the still-malleable form of the piece. The difference between working a book out in advance and conceptualizing it during production is fundamental. Sometimes this has introduced a certain tension into our collaborative process, but overall it has been beneficial in working on Nova Reperta, our most ambitious collaboration to date.

Although the project engaged our concern with systematic experimentation with narrative, striking differences in our working methods remained. My sense of narrative is deeply rooted in literary traditions, cliches, tropes and other forms that I absorbed in the process of reading the great literary classics. Reinvestigating these narrative lines has been a crucial part of my interrogation of the links between my own internal life and that of the cultural context in which my psyche intersects with the social imaginary. Brad works in afar more contingent and constructive manner to form a coherent narrative out of disparate perceptions of his experience that he has rendered into representational form. Though photography is his primary mode of mediating his own relationship with the world, he thinks in terms of books and the relationships among images (and textual elements) rather than the single photograph. For both of us the term "experimental" with respect to narrative implies a questioning of received forms a nd a critical interrogation of the function of traditional fictions as a social and personal operation.

We began Nova Reperta more than five years ago, in 1993, when we were selected to participate in an exhibition initiated by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries that asked artists to respond to works in the Bern Dibner Library of History and technology. The work we selected, Nova Reperta: New Discoveries and Inventions, was a Posthumously Published book of engravings made from drawings by the Dutch artist Jan van der Straet (Johannes Stradanus) (1523-1605) in which he celebrated those technological innovations that had shaped the modern world up to the latter half of the sixteenth century. He achieved considerable popular success during his lifetime through the printed versions of his work which were issued as a single volume in 1638 (three decades after his death), consisting of 186 plates, of which Nova Reperta comprises but a small section. Our Nova Reperta was conceived as a dialogue with the original work rather than an imitation of it. It makes no attempt to mimic the pictorial strategies of Stradanus 's work, nor to be consistent with his celebratory spirit. Rather, it is a critical reflection on the extension of that world view of progress from a perspective only possible more than four centuries later.

Our initial task was to look at the original work as carefully as possible. We had copies of the original prints made and reviewed them independently and together, writing our reactions in the margins. These were phrases, keywords or associations that seemed relevant as a way of thinking about the topics and images and their parallels with late twentieth-century culture. When I wrote the text for the book, I referred to these notes. Much of what Stradanus offers in the prints is a record of human technological ingenuity and engineering application. The prints bespeak a late Renaissance sensibility enthralled with the power of rationalization to improve and extend human power over the natural world, harnessing its latent resources with an unequivocal faith in the benefit to be accrued by humanity. Our distance from Stradanus is marked by a poignant awareness of his (apparent) lack of any sense of the human price and ecological consequences of the global expansion of consumer culture combined with unregulated exploitation of the environment. We have the privilege of hindsight and the environmental movement's effect on our thinking.

Though we had to forego work on the project in 1994, the conceptual foundations we put into place remained viable when we returned to it four years later. An artists' residency at Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, CA in August 1998 provided the opportunity to return to Nova Reperta. Brad photographed the windmills in Altamont Pass, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Port of Oakland and the oil refineries in Richmond--all sites in the Bay Area. When we sequenced the images we realized that urban landscapes and various other sites we were familiar with around New York and New Haven, CT, would work well in completing the book.

At Djerassi we were able to work extensively on writing, darkroom work, conceptualizing and, most importantly, finalizing the vision of production through which to realize the project. We entertained many possibilities before arriving at a solution that would work for all aspects of the book--which we also wanted to function as a wall piece. Both of us have been dissatisfied with the extent to which books are lost in the gallery setting in spite of (or even because of) their density and complexity.

I made a distinction earlier in regard to the "formal" and "informal" collaborations between Brad and myself: the first refers to projects in which it is clear from the outset that we will both participate in all phases of conceptualizing content and form (such as Otherspace: Martian Ty/opography [1993] or Nova Reperta), and the second indicates those that are a result of the conversations and mutual exchange of thoughts and ideas (as in The Century of Artists' Books [1995]). Though in the conventional sense I am the author of The Century, many of the ideas in it came from our conversations about artists' books. Brad brought a number of the works and artists in that text to my attention and also did the design, production and photography for the book and so was engaged in the editorial process on several levels.

Though our collaborations arose out of concerns and skills that were already mature when we met, our individual sensibilities about production and aesthetics have slowly exerted a mutual influence. This is evident when I compare Nova Reperta with Otherspace: Martian Ty/opography, our first formal collaborative books made between 1991 and 1993. There is a degree of seriousness to the newer work and we were able to engage each other at the most developed level of each other's practice.

Brad's photographic dialogue with the spectacle (as defined by Guy Debord) and his continual exploration of the parameters of the individual subjective point of view within the photographic and book media has developed over several decades. Brad is one of a handful of artists who use the offset press as a creative tool, intervening at every stage of the production process whether using traditional photography and darkroom techniques or combining these with digital processes. Both of us have worked in the printing trade, Brad in commercial shops as well as with artists' organizations including Pyramid Atlantic and Visual Studies Workshop. In January 2000, he will become co-director of Nexus Press in Atlanta. My connection with artists' books came directly from my experience as a writer and artist and from my interests in language theory, feminism and narrative. I learned to print letterpress at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland where Betsy Davids taught a combined creative writing/printmaki ng course during my final year, 1971-72. My early work also established themes that have continued to be central to my books, most particularly, a commitment to exploring the ways the visual representation of language contributes to linguistic meaning and a strong interest in the tension between the material properties of language and its capacity to communicate an individual, subjective point of view without resorting to personal disclosure, confession or diaristic accounts. The typographic approach to Nova Reperta is an extension of this. The manipulations have to do with the overall structure of the page, not with arbitrary choices.

In Otherspace: Martian Ty/opography, we explored the capacity of digital pre-press (still novel for us at that time) to extend Brad's photographic imagery and my typographic design capabilities. The book was originally conceived in a moment of inspiration at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. where we responded almost simultaneously to a display on the planet Mars by translating the reference to "topography" in a wall text to "typography." The phrase "martin ty/opography" needed much fleshing out to become something more than a one-liner. We did extensive research in the Columbia University library on the ways in which the representation of the planet Mars has developed in the three centuries since its first detailed observation by the Italian astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini in the 1660s. The images we found were intriguing to us for their visual qualities as well as for the range of belief systems that produced them and the mythic conceptions of Mars that they sustained. We wanted the bo ok to have a playful aspect as well as raise serious issues about the representation and misrepresentation of knowledge. We created a character, a scientist named Jane, whose diary of personal dilemmas runs parallel to a narrative text in which she and Mars (which, it turns out, is a sentient being, not an inert hunk of space rock) communicate through electronic and telepathic modes. We developed the basic concepts, visual research and story line collaboratively, but split the production tasks according to our areas of expertise.

One of our less complicated collaborations was the "Offset" exhibition (at Granary Books in New York City in 1993) and catalog. Brad curated the exhibition and I wrote the central catalog essay. Brad also took responsibility for the catalog's layout, design and production. I felt that my role was to synthesize his observations and insights about offset printing and artists' books and communicate them while adding my own critical assessment of the misunderstood economics of the medium. In particular, I wanted to challenge one of the most persistent myths in the artist book world: that offset is "cheap" and democratic. The hidden costs of labor, the high degree of technical skill required and the need for significant up-front capital investment were all issues I wanted to expose to readers. Brad pushed my thinking in these areas and sensitized me to the ways artists have conceived of the book in aesthetic :terms. Like The Century of Artists' Books, "Offset" represents an intellectual collaboration in which it is difficult to distinguish where my thinking begins or Brad's influence ends. I credit him with many of the observations about book structure, form and its relation to the production of meaning in creative practice that have informed my critical writing in the field.

Our main collaborative project is JAB, which began biannual publication in 1994. JAB was founded to provide a forum for critical debate about artists' books and their content. Brad is the founding editor, publisher, printer, designer and general manager of the publication, and the two of us comprise most of the editorial board (Joe Elliot, a poet and friend, was on the board at the outset and was succeeded by Janet Zweig). JAB is shaped by our travels, the people we meet, the books we find and receive and our continually expanding networks. As we moved to complete JAB's sixth year of publication, we let JAB 12 serve as a catalog for an exhibition we curated for the School of Art at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in September 1999. "Experimental Narrative and Artists' Books" showcased work by a handful of artists whose sustained use of the book as a narrative form merits serious critical attention such as Helen Douglas, Ruth Laxson, Gary Richman, Clarissa Sligh, Phil Zimmermann and several others. The exhibition served to launch Nova Reperta in its gallery display format as a wall piece or frieze more than 80 feet in length. JAB's ongoing success as a collaboration is due to its continual evolution and its capacity to extend our dialogue into a broader conversation with the artist book community. The exchange required for the collaborative process moves the text and imagery away from the habits of thought that close individual work into hermetic isolation. The dialogic aspect of collaborative production always assumes an "other" and integrates that anticipated reception into the work from the outset in a way that has proved expansive and productive.

Brad and I also got married in 1991.

JOHANNA DRUCKER is Robertson Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is currently at work on a book about art and/as information.

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