AustLit

'This issue’s callout asked for explorations and interactions of page and art in a digital format, and used a quote from Australian poet and art critic Gary Catalano (1947–2002):

If the fact that many visual artists now make books can be taken as a sign that the visual arts are becoming more literary in their forms, and, perhaps, in their aspirations, then the converse could also be said of much advanced and ambitious literature in the past twenty years. Just as visual artists have added words and discursive texts to their repertory of forms, so many writers have come to use visual devices as an essential element of their work. (1983).' (Introduction)

'In April 2016 Gwenn Tasker and Angela Gardner went to a circus performance by Circa Ensemble called when one door closes at the Brisbane Powerhouse, during which Gwenn drew and Angela wrote. We sat in the front row and, as one reviewer wrote,2 it was a brutal, intensely physical show highlighting feminist opposition to domestic violence. In the audience it felt influenced by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty as if by violent assault the work intended to shatter a comfortably false reality. As physical theatre, it was beautiful, disturbing and mesmerising, exhibiting moments of poise and balance, of pattern and repetition.' (Introduction)

'As an Australian artist book researcher, I have spent a lot of time trying to find many of the historical sources for our community conversations, image repositories, and gallery & award event webpages, and was confronted by a wave of 404 pages. I learned the pungent term link rot, where links change content or move to a new online location, and the more poetic content drift, which describes the slow constant modification of websites. I also discovered how many holes there are in the Wayback Machine if your short exhibition only existed between crawling dates. The rise of artist books in Australia coincided with a period when books about the local field weren’t published because it was assumed that all the relevant information would be forever on the internet. This is the case for most scholarly disciplines, so there’s a sinking sense of working hard downwards into a black hole. I wrote a paper about this, published in The Blue Notebook (2021), but it struck me recently that all the screengrabs I took for it would make a great zine. I recently inherited a box of coloured dry-rub Letratone from a friend who was a graphic designer in the pre-computer era. They seemed to enjoy playing with the leftover shards of colour and I love them too, so I’m scanning them for new purposes. I think they perfectly illustrate the sense of digital ruin that we’re constantly encountering.' 

(Introduction)

'This essay defines the poetic form of the calligramme (also known as the pattern poem, or technopaignia), provides a micro-history of the form in Western literature, before exploring how, with reference to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916) and Foucault’s This Is Not a Pipe, the poems in Object Permanence: Calligrammes (Puncher & Wattmann/Thorny Devil Press 2022) took shape. It also explores how, via Goethe, the calligrammes use colour, and why, via Piaget, their taking shape is a kind of poetic object permanence.' (Introduction)

During conversation, Phil Day suggests an assembly line ritual that might have been played out in the production of (medieval) hand-written texts: one person rules in the lines and passes the sheet to the next scribe who draws in the verticals. The sheet then goes to the next scribe who does the horizontals, then to another to do the obliques and so on to the colourist or illustrator. It’s a modern projection onto an imagined hand-drawn past. (Contextual Statement: Introduction)

'It all started with my playbook titled Typewriter: Used by a newspaper’s office. You might say Typewriter: Used by a newspaper’s office is a found object — I found it on a half-price table in the local chemist. I was delighted when I opened the package fully and discovered that the old-fashioned typewriter ‘plaque’ was actually the cover of a brown paper journal. You have to love brown paper.' (Introduction)

'The USYD Strike and Picket Zine is a collaborative DIY publication capturing, celebrating and complicating the experience of being on the picket lines during staff strikes at the University of Sydney in 2022. This zine grew out of conversations between staff and students participating in several days of industrial action on campus in May led by the National Tertiary Education Union. The strikes followed several months of Enterprise Bargaining Agreement negotiations during which the University refused to meet staff demands for a fair pay increase, an end to exploitative casualisation and casual wage-theft, improved parental leave and enforceable targets for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment.' (Introduction)

'Fred & Flo is a publishing collaboration by artist/archaeologist UK Frederick and artist/ writer Caren Florance. We are also academics. We recognised each other long ago as fellow gleaners, those who follow and find cultural traces, who take without taking (Bize, 2019). Our joint commitment to material and text-making processes has seen us work together over the years, sharing skills such as letterpress, printmaking, cyanotype, and other visual art processes. Our first Fred & Flo zine was made for the 2019 conference of the Heritage of the Air (HOTA) project, and was titled HOT AZ. We sourced a bulk quantity of waxed-paper airline sick bags which we screenprinted with the conference logo and filled with a 12pp photocopied zine and a laminated Conference Emergency Card.' (Introduction)

 

'This paper presents the findings of a case study designed to understand more about materials, methods and themes of Australian artists’ books and their preservation issues in collections. Artists use a huge diversity of materials and methods in the creation of artists’ books, which might make these books difficult to preserve in a library or gallery collection context. Based on interviews with five prominent Australian book artists, collectors and curators, this paper suggests that artists choose materials that reflect or express the artistic, social, and political themes of their work, as well as the long historical traditions of bookbinding, printmaking, printing, typography etc, that their work continues. However, the interviewees were also very engaged in the issues of collecting, curating, and preserving these materials. The findings of this study confirm that access to archived information about the artist’s themes, intention, and working methods would be invaluable for all aspects of collection management. Thus, there is a need to have a coherent written policies to set rules for what to include or exclude from an artists’ books policy in libraries and art collections in Australia.' 

(Publication abstract)