Rachel Whiteread, “Untitled (Library)” (1999) installed at Hirshhorn. Dental plaster from polystyrene mold and steel mounting.

So you may have noticed that I’ve started posting a “week in review” column — as a way to tie different posts together and map what has taken place on Bad at Sports. Usually I post this column over the weekend — on Saturday or Sunday. However, this week/end I was out of town, so even though Mondays are about moving on and looking forward, I thought I’d pause to look back a moment. And, unlike my usual style, this week I’m going to go BACKWARDSzzzz.

The theme I found had to with books and book love and catalogues and the material of records.

Caitlin Warner, “The Commodity, (image courtesy of SPARE)

Bailey Romaine (Happy Birthday, Bailey!) posted a really lovely interview between herself and SPARE, an artist residency and bookmaking project in Chicago’s SouthSide. It is run out of Kyle and Shannon Schlie’s apartment, where the two have reserved one room for artists to live and another for their Risograph printer — which, btw, I deeply deeply covet. As a lover of artist-run-project spaces, a bibliofile and a bookmaker, you can imagine why I would get so excited about this conversation. At one point Kyel Schlie says:

I came to books through art, so I often think of them in that context. Because I’m interested in how objects, and the ideas they carry, move and live in the world, books open up a lot of options that aren’t as likely for other art-type things. I feel like books have a potentially wider, or at least different, reach that interests me. Books circulate, books are distributed, and so on, which to me, feels like an exciting active process; one which I would like to take beyond just books.

Liz Sales, “Steam,” 2010

Carrying on with the theme of books, Monica Westin interviewed Jessica Cochran, Columbia’s Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Center for Book and Paper Arts Gallery, about their current show  “Structures for Reading: Text, (Infra)Structure, and the Reading Body in Contemporary Art,” — which opens up the conversation about artist books per se, connecting them to the body and the process of reading:

 Now that the physical book’s very existence is in flux once again, the discourse around their fate and role in our lives is, one might suggest, incongruent to their reality as inanimate objects. If you read or listen to discourse around disappearing bookshops, or talk to a reader who is defiantly holding out against that “inevitable” Kindle purchase, you’ll find that these conversations are incredibly passionate—it’s like we think of these books as living things! This helps explain the currency of the book itself as a visual signifier of our contemporaneity, or what Terry Smith calls, “our passing present” particularly when it is sited within contemporary art projects.

Stephanie Burke did it again with everybody’s favorite Top 5 Weekend Picks.

Thea Liberty Nichols posted about The Stockyard Institute, using a text that will be published in  an upcoming catalogue about their work, translating their very material, installation and situational interests into a book. In her closing paragraph, Nichols writes:

From the beginning, SI’s students have also been their teachers. Through a marriage of art and politics, they have acted transparently, embraced inclusivity, and stayed true to their belief that there’s plenty to go around. Above all, they appreciate a good spectacle, and this has been their trademark maneuver for reeling us in. The deal is sealed however, as soon as we realize that, through sheer force of will, they have the power to transform the ideal into the real.

California 17 January 2006: Had a last meal of buffalo steak, a bucket of KFC white-meat-only chicken, sugar-free pecan pie, sugar-free black walnut ice cream, Indian pan-fried bread and whole milk (ice cream was left out one hour to thaw, and turned into a milkshake by hand).

I felt like there was a interesting, ambient connection between SI’s interest in material, and the presence of books this week (which I’ve started to think more generally as records, or placeholders of memory) in Julie Green’s work — a Northwest artist that Sarah Margolis-Pineo interviewed. Green has been working on an on-going series of blue and white paintings on porcelain dishes, painting the last meals inmates:

Corvallis-based painter Julie Green has opted to address the deeply flawed system of capital punishment head on. Her ongoing series, The Last Supper, has been a twelve-year pursuit to reveal the humanity on death row through intimate portraits of last meal requests painted on ceramic plates.

The plates, currently numbering 500, are a dissonant accumulation of lives lived and lost. Displayed in clusters along the perimeter of The Arts Center, (Corvallis, OR), each constellation speaks to an ad hoc arrangement of family portraits, a domestic sensibility that is amplified ten-fold by the use of readymade tableware as canvas. Despite the gravity of the subject matter, there is a touch of whimsy to Green’s project. Her meticulously rendered pizza slices, honeybuns, and hamburgers are most often completed without any visual referent. Filtered through the artist’s memory, the foods are imbued with an illustrative quality that borders on cartoony, speaking to the endearing texture of Maira Kalman rather than the inherent gloom of the memento mori. Further, each object in The Last Supper is painted in the tradition of blue-and-white china, a hue that is simultaneously absurd and significant, drawing from one of the most recognized traditions in ceramic worldwide, from Jingdezhen ware to Willowware.

The Last Supper, an exhibit with 500 of these aforementioned plates will be exhibited at The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, (Eugene, OR), in March, and travel to The Art Gym, (Portland, OR), in April, 2013.

California 17 January 2006: Had a last meal of buffalo steak, a bucket of KFC white-meat-only chicken, sugar-free pecan pie, sugar-free black walnut ice cream, Indian pan-fried bread and whole milk (ice cream was left out one hour to thaw, and turned into a milkshake by hand).

I reposted an essay about performance by Amy Sherlock, and strangely feel like it also ties in to this overview, or memorialization or events particularly as it pertains to performance. She writes: “The Abramovic phenomenon in particular has come to exemplify the complicated alliance between performance, the museum, and institutional and commercial gallery spaces. For all its professed immediacy and the emphasis on the ephemeral ‘present,’ MoMA did a good job of packaging up  ’the moment’ and circulating it. There are photographs, official catalogue and the feature-length film.” Which is exactly what books do, or (it would seem) plates.

Last, but certainly not least — there was a great hub-bub on Monday between the lush and vibrant images of Paul Germanos and Dana Bassett’s Edition #3 of T (Guess what’s Trending: COUPLES), with a new and fancy pants layout that makes it feel almost like a print publication.

As always — thanks for reading, Chicago et al. We Love You.

Stay Tuned for some writing on performance, Object Oriented Ontology, New York, London, and more coming up this week.

Since the beginning of her tenure as the Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Center for Book and Paper Arts Gallery at Columbia College in 2010, Jessica Cochran has been quietly curating rigorous and substantial gallery exhibitions, steadily setting a new standard for book centers, which aren’t always known for their gallery shows—and expanding my own understanding of the genre of artists’ books and works on paper. This fall Cochran organized a standout retrospective of Johanna Drucker that showcased her depth and breadth as a curator; she has also organized shows both in and out of the CPBA gallery focused on the nature of text and art markets. Cochran a gifted writer, and the catalog essay for the CPBA Gallery’s newest exhibition, “Structures for Reading: Text, (Infra)Structure, and the Reading Body in Contemporary Art,” demonstrates her attunement to both theoretical questions and practical issues related to the evolution of the book, here considered through various engagements with the book-object and emerging concepts of reading in new media contexts as sites for contemporary art practices. I emailed back and forth with her after wandering around during the installation of the show, which opens tonight.

MW: For a show about text and reading the body, I expected a lot of artist books and pieces about the physical process of reading as a way of seeing in contemporary art. While there were a number of pieces along those lines, I was also struck by how many artists took up themes that I would consider questions of digital culture and new media/ the process of dematerializing the book, especially Freeman’s Commercial Yard Goods and 56 Broken Kindle Screens. Do you find that all roads these days tend to lead to the question of dematerialization? Does the concept of “remediation” you used in the catalog help to broaden this issue?

 JC: In a correspondence last fall artist and scholar Johanna Drucker purposefully used the phrase “distributed materiality of the present” rather than “dematerialized” to describe book’s existence today. To me this phrase “distributed materiality” articulates perfectly how artists in the exhibition are concerned with the multitude of ways we understand the book and interact with its many forms, from codex to pdf, through various technologies such as Internet cloud   based services, print on demand self publishing, and mobile computing. In the show, for example, Judith Leemann’s project reading aloud: stories about a coyote began with over fifty different actual books and texts, which she read aloud in her studio. This activity was recorded, edited and published into podcasts, distributed through the Internet. And for the exhibition, 5 hours of this recursive text was commercially printed on fabric, which exhibition viewers can now purchase by the yard. Suddenly this patchwork of texts has a whole new kind of potential for circulation. I also love that the bolt of fabric is in itself a sort of artist’s book, and so the texts have sort of come full circle, re-published several times over.

With regards to remediation, I love to think that the book object, when it is sited within a contemporary artwork such as a photograph, installation or sculpture performs meaning in a really incredible way. In his book on the subject, Bookwork, a fascinating read, Garrett Stewart seems to imply that books in the gallery are something of ruins or mementos because they are stripped of their original textual function. I tend to disagree. I think of the gallery as an active space. To me, really successful works of art, at least the ones that I want to show, illicit a strong sense of contemporanaeity. In this I mean that they deal with “world picturing, placemaking or connectivity” – art historian Terry Smith suggests all works that are “truly contemporary” address one or more of these concerns. So meaning is always in process, changing. So when I see a book, whether in codex or digital form, oriented within a broader art project in a gallery, I understand its currency as a cultural object that has helped to shape our “present,” and I seek out its textual message, however muted, multiplied, amplified, stripped, modified—because its still there somewhere! This to me is very active and interesting.

Judith Leeman, Reading Aloud, Installation Mockup, 2013

MW: In the catalog essay, you make reference to the work of Bob Stein in developing his social reading platform called Socialbook. More and more I hear about social reading as a solution to the problems of working with print culture in a post-print culture. You’ve called the idea of social reading exciting and exhausting—I’d love to hear more about your understandings of social reading, especially as a model for contemporary artists. When Stein talked at Columbia last year, he also put forth the idea that in the future, most books will be artist books—or “books as works of art,” as he put it. What do you think about this hunch of his?

JC: There are so many ways to understand reading as a social activity, particularly as a model for contemporary artists. Triple Canopy recently asserted in copy for their seminar Automatic Reading that one way reading takes a social form in the context of art (within the legacy of conceptualism) is when the written word is publicly activated. To this end, in my essay I cite Vito Acconci as an example of an artist who not only publicly activates the written word through performance (his move from poet on the page to artist on the street is infamous and important) but utilizes the language of reading metaphorically when describing his practice: body as page, etc. Similarly, I chose to include many works in this show, including those by Tony Cruz, Gareth Long, Judith Leemann, Matthew Girson and Moyra Davey, because they made me think about the spatial dimension of reading both around, to and with others both as personal practice and as art practice. This is the social dimension of reading in a physical sense- corporal proximity to others. And it’s no wonder that so many artists address the topic of reading in the studio and out in the world—I rarely find myself on a studio visit when the topic doesn’t meander to what the artist is reading or when my eye doesn’t repeatedly scan on the artist’s bookshelves. Artists are prolific readers!

Relative to social reading as a solution to the problem of print’s demise, I should also mention that many artists and cultural organizers are dealing with the so called “demise” of print culture in inventive, social ways meant to re-circulate books within new meaningful networks of participants by organizing libraries (Reanimation Library (New York), Read/Write Library (Chicago)), reading/pedagogical groups (The Public School, the Surplus Library) and other projects like Printers Ball draw thousands of bibliophiles and print enthusiasts. The Center for Book Arts in New York has a show up right now, Brother, Can You Spare a Stack, that imagines new models for the library as a force for social change.

The digitally-networked dimension of social reading (and writing) is an extension and acceleration of our relational impulse as readers. This is what is brilliant (and possibly exhausting) about SocialBook (where every other reader’s marginalia is yours to read if you want to) and reading online in general: we can satisfy that desire to share ideas or commune over texts instantaneously. There is so much going on in this field that is fascinating. And it seems totally plausible, per Stein’s assertion about the future of physical books as artists’ books, that as innovation continues to make browser-based and tablet-based reading more viable, that physical books will circulate with less and less efficiency as commodities within the broad consumer market, so printed books will have to become become more rarified and “boutique” existing in something like an art market. There will be a justifiable reason for a book to be printed and sold, and this reason might be bound up in its paratextual artfulness- paperstock, typography etc. That said, there is of course already a market for artists’ books (different markets for different types, from fine press books and rare books to zines and “democratic multiples”). These are not very efficient markets. It is hard for anyone to make money on their books, from dealers to publishers to artists!

MW:  Regarding the theme of reading and the body, I found that prostheses were a surprising theme of the show. Did you think about this when planning the show? Are there ways in which some substitutes for books can seem like prosthetic devices (I’m thinking about treating screens like codexes, say)? Or, to be more morbid, if books are like bodies, in that they’re physical objects that eventually decay and crumble (I’m thinking of Liz Sales’ photographs here), is part of the show about creating prosthetic devices for them?

JC: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the prosetheses that appear in the show, particularly those created by Eva Kotatkova and Johana Moscoso-those were actually the initial “structures for reading” I was thinking about early on in the curatorial process. Kotatkova’s strange limb-like book holding devices don’t make reading easier. In fact, they have such a disciplinary quality to them, they seem to be structures designed to make it harder. In one of my favorite poems in the world, The House was Quiet the World was Calm by Wallace Stevens there is a line where he talks about a reader, leaning over a book, wanting “much to be the scholar to whom his book is true.” That passage has always resonated with me: I think that there is a psychic vulnerability inherent in reading: is reading always failure? I forget almost everything I read, and it drives me crazy. Or, what if I fail to successfully use what I learn; what if the author disappoints me? In learning environments these feelings might be attributed to Imposter Syndrome. Many of Kotatkova’s prostheses, because they are sited within learning environments, seem to play off of the complexity of reading as a psychological process.

On the other hand, there are some prosthetic objects in the show designed to make reading easier- Moscoso’s Multitask Walker addresses our incessant need to read, email, eat and walk all at the same time.

Johana Moscoso, Emotional Prosthetic (in progress), 2012

And you mention Liz Sales’ work, steam, the book as a kind of decaying body. This piece is kind of sad: the steam coming off the cup on the book tells us a reader is nearby, but why is this book suddenly a prop or a tabletop landscape? Why is it hosting small trees? There is a long legacy in art and literary theory of the “book as corpus,” object of our desire and fetish (Buzz Spector outlines many of these assertions from Mallarme’s “virginal books” onward in The Book Maker’s Desire). In psychology Theory of Mind explains how we empathize with others and try to understand their behavior; we literally try to theorize what is happening in their mind. We do this with inanimate objects too, especially the book. Now that the physical book’s very existence is in flux once again, the discourse around their fate and role in our lives is, one might suggest, incongruent to their reality as inanimate objects. If you read or listen to discourse around disappearing bookshops, or talk to a reader who is defiantly holding out against that “inevitable” Kindle purchase, you’ll find that these conversations are incredibly passionate—it’s like we think of these books as living things! This helps explain the currency of the book itself as a visual signifier of our contemporaneity, or what Terry Smith calls, “our passing present” particularly when it is sited within contemporary art projects. My reaction to Sales’ photograph steam is much more passionate than it would be if it was, say, an old box or shoe sitting on the table rather than a book.

Liz Sales, Steam, 2010

MW:  I also found blueprints to be a major theme, often used very humorously—there are a few artists in the show who call ironic attention to the contrast between blueprint and realization in various projects. I found myself laughing at the contrast between the design and realization of Garth Long’s Bouvard and Pechuchet’s Invented Desk for Copying, an impossible invention in Flaubert’s novel. Do you see blueprints as a metaphor or way of understanding books as a relationship between the conceptual and the physical?

JC: I see the blueprints or “plans” in the show, particularly those by Eva Kotatkova, Gareth Long and Sebura&Gartelmann, as really light and humorous commentaries on the relationship between idea and object. Some are blueprints for totally speculative things that are absurd in terms of their actual use-value—Kotatkova’s darwings for wearable reading devices, for example, are rendered cartoonlike. The blueprints in the show also relate to the book in various ways (the idea of book as manual, book as starting point for an idea) and several also underscore a public/private theme that occurs throughout the show: the non-public place where an artist reads is the place where the artist writes, drafts, plans, makes, etc., which reaffirms reading as an active, not passive process for artists. For this reason, the desk form pops up in the show multiple times, and it wasn’t something I was thinking about in the beginning of the show.

Gareth Long, Bouvard and Pecuchet’s Invented Desk for Copying (construction diagram), Liam Gilllick Version, 2012

MW: Can you talk at all about your own hunches about the future of both Columbia’s book center and others across the country and world?

JC: I think the future for the Center for Book and Paper Arts, and that of other art / book-related organizations is exciting; the pulse at fairs like the New York Art Book Fair or Chicago’s own Printers’ Ball is extraordinary and growing. We are energized as a center and academic department right now—our activities have never been more research-driven and pedagogical, and always interdisciplinary. The interest in our academic journal, The Journal of Artists’ Books (JAB), is steadily growing, as is the subscriber base (the Centre Pompidou just subscribed a few days ago!) and we just received a major NEA grant to commission artists’ books for the iPad as part of a broader electronic publishing initiative, in addition to a Clinton Hill Foundation exhibitions grant to explore hand papermaking as social practice. We have researchers from MIT coming to our studios to work with our MFA students on paper-based electronic books. We are busy, and it often surprises people how broad our approach to publishing and book and paper arts actually is!  And the best part is that our MFA students play a role in all of this, from printing JAB to planning exhibitions.

“Structures for Reading” opens February 22 and runs through April 6 at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College. 

1. UPLIFT at Believe Inn

Work by work by Anthony Lewellen, Beth Pearlman, Chris Silva, Doug Fogelson, Eric Mecum, Jourdon Gullett, Justus Roe, Kim Frieders Tibbetts, Lauren Feece, Liza Berkoff, Matthew Hoffman, Renee Robbins, Robert Stevenson, Ruben Aguirre, and Tom Torluemke

Believe Inn is located at 2043 N Winchester Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

2. “Just Breathe Normally” at Autumn Space

Work by Brian Hubble

Autumn Space is located at 1700 W Irving Park Rd. Reception is Saturday from 6-9pm.

3. FLAT 10 (FBI 3) at Floor Length and Tux

Work by Edra Soto, Jon Bollo, Liz Nielsen, Erik Wenzel, Catie Olson, and EC Brown

Floor Length and Tux is located at 2332 W. Augusta #3. Reception is Saturday from 7-10pm.

4. CLUB HELTER SKELTER at Manifest Exhibitions

Work by Stephen Collier

Manifest Exhibitions is located at 2950 N Allen Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

5. Combinations Described at Donald Young Gallery

Work by Bruce Nauman

Donald Young Gallery is located at 224 S. Michigan Ave., suite 266. Reception is Friday from 5-7pm.

6. Nomadic Text at What It Is

Curated by Jessica Cochran and Mia Ruyter, with work by Joseph Grigely, Mark Booth, Alex Valentine, Karen Reimer, Jason Pickleman, Stephanie Brooks, Steven Miglio, Robert Ransick, Rachel Foster and Rebecca Foster.

What It Is is located at 1155 Lyman, Oak Park. Reception is Sunday from 3-8pm.