OK. Good evening, thank you all for coming in, first of all,
and thank you to the to the Bodleian for hosting me here as Princeton residents just nearing the end of my time.
Here I go home this weekend and it's been an amazing experience.
So thank you to everybody here. So I came here to produce a print and book the same print in a print version and a book version,
which was finished this week, so I'm relieved it's here.
There's a copy of the front here as well. So you get an idea of the scale of the scale and if you like, feel free to come and look later.
Just wait while some more people come in. Oh, you're welcome.
We've just started. So you've not missed the. I'll be talking more about this later in the talk.
I'm going to talk for about 40 minutes a link and then be space if anyone's got any questions.
Please. And also, I've brought a small selection of my work, smaller work out, which is from here.
You're welcome to come and take a look. They're all handling copies, so please take a look and let Alex in as well.
We're going to go over to the press afterwards as well. We'll have some more work out and feel free to talk.
I'm happy to answer questions if I can. If I can't, I'll make up some excuse.
Very small introduction to myself, I'm a visual artist working with print, language and geography.
I'm interested in how we experience place and how we describe place and how we can represent that.
And I work primarily with less oppressed Brinson. And given that it was mainly an industrial process that's changed somewhat over the last 50 years.
You could call that a decline. Some people think the resurgence as well. We can have that conversation.
But because of that, I'm interested in where the multiple meets the unique and where the ephemeral meets the archival.
And hopefully some of that will become clear as I show you some images of my own work and other work as well.
Other artists work. These are some starting points.
I'm going to leave you with those four minutes to read them through while I rearranged something.
Mm hmm. OK.
I want to talk to you about how we can read and strategies for reading if you like, the talk will be from my own perspective as a practising artist.
And I'd like to do that by looking at how a small cross-section of artists work.
And in some ways, this is from my own research. All the artists I'm going to introduce you to, or you may well be aware of.
Some of them already are artists who I've been intrigued by over a sustained period of time and
whose thinking is either fed into my own work or where I feel like there's some shared concerns.
You could say that ninety nine percent of work isn't made in a vacuum.
We work within a round or perhaps even against a history and the present and the response to it.
If you like, there's a huge amount of history, obviously here at the Bosnian and in the press room.
Well, where I've been working for the past month, there are multiple contexts and situations.
The logical thing to do would perhaps be to present this work from these artists in a chronological linear fashion.
So I'm not going to do that instead of group to work into themes.
Well, I want to show you some of the strategies and devices that these artists have used in the hope that
it will highlight our own strategies that we can use for reading and interpreting some of this work.
And these themes here naturally cross over and bleed into each other, as will become obvious through the talk.
And I also think it's very helpful to think of them as starting points, not end points.
OK. So the first thing that I'm picking out is about sex and about sex and modified, generated, appropriated.
Marion Dargis is an art artist working in Philadelphia, contemporary.
And this is a book that she produced a handful of years ago with another artist called Leah Macken.
Ultra says it's a collaboration about place systems and chance the text is generated
using optical character recognition and Google Translate using them as chance operations,
and its actual original source is Sigmund Freud Zesa, the mystic writing part.
These are just the selection of the pages, some of the text ripped through the book, which is something else, will come back to repetition.
And interacts with the imagery. And no two books are exactly the same.
Which is an interesting argument against perhaps the idea of the multiple.
And in addition, size where each copy has to be the same. None of these are the same.
Just a brief note of put dimensions here. It's a fascination of the art world I know to have dimensions on everything.
Some of them are an inch as some of them are in centimetres. Some of them have got both.
OK, so if it's important to you, you'll get a sense of it.
Hopefully from that. I like to think it's reflective of less press printing in that it works in both inches and centimetres.
People around the world use both those different systems, and we have to try and interact with each other.
So when I go to Milan to print or when I go to Belgium to print, they're all talking in centimetres with Typekit and I'm still thinking in inches.
But when I was a kid growing up, my parents worked in inches and school in centimetres, so I can't do either of them very well.
That's where I ended up. So there's a little bit of scale because I thought it might be useful.
So if we're talking about modification of text, I want to show you this work by an artist called Ken Campbell.
I have this catalogue here of his work, which I'm going to put out on the table afterwards, and you feel free to take a look.
But he's very interested as an artist because he started life as a composer in the 1950s.
Born in the east end of London, and then he went to London School of Printing and learnt graphic design and broke his apprenticeship,
in fact, to learn through graphic design before going on later in his career to create artist books.
And this is a collection of 20 of them.
But this is a really interesting book called Father's Garden, and I just want to read you what he says about this work.
If I show you a couple of images, some of the things that are happening become clear.
Rabbi Luria of Sfard prayed at dawn in his garden when he thought the world was innocent of all sin.
This book carries a poem about a father's garden that is used as a repeating image of a garden of exits and entrances.
A garden of furrows of articulated alphabet from which much may grow to sacred garden.
A garden representing Jerusalem, a garden in which our fathers juice flows everywhere.
The poem is revealed on a page within the page a plot within a plot.
The exits and entrances are eight possible typographic portals to that page.
I asked a friend how many gates the to the material Jerusalem while setting aside under my breath, let there be eight.
Lucky man, he said later. There are seven on one they don't talk about.
As each cycle of the book is completed, a flowering made of decorative typographic elements occurs at the gates.
The flowering is inspired by the design of Islamic books in the British Museum,
and each carries successfully the symbols of the last of the three religions of the book.
The typographic rules are used as bars to represent a close to the gates of the city.
Where it gets more practical and what's going on in the book is that each line of the
poem is randomly shown when typographic led rules are removed and set aside on the page.
So some of this is happening here. The line may then be seen as a happy representation of fruitful growth,
flat soldiers of colour represented in the garden and seem to walk playfully about.
The type that the poem is set in changes progressively from a brutal sans serif bold into a graceful italic serif until towards
the notion that loosening of the strictly laid out and savagely managed garden of my father might yet produce happier fruit.
My father, despite his rigour, found everything that you planted in the ground spontaneously blossomed intentionally or not.
So through the book, that's what happens. That's how the text is modified.
It's the same text. It changes with how visible and readable it is.
And as Ken says, Glen Campbell says, with the typeface indicating the feeling that it's happening.
This is something I've thought about a lot recently, and this is a new piece of work I'm making started this awesome will be a series of
four books broadly looking at elements close to where I live and where my studio is.
And the dangers of those elements might present all the dangers that we might present to those elements of this book,
is this a proof binding of it just to the front, if you want to take a look?
But something similar happens where the text begins in the book,
completely obscured and gradually becomes more readable until the last page of the book.
The full short poem, shall we call it, is revealed.
The second theme on talks about is working in series. And I'm going to show you a little more of my work here to illustrate this.
I did initially. So the piece that actually came here to make is part of a tax landscape series.
This is the fourth iteration of it that made here. I started it two years ago with this print.
It was made at Wells Book Art Centre, New York State. And I had a very simple idea for it.
Which was could you represent a landscape and experience of being in a landscape topographically through using tax?
So in some ways, this whole series. Is generated from the experience of being in the place, so my writings about being in that place.
Conversations. Oral histories.
One of my favourite aspects of it is when I'm talking to people who come to visit me when I'm on the residency and I say some of the work,
some of the text and I come from conversations they get because they get edited,
they get moved around and there's a meta moment there where I'm talking to somebody and sometimes
they realise that the conversation that happened with me might end up somewhere in the print.
And sometimes they do a very good job of not knowing that at all. Maybe they do, and they're not showing me.
But those are where the tax came from. I also take a lot of photographs while I'm on the residency.
And around the city or around the place, and I'm looking for colours, patterns, textures,
and the final arrangement often is some representation of that place, possibly as a landscape.
Elements of that landscape. This was one night on a residency in rural borders of Scotland.
This was one made in urban downtown Cleveland, Ohio.
And this is the one made here, which in the end.
Owes a lot more to maps than the previous iterations in the series have,
because perhaps because I saw the Map exhibition here, I'm one of the first days I was here and that stuck with me.
And hopefully there'll be some elements in there that you can recognise from Oxford.
Some of the curves, some of the rivers that move through the city. So this is the fourth in that series.
My plan is supposed to be 10. And then I'll stop.
Also looking in series, then this is a German artist from the city of Rostock, working now called Petra.
Petra Schulz of Auguste. A series of circle the back side of the universe.
There's elements of this that will appear in a later theme as well.
Printing from different materials and lots of press.
But if I I'll skip through this series and then go back to the beginning and you'll see what's happening.
So the first point she makes in each is the back of the letters.
Very simple technique, but really interesting and revealing. And to quote where she says she prints the backs of the letters first,
because of the geometric shape and the constructions that can be created from them,
they often have a beautiful structure and I notice that they often look like galaxies. So my understanding is that she doesn't compose these.
With the letters or the rule on psychographic elements, first, she looks at the back when she's printed, but she turns them over and prints the from.
And what's interesting to me is how it builds up as a series. How one leads on to the next and the next and the next and how they.
Amplify each other to me. This is contemporary artist based in Chicago with the such.
And a series of hers called Electric Biology. Two examples of this series here.
Over 40 in the series. And quoting from her, she says, inspired by the most complex organ in invertebrate body, the brain.
Information from the Sense Organs is collected in the brain whose activity governs behaviour, language and consciousness.
These prints were produced in sequence were colour and composition acts as signifiers of the active brain tissue generating electric fields.
So the next thing. So there are a number of process images that might be of interest to you.
Here's one. I think that Sarah's idea leads quite nicely to repetition and what happens if you repeat something.
Can Campbell's quote was nice? Because it talks about how you might find a solidity to the thing that you're working with.
But I also quite like John Cage's quote that I'm paraphrasing him, perhaps mangling a little bit.
But where he says that if something is boring for a minute, try it for five minutes.
And et cetera, et cetera. I'm paraphrasing. Somebody will know the correct quote.
But you get the idea. What happens if you keep doing something?
So this is actually the piece that I've laid out here at the front. You're welcome to take a look.
Hans, you admire, is a analysis to grow up in West Germany, as it was then his grandfather and father ran a printing plant.
And his earliest work, which you can see in his book Typo,
is literally the clean up sheets collected from around the printing works when he was a small child.
He was fascinated by these sheets that had chaotic colour combinations on them and white spirit,
you know, come off the rollers and it spread itself across the sheets,
and he collected them all up from the bins and he stashed them all away in a drawer and a desk, I think was in his father's office.
And when his family found these prints,
they were disgusted and threw them all away because they weren't what people were meant to see of the printing process.
Of course, people were meant to see the beautifully printed books that the company made, and Meyer was interested in the throwaway.
But this is a work of his, I think, leads quite nicely on from the idea of repetition on from series three into repetition.
Typekit action. And.
It comes from a series that he made several years before with the first alphabet, where he created from A to Z, an alphabet of single letters.
Arranged in multiples over printed one single letter, repeated several times in a pattern.
Larger prints and he took those prints and turned them into this piece of work.
And it's not immediately obvious how it was done, or at least it isn't to me.
And insightful, he he describes the book Typekit, he describes how he did this.
So from the first Alphabet series, the twenty six figures of the alphabet were transferred to a photo typesetting plate,
a much smaller size with the help of a machine called the Star Setter Graph, which is the first photo of typesetter.
This side note here is that there's a bit of a concern that this technology is not being kept because it's more recent.
And I know that there's certain people here, the body and who would like to make sure that lots of that machinery is kept because it comes from a very
particular point in history that was then very quickly superseded in the latter part of last century.
But the star set a graph that Maya used was the first time photo type setser and each configuration of letters was exposed time and again,
all by chance, as fast as possible on a designated surface,
measuring 25 pikers by 34 pikers with the possibility of shifting horizontally and
vertically during an action and each exposure time was limited to 13 minutes.
In the firm spirit of chance, you decided on that figure. That's how they were all exposed.
And he says, I only saw the final result when it was developed, but there was no instance in which I wasn't pleased.
Nothing can go wrong. Well, one must simply leave it up to chance. And you can see here, if you take a closer look, the letters are scattered.
Singly at the beginning and as they go round and as they come inside,
they gradually build up to not a completely solid black surface, but fairly solid.
And that was done by Miss Repetition process following a sequence, so there's a rule,
which is no the thing I'm interested in, and the sequence was simply the first print was A-plus B.
The second was A-plus B plus C, then eight plus B to C, plus the considerably over printing each of those letters.
Again and again and again, until this is the result and looking at it closely, you can't really see those letters.
It's been reduced to an extremely small size.
And mayor calls this, and in fact, a lot of his work, a process of setting up sorry setting and then winding up.
Something I think that's really interesting there is visually.
What that kind of repetition does to your eyes, to the way that you see something and then therefore the way that you interpret it and read it.
This is a piece of mine I made last year called nylon.
Nylon is like a bastardised version of new land.
So as best, I understand it. There was a period in history where new land became a common name of people and also places.
So anything that's called newlin of any kind that sounds at all similar to this.
And I suppose it comes from a time when people first started marking out land as their own finding territory, if you like.
There are lots of Nuland's, I think, in Cornwall. And my idea with this was I wanted to make the type move.
OK. It's continuous repetitions on a sheet quite large.
And I want to continue over and over and over print and see if colour can be generated.
There's a phenomenon that others will know much more about than I do where you use black and white.
And because of the vibration between them, the way that they move together and move on the page, you can see colour.
And people have said they can see colour in this, this is illusory here because of the projects that we have on the colour spectrum,
but if it's if you see it in real life, people have said they can see colours moving in and it's just black and opaque white over nothing else.
OK. But it was thinking of these ideas of new language and new relating them to new land.
Staying with repetition, this is an artist who's currently based in Detroit, Wood, Amos Kennedy.
And he makes prints that look like this. The I think they're all on 18 by 12 inch paper stock, which is a common US size.
Mrs. Rosa Parks series. So much of his work follows this former.
Portrait. It's on this brown craft paper.
Big, bold type. Over background, so I. And also a show of his in Brooklyn Library in 2017.
And he had a whole wall like this, this is actually from a different show in Richmond, Virginia, last year.
But what's interesting to me about it is what scale and repetition does to his work and what it does to the way that you can,
you know, the way that you view it and what you can then see in it as well, how that then starts to generate pattern.
Purely through repetition of this format. On a much smaller scale is the work of the Scottish artist in Hamilton, Finley.
What I like about his work is it's it's small in scale and in idea, but it's very strong in how it transmits that idea.
Very simple repetition through this poem, through this book.
About turning over the Earth. He's talking about seasons changing.
And how? I go back through it.
There's the physical obviously turning over the page. To reveal what's underneath.
It's a really simple act. And it's a I think it's a useful act to think about when we're looking at books.
A little more from Ken Campbell. This is a vehicle fire dogs that you might in 91.
And it was made at the start of the first Gulf War was when he started making the book each book.
So, Campbell, somewhere between a year and a year and a half to make.
This is an edition of 33, so you get an idea about the labour involved in this kind of book.
And there are 86 pages. If we're thinking about repetition.
Work in this kind of way. There's crossovers with other themes here in terms of the materials that he's using.
I'll come back to that later. But I'm interested here in the repetition, both of the The Shape.
It's moving through the book. But also of these poems.
And I'll just read you a short piece that he says and the way he describes.
What he was doing here. So this is his own poetry that he's written that's included in this book.
I took short phrases from each of the six poems.
And reverse the order in relation to the problems. And then place the freezes in the dark margins of chosen pages.
So if poem one phrase from poem six. Poem to a phrase from five and so on until poem six and a phrase from poem one,
the idea was that from the beginning, the hidden phrases would be predictive of poetics to come.
And increasingly, towards the end, the phrases would echo what had been read during the journey through the book.
And he finishes by saying, I do not know if this device works. So you can see up at the top there through the margins and hidden away often.
Elements of some of the other poems. So the whole book interacts with itself.
If you choose to read it in that way. And there's plenty of writers who you can read about, artist books say.
And Ken Campbell doesn't particularly associate himself with artist books.
He is an artist who makes books. Is there a differentiation?
It's an interesting conversation. But this interesting conversation about artists books about how they read okay and how you navigate through them.
You don't necessarily start at the very beginning and go through to the end and then put it down.
There are many different ways of navigating. OK.
That leads onto nicely to the next theme, which is around improvisation.
Something that Ken Campbell has used a lot through the years.
So interestingly, both Ken Campbell and Wolfgang van Gogh were worked in the trade, in the print trade.
From a young age as apprentices. As compulsive as.
And. But let's just read you a little bit from Wolfgang van Gaal's book.
My Way to Typography. Which is a very interestingly arranged book.
It doesn't necessarily sit in a sequence that you would assume.
It's just been republished as well by the publishers, in fact, after being out of print.
So I'm just going to give you a little bit because I think it's really nice the way he talks
about what what his work was like before I go on to talk about this work a little more.
My workday began at seven o'clock in the morning and ended after five o'clock in the evening in the first year.
It was the duty of the Apprentice to attend to everyone's general needs during the cold months.
I started before dawn, responsible for kindling, the fire with wood and coal to heat our section of the building before the employees arrived.
The company was called Ru Ru a Approuvé. I'm not sure I pronounce it pronouncing located in a small coach house on
middle strata close to the outskirts of the old mediaeval section of Stuttgart.
Miraculously, industrial buildings in our area were unscathed by the allied bombardment during the Second World War.
It goes on for half an hour around morning break time. I also had the task of shopping for the employees.
The lists of request was always the same. And several others wanted the popular tabloids with large, bold headlines and coloured pictures.
The printers Typekit this room, bookbinder ordered bread, cheese, ham, sausages and beer princes like beer.
You hear this a lot. The first time I went on my round of errands, I brought back the wrong beer.
The bottle was green instead of brown, apparently beer from a brown bottle tastes better, so it was sent back to the store to make the exchange.
And to this day, I only drink brown bottled beer. So.
Where does this piece of work come from?
As I learnt to master the techniques of letterpress prints in my work with typography became more experimental.
It started with letters and type elements composed in a circular ring.
The round compositions, that's this work. This theme is about improvisation.
So this is how Vanguard got there. Actually, the compositions came about as the result of a mishap.
Well, morning I lost my grip on a heavy type draw and it fell to the floor. It was filled with the smallest type we had in the shop.
A six point semi bowled. Berthold accident's grotesque.
I'm making a presumption that most people know something about letterpress printing. If you don't, six-point is tiny.
You can't read it when it's on the end of a piece of metal.
The whole case, unforeseen and unpaid work for the weekend was assured to distribute and replace every character back into the tight case,
including punctuation and numbers, would take the full two days while gathering up the letters,
I had a strange idea to fill a cardboard ring with the title standing on end letter service positioned upwards until it was packed solid in a ring.
One such round competition yielded two principle surfaces the customary face of the letters,
and by carefully turning the compose ring upside down the underside of the type.
Most foundry letters and word spaces have a characteristic groove and feet on the bottom of the metal body looking like an equal sign.
It was a revelation that this structure repeatedly left its unmistakeable tracks in every printing trial.
And he made an entire series from this work. And in the book My Way to Typography.
I think this is quite an interesting way round, it's like a strategy or a device, if you like.
At a similar time, he was also travelling to the Middle East quite a lot, and he took lots of photographs out of the aeroplane windows.
Some of them have cities as they came into land. I think particularly in Jordan and Syria.
And in the book. He juxtaposes this work with his photographs arranged in a similar ring of.
These cities from above. And they look incredibly similar.
And the thing is interesting argument there about the way round you go about creating work,
whereas I was describing before my work with the tax landscape series is going out in a
city and taking photographs of that city in that landscape and over a period of time,
they come together in a form. This is almost like the exact opposite.
He's found the form, the typography is taken or the anti typography, if you like.
In another situation, these cities seen from above. I said in my introduction that.
It's interesting to think of these strategies in these different devices as starting points, not end points.
So if this theme is about improvisation to me, it's about improvisation.
And then where there was chance encounters lead you, what you then make from that?
It's not an end in itself for me. And I think for others as well, it's not.
So Ken Campbell talks about if you have the skills chance being, you know, a valid avenue.
Surprise if you like. So this is from a series that I started this year.
Of overpromising and repetition again comes back in here, that theme.
Where? I'll show you. This is on the on the bed of the press.
This is what we call the form set up. And it's one single column of text.
The moves on a diagonal by an end space in each row.
So I wondered what happened. If you keep printing that.
Over and over. Moving the sheep very slightly each time.
So it went through multiple variations that were then thrown away.
Before it got to this, where I then worked out carefully to get that pattern, to get the movement in there, where there's gaps.
It's not entirely regular. How I'd have to move the sheet and the piece of paper you can see over there on the left
hand side is a reminder for me as I'm princeling about where each number should come,
where each party should come, and it's just a measurement guide. As to which numbers I should skip out in half centimetre increments.
So it came purely from imprecise improvisation and wondering what that might look like.
And then working backwards to create a composition from that.
And I also just want to mention here again, draw another artist through into this section.
Marianne Dages again. This is the Ultra his book generated through character recognition.
Google Translate software. And what she says about improvisation, I think, is really interesting.
Intuition, intuition. Experimentation and chance.
I can't help myself when it comes to used books and a lot of the time an artist's book begins to
form because I've been reading one thing and found a book with interesting images in another.
And the two seemingly unrelated sources combine in my head. I think that happens throughout this book.
Similarly, with Ken Campbell's work. You can see here there's a density of a that's built up and reading about his attitude to the work.
A lot of that comes about through for him. That's not.
And in fact, fighting with the process and fighting with the press. And the way it's handling.
And he's improvising ideas all the time on the bed of the press that in some ways
is the source for his work and for his ideas what the physical material does.
How it handles, how you can mutate it. And how sometimes you can make it do what it's not meant to do.
But it comes through in this work of enormous power, I think, in the end. That speaks to that process.
OK. This is something that's interesting to think.
What happens if you don't work with words, with texts? David Morrison is a contemporary artist working in Brussels, Belgium.
And his work with lots of press printing is like the press printing.
Usually almost no text. This is a piece made from Rule, so rule type II elements, same height as the type that will print.
Normally used for separating out sections of a page may be conventionally. But this is what David Morrison does with it.
There's a video of this, I don't know if it's going to work, but we'll find out.
But this shows is going to show his process as it moves around the bed and in contrast to the less the last section thinking about improvisation.
This is not improvised. I might need to hit another button.
Let's try it. Yeah.
So he has a plan on the bed to the press. And then follows that plan around with the printings.
I was going to keep going on loop. And when he describing this work, he says one of his main challenges was keeping it from moving because,
as I'm sure you can see, there's not really anything that's on a right angle very much.
There's a lot of diagonals and you have to keep it from moving through the room through the addition.
The same artist. This work was made for an exhibition on the art of Yukio.
Each invited artist chose one for one work from a list, and he, David Morrison, interpreted.
That with the technique that he uses using his bathroom, we've just seen in the previous images.
On this one, he drew in the computer first and illustrator. And he says that you started with around 15 sheets.
And with those repeated printings. He finished with one copy that was happy with.
So it gives you an idea about how things move through the process. Especially when you're working with if you like non-standard material.
In different formats and orientations. This is where you have the question about what's left of us and what's not left Cyprus.
Whereas the previous work is definitely lots of press uses brush roll that's found in every laser brush print shop.
This is printed on a regular press that is used for lots of rest printing announced, but then in fact.
But it's printed from ball bearings. OK.
Stock down. On a mounted piece of a board on the press, so mounted type II.
So that the press can print it so. Is it lots of press or not?
And I know there's lots of arguments about photo polymer. People have divergent views on it.
But this is using an actual material, individual pieces. So like we think of movable type, these are movable ball bearings.
OK. Very briefly, another piece of Ken Campbell's work.
Broken rules, broken rules and double crosses. These are this is furniture.
So if we're thinking about non-standard material that's still less of.
This is furniture usually used to create space.
It's white space, negative space in printing over printed onto each other, so bumped up to type height.
And then printed as solids over the top of each other. That's just the process image showing you how that's done.
It's a wood frame that the. He's cut out to begin with to fit together the shapes he wants.
A an Italian artist working at the moment based in Milan, Luciano Pasolini.
He's interesting because he works both with less press printing. Small edition books and wood sculpture.
And the two are one of them the same for him, sculptural printing.
And in his studio, he has examples of each with repeating shapes all the way through.
He's working with very distinct shapes. Again and again, whether it's printing, whether it's sculpture.
Elbow and tempo for people who speak Italian will know.
It just means the good time or a good time. You just described it as everyone needs a good time.
This is the place he goes to for a good song. Prince. So again, this is less of press material.
But used without words. And the sculptures that he creates as well.
All have the same format. And he describes it as a basic human form, if you like the figure standing figure with a with the torso.
And is considering working with that element through his books and through sculpture.
He says I make no difference between text and images. A printed text is an image, although the country is not true.
And everything is in the service of the overall composition. That's my basic concern.
So. There's a Rogue One.
Let's go in the. So the next section is about non-lethal press materials.
You can make an argument, the ball bearings and non-expert materials, if you like. This is going back to Wolfgang Vinagre.
And he describes in his book Wanting to make his first book, this is still at the same time that he's an apprentice compositor.
But all of this work is made through woodcuts. But it's clearly informed by his apprenticeship.
And he made contact with the wood artist Grijalva. Which I may not pronounce right.
Somebody, please correct me if I. Who he as a young student in Vanguard,
invited him to give a lecture at his institute because he thought appreciably would shake things up in what he perceived to be the stuffy,
typographic world of that time in the early 60s. Particularly coming from Swiss typography.
He thought it needed shaking in some ways. So these are elements from that first book that he produced.
I showed a couple of images earlier of this space work in progress.
This is just very simply showing you using non-lethal materials.
This imagery that's in here. This is thinking about water and flooding.
It's a series that responds to the area where, where I live and work.
And our river, we have a river that literally runs underneath the front of our house in a culvert.
Sometimes it doesn't run underneath the house. If you if anybody, you know, told the dial told it, I was where, where I live.
And the waters come straight off the moors and have a lot of peat in them, so that orange.
So I'm thinking about how to get that across. This is just very simple.
String laid down on the board, on the bed of the press.
Type II and then things printed from an over printed again and again and often without rethinking so that you get these different layering,
the layering happening. So thinking about what material you can put through the same press without damaging anything, but what can you put through it?
Aaron Coke is a really interesting artist, working currently in Colorado, he's based in the States.
Um, he works at Colorado College, but also runs a press from there as well, called the new lights press.
Which publishes books and broadsides. So in some ways, it's quite a traditional press, private press, if you like.
But the work that he produces is anything but traditional. Working with non-standard materials.
But still using the techniques and processes and equipment machines of less press printing.
And he has a really interesting approach to language and how it's created and how it's read.
I'm just going to cycle through some images so you can see how this work is done and then say a little bit in his words.
How he describes his work. So this is a regular flatbed proof press that lots of you will be familiar with.
And this is a real mix of polygraph. I suppose you could call it that.
And laser cook. So Coke says I think the act of reading is an everyday miracle.
My work is often about slowing down reading by adding layers of noise.
The general idea is to force the reader. To see their reading and in that seeing to start to build.
Sorry, I've missed about my work is about slowing down reading by adding layers of noise.
The idea is to force the reader to see their reading and in that scene to start to build compounding layers onto or off the reading experience.
Some of my work is difficult to read in a traditional sense. But I don't think the reading is about successfully decoding or solving the text.
The reading is the process of decoding. The oscillation between the layers of seeing and reading.
It's a couple more pieces of his work here. So it can be read in a conventional way, but it can be read in other ways.
And he says he goes on to say something very interesting about how he how he thinks of books and book production.
And his work, I used to plan everything out, but now I'm working towards more and more improvisation with the goal of books being
written and printed simultaneously signature by signature in a kind of feedback loop.
I want the books to be more like writing or drawing or making a film where the actual thing emerges from the process.
I'm obsessed with the idea of an emergent text or an emergent book.
I've talked a lot here and heard a lot said here. About book production.
And about how authors write texts and then the intervention and the process that happens beyond that point.
That involves Prince's Composites is being asked to interpret these texts rather than see them as completely finished.
They have to do interpretation. Throughout history.
And so I think that's a really interesting idea about the process of making a book and the meaning that's involved in that.
Last thing. Again, following on from meaning and how we read things.
I've included. Edward, you Johansson's. Quote there, because.
Is the installation that he's created? I think is really interesting.
Again, this links back with thinking about non-standard materials. Piece called If I pronounce it right, the way that a is a long, long and so vulgar,
I think like the city of or house in Denmark, so I think it's vulgar. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
But this is now playing with the idea of scale. So less lessons, a laser cut and then put through an etching process.
So this is. Most of Johansson's work is with lots of press, but he's not beholden to that if the scale.
And the words. Demands a different process. And he says very simply about this work.
A lot of the time, there's a curiosity that needs to be quenched and vulgar.
I was wondering how big would I managed to print? And then the rest of the project stems from that curiosity.
I found the paper settled on the idea of banners and then found a concepts of like the fits, the theme Volga means death.
So for him. The way I interpret this, it's a dare or a challenge to himself.
And how big he can work. And what that scale does to the work and what it says.
Going back to some of the work of your e-mail,
this is a piece called Typekit Solon that was made for a concrete poetry exhibition in Brighton in nineteen sixty seven nineteen sixty eight,
I think it was made sixty seven. The exhibition was sixty eight.
Typekit columns. These were printed letterpress.
OK, so they fit are of the process, and there's an outside of a pillar that's made of perspex printed with special links unless a press on foil.
Which Meyer says wasn't at all easy. Foy was then wrapped around the inside, which resulted in a wall effect,
and there was also a pillar with another one inside, which produced correspondingly more complicated patterns.
That's how he describes it in his book, Typo. And these were on public like a public space intervention, if you like.
And they have a kind of almost human scale to me.
Very slightly over human size. And again, like some of the other work we've seen, I've shown you as a sculptural quality to it as well.
3-D quality, which is something that installation work. How's as a possibility?
And this is something I thought about a lot. A couple of years ago, I had a commission to read from E Street Arts and Leeds to work with.
An archaeological collection of a site in the city centre, Leeds,
that was cleared to make way for a new shopping centre in the Victoria Gate Shopping Centre, which is very fancy if anyone's been there.
But they have to do a full archaeological survey on the site as I understand it,
because when they first did a cursory study and an initial study, they found human remains on the site.
From a long time ago, but still human remains, and then I think that triggers a deeper survey.
So this piece of work was a response to that survey. So using objects found in that survey.
Find like all the objects. And each of these is it opening on tracing paper about metre wide, about five or six metres tall?
And each of these represents a trench that was dug like a simple trench that would have been dug.
The archaeologists then mapped the finds from. With texts that were taken from the final survey report.
And so it's playing with. Partly, at least, what can be done without a press because there was no press.
In this space that I was using. So there's an improvised press, magnets holding letters in place.
It works. It's very slow, but it works. And the idea was to move the finds these objects from the site away from their original function because they.
No longer serve that original function. And create something new from give him the new life, if you like.
So there are things like roof tiles and their spoons, coins, bone discs.
People weren't sure what the bone discs were, but they you see them repeating the.
And one thing I found really satisfying about this was a an archaeologist who came to visit it.
Who appreciated it, because he said this is the archaeology of the working classes.
Because all the objects, all the finds from the survey were what normally would just be thrown away.
There'd be no interest in studying them at all, because it's not a Roman chariot that's been found in Yorkshire.
It's not some kind of burial site. This specific interest that the all the objects, all the items come from people's day to day lives.
So that's also part of the layering of what it represents.
And the thing in this work, certainly in my thinking around it and my thinking around the other artist.
Throughout this talk I've introduced to you or shown to you.
There's this fundamental question of what if? Two very, very simple words, but what if you try this thing?
What if you try something? What if you try using a different method for generating texts from what you would usually use?
What if you try printing rules in a repeating pattern?
What happens? What happens if you continue continually over print text, what does that give you?
And then this work, some of those surfaces there are raised tight by gaffer tape.
Stuck around a piece of card and then flattening. What if you do that a lot about the materials here that we work with and what can be done with them?
What that then says and like I said several times, but improvisational attitude as a starting point, where does that then lead you?
What if you made an enormous column of text and put it outside in a shopping centre for people to walk around, avoid bump into what happens?
And that is my conclusion. If you like. What if you tried this thing?
What can go wrong? Thank you very much for listening.