To be fair.

9[TM] BIENNIAL PYRAMID ATLANTIC BOOK ARTS FAIR AND CONFERENCE

SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND

NOVEMBER 16-18, 2006

If Afterimage were a journal of media arts from centuries past, there would be much to report on from the "Fair" component of Pyramid Atlantic's Book Arts Fair and Conference, a two-day event held biennially in Silver Spring, Maryland. The majority of titles displayed and sold by small, private artists' presses were made using letterpress (nineteenth-century technology), whereas the latest modes of print media, namely print-on-demand, and digital technologies--not to mention computer-made imagery and photography--were the obvious production minority. To put it flatly, most proprietors in attendance had traditional, formalist leanings. The negotiation of appearance and content, on the other hand, was at the core of the conference component. Each of the conference's three breakout sessions dealt implicitly with mediation. The coupling of the fair's formalism and challenging conference talks resulted in an atmosphere of reticence as those involved with book arts continue to question and confront the expectant development of important criticism for the field.

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Clifton Meador, artist and coordinator of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts Program at Columbia College Chicago, presented his paper, "Disciplining a Craft," in which he mediated between techniques taught in the craft culture of workshops and the latent expressiveness expected from academic studio art courses. Meador argued that by moving book arts into the academy, concerns have been reallocated, giving precedence to concept over craft. He substantiated his claim through an analysis of course descriptions at many nonprofit book arts centers as compared to those of studio art programs. Book arts classes situated in studio art departments are expected to operate by ideas, as the academy does. Therefore, techniques are presented in a way that historicizes and contextualizes craft at the service of creating aesthetic, meaningful communication.

Pattie Belle Hastings, an artist, founder of Ice House Press (publisher of multi-media CDs and books), and faculty at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, communicated through a myriad of mediating strategies including performance, live projected reading, and the display of creative "evidence." Her presentation was a performance based on her project "Cyborg Mommy," and her book and interactive DVD, The Scarlet Genotype (2004). She showed slide illustrations from her current research area--parenting her child--and discussed the in-depth analysis of her metaphoric "subject." Research conducted for Hastings's "Cyborg Mommy" has resulted in unusual visual evidence. For instance, samples taken from My Little Pony[R] dolls were introduced to glass slides, magnified, and documented. This study examined the deep structure from one of many intermediaries between the subject and researcher, namely the gender specificity of the child's toys. Hastings's research must have proved convincing as questions from audience members were asked performatively in the nomenclature of scientific study as demonstrated by the artist.

The science of reading comprehension was the subtext of "Artists' Books: Between Viewing and Reading," presented by Ward Tietz, artist and professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he directs the Poetry and Seminar Series. Tietz's talk included examples of artists' books where "the verbal channel begins to be incorporated into the pictorial channel." He illustrated how we become mediators of unusual derivations throughout an artists' book, thus challenging the standard, western mode of top-to-bottom, left-to-right reading. Tietz drew from cognitive psychology concepts, recognizing the involvedness of thoroughly reading a book when sustainable mental picturing of texts is intervened upon by imagery, or, if reversed, viewing pictures is disrupted by words. Struggling to read artists' books is valuable, Tietz asserts:

since such difficulty is directly linked to their ability to contest

the institutional norms of production and reception that we've

inherited from literature and the visual arts, such contestation is

important because it allows artists' books and other liminal or hybrid

forms to demonstrate a condition where aesthetic value is not

categorically determined.

Relating ideas presented at the conference to the books in the fair is itself a difficult task. It could be argued the Pyramid Atlantic gathering is an amalgam of proprietorship and scholarship and suffers from a discrepancy in values. Regardless, this particular biennial assembly provides much-needed contact with artists' books themselves. Access to many titles is extremely limited. Perhaps if the books for sale were assessed on their complexity as described by Tietz or their makers influenced by Hastings's subjective research or the craftspeople indicted by Meador's call for a "conceptually-defined discipline," then more ideas will be brought to the fair the next time around.

TATE SHAW is a book artist, co-publisher of Preacher's Biscuit Books, and an instructor at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.