Originally I started making limited editions (or more often than not, editions of one art books), books made out of the need to contain serial art, works that radiated momentum. Drawings and or paintings that worked in sequence or related their intimacy by being hand held, compact, mobile--not stationary and subject to the flat plane of white washed wall. They are lively, rich, multi-layered expressions that happened to take on the form of a book which relates looking to study, to meditation, to a honed-in calibration of relations where the art object is proportional to the body, to the mind--neither dwarfs the other. These manifestations were my own. Occasionally or eventually text found its way in. Textual aspects became more than formal components. A lyrical addition became vital, not as subtext, but as another original meaning and dimension. Fusing these elements was never meant to illustrate or highlight either for the other. The text was as much mental gesturing as were the drawings, paintings and or photographs. The dialectical nature of so much art making seemed opposed to our actual conditions: that we think and write and create visual art hand and hand--they need not be separate departments. There is a strong tradition of artists books as well as limited edition, artfully made poetry books, using the letter press, fine paper, etc. I felt that the emphasis of these latter books presented the textual elements hierarchically and reduced the significance of all other elements besides the text. I thought it would be quite possible to counteract this discrepancy and enact the visual elements in a way that they might be on equal footing as the text. Certainly other considerations were important too, but these were a few basic concerns, starting out.
At present I have given over to the chapbook format for the most part--though I have published two perfect-bound books, Elliza McGrand´s Shadow Dragging Like a Photographer´s Cloth and Jonas Mekas´ Daybooks. I look for the utmost realization of the felicity of language. Urgency. Gorgeousness, lushness--most often sensuality and splendor additionally. Emotionally and politically loaded. It remains to be seen if steely, dry examples of poetry will have any dynamic capacity. Potentiality and kinetic energy seem desirable. To preserve the strangeness between people, that personal destiny of a "singularity of some kind" as Agamben calls it, sure! The virtual can take care of simulacrums and reproductions that cave into selfsame. Because of this, I tend toward the underdog. The poet who works manifestly without the banter of so much social register and the cacophonous effect thereof. The fervor that arises autonomously. It is only interesting to operate independent of preexisting paradigms of value, aesthetic value I mean. I seek the unapparent, primed, lucid expression situated in a beckoning temporal condition. Each book by necessity of this statement must look different, must be actualized holistically to fully round out its sense.
For anyone who has delved at all into what is known as the pataphysical horizon of excess, namely, the excess of insignificance and emptiness, this is precisely the counterpart. These chapbooks are the desires manifested in quantities too small to fulfill, let alone sate or indulge; they are distributed hand to hand, with personal address, all parties come together. Reunions abound. This is, however, a different kind of extreme process.
Much of the material I use for printing is recycled, I plunder dumpsters and garbage sites to reclaim it. A lot of the paper stock is retrieved this way. The simplest solutions I champion: stencil and spray paint, one color off-set. There are no standards, no look, no goals. By making consideration for these books I am able to make the greatest connection with the work--my visual work conjoins to assemble what is the material projection of both and will find reception. Hopefully all of this involvement will heighten the perception of the book beyond mere plight as commodity. Irony may not be necessary to achieve this aura. The interplay of suggestions, the layers of attraction and reference cuts a swathe through the very artifice normally imposed on the mechanized.
Last year I published 6 titles, so far this year, 5. No entropy yet. Can´t wait to
reveal what is forthcoming, but secrets are mysterious too . . .
© Brenda Iijima 2005
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catalogue & ordering : Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs
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