Amaranth Borsuk

The artist's book, informed

Conceptual approaches in the handmade artist's book

Tony White -- Pickled Books — Two jars from Tony White's pickled books (1992)

My last post explored book artists who work conceptually using print-on-demand technology, but the use of conceptual methodologies extends to those who work in hand-made books as well.

This summer and fall, I have spent time in special collections at the University of Washington (partly in preparation for the Affect and Audience in the Digital Age symposium, and partly to find books for my spring workshop).

The artist's book as idea

Book artists who print on demand

Amaranth Borsuk

Travis Shaffer Reworded — Travis Shaffer, Reworded (Self-Published, Print-on-demand book, BLURB, 2013). Image: Travis Shaffer

My last commentary began by asking what a print-on-demand artist's book might look like and explored works of conceptual writing that use the trade paperback form as a central aspect of their poetics.

I'd like to ask the question again, and offer a somewhat different print-on-demand approach:

So what might a conceptual, print-on-demand artist's book look like?

It might resemble Travis Shaffer's work.

The POD people

Writing through, erasure, appropriation, mimicry

Amaranth Borsuk

Mimi Cabell and Jason Huff, American Psycho (2012). image: Mimi Cabell

So what might a conceptual, print-on-demand artist's book look like?

Several contemporary writers are using the form of pre-existing books as a container for innovative publishing experiments that they can make available at a reasonable price thanks to POD and affordable printing options. Like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, these new books resemble their sources externally, but diverge dramatically in content, which involves erasure and writing-through. They are also facilitated by the availability of digital editions of these books which provide a searchable, scrapable, alterable source.

The following are not all print-on-demand publications, but they take on trade paperback form in ways that intrigue me:

The conceptual artist's book

Are all artists' books conceptual?

Amaranth Borsuk

Twentysix Gasoline Stations by Ed Ruscha (1962), image via Franciselliott, Wikipedia.

This fall I am co-organizing a symposium through the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington called “Affect and Audience in the Digital Age.” A collaboration between researchers in poetics from the Bothell and Seattle campuses of UW, our event explores the impact of digital mediation on contemporary poetry. Here is how my co-organizers Sarah Dowling, Brian Reed, and Gregory Laynor and I describe it on the conference website:

Audience in the Digital Age is a one-day symposium exploring emergent modes of creative public scholarship. Specifically, we are interested in scholarly, pedagogical, curatorial, and creative practices that attend to the digitally mediated character of contemporary poetry.

As a scholar, poet, and book artist, I am interested in the ways digital publishing has changed or is changing the nature of artists' books. For my commentaries, I will be reporting on books of poetry that might be termed "conceptual artists' books" for the ways they take advantage of appropriation, crowd-sourcing, digital archives, or other methodologies that interlink the work's concept and form. In many cases, these are books that either take advantage of or nod toward digital and print-on-demand publishing, placing themselves in a lineage with Ed Ruscha's democratic multiples. How has POD facilitated the creation of artists' books that might once have been thought unpublishable? How do such works align with unique and hand-made artists' books that take advantage of similar techniques?

I will be drawing material from the book arts collection at the University of Washington, which houses over 21,000 books from the historical to the contemporary, as well as from my own collection and from the web. I welcome suggestions for works that fit this theme, which arose from my preparations for a symposium I am co-curating at the Simpson Center for the Humanities on October 18th along with Sarah Dowling, Brian Reed, and Gregory Laynor: Affect and Audience in the Digital Age. The event culminates with a reading by Kate Durbin, Craig Dworkin, Adam Frank, Ray Hsu, and Rachel Zolf at the Henry Art Gallery.

Amaranth Borsuk is the author of the chapbook, Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010); Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012), selected by Paul Hoover for the 2011 Slope Editions Book Prize; and, together with programmer Brad Bouse, of Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012), a book of augmented-reality poems. Her collaboration with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher, Abra, recently received an Expanded Artists' Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago and will be issued as an artist's book and iPad app in late 2013. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and recently served as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT, where she taught classes on digital, visual, and material poetics. She is an Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, where she also teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics.

Follow her or suggest books at @amaranthborsuk.

Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.

Simpson Center for the Humanities Symposium: Affect and Audience in the Digital Age, Oct. 18th 2013

Affect and Audience reading at the Henry Art Gallery, Oct. 18, 2013

MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics, UW Bothell