Show: Twenty Years of Granary Books

Show NiKKi"WiDNER Sara M. Larsen Staples In the chronicle of independent publishing and distribution, Granary Books has played a groundbreaking role in the movement of contemporary artists' books and the study of book arts. Through the collaboration of artists, writers, printers, and typographers, a communal project takes shape. A sampling of these collaborations and historical influences were seen in the exhibit, "Too Much Bliss: Twenty Years ofGranary Books," a feature of forty limited-edition artists' books exhibited at Smith College Museum of Art from November 12, 2005, through February 19, 2006. In the second-floor gallery space, pages lie open in glass display cases. A small reading room is furnished with seating and a shelf of Granary's trade editions. The artists' books feature both solo and collaborative works, printed by various methods: letterpress, offset lithography, digital prints, woodcut, silkscreen , and relief printing. Artists' books, printed in limited editions, focus on the craft ofbookmaking, specifically binding, typography, design, and printing. From concept to form, these books are themselves communal works of art. Take, for instance, a letterpress poem, printed in formal script on white card stock, enclosed in two separate envelopes, and titled Noah Webster to Wee Lorine Niedecker (1986), by Jonathan Williams. The two-hundred -copy edition is written in a formal script and is an homage to Niedecker's own series of homage poems: Noah Webster to wee Lorine Niedecker you condense milk in a condensery; you condense sense in a consensery, young lady. Here the production and writing are entwined. The piece marks Granary's first publishing effort, when founder and director Steve Clay first focused on distributing small press books (mainly poetry), pamphlets, and broadsides. Another compelling piece included in the show is Nods (1991), a collaborative book by artist Barbara Fahrner, composer/artist/writer John Cage, and typographer Philip Gallo. This book was constructed much like Cage's own work, allowing indeterminacy to open the possibilities of shifting perspectives. Fahrner performed chance operations on Cage's text and, in response to those forms, created images, which Gallo set in type. Nods marked a new publishing direction for Granary: the interactive process óf bookmaking. As Clay states in his Double Change interview, given "the foundation of the master plan without a master plan. . .one book led to the next and the next and the next (nearly 100 times now) with no predetermined plan...." The exhibit also showcases works that catalogue the everyday . Holten Rower's Non (1995) is a text-less book made from found materials that articulate their place of origin. Listed in the colophon page are such details: "CARDBOARD—Toilet paper cores. BARGE CEMENT—Quabang Corporation, N. Brookfield, Massachusetts. SOAKING MATERIAL— Municipal water, New York Reservoir Service. ..." Likewise, The History ofthe/my World (1995) by Johanna Drucker is a mythic tale that collages western civilization through the artist's own memory. Distinctive typography and design create texture and employ three discrete narrative voices without interaction. Drucker navigates the subjective space through history, fiction, and recollection. Henrik Drescher's Too Much Bliss (1992) reads like a cacophonous scrapbook in which the book is made accountable as record-keeper. Images and verbal thoughts are sketched, crossed out, and rewritten, repeatedly shifting conversations. The work is a cluster of media, ideas, and images in the form of collage, drawing, painting, and incisions. According to Drescher, Too Much Bliss was made with "scars, tattoos, cracks, memories, impressions, flashbacks, forgotten instructions...everything at once." Too Much Bliss, in both Drescher's original work sense and in this current exhibition, reveal how Steve Clay and Granary Books established the artists' book as a distinctive form, reflecting both craft and conception. Writer, photographer, andfilmmaker Nikki Widner is coeditor ofOne Less Magazine. Her writing has recently appeared in Verse, ThreeTherefore Two, Nerve, and Lantern. > One afternoon at Cafe Revolution in San Francisco's Mission District, Scott Inguito sat at a table, smoking his usual cigar, with a copy ofPaul Celan's Breathturn (1995) spread out before him, and proceeded to collage a new poem from the left and right edges of its notes section. This left and right columnar form, Inguito notes, was inspired by his reading of Franck André Jamme...