Zemni Images

Linda Mayoux Notes for Creative Activism

Exhibitions and the White Cube

Category: Presentation Formats

  • Exhibitions and the White Cube

    Reflections on: Thomas McEvilley’s summary of O’Doherty’s 1976 series of articles for ArtForum in his introduction to O’Doherty, B (1999) Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space University of California Press

    Traditionally the photograph has been considered in terms of a print, and the high point of recognition for a photographer being an exhibition of their prints in a Fine Art Gallery. Galleries may present very different types of space in terms of lighting conditions, amounts and shape of space and general ‘feel’. But a tendency has been to galleries presenting white ‘neutral’ space. However the apparent ‘neutrality’ of this space needs to be questioned in terms of the implicit meanings this imposes on the image and the presumed ’empty mind’ of the viewer.

    I would argue that a more interesting approach would be to acknowledge the importance of both context and the viewer’s life experience in giving meaning to the image, as valuable and integral parts of the art itself. This could mean displaying the same image in different conditions and explicitly promoting discussion of the ways that different life perspectives and everyday experiences of different viewers affect the meanings attributed. This could in turn lead photographers to discover ever more interesting perspectives and innovative approaches to their own work.

    For the moment I do not have the equipment or skills to produce for gallery exhibition.

    Summary of the article

    The main argument underlying the three articles is that the modernist gallery practice of placing artworks in a ‘White Cube’ places them in a sterile environment, depriving them of both connection to outside life and subjective meaning to the viewer, perpetuating the power of an art establishment elite.

    The first of O’Doherty’s articles equates the physical space of the White Cube – windows sealed off and white walls with ceiling lights –  to religious spaces and tombs designed to maintain particular social orders and power structures. ‘Art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is lots of ‘period’ (late modern) there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died already to be there.’

    ‘The eternity suggested in our exhibition spaces is ostensibly that of artistic posterity, of underlying beauty, of the masterpiece. But in fact it is a specific sensibility, with specific limitations and conditions that is so glorified. By suggesting eternal ratification of a certain sensibility, the white cube suggests the eternal ratification of the claims of the caste or group sharing that sensibility. As a ritual place of meeting for members of that caste or group, it censors out the world of social variation, promoting a sense of the sole reality of its own point of view and, consequently, its endurance or eternal rightness. Seen thus, the endurance of a certain power structure is the end for which the sympathetic magic of the white cube is devised.’

    The second part of the article looks at what this institutionalisation for the spectator ‘In return for the glimpse of ersatz eternity that the white cube affords us – and as a token of our solidarity with the special interests of a group – we give up our humanness and become the cardboard Spectator with the disembodied Eye…tireless and above the vicissitudes of chance and change’ and its underpinnings in modernist aesthetics of formalism and abstraction in the search for ‘transcendence’.

    The final part of the article looks at the anti-formalist tradition that questioned and mocked the emptiness and meaninglessness of this white space.

    My reflections

    Both the original 1976 article and the 1999 book are now quite old, and have – as the end of the article suggests and also the anti-formalist tradition and critique of modernism – now become part of the ‘Canon’.

    In relation to photography, the exclusive dominance of the ‘White Cube’ as an aesthetic guardian never really existed – despite the authority of organisations like the Royal Photographic Society. Photography by its nature is copiable, and the wide availability of cheaper cameras has always made it less exclusive. Local camera clubs and their exhibitions have been popular for a very long time – few being able to replicate the ‘ideal gallery conditions’. Technological advances with digital software and the Internet and possibilities for mass self-publishing have significantly increased the production and dissemination options.

    There is nevertheless a continuing question of ‘quality’ and relationship of photography to the Fine Art world. There has been an expansion of private and public gallery spaces in large cities like London (eg but not only Photographer’s Gallery) where photography is displayed as ‘White Cube Fine Art’. Work of photographers is now commonly curated as Fine Art exhibitions in galleries like the Tate (See http://www.tate.org.uk/search?q=Photography), National Gallery (https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/search?q=photographers),  and National Portrait Gallery. This inevitably raises issues of the power of the curator and the degree to which they promote or challenge established aesthetic ideas.

    In order to justify its display in a gallery such photography has to be ‘special’ – for example very large format images that can only be displayed in a gallery, abstraction or innovative use of traditional or digital techniques or drama in depiction of war and conflict. The gallery space and time is also inevitably a specific time that people set aside to visit a specific space – many after a long and expensive special journey. This means that certain norms of respect for the space and time of other visitors needs to be respected. Normally also the ’empty mind’ to absorb the ‘meaning of the works’ is seen as the ideal – together with reading of books etc on the photographer and work. This is true even of OCA Study visits.

    One way possible with photography would be to present prints of the same photograph in very different conditions and spaces as part of the same exhibition, or linked displays. Making the question of context an integral part.

    Another way to go beyond the ’empty mind’ approach (even in a White Cube gallery) would be not to replicate in photography the now somewhat cliche anti-formalist exhibitions, but to explicitly encourage the viewers to bring in and exchange ideas from their respective ‘outside worlds’. What does the same photograph, displayed in the same conditions mean to people with very different life experiences? That differential audience response – and even its day by day variation – is an integral part of the meaning. This would however need to go beyond the superficial recording of reactions in visitor’s books etc.

    Embracing rather than avoiding this diversity of contextual and audience meaning could lead to exciting new directions for photographers themselves. With the many digital processing options, different contextual effects could be mixed and explored to replicate or challenge them. The very different viewer responses could lead to further processing experiments and/or new images. This also opens up the possibility of more imaginative galleries themselves.

    We have also not yet seen the full effects of a move towards ‘virtual galleries’ that can (with virtual reality goggles) replicate the gallery experience – either a White Cube in one’s own home. Or infinite variations and user-generated interpretations.

     

  • Origins of the book

    Origins of the book Edit
    The binding of a Chinese bamboo book (Sun Tzu’s The Art of War)
    The craft of bookbinding probably originated in India, where religious sutras were copied on to palm leaves (cut into two, lengthwise) with a metal stylus. The leaf was then dried and rubbed with ink, which would form a stain in the wound. The finished leaves were given numbers, and two long twines were threaded through each end through wooden boards, making a palm-leaf book. When the book was closed, the excess twine would be wrapped around the boards to protect the manuscript leaves. Buddhist monks took the idea through Afghanistan to China in the first century BC.

    Similar techniques can also be found in ancient Egypt where priestly texts were compiled on scrolls and books of papyrus. Another version of bookmaking can be seen through the ancient Mayan codex; only four are known to have survived the Spanish invasion of Latin America.

    Writers in the Hellenistic-Roman culture wrote longer texts as scrolls; these were stored in boxes or shelving with small cubbyholes, similar to a modern winerack. Court records and notes were written on wax tablets, while important documents were written on papyrus or parchment. The modern English word book comes from the Proto-Germanic *bokiz, referring to the beechwood on which early written works were recorded.[4]

    The book was not needed in ancient times, as many early Greek texts—scrolls—were 30 pages long, which were customarily folded accordion-fashion to fit into the hand. Roman works were often longer, running to hundreds of pages. The Greeks used to call their books tome, meaning “to cut”. The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a massive 200 pages long and was used in funerary services for the deceased. Torah scrolls, editions of the Jewish holy book, were—and still are—also held in special holders when read.

    Scrolls can be rolled in one of two ways. The first method is to wrap the scroll around a single core, similar to a modern roll of paper towels. While simple to construct, a single core scroll has a major disadvantage: in order to read text at the end of the scroll, the entire scroll must be unwound. This is partially overcome in the second method, which is to wrap the scroll around two cores, as in a Torah. With a double scroll, the text can be accessed from both beginning and end, and the portions of the scroll not being read can remain wound. This still leaves the scroll a sequential-access medium: to reach a given page, one generally has to unroll and re-roll many other pages.

    Early book formats Edit

    In addition to the scroll, wax tablets were commonly used in Antiquity as a writing surface. Diptychs and later polyptych formats were often hinged together along one edge, analogous to the spine of modern books, as well as a folding concertina format. Such a set of simple wooden boards sewn together was called by the Romans a codex (pl. codices)—from the Latin word caudex, meaning ‘the trunk’ of a tree, around the first century AD. Two ancient polyptychs, a pentaptych and octoptych, excavated at Herculaneum employed a unique connecting system that presages later sewing on thongs or cords.[5]

    At the turn of the first century, a kind of folded parchment notebook called pugillares membranei in Latin, became commonly used for writing in the Roman Empire.[6] This term was used by both the pagan poet Martial and Christian apostle Paul the Apostle. Martial used the term with reference to gifts of literature exchanged by Romans during the festival of Saturnalia. According to T. C. Skeat, “…in at least three cases and probably in all, in the form of codices” and he theorized that this form of notebook was invented in Rome and then “…must have spread rapidly to the Near East…”[7] In his discussion of one of the earliest pagan parchment codices to survive from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, Eric Turner seems to challenge Skeat’s notion when stating “…its mere existence is evidence that this book form had a prehistory” and that “early experiments with this book form may well have taken place outside of Egypt.”[8]

    Early intact codices were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Consisting of primarily Gnostic texts in Coptic, the books were mostly written on papyrus, and while many are single-quire, a few are multi-quire. Codices were a significant improvement over papyrus or vellum scrolls in that they were easier to handle. However, despite allowing writing on both sides of the leaves, they were still foliated—numbered on the leaves, like the Indian books. The idea spread quickly through the early churches, and the word Bible comes from the town where the Byzantine monks established their first scriptorium, Byblos, in modern Lebanon. The idea of numbering each side of the page—Latin pagina, “to fasten”—appeared when the text of the individual testaments of the Bible were combined and text had to be searched through more quickly. This book format became the preferred way of preserving manuscript or printed material.

  • Bookbinding

    Bookbinding

    Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from an ordered stack of paper sheets that are folded together into sections or sometimes left as a stack of individual sheets. The stack is then bound together along one edge by either sewing with thread through the folds or by a layer of flexible adhesive. For protection, the bound stack is either wrapped in a flexible cover or attached to stiff boards. Finally, an attractive cover is adhered to the boards and a label with identifying information is attached to the covers along with additional decoration. Book artists or specialists in book decoration can greatly expand the previous explanation to include book like objects of visual art with high value and artistic merit of exceptional quality in addition to the book’s content of text and illustrations.

    Bookbinding is a specialized trade that relies on basic operations of measuring, cutting, and gluing. A finished book depends on a minimum of about two dozen operations to complete but sometimes more than double that according to the specific style and materials. All operations have a specific order and each one relies on accurate completion of the previous step with little room for back tracking. An extremely durable binding can be achieved by using the best hand techniques and finest materials when compared to a common publisher’s binding that falls apart after normal use.

    Bookbinding combines skills from other trades such as paper and fabric crafts, leather work, model making, and graphic arts. It requires knowledge about numerous varieties of book structures along with all the internal and external details of assembly. A working knowledge of the materials involved is required. A book craftsman needs a minimum set of hand tools but with experience will find an extensive collection of secondary hand tools and even items of heavy equipment that are valuable for greater speed, accuracy, and efficiency.

    History of bookbinding 


    Decorative binding with figurehead of a 12th Century manuscript – Liber Landavensis.

    9th Century Qur’an in Reza Abbasi Museum

    Sammelband of three alchemical treatises, bound in Strasbourg by Samuel Emmel ca.1568, showing metal clasps and leather covering of boards
    Western books from the fifth century onwards[citation needed] were bound between hard covers, with pages made from parchment folded and sewn on to strong cords or ligaments that were attached to wooden boards and covered with leather. Since early books were exclusively handwritten on handmade materials, sizes and styles varied considerably, and there was no standard of uniformity. Early and medieval codices were bound with flat spines, and it was not until the fifteenth century that books began to have the rounded spines associated with hardcovers today.[9] Because the vellum of early books would react to humidity by swelling, causing the book to take on a characteristic wedge shape, the wooden covers of medieval books were often secured with straps or clasps. These straps, along with metal bosses on the book’s covers to keep it raised off the surface that it rests on, are collectively known as furniture.[10]

    The earliest surviving European bookbinding is the St Cuthbert Gospel of about 700, in red goatskin, now in the British Library, whose decoration includes raised patterns and coloured tooled designs. Very grand manuscripts for liturgical rather than library use had covers in metalwork called treasure bindings, often studded with gems and incorporating ivory relief panels or enamel elements. Very few of these have survived intact, as they have been broken up for their precious materials, but a fair number of the ivory panels have survived, as they were hard to recycle; the divided panels from the Codex Aureus of Lorsch are among the most notable. The 8th century Vienna Coronation Gospels were given a new gold relief cover in about 1500, and the Lindau Gospels (now Morgan Library, New York) have their original cover from around 800.[11]

    Luxury medieval books for the library had leather covers decorated, often all over, with tooling (incised lines or patterns), blind stamps, and often small metal pieces of furniture. Medieval stamps showed animals and figures as well as the vegetal and geometric designs that would later dominate book cover decoration. Until the end of the period books were not usually stood up on shelves in the modern way. The most functional books were bound in plain white vellum over boards, and had a brief title hand-written on the spine. Techniques for fixing gold leaf under the tooling and stamps were imported from the Islamic world in the 15th century, and thereafter the gold-tooled leather binding has remained the conventional choice for high quality bindings for collectors, though cheaper bindings that only used gold for the title on the spine, or not at all, were always more common. Although the arrival of the printed book vastly increased the number of books produced in Europe, it did not in itself change the various styles of binding used, except that vellum became much less used.[12]

    Up to the early nineteenth century books were hand-bound, sometimes using precious metals such as gold or silver and costly materials, including jewels, to cover valuable books and manuscripts. Book bindings had existed as a functional device for hundreds of years, both to protect the pages and also as an elaborate decorative element, to reflect the value of the contents.

    The process of bookbinding began to change with the introduction of mechanical bookbinding techniques in the 1820s. The availability of cheaper materials such as cloth and paper and the faster industrialised process of mechanically-produced paper and steam-powered presses gave rise to a greater volume of books at a lower cost per book. Hand-binding began to wane as a consequence.

     
    Historical forms of binding

    • Coptic binding: a method of sewing leaves/pages together
    • Ethiopian binding
    • Long-stitch bookbinding
    • Islamic bookcover with a distinctive flap on the back cover that wraps around to the front when the book is closed.
    • Wooden-board binding
    • Limp vellum binding
    • Calf binding (“leather-bound”)
    • Paper case binding
    • In-board cloth binding
    • Cased cloth binding
    • Bradel binding
    • Traditional Chinese and Korean bookbinding and Japanese stab binding
    • Girdle binding
    • Anthropodermic bibliopegy (rare or fictional) bookbinding in human skin.
    • Secret Belgian binding (or “criss-cross binding”), invented in 1986, was erroneously identified as a historical method.

    Basic types of binding

    bookbinding workshop Singapore overview http://www.bookbindingworkshopsg.com/bookbinding-techniques/

    Bookbinding is an artistic craft of great antiquity, and at the same time, a highly mechanized industry. The division between craft and industry is not so wide as might at first be imagined. It is interesting to observe that the main problems faced by the mass-production bookbinder are the same as those that confronted the medieval craftsman or the modern hand binder. The first problem is still how to hold together the pages of a book; secondly is how to cover and protect the gathering of pages once they are held together; and thirdly, how to label and decorate the protective cover.[1] Few crafts can give as much satisfaction at all stages as bookbinding—from making a cloth cover for a paperback, or binding magazines and newspapers for storage, or to the ultimate achievement of a fine binding in full leather with handmade lettering and gold tooling.[2]

    Before the computer age, the bookbinding trade involved two divisions. First, there was Stationery binding (known as vellum binding in the trade) which deals with making new books to be written into and intended for handwritten entries such as accounting ledgers, business journals, blank books, and guest log books, along with other general office stationery such as note books, manifold books, day books, diaries, portfolios, etc. Second was Letterpress binding which deals with making new books intended to be read from and includes fine binding, library binding, edition binding, and publisher’s bindings.[3] A result of the new bindings is a third division dealing with the repair, restoration, and conservation of old used bindings. With the digital age, personal computers have replaced the pen and paper based accounting that used to drive most of the work in the stationery binding industry.

    Today, modern bookbinding is divided between hand binding by individual craftsmen working in a one-room studio shop and commercial bindings mass-produced by high speed machines in a production line factory. There is a broad grey area between the two divisions. The size and complexity of a bindery shop varies with job types, for example, from one of a kind custom jobs, to repair/restoration work, to library rebinding, to preservation binding, to small edition binding, to extra binding, and finally to large run publisher’s binding. There are cases where the printing and binding jobs are combined in one shop. A step up to the next level of mechanization is determined by economics of scale until you reach production runs of ten thousand copies or more in a factory employing a dozen or more workers.

    Single leaf binding

    Double fan binding

    Case and bradel binding

    Coptic stitch vs kettle stitch

    Coptic binding

    Coptic binding or Coptic sewing comprises methods of bookbinding employed by early Christians in Egypt, the Copts, and used from as early as the 2nd century AD to the 11th century.The term is also used to describe modern bindings sewn in the same style.

    Coptic bindings, the first true codices, are characterized by one or more sections of parchment, papyrus, or paper sewn through their folds, and (if more than one section) attached to each other with chain stitch linkings across the spine, rather than to the thongs or cords running across the spine that characterise European bindings from the 8th century onwards. In practice, the phrase “Coptic binding” usually refers to multi-section bindings, while single-section Coptic codices are often referred to as “Nag Hammadi bindings,” after the 13 codices found in 1945 which exemplify the form.

    Nag Hammadi bindings

    Nag Hammadi bindings were constructed with a textblock of papyrus sheets, assembled into a single section and trimmed along the fore edge after folding to prevent the inner sheets from extending outward beyond the outer sheets. Because the inner sheets were narrower than the outer sheets after trimming, the width of text varied through the textblock, and it is likely that the papyrus was not written on until after it was bound; this, in turn, would have made it a necessity to calculate the number of sheets needed for a manuscript before it was written and bound.[3][4] Covers of Nag Hammadi bindings were limp leather, stiffened with waste sheets of papyrus. The textblocks were sewn with tackets, with leather stays along the inside fold as reinforcement. These tackets also secured the textblock to the covers; on some of the Nag Hammadi bindings, the tackets extended to the outside of the covering leather, while on others the tackets were attached to a strip of leather which served as a spine liner, and which was in turn pasted to the covers.[5] A flap, either triangular or rectangular, extended from the front cover of the book, and was wrapped around the fore edge of the book when closed. Attached to the flap was a long leather thong which was wrapped around the book two or three times, and which served as a clasp to keep the book securely shut.

    Multi-section Coptic bindings

    Multi-section Coptic bindings had cover boards that were initially composed of layers of papyrus, though by the 4th century, wooden boards were also frequent. Leather covering was also common by the 4th century, and all subsequent Western decorated leather bindings descend from Coptic bindings.

    Approximately 120 original and complete Coptic bindings survive in the collections of museums and libraries, though the remnants of as many as 500 Coptic bindings survive.

    The few surviving very early European bindings to survive use the Coptic sewing technique, notably the St Cuthbert Gospel in the British Library (c. 698) and the Cadmug Gospels at Fulda (c. 750)

    Modern Coptic bindings

    Modern Coptic bindings can be made with or without covering leather; if left uncovered, a Coptic binding is able to open 360°. If the leather is omitted, a Coptic binding is non-adhesive, and does not require any glue in its construction.

    Artisans and crafters often use coptic binding when creating hand made art journals or other books.

    Ethiopian binding

    The Ethiopian bookbinding technique is a chain stitch sewing that looks similar to the multi section Coptic binding method. According to J. A. Szirmai, the chain stitch binding dates from about the sixteenth century in Ethiopia. These books typically had paired sewing stations, sewn using two needles for each pair of sewing stations (so if there are 2 holes, use 2 needles…or 6 holes, 6 needles etc.). The covers were wooden and attached by sewing through holes made into edge of the board. Most of these books were left uncovered without endbands.

    Japanese Bookbinding

    Islamic bookbinding

    Case and Bradel binding

    A Bradel binding (also called a bonnet or bristol board binding, a German Case binding, or in French as Cartonnage à la Bradel or en gist) is a style of book binding with a hollow back. It most resembles a case binding in that it has a hollow back and visible joint, but unlike a case binding, it is built up on the book. Characteristic of the binding is the material covering the outside boards is separate from the material covering the spine. Many bookbinders consider the Bradel binding to be stronger than a case binding.

    This type of binding may be traced to 18th century Germany. The originator is uncertain, but the name comes from a French binder working in Germany, Alexis-Pierre Bradel (also known as Bradel l’ainé or Bradel-Derome). The binding originally appeared as a temporary binding, but the results were durable, and the binding had great success in the nineteenth century.Today, it is most likely to be encountered in photo albums and scrapbooks.

    The binding has the advantage of allowing the book to open fully, where traditional leather bindings are too rigid. It is sometimes modified to provide a rounded spine. This lends the appearance of a book where the paper is not suited to spine rounding; this is also to provide a rounded spine to a book too thin for a spine rounding to hold. The binding may also provide an impressive-looking leather spine to a book without incurring the full expense of binding a book in full or partial leather.

  • Book Design Process

    Working to a Brief

    Working to a ‘Brief’

    A book designer generally works to a ‘brief’ – a specific set of requirements for a particular project. The brief may be set by an external agency, or it may be self-initiated. The scope of the brief may vary in terms of how much creative input the designer can exercise. In some assignments the designer is provided with text and images, along with clear guidelines as to how these are to be set out. In other cases they may be provided with a brief outline of content and title and asked to ‘come up with ideas’ – to devise concepts for cover images, for example.

    The role of the designer

    The designer’s role is collaborative and communicative. The designer is responsible for the visual elements on the page, the structure, arrangement and layout of typography and images. The role can be highly creative, particularly when the role crosses over into art direction; where this is the case, the designer’s ideas play a major part in shaping the visual book form.

    There is a clear distinction between:

    • editorial roles: an editor deals with all the text
    • designing roles: a designer deals with the images and layout. A designer deals with the arrangement of the text and images but never edits the text. Although errors in the text may be apparent, a designer never makes corrections without first alerting the client and the editor.

    Depending on the publishing and production model used, the designer may
    be largely responsible for aspects of the proposal, development and realisation of the book form and may oversee the control of various elements as the book makes its way through the production process, ultimately checking printer’s proofs and ‘signing off’ a project when it is ready to go to print.

    Creative Design Process

    Book design is related to graphic design and a similar working process underpins much of the creative thinking and evolution of any particular design job. The creative design process includes the following stages:

    • Ideas generation
    • Research
    • Development
    • Visuals
    • Presentation

    But it is not a prescriptive process – key phases (eg research and development) often overlap and link quite organically. Design work generally follows a cyclical rather than a linear process, repeating the phases many times from a micro to macro scale and back to refine and ultimately conclude the design.

    Generating ideas
    The design process begins with the generating of visual ideas. In this early formative stage, be as wide-ranging and imaginative as possible in your ideas. ALL ideas are valid at this point, so don’t censor; this is not the stage to decide what is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ idea – at this point they are all just ‘ideas’ with equal
    merit. Record your thought processes and ideas using (in no particular order):

    • Brainstorming/spidergrams/mindmaps: ideas expressed in short sentences, ideas can be triggered by previous, or be new, bizarre ideas are encouraged – good triggers, freethinking – the more the merrier, all ideas stated uninterrupted and accepted – none are rubbished. Concept maps like spidegrams can be used to explore concepts and the connections between them, these can be coloured, rearranged and reworked and redrawn to progressively clarify and then link, or deconstruct again to get new thoughts and angles. It may be useful to mix working with computer programmes like Mindjet, Inspiration or iThoughtsHD and work on paper.
    • thumbnail sketches: quick pen or pencil line drawings to give a reminder of a fleeting idea, and can give an indication of composition and art direction. For example, how does the subject sit in the frame? How is the subject lit? What particular attributes does that subject have? Often experimentation in digital form using Illustrator or Photoshop can usefully complement the work on paper to quickly explore different compositions and colour combinations from scanned sketches.
    • annotation in wiring or ‘sketchnoting’ on the paper thumbnails. Again it is often useful to scan in combinations and get printouts that can be scribbled over without overshadowing the original ideas.

    It is important to let one idea flow fluidly, intuitively and organically into another to make unexpected links and associations.

     

    Review and selection
    Review your thumbnail sketches and analyse each one through a process of critical evaluation. Which ideas are you drawn to? Which ideas have ‘legs’ – possible interesting outcomes which are worth pursuing? Often the ideas which are strongest are those which have depth, or many layers of association. Perhaps you are intuitively drawn to a particular idea. Select several ideas/thumbnails which you would like to develop further.

    Research and development

    The form your research will take depends on the individual elements of your idea. It may be that you need to make some objective drawings, for example, to understand your subject better, and to consider aspects of composition. Other research activities include arranging a photoshoot to further explore your visual ideas, or going on-line to source material that informs your ideas. You can use both primary and secondary sources of research in this way. Research feeds into the development of your visual work, informing and advancing your ideas. Document this phase of the work accordingly.

    Visuals
    This is the culmination of all your preliminary work. Work up some more developed visual sketches. These can be hand-drawn illustrations, photographs, and/or include typography. The presentation can be a little rough around the edges but should show the main elements of the design.

    Presentation
    Present your ideas as finished visual images. Create digital files of your images, making sure these are a reasonable resolution – 180dpi is a good minimum, 300dpi is optimum.

  • Fanzines

     

    It was first used by US sci fi enthusiast Louis Russell Chauvenet in 1940 and by 1949 was in common use.

    ‘Fanzine’ was abbreviated to ‘zine’ in 1970s.  The rise of fanzines  was part of the punk subcultural response to mainstream society – in this case, mainstream print.

    • Distribution: Zines were hand-made publications produced in small quantities on an irregular basis.They were usually small enough to easily fit in the hand although sometimes they were oversized broadsheets. They were distributed by hand and word of mouth or via independent music or book stores or through zine fairs and symposia.
    • Readership were super-niche interest groups and cultural underground.
    • Production: Created by a single producer as both author and designer. Unencumbered by censorship or corporate strategy. Producers were often readers and/or fans sharing same interests.
    • Subject matter As ‘Genuine voices outside of all mass manipulation’  they  explored a wide variety of themes political, humorous, poetic, underground music not necessarily represented in more conventional print.  They were also a forum for personal experimentation ‘perzines’ as unique auto/biographical snapshots.’practice of self-making though zine-making is particularly momentary,’Sometimes a testing ground to ideas which then move to the mainstream. Eg Giant Robot and Bust Magazine.
    • Style Lively Do it yourself style uninhibited by design conventions. Often chaotically lively layout.
    • Cheap and designed to be ephemeral They were often printed using photocopiers, stencil and other ‘hands-on’ processes. Sometimes they were more 3-dimensional and incorporated recycled objects or materials.
    • Materials different coloured papers, crayons, felt-tip markers, Ribbons, stickers. Collages photos hand-drawn illustrations. often made with very basic tools: scissors, glue.
    • Typography handwritten or typewritten or using rub-down lettering.

    Feminist zines use provocative language, sexual imagery, a mix of styles aiming to shock. Guerilla Girls, a feminist group fighting sexism in arts practice produced many fanzines. Formed in New York in 1985, the group maintain their anonymity by wearing gorilla masks and using the names of dead female artists as pseudonyms, e.g. Frida Kahlo and Hannah HÖch. They put pressure on organisations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by uncovering statistics that reveal the extent of patriarchy in the art world past and present. The original group disbanded in 2001 but several Guerrilla Girl spin-offs still exist. Recent campaigns include ‘Unchain female directors’ targeted at the male-dominated world of the Hollywood film studio.

    St John’s college photo

    In the 1990s faux fanzines started to be produced by multinational companies. Dirt by Warner Brothers, Full Voice by Body Shop etc.

    There are now also online and digital forms.

    St John’s college photo

  • History of book design

    Origins

    The earliest forms of books were scrolls produced by Egyptian scribes over 4,000 years ago.

    • Images and vertical text were hand-drawn onto palm leaves, then later onto papyrus scrolls.
    • Papyrus was made from the pith of the papyrus plant and was rather like thick paper. It was used throughout the ancient world until the development of parchment.
    • Parchment was a superior material to papyrus. Made from dried, treated animal skin, parchment could be written on on both sides and was more pliable than papyrus, which meant that it could be folded.
    • Folding a large parchment sheet in half created two folios – a word we still use today to number pages. Folding the sheet in half again created a quarto (4to) and folding that in half again made eight pages – an octavo (8vo).The development of parchment created a break with the scroll form. Folded pages were now piled together and bound along one edge to create a codex, a manuscript text bound in book form.

    Paper, invented in China, spread through the Islamic world to reach medieval Europe in the 13th century, where the first paper mills were built. See ‘Paper’ full post.

    Skilled hand-lettering was laborious and time-consuming and a world apart from the printing methods of today.

    Illuminated manuscripts

    The term manuscript comes from the Latin for hand ‘manus’ and writing ‘scriptum’. Illuminated manuscripts, often containing religious, historical or instructive texts, were coloured with rich and delicate pigments, often with the addition of gold leaf. These were objects of rare beauty. Bound manuscripts were produced in Britain from around 600 to 1600.

    The advent of movable type

    Movable type brought about a massive revolution in the way books were designed, produced and perceived.
    Sandcast type was used in Korean book design from around 1230 and woodblocks were used to print paper money and cards in China from the seventh century.
    Johann Gutenberg produced the first western book printed using movable type in 1454. This was the Gutenberg Bible or ‘42-line Bible’. This led the way for a revolution in the way books were designed and printed. Having set the metal type, the printer could then produce multiple copies. The printing process made books much more widely available to a larger audience. By 1500, printing presses in Western Europe had produced more than twenty million books.

    Arts and Crafts movement

    Private English presses such as Doves Press and the Ashendene Press typified the publishing industry in the early part of the twentieth century. The influential designer, craftsman, artist and writer William Morris (1834–96) founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891; this was dedicated to publishing limited edition, illuminated style books. The designer Eric Gill (1882–1940), a
    fellow member of the Arts and Crafts movement, designed books for both English and German publishers. Gill also produced The Canterbury Tales (1931) for Golden Cockerel Press, which was one of the last English presses still going strong after 1925.

    While English and German publishers were known for the quality and craftsmanship of their typography and overall book design, French publishers such as Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939) focused on the illustrative elements of book design. ‘Livres de luxe’ were expensive editions of books illustrated by contemporary artists such as Bonnard, Chagall, Degas, Dufy and Picasso.

    20th Century

    Artistic movements had a real and direct impact on book design in the twentieth century, with the Fauvists, Futurists, Dadaists, Constructivists and Bauhaus feeding into a febrile pot of manifestos, ideas and approaches to typography and book design.
    Allen Lane founded Penguin Books in England in 1935, with the aim of producing affordable books for the masses. The books were characterised by strong typographic and design principles. In the early 1950s designers Jan Tschichold and Ruari McLean created modernist iconographic cover designs for Penguin books.
    Advancing print technologies, letterpress, offset lithography and the development of graphic design, gave rise to a plethora of colour printed material, making book design one of the earliest and best examples of mass communication.

    Fanzines

    The digital era

    The 1980s and 1990s saw the burgeoning of desktop publishing (DTP). Book design was no longer bound by the constraints of metal typesetting. Apple Macintosh computer systems enabled book designers to integrate text and images into multiple pages digitally, on-screen. This move away from traditional design and printing processes created massive upheaval in the publishing industry, and many long-established forms of working were usurped by the new digital technology.

    In new wave of graphic and book designers emerged who embraced the new technology and, like the Futurists and Dadaists before them, questioned and experimented with some of the conventional approaches to typography and book design. Designers such as Neville Brody (Fuse magazine) and David Carson (The End of Print) captured the experimental mood of the time.

    The revolution in printing processes continues apace today, but the book in its traditional form remains a pervasive presence alongside its digital counterparts – the e-book is a good example. The internet has revolutionised the way book designers work, making distance book design work a  commonplace reality. In addition, a huge and often overwhelming range of fonts, images and resources is immediately available online. The word ‘font’ has entered everyday vocabulary – even for schoolchildren – and choosing the best font for the job is now something that many of us do almost without thinking. DTP means that everyone can potentially access what they need to design a book. From a purist perspective, the inherent danger with this creative freedom is that poor design choices result from uninformed ‘quick-fix’ solutions. The positive aspect is that the designer has never before had so many options to choose from, in terms of typography, design and production values.

  • Artists and Handmade Books

    Book Arts Web:

    Discovering Artists Books: The Art, the Artist and the Issues

    Definition of Artist Books

    Artist Books 3.0 

    The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-Space by Johanna Drucker