Third Workshop #3

On Friday morning, May 25, Hadley, Maxwell, and I wheeled the plaid shopping cart out to fetch some of the excellent weiß spargel that’s been filling the German markets. This thick, white asparagus would be part of our barbecue that night, for the workshop’s evening session. We also bought meats, chips, bread, salad, more beer and proseco, and a bottle of “Standard” vodka, an especially clean, fresh vodka that we put on ice for the evening.

The afternoon session was focused on material media, meaning those objects that can depart from us and travel through the world independently, thereby connecting us to others in a shared conversation. We made a pile of such things on the big table and conducted our discussion by simply pulling out the ones we liked and asking questions. So, just as the first day had unfolded via the logic of people in a room together, I hoped this day would be shaped by the material things we’d gathered. In attendance were Hadley, Maxwell, Michael Baers, Michel de Broin, and Christian Struck.

Nearly all of us brought printed matter. Michael Baers shared copies of his Meta Comics, which were satisfyingly tabloid and printed on cheap newsprint. Interestingly, some that were printed in blue ink with “better” typefaces engaged me less; they occupied an uncomfortable middle ground between the populist rhetoric of tabloid newspapers and the collectible/commodity rhetoric of fine art. The tabloid’s indifference to damage or decay excites me. I took Michel de Broin’s well-made softbound catalog (documenting his own work) in hand and whacked it against the tabloid comic over and over, demonstrating the comics’ superior resilience. By contrast, it only took a passing smear of newsprint ink to “completely ruin” Michel’s book. (Though, Michel said he doesn’t mind a smudge or smear, and, indeed, even after the attack his catalog still looked very handsome, roguish, like early Marlon Brando.)

We turned our attention to two art journals that use unbound newsprint, but with very different goals and style. One, Fillip, is a tabloid-sized quarterly printed on a fine, heavy stock with very clean, formalist design. The other, The Organ (now defunct), was a remarkably wide broadsheet on cheap newsprint that borrowed design strategies from mid-20th century newspapers. Both spoke about contemporary art practice from the point of view of a North American city, Fillip from Vancouver, BC, The Organ from Portland, Oregon. It was remarkable how clearly the physical differences between these two essentially similar objects distinguished them from each other and communicated very different messages.

Fillip’s formal clarity, spaciousness, whiteness, circumspect typeface, and regular, even columns announced modernity, transnational legibility, the art gallery, money, intellect and irony. The Organ’s almost-literal “heart on its sleeve” (the logo is an enormous, detailed heart), its various hand-drawn illustrations, gossip-column layout, and dense patchwork of newspaper-style design suggested the local, immediate, populist, anti-intellectual frontier mentality, masking a deep sense of irony. The design of both papers is misleading. Neither paper has any money; their globalism (as for most) is contained in a Rolodex; they are painfully sincere. The Organ is refined, and intellectual just as Fillip is devotedly local and populist. In both cases these virtues are obscured not out of deceit but as a kind of pleasurable masquerade for promenading in the public eye.

Discussion of the “global focus” of Fillip led me to present Phil Elverum’s home-made pamphlet, “Headwaters.” Hand-lettered and Xeroxed in Anacortes, WA, this product of DIY pop music is distributed and understood across a far greater portion of the globe than any of the glossy global art magazines, such as Frieze, Artforum, or Parkett. Elverum (a musician who performs as Mount Eerie or The Microphones) has confounded the prevailing dichotomy of global/local by making a kind of cottage industry of recording, writing, and printing at home with a small group of friends, and then carrying this work by hand as he travels the globe to play concerts. He organizes his tours person-to-person by announcing, on his internet site, where he’d like to go and waiting for suggestions. Thus, without any overarching global infrastructure, Elverum, and his products, irrigate a global economy and conversation. Yet the objects, especially the hand-lettered and printed ones, announce a kind of modest, limited local focus that belies their reach.

Hadley and Maxwell admired Michel’s well-made book, and pleaded with us to help them decide how to spend a publishing budget they’d been granted along with their show at the Bethanien (scheduled to open on September 27, 2007). They have 7000 euros for “publication” and are reluctant to spend it on the usual catalog, even a handsome one like Michel’s, because they have seen the hidden stacks of thousands of leftover copies that fill the attic of the Bethanien. We recoiled in horror at this image of ghostly infestation: every arts center across the globe creaking under the growing weight of stacks and stacks of obligatory publications that are printed and then stored. Hadley and Maxwell are loath to add to this burden.

Their plea focused our attention on distribution. How does printed matter end up in the hands of a reader ready for meanings? If the purpose of these objects and their motion through the world is to enact a conversation, what can be done to support that, to make them really reach across those distances and connect? Michael shares their dilemma in his gallery based work, where a great deal of printed matter is made with no particular place to go after it performs as “installation” in the gallery. We discussed some of the options, both for ephemera (like unbound newsprint or comics) and for bound books.

In both cases, there are established “umbrella” distributors whose function is to take in a great range of similarly designed objects and distribute them over a broad geographic area (usually a continent) to vendors accustomed to selling specifically that type of object (a book or magazine or what-have-you). These distributors (they include Ingram, Baker and Taylor, PGW, and Partners West, in North America) typically charge around 50% of the sale price for every item they handle. The remaining 50% is split between the vendor and the publisher (who then splits their take with the author). To fill orders from vendors promptly, these umbrella distributors keep large warehouses of books stocked by orders from publishers. An online service, such as Amazon, is identical in its operations, except that individual customers can order from them without a bookstore intervening. Amazon charges about 55% of the list price.

Because this method is both expensive and inefficient, several variations have developed. One is an umbrella distributor that is selective about its products and functions as a kind of publicity arm, advocate, or sales force for the publishers it represents. In the U.S. there are several, including Consortium, which is focused on literature, and D.A.P., which has its own imprint and distributes related art presses. Almost any smaller-scale umbrella distributor will function more as an advocate or sales force (or at least as a kind of brand or imprimatur) because it is smaller.

There are also rhizomatic networks, similar to Phil Elverum’s, that are formed by individuals moving through the world to meet fellow travelers in other cities. When an author tours, he or she often makes friends who then act as a network for distributing future, or related, objects. These networks are mostly informal and accessed through friendships, but some of them (such as McSweeneys’ list of 200 independent book vendors in North America) have been turned into publicly available resources. Given the expense of shipping and storing printed matter, these person-to-person, friendship-based networks make a great deal of sense. A guiding principal might be that after you’ve printed all your copies, only send one out to a reader or someone you trust to shepherd it to a reader. Copies sent into an anonymous system are liable to go unread.

Following this principal, many publishers have turned to pre-sales, or subscriptions, to generate a market/community for the object in advance of making it. These networks are also best constructed, initially, through personal relationships, and can expand outward through ring by ring of extended personal relationships. Since sales of, say, 500 or 600 copies of a softbound book are usually enough to pay the cost of printing and distributing, this method is a very viable one.

This overview of some common methods was relevant to Michael’s situation, but it still left Hadley and Maxwell without a good solution. They are making just one publication, not founding a distribution network. We wondered what printed matter already circulates and is read widely. Maybe they could use their money to be visible in such an object, and therefore actually have their work reach a public. I suggested buying a page in Artforum and using it as their publication. Michael pointed out that there is a history of this, citing Dan Graham in particular. If Hadley and Maxwell do it, their publication will be seen and understood in the light of that history. The context was not entirely unwelcome. Also, the context of commercial ads (which this would be) seemed to interest Hadley and Maxwell enough to keep the idea alive. I’ll be curious to see what they do.

Throughout, we discussed the expectations that these normative models of publication (such as the catalog and the art quarterly) impose on artists, especially the obligation to account for one’s self and one’s biography in relation to the art. Michel’s catalog, as is typical, has a resume of his life. Also, he told us, a website called Artfacts.net has produced a rank for him (and others) which accompanies a page of statistics about his work in the market. Another online site requested that he answer ten questions so they can post his answers on their page.

Apropos of this dilemma, I described my use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to generate a “personal weblog.” In brief, the AMT is a bulletin board of menial tasks anyone can do online for money. The money is small (usually 1 – 5 cents per task) and the tasks are mostly to make simple judgment calls that a computer can’t do on its own (such as, say if a picture is of a dog or a cat). Amazon created the Mechanical Turk as a way to embed human judgment inside their automated help systems. The bulletin board fields thousands of tasks required by the automated help system, but the user never sees the human element. (Thus the Mechanical Turk.)

Once a week I post a task: “write an entry for my blog.” Some anonymous someone, somewhere, then writes an entry for my blog, as me, and sends it back, and I pay them $10 and post it on my “personal weblog.” Michel was charmed by this solution and immediately wanted to use it for his online questions. We spent the rest of the afternoon online, harvesting five different sets of answers that Michel could use. While we worked, dark storm clouds gathered outside. In a day or two I will post the report of our barbecue that transpired that night amidst rainbows and lightning.