Papers by Marian Crawford
The Blue Notebook, 2021
"Knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in the object of the book it... more "Knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in the object of the book itself, but in the experience rescued from the page and transformed again into experience, ... In the reader's own being." (Manguel, 2006: 91)
Although the work of an artist, the artist book is often not immediately recognised or acknowledged as an artwork. However cleverly disguised as a novel, the often text-free and image-filled artist-made book navigates many fields: design and typography, bibliographic studies and librarianship, fine art, literature and poetry.
To explore the slipperiness of its character, this paper looks closely at certain artist books as case studies, and considers whether the form and content of these hand-printed artworks present an opportunity to test conventions of both the book and the portrait. My book 'Picturing the Island' (2016) presents a portrait of Central Pacific islands, while Alison Alder’s 'Sleep of Doubt' (2015) is populated by screenprinted portraits of contemporary Australian politicians. Both artists have discovered that when a book is hand-made, the signifying power of this familiar form changes.
After establishing this possibility of new knowledge, which is particularly significant in the face of wearisome political cynicism and the overabundance of images, this paper will then propose the artist book as a contemporary art object that presents possibilities for optimism, intimacy and specificity.
Verso: a magazine for the book as a work of art, 2015
Anderson and Harrison’s 'Howl for a Cockatoo' sits neatly within its solid grey linen case. The b... more Anderson and Harrison’s 'Howl for a Cockatoo' sits neatly within its solid grey linen case. The book and case when held together are heavy and in an uneasy and worrying correspondence, this work is as weighty in subject as it is in kilograms.
After opening this firm grey box, the first task of engagement with this work is to navigate a lengthy list. The title and authors of the book and their acknowledgements and references are clearly detailed on the inside of the case’s cover. Their references are broad, from Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland', contemporary debates and inquiries regarding the sexual abuse of children, the life of female convicts in Australia both colonial and contemporary, feminism and misogyny to Sydney's Cockatoo Island and that island's history as a place of imprisonment. It is only in a careful engagement with the book that these disparate sources are drawn together.
The Blue Notebook, 2018
The processes of setting and printing text with the printmaking processes of handset type suggest... more The processes of setting and printing text with the printmaking processes of handset type suggests both gathering and dispersal. This unsettling impermanency leads to a consideration of notions of history and of time. These contentions will be explored with reference to German art historian and artist Aby Warburg, and my experiences of working with poets Christopher Barnett and Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis.
JAB (Journal of Artist Books), 2017
Alberto Manguel comments ‘Knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in ... more Alberto Manguel comments ‘Knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in the object of the book itself, but in the experience rescued from the page and transformed again into experience, ... In the reader's own being.'* To test this observation about knowledge, I explore how the fields of contemporary fine art, the image, the printed image and the book intersect and are enfolded within each other.
The print and the book are presented as sociable forms, and the significance of the material qualities of the book in an era of digitisation is considered. The possibility of a link between the multiple and serial nature of the print and Derrida’s discussions of the processes of loss and mourning is presented. I suggest that when these disciplines and histories are enfolded and enmeshed, the past can spring into life. As the pages of a book fold one over another as it is read, a multi-faceted experience of immediacy and history are present for the reader. This evocation of a multiplicity of experiences has the potential to generate new knowledge for the reader.
This contention is extended and explored in a discussion of German artist Aby Warburg’s intuitions about art history as a phantom, Warburg’s Library and Atlas, and the implications of these perceptions to present an alternative understanding of temporality and art history is considered.
From this, I suggest that the book, and particularly the artist-made book, might be positioned in the centre, or one of the centres, of an intersection of knowledge systems.
* Manguel, Alberto. 2006. The Library at Night. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. p.91
Verso: A magazine for the book as a work of art, 2016
We respect philosophers for their examination of the intricate fabric of our engagements with eac... more We respect philosophers for their examination of the intricate fabric of our engagements with each other and with the world. This age-old task of philosophy, an examination of ‘the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself’*, is daunting and labyrinthine. When an artist finds a philosopher who writes with art in mind, scrutinising the role an art-object plays in the complexity of our relationships, how might the artist respond?
Nourished by this complex thinking around the object-hood and contingency of the art-object, Sabine Golde has responded directly to German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s essay 'Art and Space'. Golde’s works generally take the book form, and in this particular inter-weaving, philosophy and the printed page illuminate each other.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein Accessed 20.12.15
Parenthesis : the newsletter of the Fine Press Book Association, 2014
Codex Australia’s Symposium and Book Fair 2014, was held at the Centre for Theology & Ministry, P... more Codex Australia’s Symposium and Book Fair 2014, was held at the Centre for Theology & Ministry, Parkville, Victoria, Australia. It was comprised of presentations of papers (1 & 2 March), a symposium (3 March) and a Book Fair (1, 2 & 3 March), and this review, for the sake of brevity, focuses on the presentations of papers.
Verso: a magazine for the book as a work of art, 2018
"I have written all this because I have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in ... more "I have written all this because I have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved."*
A wooden box, a cross between a coffin and an exquisite lacquered tray, hand-crafted in Japan from Paulownia tree, encloses the book. Resting inside this carefully crafted object, the book is comfortably and safely contained.
Once the lid of the box is lifted, the cover is presented. It is made from a grey, textured paper that is more akin to a sheet of cement than to any form of leather or buckram. The grey of the Brazilian stone leaf paper is roughly textured, like unpolished concrete, and has remnants of the fragments of the stone from which it was made, perhaps, still glittering in its surface. The back cover of this book is similarly sumptuous and suggestive, an image in itself, made from a sort-of woodgrain that could also be a rolling texture of satin or silk. Elemental materials have been employed to make this book, this cover suggests.
* Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. 1977. (First published in 1933). In Praise of Shadows. New Haven Connecticut: Leete’s Island Books. p. 42.
Verso: A Magazine for the Book as a Work of Art,, 2018
This book presents an everyday experience, via poetic language and imagery, as a transformative i... more This book presents an everyday experience, via poetic language and imagery, as a transformative illumination. As its pages turn, an intimate and privileged entrée into the subjective world and work of a poet and artist is granted.
The month of May in Ashby’s work might suggest both autumn or spring, depending on your hemisphere, and that hint of the change in temperatures-to-come that these transit seasons promise. At first glance though, the cover of his book insinuates something stellar and celestial. It is patterned, perhaps, with a suggestion of the night sky. But looking closer, it’s all geometry. Those maybe-stars are actually tiny crosses, the symbol that was once perhaps the signifier of a star on a celestial map. Overlapping circles, that perfectly regular form, create a grid that flips between tiny fragments and larger circles. Still, although the mistiness of a starry night has been transformed into mathematics’ planes and vectors, there is something undeniably cosmic about the streaks of morning- (or is it dusk) sun-streaked soft cloud shapes that sit in horizontal bands across the sky of the cover.
Correlations Between Independent Publishing & Artists Book Practice, Dc3p bookfoundry, 2018
It’s the mechanics of it that are interesting.
At the airport I sit watching the loading and unl... more It’s the mechanics of it that are interesting.
At the airport I sit watching the loading and unloading, refuelling, the little carts coming and going with their trailers full of baggage. I observe all the feeding and loading of the plane that is needed to get it going, and marvel at the magnitude of the activity it takes to achieve that miracle: flight. I’d much rather sit here, watching all this machinery move across the tarmac, than wander the boutique-lined glossy- floored airport avenues, feeling like a stranger amongst the glittery glassiness of the shops and cafés.
And in making a printed image there is a similar fascination with mechanics. No matter the idea, the image, the text; once we send our thoughts off to the printer— whether it’s in the form of a hand printed etching or a laser printed Word doc—a similar miracle occurs. Your content is transferred to a printed page. It is all too easy to discount this set of rather mundane and prosaic mechanical activities. But to realise that this sensational transformation would not happen without them is a cause for wonderment: a huge and enormously weighty metal structure is made airborne, a set of hieroglyphics on a screen become text on a crisp white page, and lines etched into a rectangle of copper become a fine art print.
IMPACT Printmaking Journal, 2020
This paper investigates how recollections of a colonial childhood might be re-contextualised with... more This paper investigates how recollections of a colonial childhood might be re-contextualised within Pacific Ocean cultures and their histories and the fields of island studies and post-colonialism, in the language and materials of creative visual art. Examining Crawford’s artist book 'Picturing the Island' (2016) as case study to resolve these questions, this paper examines whether printed artworks, and particularly artworks employing the book form, present an appropriate opportunity to gather these diverse narratives. Given the historical significance of the printed page and its various origins in news media, the library, literature and fine art, does an artist-made book, with its poetic and discrete significance as an art object, carry a resonance powerful enough to contemporise the past?
Journal of Artists' Books, 2016
This paper explores links between publications that provide us with the daily news and global eve... more This paper explores links between publications that provide us with the daily news and global events in printed and digital formats and the printed page made by artists in printmaking studios. The relations between the circulation of news, current affairs, communication systems, and fine art are critical to my understanding of and interest in the value of an artefact and of the artist book. These links and connections make the book such a compelling object, and the hand-crafted book perhaps even more so. What roles can the printed page, the book, and the artist book play in illuminating the past and enlightening us about the potential of the future?
I will suggest that artists can be prompted by an engagement with the artist book form to think about our capacity and responsibility to report on and engage with current events, and to interrogate the power and significance of the artist book as an art object. This engagement with current events and with art practice is a reciprocally supportive relationship. I will argue that artists demonstrate a consideration of these inter-relations in projects that recontextualize the news in their art practice, and in making these practices public in book form.
I will examine three forces in considering these questions: the social nature of printmaking processes, the agency of the art object, and the art object as gift.
Verso: A Magazine for the Book as a Work of Art, 2016
This presentation explores the relationship between fine art, images and knowledge, asking ten qu... more This presentation explores the relationship between fine art, images and knowledge, asking ten questions as scaffolding for my argument. At the heart of the interests that have led me into this field is a curiosity about where an image sits within a system of knowledge, within epistemologies. How is it that an image, and images in relation to each other, represent and carry knowledge, and help us to know the world? What is the pedagogic power of an image? This relationship between art and knowledge is intimate and it is the role of artists to investigate and add to this relationship.
My most insistent and persistent fascination within fine art is centred around the printed image, and includes the fine art print, the printed page, and the relationship between text and image on the printed page which then extends to the book and literary studies.
Axon: Creative Explorations, 2018
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his e... more Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes: (1)
We drifted through a private museum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Our host, its curator and collector, shadowed us as we wandered through the dust-covered Bedouin necklaces, rings and coins, shelves bursting with Arabian coffee pots and copper vessels, skull-shaped ashtrays and toy tin trucks, a pelt of an Arabian wildcat, cheetah or was it leopard, weaponry, guns and knives; until we saw the portrait. The glittering picture, surrounded by an elaborate gilt frame, was an image of the King. His face, sitting on a ground of the darkest black velvet, had been dotted into existence in a dazzling arrangement of pearls.
The King’s image was constructed in a pattern of pearly spheres, echoing the invention of the halftone dot that revolutionised mechanical reproduction and printing in the late nineteenth century. ‘The halftone (dot) dumbly renders everything in the photograph’(2) in a direct translation. To create the complex tonality of the image the dots are different sizes: large and sumptuous, small and prickly.
This ingenious translation of what we see into a pattern either of analogue dots or their contemporary descendants, digital pixels, converts our image into an easily printable matrix. The dotty newspaper prints of the newspapers of my childhood were printed this way, and using the magnifying tool of Photoshop we can see the pixilation of a digital image. This magically clever language of the print glittered clearly in this pearly picture of a Saudi King.
1 Shakespeare, William. 1610-11. The Tempest. Act 1, Scene 2.
2 Benson, Richard. 2008.The Printed Picture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. p 220.
Verso: A Magazine for the Book as a Work of Art, 2016
"I, however, had something else in mind: not to retain the new but to renew the old. And to ren... more "I, however, had something else in mind: not to retain the new but to renew the old. And to renew the old - in such a way that I myself, the newcomer, would make what was old my own - was the task of the collection that filled my drawer."
Walter Benjamin(1)
In a plain card folder, the documents sit. This folder, which is also a cover for a book, is a strange green colour, a pale olive. It has a happier green cloth tape holding it together along the spine. This is a simple folder. Easy to make, the card cover has rounded edges, reminiscent of the rounded edges of a manilla folder, the once ubiquitous inhabitant of the office, all now of course relegated to the computer’s finder and e-folders. Who still uses these paper folders? The name of this work is indicated on a slip of paper, a label that again resonates with the systems of filing, labelling, documenting. The label is neatly pasted onto the green-olive card cover, and the title is ‘baring antebellum Bishopsgate Within. CITY A.M.’, three titles in one.
1. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935 - 1938. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press of Harvard 1999. p403, cited in Walter Benjamin’s Archive, Images, Texts, Signs, London New York: Verso 2007. p8.
Verso: A Magazine for the Book as a Work of Art, 2017
Closed, a large and sturdy box is covered in grey linen. Opened, the box reveals the book, its sp... more Closed, a large and sturdy box is covered in grey linen. Opened, the box reveals the book, its spine encased in glossy black leather and a densely black intaglio-printed image splashing across the cover. The image signals the shape of a bird's wing, a bird in flight or maybe in fright. The corners of the cover are adorned with patches of glowing yellow leather, which are echoed in the printed yellow shapes of the bold black, yellow and white imagery of the end papers. These colours are printed at full intensity, no shrinking violets or delicate roses here, and they have been drawn by the hand of an abstract expressionist distracted by a hint of bird-wing.
Verso, 2017
Moths and butterflies act as metaphors for migration, loss and transformation in G. W. Sebald’s ... more Moths and butterflies act as metaphors for migration, loss and transformation in G. W. Sebald’s novel 'Austerlitz'. The novel’s narrator, also named Austerlitz, recalls learning about these fascinating creatures from his Great-Uncle Alphonso, and Sebald’s descriptions of Austerlitz’s reactions are precise:
"(we) could not get over our amazement at the endless variety of these invertebrates, which are usually hidden from our sight, and that Alphonso let us simply gaze at their wonderful display for a long time … Some had collars and cloaks, like elegant gentleman on their way to the opera … some had a plain basic hue, but when they moved their wings showed a fantastic lining underneath, with oblique and wavy lines, shadows, crescent markings and lighter patches, freckles, zigzag bands, fringes and veining and colours you could never have imagined…"*
There is something almost beyond imagining too, in Julie Chen’s 'Chrysalis'. Like some of the creatures of the insect world, it is made up of many parts that demand close and careful looking before its wondrous nature is revealed.
* Sebald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz. London: Penguin. 128-129.
There is something in the character of the print that encourages an engagement with the world and... more There is something in the character of the print that encourages an engagement with the world and with the forces that shape contemporary politics. But what is it about an artist's print that is often made by hand on a quiet manual press that resonates so clearly for us in an era of escalating global conflicts? The print can always be More than One. Susan Tallman argues that the multiple identity of the print, its editionability, places it outside the world of the unique object. Felix Gonzales-Torres's stacks of printed materials 'articulate… the profound difference between the single domineering art object, and the multiple, adaptable, social character of the edition.' (Tallman 40) Is it the potential for multiples inherent to the print that gives it a special capacity to change our thinking? If this capacity for sharing and spreading information is further coupled with the special significance of the art object, does a transformation of understanding for artist and audience become possible? This paper argues that print is a sociable medium with a special relationship to the book, to the publication of the news, and to the dissemination of information. This sociable nature of the print suggests a consideration of social relations and power structures, and the artist's role in negotiating these dynamics. In considering these interactions, artists are prompted to think about our capacity and responsibility to report on and engage with current events, and to interrogate the power and significance of the art object in this context. Artists demonstrate this consideration in projects that recontextualise the news in their art practice, and in making these practices public. These threads-the sociable and multiple possibilities of the edition-draw artists to prints. Where there is one, there can be many and we can share.
Intersections and Counterpoints: Proceedings of the Impact 7 International Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking Conference. Morgan, L. (ed.). , 2013
The print on paper is never enough, it always refers to an other. The origins of the work shift b... more The print on paper is never enough, it always refers to an other. The origins of the work shift between idea, matrix and impression. Print technologies are historically associated with and characterised by endless reproducibility. Prints are copies of what might be called the original thought.
In “The Work of Mourning”, Jacques Derrida describes the law of friendship and mourning—“One friend must always go before the other; one friend must always die first.” The other is left to commemorate. We can interiorize them as perfect and ideal, or remain in a state of impossible mourning, with the deceased at an infinite distance, leaving them their alterity and singularity.
Derrida adds: “In ‘each death’ there is an end of the world, and yet the rhetoric of mourning allows us to speak of this end and multiply it, both to anticipate it and repeat it–with regard not only to one friend... but many, one death after another... there is no first death available to... become the sole and incomparable object of our mourning, iteration is unavoidable...”
Do print processes have at their heart an engagement with multiplicity that echoes this unavoidable iteration of mourning? Does this distance from origin that characterises the print suggest both alterity and commemoration?
Artist's Pages by Marian Crawford
Encounters with Books, 2018
Artist's page
Books by Marian Crawford
Grace McQuilten and Daniel Palmer. (editors). Dystopian and Utopian Impulses in Art Making. Bristol, UK: Intellect. , 2023
In these times of rampant distrust of news as a source of information, how does a creative artwor... more In these times of rampant distrust of news as a source of information, how does a creative artwork when paired with the print's historical connection to the distribution of information embody or present an opportunity for an expression of optimism for the future?
The migration of an image from origins in news media to the field of fine art presents the opportunity for an imaginative reaction and recreation of the world, fashioned by the artist's hand and values. This act of repurposing, making and redistributing images can be seen as a creative liberation born out of Dystopian and Utopian inclinations and enabled through the politics of the press.
According to Simon O’Sullivan it is important to understand, ‘politics – and political art practice – as not just being about institutional and ideological critique, but as involving the active production of our own subjectivity.’ (O’Sullivan 2008: 1) As artists pluck texts and images from a daily news cycle to be employed as source materials for creative practice, an imaginative manipulation of these found materials occurs. In this re-ordering of significance and production methods, is a new a status for these re-cycled images provoked? And does the subjectivity of creative art practice promote new ways of knowing?
This chapter examines how artworks produced in the artist’s studio are linked to more public expressions of opinion found in the publication of the news. Three case studies are presented: Alison Alder’s Newscrap (2018), Marian Crawford’s Antiquities (2015) and Richard Harding’s Pinkwashing (2018-2019) will be analysed to examine the links between the frameworks of the archive, multiplicity and replication. Negotiated through the processes of creative practice, Alder, Crawford and Harding re-order the news, presenting it anew in the imaginative language of visual artworks.
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Papers by Marian Crawford
Although the work of an artist, the artist book is often not immediately recognised or acknowledged as an artwork. However cleverly disguised as a novel, the often text-free and image-filled artist-made book navigates many fields: design and typography, bibliographic studies and librarianship, fine art, literature and poetry.
To explore the slipperiness of its character, this paper looks closely at certain artist books as case studies, and considers whether the form and content of these hand-printed artworks present an opportunity to test conventions of both the book and the portrait. My book 'Picturing the Island' (2016) presents a portrait of Central Pacific islands, while Alison Alder’s 'Sleep of Doubt' (2015) is populated by screenprinted portraits of contemporary Australian politicians. Both artists have discovered that when a book is hand-made, the signifying power of this familiar form changes.
After establishing this possibility of new knowledge, which is particularly significant in the face of wearisome political cynicism and the overabundance of images, this paper will then propose the artist book as a contemporary art object that presents possibilities for optimism, intimacy and specificity.
After opening this firm grey box, the first task of engagement with this work is to navigate a lengthy list. The title and authors of the book and their acknowledgements and references are clearly detailed on the inside of the case’s cover. Their references are broad, from Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland', contemporary debates and inquiries regarding the sexual abuse of children, the life of female convicts in Australia both colonial and contemporary, feminism and misogyny to Sydney's Cockatoo Island and that island's history as a place of imprisonment. It is only in a careful engagement with the book that these disparate sources are drawn together.
The print and the book are presented as sociable forms, and the significance of the material qualities of the book in an era of digitisation is considered. The possibility of a link between the multiple and serial nature of the print and Derrida’s discussions of the processes of loss and mourning is presented. I suggest that when these disciplines and histories are enfolded and enmeshed, the past can spring into life. As the pages of a book fold one over another as it is read, a multi-faceted experience of immediacy and history are present for the reader. This evocation of a multiplicity of experiences has the potential to generate new knowledge for the reader.
This contention is extended and explored in a discussion of German artist Aby Warburg’s intuitions about art history as a phantom, Warburg’s Library and Atlas, and the implications of these perceptions to present an alternative understanding of temporality and art history is considered.
From this, I suggest that the book, and particularly the artist-made book, might be positioned in the centre, or one of the centres, of an intersection of knowledge systems.
* Manguel, Alberto. 2006. The Library at Night. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. p.91
Nourished by this complex thinking around the object-hood and contingency of the art-object, Sabine Golde has responded directly to German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s essay 'Art and Space'. Golde’s works generally take the book form, and in this particular inter-weaving, philosophy and the printed page illuminate each other.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein Accessed 20.12.15
A wooden box, a cross between a coffin and an exquisite lacquered tray, hand-crafted in Japan from Paulownia tree, encloses the book. Resting inside this carefully crafted object, the book is comfortably and safely contained.
Once the lid of the box is lifted, the cover is presented. It is made from a grey, textured paper that is more akin to a sheet of cement than to any form of leather or buckram. The grey of the Brazilian stone leaf paper is roughly textured, like unpolished concrete, and has remnants of the fragments of the stone from which it was made, perhaps, still glittering in its surface. The back cover of this book is similarly sumptuous and suggestive, an image in itself, made from a sort-of woodgrain that could also be a rolling texture of satin or silk. Elemental materials have been employed to make this book, this cover suggests.
* Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. 1977. (First published in 1933). In Praise of Shadows. New Haven Connecticut: Leete’s Island Books. p. 42.
The month of May in Ashby’s work might suggest both autumn or spring, depending on your hemisphere, and that hint of the change in temperatures-to-come that these transit seasons promise. At first glance though, the cover of his book insinuates something stellar and celestial. It is patterned, perhaps, with a suggestion of the night sky. But looking closer, it’s all geometry. Those maybe-stars are actually tiny crosses, the symbol that was once perhaps the signifier of a star on a celestial map. Overlapping circles, that perfectly regular form, create a grid that flips between tiny fragments and larger circles. Still, although the mistiness of a starry night has been transformed into mathematics’ planes and vectors, there is something undeniably cosmic about the streaks of morning- (or is it dusk) sun-streaked soft cloud shapes that sit in horizontal bands across the sky of the cover.
At the airport I sit watching the loading and unloading, refuelling, the little carts coming and going with their trailers full of baggage. I observe all the feeding and loading of the plane that is needed to get it going, and marvel at the magnitude of the activity it takes to achieve that miracle: flight. I’d much rather sit here, watching all this machinery move across the tarmac, than wander the boutique-lined glossy- floored airport avenues, feeling like a stranger amongst the glittery glassiness of the shops and cafés.
And in making a printed image there is a similar fascination with mechanics. No matter the idea, the image, the text; once we send our thoughts off to the printer— whether it’s in the form of a hand printed etching or a laser printed Word doc—a similar miracle occurs. Your content is transferred to a printed page. It is all too easy to discount this set of rather mundane and prosaic mechanical activities. But to realise that this sensational transformation would not happen without them is a cause for wonderment: a huge and enormously weighty metal structure is made airborne, a set of hieroglyphics on a screen become text on a crisp white page, and lines etched into a rectangle of copper become a fine art print.
I will suggest that artists can be prompted by an engagement with the artist book form to think about our capacity and responsibility to report on and engage with current events, and to interrogate the power and significance of the artist book as an art object. This engagement with current events and with art practice is a reciprocally supportive relationship. I will argue that artists demonstrate a consideration of these inter-relations in projects that recontextualize the news in their art practice, and in making these practices public in book form.
I will examine three forces in considering these questions: the social nature of printmaking processes, the agency of the art object, and the art object as gift.
My most insistent and persistent fascination within fine art is centred around the printed image, and includes the fine art print, the printed page, and the relationship between text and image on the printed page which then extends to the book and literary studies.
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes: (1)
We drifted through a private museum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Our host, its curator and collector, shadowed us as we wandered through the dust-covered Bedouin necklaces, rings and coins, shelves bursting with Arabian coffee pots and copper vessels, skull-shaped ashtrays and toy tin trucks, a pelt of an Arabian wildcat, cheetah or was it leopard, weaponry, guns and knives; until we saw the portrait. The glittering picture, surrounded by an elaborate gilt frame, was an image of the King. His face, sitting on a ground of the darkest black velvet, had been dotted into existence in a dazzling arrangement of pearls.
The King’s image was constructed in a pattern of pearly spheres, echoing the invention of the halftone dot that revolutionised mechanical reproduction and printing in the late nineteenth century. ‘The halftone (dot) dumbly renders everything in the photograph’(2) in a direct translation. To create the complex tonality of the image the dots are different sizes: large and sumptuous, small and prickly.
This ingenious translation of what we see into a pattern either of analogue dots or their contemporary descendants, digital pixels, converts our image into an easily printable matrix. The dotty newspaper prints of the newspapers of my childhood were printed this way, and using the magnifying tool of Photoshop we can see the pixilation of a digital image. This magically clever language of the print glittered clearly in this pearly picture of a Saudi King.
1 Shakespeare, William. 1610-11. The Tempest. Act 1, Scene 2.
2 Benson, Richard. 2008.The Printed Picture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. p 220.
Walter Benjamin(1)
In a plain card folder, the documents sit. This folder, which is also a cover for a book, is a strange green colour, a pale olive. It has a happier green cloth tape holding it together along the spine. This is a simple folder. Easy to make, the card cover has rounded edges, reminiscent of the rounded edges of a manilla folder, the once ubiquitous inhabitant of the office, all now of course relegated to the computer’s finder and e-folders. Who still uses these paper folders? The name of this work is indicated on a slip of paper, a label that again resonates with the systems of filing, labelling, documenting. The label is neatly pasted onto the green-olive card cover, and the title is ‘baring antebellum Bishopsgate Within. CITY A.M.’, three titles in one.
1. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935 - 1938. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press of Harvard 1999. p403, cited in Walter Benjamin’s Archive, Images, Texts, Signs, London New York: Verso 2007. p8.
"(we) could not get over our amazement at the endless variety of these invertebrates, which are usually hidden from our sight, and that Alphonso let us simply gaze at their wonderful display for a long time … Some had collars and cloaks, like elegant gentleman on their way to the opera … some had a plain basic hue, but when they moved their wings showed a fantastic lining underneath, with oblique and wavy lines, shadows, crescent markings and lighter patches, freckles, zigzag bands, fringes and veining and colours you could never have imagined…"*
There is something almost beyond imagining too, in Julie Chen’s 'Chrysalis'. Like some of the creatures of the insect world, it is made up of many parts that demand close and careful looking before its wondrous nature is revealed.
* Sebald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz. London: Penguin. 128-129.
In “The Work of Mourning”, Jacques Derrida describes the law of friendship and mourning—“One friend must always go before the other; one friend must always die first.” The other is left to commemorate. We can interiorize them as perfect and ideal, or remain in a state of impossible mourning, with the deceased at an infinite distance, leaving them their alterity and singularity.
Derrida adds: “In ‘each death’ there is an end of the world, and yet the rhetoric of mourning allows us to speak of this end and multiply it, both to anticipate it and repeat it–with regard not only to one friend... but many, one death after another... there is no first death available to... become the sole and incomparable object of our mourning, iteration is unavoidable...”
Do print processes have at their heart an engagement with multiplicity that echoes this unavoidable iteration of mourning? Does this distance from origin that characterises the print suggest both alterity and commemoration?
Artist's Pages by Marian Crawford
Books by Marian Crawford
The migration of an image from origins in news media to the field of fine art presents the opportunity for an imaginative reaction and recreation of the world, fashioned by the artist's hand and values. This act of repurposing, making and redistributing images can be seen as a creative liberation born out of Dystopian and Utopian inclinations and enabled through the politics of the press.
According to Simon O’Sullivan it is important to understand, ‘politics – and political art practice – as not just being about institutional and ideological critique, but as involving the active production of our own subjectivity.’ (O’Sullivan 2008: 1) As artists pluck texts and images from a daily news cycle to be employed as source materials for creative practice, an imaginative manipulation of these found materials occurs. In this re-ordering of significance and production methods, is a new a status for these re-cycled images provoked? And does the subjectivity of creative art practice promote new ways of knowing?
This chapter examines how artworks produced in the artist’s studio are linked to more public expressions of opinion found in the publication of the news. Three case studies are presented: Alison Alder’s Newscrap (2018), Marian Crawford’s Antiquities (2015) and Richard Harding’s Pinkwashing (2018-2019) will be analysed to examine the links between the frameworks of the archive, multiplicity and replication. Negotiated through the processes of creative practice, Alder, Crawford and Harding re-order the news, presenting it anew in the imaginative language of visual artworks.
Although the work of an artist, the artist book is often not immediately recognised or acknowledged as an artwork. However cleverly disguised as a novel, the often text-free and image-filled artist-made book navigates many fields: design and typography, bibliographic studies and librarianship, fine art, literature and poetry.
To explore the slipperiness of its character, this paper looks closely at certain artist books as case studies, and considers whether the form and content of these hand-printed artworks present an opportunity to test conventions of both the book and the portrait. My book 'Picturing the Island' (2016) presents a portrait of Central Pacific islands, while Alison Alder’s 'Sleep of Doubt' (2015) is populated by screenprinted portraits of contemporary Australian politicians. Both artists have discovered that when a book is hand-made, the signifying power of this familiar form changes.
After establishing this possibility of new knowledge, which is particularly significant in the face of wearisome political cynicism and the overabundance of images, this paper will then propose the artist book as a contemporary art object that presents possibilities for optimism, intimacy and specificity.
After opening this firm grey box, the first task of engagement with this work is to navigate a lengthy list. The title and authors of the book and their acknowledgements and references are clearly detailed on the inside of the case’s cover. Their references are broad, from Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland', contemporary debates and inquiries regarding the sexual abuse of children, the life of female convicts in Australia both colonial and contemporary, feminism and misogyny to Sydney's Cockatoo Island and that island's history as a place of imprisonment. It is only in a careful engagement with the book that these disparate sources are drawn together.
The print and the book are presented as sociable forms, and the significance of the material qualities of the book in an era of digitisation is considered. The possibility of a link between the multiple and serial nature of the print and Derrida’s discussions of the processes of loss and mourning is presented. I suggest that when these disciplines and histories are enfolded and enmeshed, the past can spring into life. As the pages of a book fold one over another as it is read, a multi-faceted experience of immediacy and history are present for the reader. This evocation of a multiplicity of experiences has the potential to generate new knowledge for the reader.
This contention is extended and explored in a discussion of German artist Aby Warburg’s intuitions about art history as a phantom, Warburg’s Library and Atlas, and the implications of these perceptions to present an alternative understanding of temporality and art history is considered.
From this, I suggest that the book, and particularly the artist-made book, might be positioned in the centre, or one of the centres, of an intersection of knowledge systems.
* Manguel, Alberto. 2006. The Library at Night. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. p.91
Nourished by this complex thinking around the object-hood and contingency of the art-object, Sabine Golde has responded directly to German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s essay 'Art and Space'. Golde’s works generally take the book form, and in this particular inter-weaving, philosophy and the printed page illuminate each other.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein Accessed 20.12.15
A wooden box, a cross between a coffin and an exquisite lacquered tray, hand-crafted in Japan from Paulownia tree, encloses the book. Resting inside this carefully crafted object, the book is comfortably and safely contained.
Once the lid of the box is lifted, the cover is presented. It is made from a grey, textured paper that is more akin to a sheet of cement than to any form of leather or buckram. The grey of the Brazilian stone leaf paper is roughly textured, like unpolished concrete, and has remnants of the fragments of the stone from which it was made, perhaps, still glittering in its surface. The back cover of this book is similarly sumptuous and suggestive, an image in itself, made from a sort-of woodgrain that could also be a rolling texture of satin or silk. Elemental materials have been employed to make this book, this cover suggests.
* Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. 1977. (First published in 1933). In Praise of Shadows. New Haven Connecticut: Leete’s Island Books. p. 42.
The month of May in Ashby’s work might suggest both autumn or spring, depending on your hemisphere, and that hint of the change in temperatures-to-come that these transit seasons promise. At first glance though, the cover of his book insinuates something stellar and celestial. It is patterned, perhaps, with a suggestion of the night sky. But looking closer, it’s all geometry. Those maybe-stars are actually tiny crosses, the symbol that was once perhaps the signifier of a star on a celestial map. Overlapping circles, that perfectly regular form, create a grid that flips between tiny fragments and larger circles. Still, although the mistiness of a starry night has been transformed into mathematics’ planes and vectors, there is something undeniably cosmic about the streaks of morning- (or is it dusk) sun-streaked soft cloud shapes that sit in horizontal bands across the sky of the cover.
At the airport I sit watching the loading and unloading, refuelling, the little carts coming and going with their trailers full of baggage. I observe all the feeding and loading of the plane that is needed to get it going, and marvel at the magnitude of the activity it takes to achieve that miracle: flight. I’d much rather sit here, watching all this machinery move across the tarmac, than wander the boutique-lined glossy- floored airport avenues, feeling like a stranger amongst the glittery glassiness of the shops and cafés.
And in making a printed image there is a similar fascination with mechanics. No matter the idea, the image, the text; once we send our thoughts off to the printer— whether it’s in the form of a hand printed etching or a laser printed Word doc—a similar miracle occurs. Your content is transferred to a printed page. It is all too easy to discount this set of rather mundane and prosaic mechanical activities. But to realise that this sensational transformation would not happen without them is a cause for wonderment: a huge and enormously weighty metal structure is made airborne, a set of hieroglyphics on a screen become text on a crisp white page, and lines etched into a rectangle of copper become a fine art print.
I will suggest that artists can be prompted by an engagement with the artist book form to think about our capacity and responsibility to report on and engage with current events, and to interrogate the power and significance of the artist book as an art object. This engagement with current events and with art practice is a reciprocally supportive relationship. I will argue that artists demonstrate a consideration of these inter-relations in projects that recontextualize the news in their art practice, and in making these practices public in book form.
I will examine three forces in considering these questions: the social nature of printmaking processes, the agency of the art object, and the art object as gift.
My most insistent and persistent fascination within fine art is centred around the printed image, and includes the fine art print, the printed page, and the relationship between text and image on the printed page which then extends to the book and literary studies.
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes: (1)
We drifted through a private museum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Our host, its curator and collector, shadowed us as we wandered through the dust-covered Bedouin necklaces, rings and coins, shelves bursting with Arabian coffee pots and copper vessels, skull-shaped ashtrays and toy tin trucks, a pelt of an Arabian wildcat, cheetah or was it leopard, weaponry, guns and knives; until we saw the portrait. The glittering picture, surrounded by an elaborate gilt frame, was an image of the King. His face, sitting on a ground of the darkest black velvet, had been dotted into existence in a dazzling arrangement of pearls.
The King’s image was constructed in a pattern of pearly spheres, echoing the invention of the halftone dot that revolutionised mechanical reproduction and printing in the late nineteenth century. ‘The halftone (dot) dumbly renders everything in the photograph’(2) in a direct translation. To create the complex tonality of the image the dots are different sizes: large and sumptuous, small and prickly.
This ingenious translation of what we see into a pattern either of analogue dots or their contemporary descendants, digital pixels, converts our image into an easily printable matrix. The dotty newspaper prints of the newspapers of my childhood were printed this way, and using the magnifying tool of Photoshop we can see the pixilation of a digital image. This magically clever language of the print glittered clearly in this pearly picture of a Saudi King.
1 Shakespeare, William. 1610-11. The Tempest. Act 1, Scene 2.
2 Benson, Richard. 2008.The Printed Picture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. p 220.
Walter Benjamin(1)
In a plain card folder, the documents sit. This folder, which is also a cover for a book, is a strange green colour, a pale olive. It has a happier green cloth tape holding it together along the spine. This is a simple folder. Easy to make, the card cover has rounded edges, reminiscent of the rounded edges of a manilla folder, the once ubiquitous inhabitant of the office, all now of course relegated to the computer’s finder and e-folders. Who still uses these paper folders? The name of this work is indicated on a slip of paper, a label that again resonates with the systems of filing, labelling, documenting. The label is neatly pasted onto the green-olive card cover, and the title is ‘baring antebellum Bishopsgate Within. CITY A.M.’, three titles in one.
1. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935 - 1938. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press of Harvard 1999. p403, cited in Walter Benjamin’s Archive, Images, Texts, Signs, London New York: Verso 2007. p8.
"(we) could not get over our amazement at the endless variety of these invertebrates, which are usually hidden from our sight, and that Alphonso let us simply gaze at their wonderful display for a long time … Some had collars and cloaks, like elegant gentleman on their way to the opera … some had a plain basic hue, but when they moved their wings showed a fantastic lining underneath, with oblique and wavy lines, shadows, crescent markings and lighter patches, freckles, zigzag bands, fringes and veining and colours you could never have imagined…"*
There is something almost beyond imagining too, in Julie Chen’s 'Chrysalis'. Like some of the creatures of the insect world, it is made up of many parts that demand close and careful looking before its wondrous nature is revealed.
* Sebald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz. London: Penguin. 128-129.
In “The Work of Mourning”, Jacques Derrida describes the law of friendship and mourning—“One friend must always go before the other; one friend must always die first.” The other is left to commemorate. We can interiorize them as perfect and ideal, or remain in a state of impossible mourning, with the deceased at an infinite distance, leaving them their alterity and singularity.
Derrida adds: “In ‘each death’ there is an end of the world, and yet the rhetoric of mourning allows us to speak of this end and multiply it, both to anticipate it and repeat it–with regard not only to one friend... but many, one death after another... there is no first death available to... become the sole and incomparable object of our mourning, iteration is unavoidable...”
Do print processes have at their heart an engagement with multiplicity that echoes this unavoidable iteration of mourning? Does this distance from origin that characterises the print suggest both alterity and commemoration?
The migration of an image from origins in news media to the field of fine art presents the opportunity for an imaginative reaction and recreation of the world, fashioned by the artist's hand and values. This act of repurposing, making and redistributing images can be seen as a creative liberation born out of Dystopian and Utopian inclinations and enabled through the politics of the press.
According to Simon O’Sullivan it is important to understand, ‘politics – and political art practice – as not just being about institutional and ideological critique, but as involving the active production of our own subjectivity.’ (O’Sullivan 2008: 1) As artists pluck texts and images from a daily news cycle to be employed as source materials for creative practice, an imaginative manipulation of these found materials occurs. In this re-ordering of significance and production methods, is a new a status for these re-cycled images provoked? And does the subjectivity of creative art practice promote new ways of knowing?
This chapter examines how artworks produced in the artist’s studio are linked to more public expressions of opinion found in the publication of the news. Three case studies are presented: Alison Alder’s Newscrap (2018), Marian Crawford’s Antiquities (2015) and Richard Harding’s Pinkwashing (2018-2019) will be analysed to examine the links between the frameworks of the archive, multiplicity and replication. Negotiated through the processes of creative practice, Alder, Crawford and Harding re-order the news, presenting it anew in the imaginative language of visual artworks.