US $25
The Global Journal of Prints and Ideas
July – August 2016
Volume 6, Number 2
Cécile Reims • Theodore Roszak • Ellen Lanyon • Degas Draws Mary Cassatt • Peter Milton • Beauty and Mathematics
Women, Prints and History • Alternative Publishing in the 21st Century • Conservation • Spring Auction Report • News
BOOK REVIEW
Reclaiming the Means of
Production: Self-Publishing in
the 21st Century
By Megan N. Liberty
P
NO-ISBN: on self-publishing
Edited by Bernhard Cella, Leo Findeisen
and Agnes Blaha
506 pages, 497 color illustrations
Published by Walther König, Cologne, 2016
$35
The Newsstand
By Lele Saveri
352 pages, 32 color and 256 b/w illustrations
Published by Skira Rizzoli, New York, 2016
$45
Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art
Edited by Sara Martinetti and
Leontine Coelewij
600 pages
Published by Walther König, Cologne, 2016
$59.95
rinted Matter’s NY Art Book Fair is
a wildly popular event and it is just
one of more than 40 artist’s book fairs
that take place around the world every
year.1 “When we began the fair [in 2006],”
then-director AA Bronson explains, “we
were highly aware of representing all the
various forms of art publishing in the
field: mainstream publishers, academic
presses, art distribution companies, art
magazines, small independent publishing
companies.”2 In its first years, the fair had
70 exhibitors and some 3,000 visitors; by
2014 participation had ballooned to 350
exhibitors and more than 35,000 visitors. 3 Despite the rise of online publications, blogs and PDF distribution options,
artists and publishers continue to produce printed books, particularly zines
(DIY publications cheaply made in multiple, usually by photocopier) and printon-demand publications; art book fairs
continue to display them, and visitors
continue to buy them. Recently, a number of museum exhibitions have given
critical attention to this phenomenon, its
history and present, as do three important new books out this year—NO-ISBN:
on self-publishing, The Newsstand and Seth
Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art.
NO-ISBN is a small but dense volume
that traces the history of printed books
and pamphlets from Gutenberg to the
current self-publishing boom. Arriving
sealed in a printed blue wrapper, the book
cannot be thumbed through without a
reader’s first ripping open the wrapper
and being immediately forced into tactile engagement with disposable materials and the idea of the book’s status as an
object. (The cover repeats the design of
the paper wrapper but with trompe l’œil
wear and tear.) Edited by sculptor and
installation artist Bernhard Cella, media
theorist Leo Findeisen and art historian
Agnes Blaha, the book includes an illustrated catalogue of artists’ books and
zines as well as essays by artists and theorists, including Sylvie Boulanger, Gilbert & George and Kenneth Goldsmith.
Woven through these is a conversation
between editors Cella and Findeisen that
discusses the origins of the “No-ISBN”
project in Cella’s Salon für Kunstbuch—a
space founded in Vienna in 2007 for the
consideration of books and book culture more generally.4 “I noticed,” Cella
says, “that hidden in the mass of artists’
books is a subgroup of sorts; an amazing amount are published without an
ISBN.”5 These include punk zines such
as Raymond Pettibon’s Cars, TV, Rockets, H-Bomb—you name it (1985); somber
books like Andrew Blackley’s 2008 Nuit
und Niebla, which is built from online
translations of the closing lines of Alain
Resnais’ 1955 Holocaust documentary
Night and Fog; as well as design-oriented
projects such as Scott Massey’s freemag
zines subtitled, “A mixed up Zine about
nothing at all” (2008 and 2009).6
The ISBN (international standard
book number) is a unique identifier that
indicates the author, title and edition
of a volume. The earliest version was
implemented in 1970 to enable digital
cataloguing and tracking.7 Cella wondered whether the lack of ISBNs was “a
conscious decision, or simple ignorance,
which would then tend to make it irrelevant” in terms of its meaning as art. He
concluded that, whether intentional or
not, the number’s absence showed that
its function—inventory control—was not
relevant to the aims of these creators, and
implied a set of priorities that diverged
from standard publishing. 8 To investigate this further, Cella used posters at the
2009 NY Art Book Fair to call for the submission of books without ISBNs. 9 These
works, along with those that first caught
his attention, are collected in NO-ISBN.
Existing outside the standard system of
commercial production and distribution,
self-published works offer an alternative
to mainstream publishing and its potentially stifling authority.
For artists and writers, self-publishing
offers control over aspects of content,
physical production and social distribution that are removed in most commercial publishing scenarios. Phil Aarons, a
zine collector and Printed Matter board
member, explains that “zines are written,
designed, pasted up, photographed and
distributed by the zine maker, removing
all intermediaries in the creative process.”10 The price point is usually very
low, making them easily collectible. The
vendor is often the artist, which contributes to the intimacy of the exchange and
aligns with the way many book artists
view the ideal artwork—a point of direct
connection with other people. These
works “exist outside the purview of all
Art in Print July–August 2016
39
No-ISBN poster near the NY Art Book Fair in 2009. Image courtesy Bernhard Cella.
major bookstores and most all libraries,”
explains Aarons, “yet they invariably find
their way into the hands of those who
appreciate them.” He describes their role
of “community building” and sees their
content and function as “both insanely
personal and highly communal.”11
The political ambitions of ISBN-free
books and zines are expressed in various
ways, the authors note:
Political participation may refer to
the content of the respective book,
to the book’s democratic qualities in
terms of production, distribution, and
reception, or to a role-model function
as an alternative economic system;
a book market distinct from the art
market.12
Lele Saveri’s project The Newsstand
was an example of direct distribution and
40
Art in Print July–August 2016
the intertwining of the political and the
communal in zine culture. In 2013–2014
Saveri rented an abandoned newsstand in
the Metropolitan/Lorimer subway stop
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he
sold self-published materials—primarily zines but also “micro-editions” such
as posters, comics, T-shirts, pins and
audiocassettes.13 It was open to anyone
who wanted to sell, show or perform an
art project, “as long as it wasn’t offensive
or racist,” Saveri says.14 The zines ranged
from text-heavy publications such as Slice
Harvester Quarterly, which linked pizza
shop reviews to personal experiences, to
Alexander Duke’s illustrative and comical
Jesus Wore a Kanye Piece or Jason Polan’s
observations on museum culture, People
at the Whitney. The Newsstand also offered
readings and performances, and served as
a gathering spot for zinesters, poets and
performers. “Unlike a store where people
go quickly in and out before carrying on
with their day,” Saveri recalls, “The Newsstand was one where customers tended to
spend some time.”15
The project’s trajectory illustrates the
futility of conceiving the current swell
of self-publishing in terms of “outsider”
versus “insider,” or “subversive” versus “mainstream:” The Newsstand was
recently recreated within the walls of the
Museum of Modern Art as part of the
recent photography survey,16 and it is the
subject of a new book from Skira Rizzoli.
In a nod to handmade zine aesthetics, the
book is bound between cardboard covers
with an open spine and visible stitching.
Inside, it is filled with images of the materials sold by the shop and interviews with
participating artists.
“One minute in The Newsstand and
you’d know it wasn’t about money,”
explained one of the volunteers who
worked there and displayed work.17 As
with artists manning their own tables
at books fairs, The Newsstand offered the
unification of maker and vendor, creating
a purposeful intimacy.18 It was about the
“value of things that you can hold in your
hands,” Saveri asserts, especially when
“underground, with no phone service” to
distract you.19
The American artists’ book movement is commonly dated to Ed Ruscha’s
Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and has
strong roots in both Pop art and conceptual art. The publications of art dealer
and curator Seth Siegelaub (1941–2013)—
especially
his
exhibition-in-a-book
works—were pivotal in this development.
As the authors of NO-ISBN note, Siegelaub
defined the catalogue as a “metaphorical space” that seemed to be
more appropriate for the works of
[conceptual] artists than exhibition in
the real space of the gallery. Through
this new positioning of a medium that
had held a purely supportive role until
then, the implicit hierarchy between
book and walk-in (or visitable) exhibition shifted.20
Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual
Art was published on the occasion of
an eponymous exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam this past
spring. 21 The book surveys Siegelaub’s
innovative publishing, his involvement
with bibliography and cataloguing, as
well as his interest in textiles and design.
Like the other publications discussed
here, this book has been designed to
defy expectation—in place of the familiar glossy museum catalogue, we find
a floppy softcover with extremely thin
paper. Illustrated with archival documents, postcards, photographs and other
ephemera, it presents a visual chronology
of Siegelaub’s life and work, alongside
interviews with him and the artists with
whom he worked.
Siegelaub’s book projects with conceptual artists such as Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson
and Lawrence Weiner moved away from
the model of gallery art, focusing instead
on the possibilities offered by books as
primary art objects, such as the serial
development of idea over multiple pages,
and the purposeful sense of disposability implicit in cheap paper and low resolution reproductions. (These would all
become important elements of zines.)
As Julia Bryan-Wilson notes, “There was
often little to either buy or see in a traditional gallery setting, including mounting a show that consisted in its entirety of
nothing but the catalogue.”22 The books
that Siegelaub began publishing in 1968
did not document an exhibition of artwork that existed elsewhere; they were
exhibitions of artwork that existed only
within the pages of the book. His most
famous work, known as the Xerox Book,
was a group show in which seven artists
were each offered 25 pages in which to
create a work. 23 Siegelaub explained:
View of The Newsstand inside the Metropolitan/Lorimer subway station in Brooklyn, NY. Reproduced
from Lele Saveri, The Newsstand (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2016), 6.
when art does not any longer depend
upon its physical presence, when it
has become an abstraction, it is not
distorted and altered by its representation in books and catalogues. It
becomes primary information, while
the reproduction of conventional art
in books or catalogues is necessarily
secondary information.24
The book is no longer a kind of
advertisement for something else; it has
become self-sufficient. Bryan-Wilson
sees Siegelaub as pressing “for change
in a system that monetizes, and indeed
instrumentalizes, [artists’] work.”25 Contemporary self-publishing echoes this
idea of the book as a primary—rather
than documentary—object.
One of the goals of artists’ self-publishing, as manifest in NO-ISBN and The
Newsstand, has been the closing of distance between the artist and the viewer.
But like the Siegelaub monograph these
same projects celebrate—indeed elevate—a new form of intermediary: the
Left: nohawk (Scott Massey), freemag 001 (2008), artist’s book, mixed media, 64 pages, 6 x 9 inches. Printed and published by the artist, Huntington
Beach, CA. Right: Scan of the cover of Jason Polan’s People at the Whitney Museum reproduced from Lele Saveri, The Newsstand (New York: Skira
Rizzoli, 2016), 67.
Art in Print July–August 2016
41
Left: Interior of The Newsstand on the first week it was open. Right: Priscilla Jeong working inside
of The Newsstand on the last month with decor and art left by previous events and guest clerks.
Both reproduced from Lele Saveri, The Newsstand (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2016), 308 and 311.
editor-curator-entrepreneur. Sylvie Boulanger, director of the Centre national
édition Art Image (CNEAI), argues that
“by considering the published space as
a public space and by interpreting the
act of publishing as an artistic act, they
reveal the challenges of a new cultural,
economic, and technological context.”26
Artists have reconsidered the book as
both a conceptual space for expression
and a physical object for distribution and
consumption. Tactility is critical. Aarons
observes that “the physicality of the zine
itself, so unlike a digital image flickering across a computer screen, makes a
direct connect between the creator and
reader, and among those who read and
share zines.”27 In NO-ISBN, Agnes Blaha
notes that book artists “conceptualize
art in a form that needs to be handled
to be fully experienced.”28 She goes on
to draw a connection between the intimacy of touch at the creative and the
receiving end. “The obvious difference,”
Blaha writes, “between the immediacy
zinesters choose by cutting, gluing, writing by hand, and the alternative—the
use of digital tools to design, assembleand type—is touch.”29 Just as Seiglaub’s
books eliminated the gallery space as a
mediator, zines compress the distance
between creator and reader through
indexical traces of hand production and
often through the creator’s presence at
the moment of sale.
This emphasis on tactility might seem
at odds with conceptualism’s interest
42
Art in Print July–August 2016
in dematerialization but for the cheapness and fragility of the materials used.
These books, while they may be saved in
archives and personal libraries, are not
made to last. Bryan-Wilson writes that
Siegelaub chose paper-based distribution “for its expediency, ordinariness,
cheapness, and capacity for rapid circulation.”30 In projects like The Newsstand,
this “rapid circulation” becomes part of
the performance of the works.
It is worth noting that the three books
reviewed here have been published by
eminent art book publishers—Skira Rizzoli and Walther König—offering evidence of the increasing prominence of
the self-publishing and zine phenomena.
In a time when most communication is
done via a screen, the rise of this practice
demonstrates a prevailing desire for these
hand-crafted objects, highlighting their
expressive potential to build community
and provide an alternative mode of selfexpression.
Megan N. Liberty is a writer based in Brooklyn.
Notes:
1. Bernhard Cella and Moritz Küng, “Actually it is
quite simple: A book is a book. Artists are people
and people make books,” in NO-ISBN: on selfpublishing (Cologne: Walther König, 2016), 209.
2. AA Bronson, “On the community and politics of
Self-Publishing,” in The Newsstand (New York:
Skira Rizzoli, 2016), 51. To preserve this breadth,
Max Schumann, Printed Matter’s current director,
supplemented the standard fee-paying fair booths
with a “Friendly Fire” section where exhibitor
tables are free.
3. Ibid.
4. Gabrielle Cram, “NO-ISBN—The An-Archive
as Subject,” in NO-ISBN, 259–260; Leo Findeisen
and Bernhard Cella, “…more real than art—The
Art of Assembling,” in NO-ISBN, 82–3.
5. Ibid., Findeisen and Cella, 82.
6. Register of books in NO-ISBN collection, in NOISBN, 11, 27, 24.
7. “Helping a friend out: On the origins of ISBN,” in
NO-ISBN, 123–24.
8. Findeisen and Cella, “…more real than art,”
170.
9. Ibid., 168.
10. Phil Aarons, Forward, in The Newsstand, 13.
11. Ibid., 13–14.
12. “NO-ISBN as a Political Strategy,” in NOISBN, 383.
13. Lele Saveri, Introduction, in The Newsstand,
9–11; Sylvie Boulanger, “The Phenomenon of
Micro-edition: A Silk Road,” in NO-ISBN, 250.
14. Ibid., Saveri, 9.
15. Ibid., 11.
16. Ocean of Images (7 November 2015—20
March 2016).
17. Priscilla Jeong, Nick Sethi and Nathaniel
Matthews, “On Working at The Newsstand,” in
The Newsstand, 266.
18. Ibid., 11.
19. Saveri, in The Newsstand, 11.
20. “Printed Space as Legacy of Conceptual Art,”
in NO-ISBN, 177.
21. “Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art” (12
December 2015—17 April 2016).
22. Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Seth Siegelaub’s Material Conditions,” in Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art (Cologne: Walther König, 2016), 30.
23. The artists were Carl Andre, Robert Barry,
Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol Lewitt, Robert Morris and Lawrence Weiner.
24. Ursula Meyer and Seth Siegelaub, “When
you Become Aware of Something, It Immediately
Becomes Part of You,” in Seth Siegelaub, 190.
25. Bryan-Wilson, “Seth Siegelaub’s Material
Conditions,” 31.
26. Boulanger, “The Phenomenon of MicroEdition,” 249.
27. Aarons, in The Newsstand, 14.
28. Agnes Blaha, “Tackling Tactility—What is it
that makes theorists shy away from the haptic
domain?” in NO-ISBN, 278.
29. Ibid., 281.
30. Bryan-Wilson, “Seth Siegelaub’s Material
Conditions,” 37.