“My personal definition of
the book is quite broad, with boundaries that are in constant flux. At the core
of my interpretation is the act of reading, and the element of time that is
essential to this act.”
–Julie Chen
Glimpse, Julie Chen and Barbara Tetenbaum, 2011
S: You’re a sort of master builder
when it comes to book forms. My favorites are your books that involve moving parts. These seem at once game-like (Cat's
Cradle, The Guide to Higher Learning, Personal Paradigms) and machine-like
(Full-Circle, True to Life). When I
consider the mechanics behind multimedia work, Glimpse seems a great example of how a structure moves to
physically describe the process of what some call essay or memoir writing--how
real life events become narrative visual form. I wonder if the machine-like
qualities of your work are intended to draw attention to the process of
combination, especially by placing it in the hands of the viewer. Why do you
think your books so often, and in so many ways, ask viewers to handle and
actively experience them?
J: What I am trying to do in my work
is give the reader a physical experience of reading/viewing. The activity of
reading a typical (non-artist's book) book is basically a visual one for most
people: You take in the content with your eye. This is especially true with
e-books, but is also somewhat true even with paper books. The object itself is
perceived mainly as a carrier for content (This is of course not the case for
people in the book arts and graphic design who tend to be much more aware of
how the type, images, paper and binding are all affecting the reading
experience). My interest in approaching the book as a medium for art is to get
people to interact with the physicality of the book, and to experience the
activity of reading haptically. The book form can be so much more than a
carrier for content: The book as object can be a significant contributor of the
content along with text and image. I have never really considered the
"machine" aspect of my work, but it's an interesting idea that I will
give more thought to.
S: Cool. I like thinking of the "book
as object" as a sort of third element in the experience as well. In regards to games, chance seems
a force considered in both the text and forms of your work. I wonder sometimes at
the presence of chance in work that combines two media--when and how do
pairings happen? Can you talk a bit about how, or if chance plays a role in
your own process, and if pairings of text and image seem to happen on their own
or "by chance" for you.
A Guide to Higher Learning, Julie Chen, 2009
J: Funny you should ask this question
as chance is something that I have not considered with much in my work, until
now. My latest book, Family Tree, consists for 16 wooden cubes with text and
image on all 6 sides. One of the reasons I chose this form was to take maximum
advantage of the idea of random access of content. There are actually 2.8
trillion permutations possible with 16 cubes. I haven't, of course, tried even
a fraction of that number, although I designed the piece to allow for a very
wide range of possible meaningful permutations to occur. It all depends on what
any individual reader chooses to focus on. People will always search for
meaning, so I have a feeling that even though chance can play a significant
role in the reading/viewing process, people will tend to gravitate towards
combinations of content that they find meaningful.
The other piece of mine that utilizes
chance as a significant factor in the reading/viewing process is Personal
Paradigms. Because this piece was designed as a game, chance allows the reader/
participant to enter into a content-making space with some of the decisions
pre-made for them. This shortens the process, and also allows the participant
to (hopefully) feel freer to make meaningful combinations of ideas that were
selected randomly since they do not have to own all the decisions, but instead
have to make the best of what they randomly selected. Some limitations in the
process of art making are almost always beneficial as being told you can make
absolutely anything would paralyze most people, at least temporarily. In
general, though, I orchestrate how text and image interact in my work very
carefully. In order to give the reader a specific experience of content, I feel
I have to control how content is revealed/delivered, except in instances such
as with those examples described above, where chance is an intentional
contributor to the reading process.
S: Content-making space. Yes. Which medium do you begin with to get to this point with
a reader? Is text always present from the beginning? Or do visuals ever come
first?
J: The
way in which a project begins varies a lot from piece to piece. Once I choose a
subject, it can just as easily be structure or image that is the starting point
rather than text, although I do have to say that the development of text
usually starts fairly early in the process. Once I start working seriously on a
piece, everything develops together. I might spend a few days working on the
text, but then put that aside to work on image or structure. For me, the book
usually develops in an integrated fashion. It's almost never a question of the
piece being built around a single sacrosanct element such as the text. Rather,
every element is up for adjustment in order to make the piece work.
In some instances,
a breakthrough about book structure has caused both the written and visual
content of a project to be radically adjusted. This was the case with Panorama, which started out to be a much
smaller format book. It wasn't until the voice of the structure fully emerged
that it turned out that the piece needed to be very large in order for it to
really speak. This involved a lot of adjustments to both text and image after
the printing had already begun.
S: “The voice of the structure fully emerging” is a really
wonderful description of this process. Can you talk a bit more about that moment?
I’m curious about instances of emergence like this in which one or both media
adjusts so the two can work better together. Does happen for you often at the
end of a big project? What do you think brings emerging about?
J: Often when I
begin a piece, I only have a vague or very simplistic idea of I where I'm
going, but I've learned to trust the process. While moments of emergence
sometimes seem to happen suddenly, like a seemingly random flash of
inspiration, they really only happen as the result of allowing myself to think
about a project over a period of time. I try not to place too much emphasis on
the early stages of working on a piece with the goal of finding an answer or solving
a problem, but rather of exploring whatever it is that is pushing me in the
initial direction that I'm going in. I try to hold things as loosely as I can
for as long as possible, and am still often surprised at the unexpected
directions that projects sometimes go in. It's always less stressful if these
moments happen on the front end of a project, but I've definitely had big
changes in my thinking happen midway or even later in a project. There is
usually a moment though, after which big changes are totally unfeasible, and
once that point arrives, a lot of soul searching happens about whether or not
the new thing is really vital to the project.
S: At the heart
of this interview series is a search on my part for a language of craft that
describes when and how art+text functions. Do you have terms for the ways words
partner with visuals successfully in the book arts? I can see how some might
describe this quality simply by naming the binding type or book form, but there
seems something more to be said about how ideas are conveyed via a codex vs. a
tunnel book, and that this is about more than the echoing of content and form.
J:
I definitely think the way in which text and structure works together is more
than just one echoing the other. I don't have any specific language to describe
how text and structure work together but do think that it has something to do
with the way we perceive objects. If the object in question is a traditional
codex book, even the most informed of book art audiences is going to automatically
go into "codex mode", meaning they have subconsciously prepared to
read in ways in which a typical codex is usually read. When the book in
question turns out to not follow known or expect rules, people will quickly
adjust their expectations and respond to what is actually happening in the book
vis a vis the text. But that initial assumption about the object is something
that book artists who use the codex form simply have to be aware of and figure
out how to subvert. With non-traditional book forms, the expectations are much
less ingrained, although with informed book art audiences, there will certainly
be some kind of preconceived expectation with known forms such as the tunnel
book or flag book. But even so, our cultural expectations about what a codex
"is" is so much more ingrained in our thinking that people are much
more willing and able to have open minds when it comes to reading text in
non-codex formats.
How Books Work, Julie Chen and Clifton Meador, 2011
S: There’s something really curious going on here in
the way audiences learn to perceive and experience objects containing text that
has to do with the lens of “book as object.” I
once heard your work described as "sculptural vessels for the written
word," which I liked, but I’ve been treading lightly lately in labeling
which media carries the other when combination is involved, especially from
calling forms "containers" because I like to think that the
components carry equal weight, not one another. Do you ever think of your material/physical
work as a vessel for its language? Do you have another means to describe the
relationship?
J: I
definitely do not consider the physical part of the work to be a container for
the content part of the work. The physical object, including the structure,
materials, and media is a full partner with text and image to create the meaning
of the piece. They are separable on a technical level, of course, but take any
one element away, and the whole thing loses its identity. I don't really have a
single word to describe the relationship of text and image to the physical
object, but this question makes me realize that I should come up with an
articulate way to explain this.
Cat's Cradle, Julie Chen, 2013
S: I like the term
“partner” here because of its nod to dance, and because it suggests something
like a marriage (which seems an overused term in multimedia circles) that is
based more on the work at hand rather than a pre-arranged agreement, but maybe
it's my idea of marriage that's the problem there.
Among the makers
I'm interviewing for this series, your work might push the idea of
"text" the furthest. Many of your pieces reside in museums, as well
as libraries, but are produced in often very limited editions. Where, in an
ideal world, would an audience encounter your work? How much does the issue of
audience come up for you? What about the argument about how few people
encounter an artist's book in their lives? Are the book arts not a form
dedicated to the masses?
J: I
have been asked this question many times before, and I would like to answer
with a question: Why is a limited edition perceived as being inaccessible when
there are a number of copies available for viewing (as opposed to other types
of art such as painting and sculpture where there is only one)? In the case of
many of my editions, such as Panorama,
there are 100 copies in the world, many of which reside in libraries. All it
takes is for someone to go one of those libraries (in some cases, there is a
need to make an appointment) and the book will be placed in their hands. Unlike
unique works of art that are only accessible when they are displayed in
exhibitions, the limited edition artist's book actually is quite accessible.
Interested parties in most regions of the US could see one of my books without
too much difficulty by going to the special collections section of the nearest
university library. Even if a person happened to know that an institution owned
a painting, sculpture, or even a print, it is very unlikely that they would be
able to access those works when the pieces were not on display.
In
regard to the second part of your question about books being a form dedicated
to the masses, I agree with the premise, but make the distinction between books
and artists' books. I think book artists are like other type of artists: we
make work for an audience and want our work to be viewed and/or experienced. Do
most artists make work that is dedicated to be experienced by the masses? I
think the answer is no. Should books in their general form (as opposed to their
artistic form) be available to the masses? Of course. Do some book artists have
the intention of creating artists' books with the intention of disseminating
them to the masses? Certainly. Is that my intention as an artist? Not really.
While I do want my work to be experienced by as many people as possible, it is
intended to be an intimate experience between the reader and the book. The
technical complexity of what I am doing, and my belief that the materials,
media and structure of the piece all contribute significantly to the experience
of the reader, along with the content, means that my production is generally
necessarily limited to relatively small editions. But I do feel that they are
very accessible by art standards.
View, Julie Chen, 2007
S: That’s well said, and raises some important distinctions.
Your first question addresses how the book arts span two mainstream medias that
place perhaps incompatible expectations on the form. This makes me think:
Is this because the process of making an artist's book is more book-like, and
the reproducing and accessing is more art-like? Or is it still somewhere
between—that a piece of book art is more accessible than a painting but less
than a novel and access will always be imperfect? Or perhaps the publication
process for book arts is fitting after all, because it mimics the
doubled-nature of book art even after the physical work is complete.
You situate
yourself and your intentions more in in the camp of visual artists, and your
work is certainly accessible by those standards. But as multimedia image+text
work morphs further to include more text-heavy works, do you think the right
place for the artist's book will always be in a special collection—somewhere
between a museum gallery and the stacks of a library?—or might the ways we
reproduce and access these works evolve with their mediums?
J: While I
understand the impulse to want to move artists' books from the library to the
gallery, I have conflicting feelings about this. While I do consider what I do
to be visual art, I also firmly believe that my books have to be handled in
order to be experienced fully. This makes the library model much more in
keeping with the type of interaction that I am wanting my audience to be able
to have with my books. There is a gallery in the Bay Area, Seager Gray Gallery
in Mill Valley, that has an annual artist's book exhibition every Spring. Donna
Seager, one of the owners of the gallery, has maintained a hands-on approach to
these exhibitions, allowing viewers to handle the books with white gloves,
creating a type of hybrid experience between a library and gallery such as you
mention in your question. Unfortunately, the gallery has had to scale back on
this approach due to wear and tear issues on the work in past exhibitions,
although Donna will be happy to show anyone a book page by page if asked. The
idea of a hybrid space in which artists' books are treated as art, but which
also allows viewer/readers to interact with the works as in a library, is
something to strive for.
S: True
that. It seems our spaces of display are behind in the ways they prompt or
dissuade interaction with the things displayed. Thanks, Julie.
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