propositions press

is "tech" "racist"? what kind of a question is that?

One Jen Rhee stumbled upon my blog several months ago and, given my interests in art and social conditions, invited me to embed the following infographic that she and a small group of collaborators assembled. Here it is. My comments follow below.

Created by: OnlineITDegree.net

Given the brand-recognition angle of the above infographic, I can only assume that by adding it to my blog I am helping out Jen. But on this blog the price for publicity is critique. My evaluation, then.

I like the design sensibility and talent for organizing information. I also enjoy the choice of a Murray Hill-like display font for an infographic about racism. It makes ironic reference to the Mad Men-era of ugly prejudice mixed with stylishness.

What I find weaker is the analytical framework, particularly the use of the words “tech/technology” and “racist.” Are notebooks and handheld electronic devices synonymous with tech or technology? If this is about patterns of racial exclusion and dominance within an industry, then perhaps the point would be better made if some comparison were made against a different industry. For example, are the numbers of tech start-up entrepreneurs any different when compared to the executives of automobile companies? If the profiles are comparable, then can one be described as racist when the other is not? Or are both then to be considered racist, and where would that leave us? And where would that leave the meaning of "racism"? 

Furthermore, is racism a phenomenon limited to the exclusions of and biases against Black and Hispanic people? What about the over-representation of white managers and senior executives in relation to the abundance of East and South Asian junior engineers? How might that also fit into the patterns of exclusion you are attempting to address? Silicon Valley is the physical manifestation of a global industry, and beyond that, of a global economy. Who are the South Asians that find their way to a glass-ceiling career in a Silicon Valley company? Might there be some patterns there that reflect the social hierarchies of an entirely different context?  

It is not necessarily that I disagree with the observations highlighted in the infographic, more that I sense incompleteness in its analysis, a need for a more fine-grained argument, and contextual information that probably overrides the infographic medium. 

the sticker pack of 22-3254

How does one teach the art of intervention? This is an important question for more and more teaching artists, if only because so many of the artists who do the kind of work that doesn’t get rewarded by the commercial art market have found spaces of livelihood in the art schools, universities, colleges, and K-12 schools as education labor. But it is more than that. The arts of social engagement (involving every discipline) have opened necessary avenues of practical citizenship and political action. In the visual arts, an area in which a lot of theorizing about and validation of social engagement now goes on, the question feels heavy. The fact that so much art activity these days is about and/or actually involves teaching, learning, and education, adds urgency simply for the fact of the pedagogical mode being put on the aesthetic agenda.

It is against this inquiry that I had an opportunity recently to try out a modest intervention exercise for the students in the class I am teaching right now at Columbia College, 22-3254 Special Topics: Making Print Political. The short description is the students designed and assembled a handsome pack of five stickers and distributed them at a March 19 anti-war panel discussion event unannounced.

I have done projects of a social engagement nature with students in the past, but only as a visiting artist at other schools. This is the first time I had the opportunity to embed such an exercise into one of my own classes. This is how the project came together.

Critical Encounters (or CE) is a year-long campus wide theme and series of inquiries at Columbia College Chicago, around which a faculty fellow coordinates programming, teaching, and academic activity from a variety of disciplines and fields. For the 2011-12 school year the CE theme is Rights, Radicals, + Revolution. A great list of starting point inquiries can be found here. The course I am teaching right now was offered under the auspices of the CE initiative.

The CE initiative also issues small project-based grants to faculty and students to help them realize creative projects during the semester that fall outside of their normal work and specifically is intended to advance the conversation around the CE theme. I was awarded one of these grants to fund a project with my class using commercially produced print media to be disseminated at the March 19 event.

Learning the art of intervention requires the stakes of a real audience, and we were not going to assemble an audience on our own. Piggy-backing on somebody else’s event was the way to go, especially a panel event. Moreover, the panel format practically begs for intervention. Panels are by nature tedious, but boring formats for discussions about peace and social justice issues—ie, about how the world needs to be different—are particularly disheartening. Even if rather unintrusive, adding an unannounced element could only help expand the experience for those in attendance.

More importantly, the timing worked. The successful grantees would only be notified the first week of February, two weeks into the fourteen-week semester. Not knowing until then left me in the position of hedging a simple project against the potentially short time frame for execution. Pushing the completion date out beyond Spring Break would have interfered with the last and most ambitious assignments of the semester; getting something together before then was impossible given the concentrated material I had already planned for the first half of the course. In essence, the CE grant project, if it were to happen, was fated to be a side project within the regular course work. For all these reasons, March 19 made for a convenient target date (the class meets on Mondays). For conceptual reasons, the event lent our project a built-in significance and starting point for interpretation, it marking the ninth anniverary of the 2003 beginning of the Iraq War.

It was an intervention with no name. But it had everything else—a good look and feel, material simplicity, insistent but non-ideological politics, a deserving occasion, and a collaborative spirit. After reviewing ideas, format, material options, and costs, we decided to go with stickers as the medium. We did not discuss the desired outcome of the intervention, but I am not sure that conversation would have been very useful anyway. For one thing, the students are neither fully agreed politically, nor on average fully committed to their positions—they are in midst of political educations. It would be a good exchange, but it would have been premature for the purposes of determining a unified direction. We will discuss outcome in the debriefing.

The stickers were good for breaking up the project into tasks. In addition to creating the graphic designs, performing the on-site distribution, and designing the packet were the main tasks. Some of the students have online channels through which they can share the documentation. Everybody contributed.

Instead of a single clear and explicit message, we went with the idea of an assortment of designs, without stylistic unity, and with an openess to messaging. The design work was split among five students, with each allowed to interpret the meaning of the event openly. The students came up with fifteen designs out of which the entire group decided on a final five for the stickers. I am certainly biased, but I think they are amazing. As a way to take the event's audience and therefore the conversation to places positively beyond the event's announced topics of peace and anti-militarism, the art object was undoubtedly a success.

 

Once the first stage of conceptual conversations were done, I played the role as coordinator, making sure that people stayed observant of the calendar, kept track of the spending, did all the online ordering, and received the finished materials. Here we are, for assembling the packs.

Then a team went to the Cultural Center to distribute and document. We had guesses about the event’s audience, in terms of size and profile, but no certainty until we got there. Turns out it was a small crowd, and worse yet, only two of the four scheduled speakers made it. The event energy was low. Rather than viewing that as a failure, I prefer to think of us as having made the event far more interesting than it would have been otherwise. Here we are, gifting them away.

 

Here's a dude checking them out. He was decked out in Occupy buttons and carried with him a few copies of an Occupy publication. I think it was the Occupied Chicago Tribune. 

The project was an exercise in experiential learning, and was intended to show students how to make something simple but meaningful, using some standard strategies of activist and socially-engaged art. Conceptually, the intent was to put a friendly wrinkle into a politically-informed but fatally unimaginative event. I would say our goal was achieved, even if the bar was set fairly low. But to that end, a spectrum of learning purposes were fulfilled, from the universal lesson of meeting a tight deadline with a quality product, to the accumulation of concrete experience in producing print media art work.  

The more complex questions having to do with performative interventions, the aesthetics of what Brian Holmes calls 'event work,' what the institutionalization of activist art bodes, how art interventions might figure in revitalizing a moribund leftist culture, and so forth, remain to be explored. But teaching the art of interventions reproduces presumed values and priorities–even a modest project like ours does this, because of its institutional sponsorship (and attendant taboos), the inequities inherent in a teacher/student arrangement, and many other manifestations of the power structure embedded in the conditions surrounding this project. Given that, I look forward to seeing more critical analysis of such teaching, hopefully beginning with our debriefing.

from the archives, our first site specific work

I found this old slide the other day. It is from the spring of 1990.

Miyo Kachi, Dan Froehlich, and I were students at the time. We rented the lower flat of a house in Northfield, west of the Cannon River, almost exactly between the two campuses. We (and our frequent guest Sarah Van Orman) called our home Pineapple House.

The house didn't come with a compost bin and the idea of household composting was still kind of a subcultural thing at the time. But we were all former Farmhouse residents, so composting had already become second nature to us. I remember that we can been "saving" our kitchen waste over the cold Minnesota winter, ie collecting it in a can or bucket out back, leaving it frozen until the spring thaws. As it warmed, we had to build a bin for it.

As it happened, Miyo and I were in a sculpture class together that spring. She had scavenged this cyclone fencing material and a clump of chicken wire. So we collaborated on this compost bin project in satisfaction of one of our assignments, the site specific project. We planted the bin on this little slope that ran across the property like the step into a sunken living room, about the only distinguishing feature of the backyard; you can see the brick supports on the back end, keeping the hardware cloth bottom level. For the critique we christened the bin with a banana peel, also visible.

I'm not sure if it was used much–the end of the school year came and we all moved out in a matter a few weeks. But it is funny to see this pic now, before I knew about all the different currents among artists that this project relates to. It just goes to show, often artists find their way to where they are through modest beginnings of intuition and immediate needs, without worrying about the formalities of discourse, art history, and proper theorizing. We had non-academic reasons to be creative. What mattered in this case, and what I am concerned about now even as I look at this image, is how the bin performed. It still strikes me as nice looking and a clever reuse of found materials, especially considering our somewhat limited skills at that time. But obviously it is not going to facilitate a hot compost, or be very convenient for turning.

Maybe Miyo and I could plan on designing an improved version for the project's 2015 25th anniversary. 

a book, from cell 29 to room 458 (with an ocean view)

Steamed clams for dinner and a marion berry cobbler for dessert. Sideways rain and a cozy fire in the hotel room. Hot tubs, a movie, and a book. A view of waves pounding, the tide coming in, and a jigsaw puzzle on the table. 

For a short two days we are doing what winter vacationers do on the Oregon coast every year, plus enjoying this year’s speciality: Santorum jokes. 

Vacations are about getting away, but like all our Oregon trips, this one is the yearly homecoming. Our household has Oregon roots on both sides, so our trips fall under the heading of our travel corridors: back and forth, once a year, Portland/Salem/the coast to Madison/Chicago/the Midwest. But on this trip out the book I have before me takes me back the way I came, back to the places where a lot of it started for me, namely Detroit and Chicago.

I found this volume in the anarchism section at Powell’s in Portland. I was about to pass on it because $40 is a lot to pay for an old book that has seen better days.
The spine is damaged and the copyright page is torn. The corners are turned and overall, despite its lasting beauty and impressive durability–appreciate the lettering on the cover: gilded and feathered elegance in anarchism!–it is a book that clearly has been through many hands. But this isn’t just any title or any volume. This is a book of writings by Albert Parsons (aka husband of Lucy Parsons), one of the Haymarket martyrs and an anarchist printer, published posthumously. I cannot say for sure if it is a first edition, but it is copyright dated 1887 with no other dates, and the book has the look, feel, and construction of an object 125 years old. So, really, it would have been difficult to forgo even without this clincher: upon examination I noticed that it bears a stamp from the Wayne State University Libraries.

Therefore it is entirely conceivable that this very object passed through the hands of the Detroit anarchists who made up the radical world that influenced a good number of us teenagers back in the 1980s in the suburbs of Oakland County. Maybe the Detroit printer Fredy Perlman, who helped to usher into the English-speaking world the thought of Debord and the Situationists, held this very book in his hands. Maybe the activist lawyer Kenneth Cockrel, who did so much work for the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and who had earned a degree in political science from Wayne State, had racked up overdue fines on this book. Mine is not as good a story as my bibliophile friend Kevin Connolly’s tale for the ages, but in terms of a single book tracing a personal and social history generations after its publication, and the possiblities of connections we can now dream about, it is the best I have had.

But what does the journey of this volume say about the corridors of time and space that a strain of radicalism may travel? The book took shape in the cell of a wrongly condemned anarchist in the Cook County Jail,

 became a published reality shortly after the state-sanctioned murder of the author, landed for who knows how many years in the collection at Wayne State, which for many decades was one of the most accessible of America’s public urban universities. And then the book was returned to commercial circulation via Powell’s Books. Between those steps there were undoubtedly other stops—circulation through private collections, sales and re-sales, years on the shelves belonging to now unknown shops, libraries, owners, or borrowers--maybe in Michigan, maybe in Oregon, and who knows where else. In early 2012 it comes into my hands, slightly callused from guitar and presswork but mostly soft like an intellectual’s, suffering invisibly from carpal tunnel, to take back to the Midwest. Is it the completion of a circle or just another returned book in the great cosmic radical library? 

Given the battles being fought in Wisconsin, the Rahm Emanuel mayoral disaster unfolding in Chicago, and the ongoing contested destruction and reconstruction of Detroit, it feels good to be returning home with a book that others used in their midwestern-global struggles from earlier times. Maybe the timing puts a digestible veneer on my hydrocarbon privileges. If it were only about collecting this would be just another instance of radical nostalgia. To safeguard against that, who, in my turn, can I influence? Anybody out there want to borrow this book?

 

book points, furniture joints: John Preus and The World As Text

The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College commissioned me to write a text to accompany the exhibition The World As Text from earlier in the summer, organized by artist John Preus. The publishing schedule has been pushed back, the show is over, and I have not been given any info on a definite timeframe. But that is what a blog is for. Here it is.

– Dan

Book Points, Furniture Joints: John Preus and The World As Text

❆

What do books ask of us, besides some time with our minds and our eyes? Our ears, fingers, and palms? Our butts and our backs? Using a book usually means using all of these things. The comfortable functionality of most ordinary books is based on conventions that attend to the act of reading, that is, bringing all these body parts into coordination. But while the average paperback bears evidence of considerations that go into making a book a user friendly object, the space beyond the reader’s body almost always seems to lie outside the bookmaker or designer’s purview. And still the books demand of us—their readers, borrowers, and collectors—a consideration of space and support, of storage and display solutions. Books need a furnished space in which we can read them, look at them, and learn from them. A collection of artists’ books want even more, neither the false neutrality nor the ostentatiousness of a collecting institution, but rather a space equal to the books themselves.

✴

For decades now artists have been making books and book systems that take note of the space in which books get read and browsed. That attention could be negative, as in the literally passive aggression of Jorn and Debord’s sandpaper-bound memoires. Or utopian, as in the swarming circumvention of commercial art scenes and the creation of autonomous networks through mail art, which so often made use of book forms. The fine press bookmakers who create amazing hand-bound or letterpress printed books that seduce through aesthetics and celebrate a shared history of analog skills, situate their books self-consciously or not in the conservative surroundings of the special collections libraries or within vitrines in museums and art centers. Artists of a revolutionary nature have sometimes reworked the relationship between books and printed matter and their spaces of study altogether, as in Temporary Services’ Binder Archives. But it seems the “reading room” itself remains under-developed as, ideally, an aesthetically unpredictable but eminently functional space.

✼

Lots of books need to be disposed of. Bad novels, mass market paperbacks, textbooks, pamphlets, ring binders, magazines, and manuals of all kind overflow the bottom tier secondary markets. That is, if they are lucky enough to make any stops at all before going to the recyclers, incinerators, and landfills—in the case of mass market paperbacks, sometimes from the store rack straight to the dump, unsold much less unread. Books-on-demand and the new legitimacy of self-publishing are bringing books into existence that as of yet have no clear long term place in the world. E-books promise a whole other universe of waste, plastic, recoverable heavy metals, and unread gigabytes. Perhaps the Adam Batemans of the future will arrange thousands of e-book readers in carefully interlocked stacks. On the other hand, ever more books are collected, protected, conserved, and put away with some notion of perpetuity—or else treated as a semi-liquid investment. The pool of buyers of vintage, antiquarian, and collectible books, magazines, newspapers, maps, cards, art books, and comic books, has been greatly enlarged by the Internet marketplace, bringing in who knows how many buyers who otherwise might never have found access to such objects. Other than bidding and buying, the disparate online world of book wealth includes the viewable items of special collections libraries, the pictures of personal collections that generate bookshelf envy, and the occasional news item about institutional acquisitions of personal libraries and archives of notable persons. Electronic media in all its forms and uses in relation to books only makes the problem of real space functionality and purpose if not more urgent, then at least more neglected. Just ask any librarian, or for that matter, the former strategists of Borders. 

✥

How many of us have furnished our own homes in ways shaped by the spaces of books, from out in the world? I have a favorite reading chair. It is a sturdy Danish armchair with a torn leather seat that I rescued from the curb in Hyde Park, which also happens to be one of the best neighborhoods for finding books—new, used, and thrown away. That chair, both in my front room and on the curb where I found it, represents the way in which books exist not just a medium and a technology in themselves, but also as a core form around which revolves a particular field of behavior and material support. I have a friend who bought a table from a public library that was in the process of replacing their furniture, repurposing it as a kitchen table. How many and what kinds of books had spent time on that four-legged construction? Weeks after making the purchase at the library garage sale, he found a clue—may ’68 had been carved roughly into the skirt. In the case of my chair, somebody’s junked furniture eventually got plugged meaningfully into another person’s life through the activity of armchair reading. My friend’s table, once the site of quiet study and silent subversion surrounded by public stacks, now supports lively multi-generational conversations and the conviviality of family life, surrounded by a private collection of books. In both cases, we as secondary users and owners came into an inheritance of furniture that merged with the past and present of books.

❉

With The World As Text, artist, designer, and builder John Preus works with and about books for the fourth time.* In each case a client or an exhibition space invited Preus or the collaborative group that he was a part of to design a solution to a problem having to do with books. Books themselves are not one of his media and in none of the four projects did he or the group select the books for which they built structures. His responsibilities essentially ended where the books began. Thus, on one level Preus relates to books as do all busy people in that he simply wishes he had more time to read, finding in them the world of ideas. But having to meet the design needs posed by book collecting clients or book-centered exhibitions reveals aspects of the life, materiality, and use of books that most people, including most book artists, do not think about. Moreover the privileged perspective into books that may be gained by designing and building reading and display spaces, as well as objects made out of books, becomes quite interesting when set in relation to Preus’s constant interest, the inheritance and mutation of building and architectural materials and their utility. The question is, how and where does his evolving understanding and view of books, book collections, and book culture dovetail with his larger commitments to building out of materials—often scavenged or drawn from streams of surplus—that contain particular histories of design put into use, cultural patterns, and economic conditions.

❀

As with my friend’s table or my chair, the desks and chairs in The World As Text have been brought out of one bookish environment (maybe an office, maybe a waiting room) and put into another. The difference is that Preus and his team were charged with no mere task of salvage and re-use, but rather of formal mutation within the confines of overall functionality—in other words, to create furniture that leaves the realm of furniture, but still functions as furniture. It is an ambition to match that of those who curated the books on display, as well as of those who authored, designed, and crafted the books themselves. The measure of success then, might also be those of the books. That is to say, will the creations of Preus and his team—not only the discrete objects, but also the reading room as a whole—live on after the show, as the best books live on after they are returned to the shelf? My guess is that Preus himself will only grant success when he sees that the project lives on as not only material evidence, to be seen and used again, but rather as the most powerful inheritance of all: as inspiration.

 

* The projects were:

2nd-hand reading room, threewalls, Chicago

Another Story, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago

Dorchester Project, Chicago

John has designed and assembled storage systems for several private residences, as well. Check out the Dilettante Studios site.

 

report on the hamilton wayzgoose

Mister Koppa and I made the trip to the first ever Hamilton Wood Type Museum Wayzgoose.

mister koppa with the wood border stamping machine

What’s a wayzgoose? Back in the day it was the end of summer bash thrown by the master printer for his shop underlings and apprentices. And now, I guess, it’s the kind of event the Hamilton staff put together for us–“us” being a gathering of type nuts, artists, letterpress printers, typographers, graphic and type designers. About 50 were in attendance. Mister Koppa and I were just about in the middle of the pack, age-wise. It was good to see so many young people turning out, seeing this as a living thing.

We were treated to power point presentations by Rich Kegler and Juliet Shen on the first evening. Juliet Shen told the story of working with Pugent Sound Salish tribes to design a font for the preservation and continuation of the Lushootseed language, which is down to ten or less native speakers, and having the font cut as a new wood type by Hamilton.

 

juliet shen and the lushootseed font design project

She had an elegant explanation for why she approached Hamilton about producing a new face in wood type, and in a language that does not use the straightforward Latin alphabet. She said simply, working and printing in wood type is better for getting the young people interested in learning to read, speak, and write in the language. 

The second day was organized around four different presentations, including a demonstration of the pantograph router by Norb Brylski, one of the old-timers from the Hamilton workforce. This man was a printer with his own shop first, and then after leaving that part of the trade spent years cutting wood type faces for Hamilton, in time becoming a master of the pantograph router, understanding all the nuances of the tool. This tool, in which the pantograph is machined to such a quality of stability and precision that it can be attached to a router run on pressurized air, was at the heart of the Hamilton production of wood type, and one of the main reasons decorative faces could be produced cheaply enough to be used widely in commercial printing. 

All throughout the demonstration people got to ask him questions. Most were of a technical nature. Paul Aken asked him about the shoulder height and depth of the counter (sorry, those are cast type terms). I asked him how they measured the productivity of each pantograph operator. He said that management had figured out a standard of output, so many fonts in a given face in a given size in a given amount of time. I can’t remember if he said it was all charted out or not, but that’s how I’m picturing the information. The reason this is crazy to think about is, this was a pretty skilled kind of work, including having to cut by hand every single inside corner to a sharp angle for many faces, because the router bits all leave a round corner. Quantifying all that across the room full of pantagraph operator-craftsworkers, such that the information could be figured into larger decisions regarding the future prospects of the company, was probably a typical industrial efficiency problem for the time. I think it was one of the Moran brothers who noted that over the decades there had been a great many women in this occupation. I also asked Mr. Brylski if he was in a union. He was; I think he said it was the carpenters and joiners union. 

Richard Zauft, under whom I studied about thirteen years ago, led a hands-on print session using for the first time the newly unveiled Hamilton face, Carter Latin, the first typeface designed by Matthew Carter for wood type. Matthew Carter has done just about everything a guy can do in the field of typography and type design, but it turned out he hadn’t ever designed for wood type. So this, too, was (for type nuts, at least) a pretty special moment, and super fun to do. Hundreds of proofs were made over the course of the day, including many on paper taken from a shop scrap pile, with entertaining results. Matthew Carter was there, presiding like a pleased patrician grandfather.

richard zauft, typographer

Jim Moran gave us a wonderful introduction to and status report on the recently acquired inventory of printing blocks from the old Globe company of Chicago. I don’t know what the proper name of the business was. It might have been Globe Print, or Globe Printing, or Globe Show Print. They were in the business of letterpress printed advertising. Movie posters, rodeo, car racing, and circus posters, and signage for grocery stores and small retailers.  And some political signage, including a lot of blocks for the old Illinois US Senator Dirksen. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, in terms of a fusion of material and social history. Who were these people in the 40s, 50s, and 60s who were going to rodeos, circuses, and scary movies? The whole thing had the air of a healthy working class world, with its own amusements and nascent consumer economy. Jim made the point that some of the circus posters that feature clowns are actually quite sinister, with the clowns playing as figures of chaos and menace. So what was life like for the classes of citizenry who consumed the thrills and contrived scares of the circus midway and freak shows? Who shopped at the stores that advertised their meat discounts in the windows? And whom Senator Dirksen wanted to reach? Lots to wonder about there. Unfortunately, not much is known about Globe. Jim is starting to get some leads on the company, people who may have been involved, but it sounds like that is in an early stage. 

partial posters in the men's bathroom, hamilaton wood type museum

The Hamilton staff and volunteers are slowly making their way through an estimated 1400 blocks, many of them damaged, and all of them having arrived in a completely disorganized state. The story is, the Globe company cleared them out and packed them for storage, but then they were somehow left in a tractor semi-trailer for 25 years, and practically forgotten. A whole bunch of type came along with it that they are also sorting. Some of the blocks are just amazing, and the proofing of them is what is a great motivation for putting in the labor. 

Most of the blocks are carved or cut vinyl. But check out this one, which is pure woodcut, handcarved.

from the globe collection, hamilton woodtype museum

 This place is the mecca of wood type, no question. For the letterpress printer, there’s interesting stuff at every turn.

 

just another amazing specimen sheet, hamilton wood type museum