Gretchen Frances Bennett — Gretchen Frances Bennett

The Artist Book and New Narratives

Course Description

This course, The Artist Book and New Narratives, is a blended art seminar and studio course, with a focus on the design and development of small, art-based, book publications, performing across disciplines and materials. Learning methods include working with digital technology, as well as manual methods (for example, collage and drawing) and writing. From a thematic point of view, the course explores the basic concepts of space that combine art, design, media and daily life, in book form. At the end of this course, student work is summarized in a comprehensive catalog. This resulting book serves as documentation of the project, as a guide to future projects and coursework, and is also a stand-alone artist book.

The array of diverse voices expressed in the individual books and combined catalog provide what Stockholm-based OEI magazine refers to as: "extra-disciplinary spaces and de-disciplinizing moments — experimental forms of thinking, montages between poetry, art, philosophy, film, and documents; critical investigations, editorial enunciations, aesthetic technologies, non-affirmative writing, speculative archaeologies, new ecologies, and alternative historiographies and speculative ethnographies."[1]

This course combines two essential elements of the study of artistic expression: the creation of original works, through personal narrative and vision and the mastery of select tools, such as Adobe InDesign software; and the analytic study of artistic works in this genre. It occupies a sliding space between digital and analog, the hand-held book and the web, the classroom, and the larger world. Through the tool of the personal book, the course looks at how the artist book addresses currents in contemporary art, design, and culture, such as net art and shared spaces, as it explores the creation of a more comprehensive if idiosyncratic, historical record. It provides an interdisciplinary environment, in which to talk about individual experiences of ordinary life, reframing everyday details as meaningful revelations.

The Book Space is Interdisciplinary
This book-based teaching space is a container for an interdisciplinary array of work, filtered through basic ideas of book structures and design, relationships of form and content, the possibilities of text and image, history, collaboration, and distribution. This idea of combining a book, a class, and history is one possible look at "what is commonly called the ‘artist’s book’— an evolving art form that has been an ongoing matter for exploration for artists internationally."[2] A plastic response vehicle and container, this curricular book tool incorporates individual daily life observations, which can be accessed in person and online, as a resource and archive. It is also a way to extend the classroom experience beyond one term or place, by leaving an in-hand and online record. The classroom tool of a book is a space that allows local political and cultural issues to impact creative life, using the individual lived experience as the raw material for the course. The book of individual chapters contributed from each student, combined into a course catalog, references ‘encyclopedia,’ but, in form, lacks any drive for totality or pretense of completeness. Its open-endedness is what makes it possible.

Text-based Templates

Lorrie Moore’s book of essays, Self-Help, and How to Set a Fire and Why, by Jesse Ball, exploring second-person prose; painter Amy Sillman’s ‘zines; and Teju Cole’s collection of nonfiction essays, Known and Strange Things, narrative based on a journey through all the landscapes he has access to, including international, personal, cultural, technological and emotional.

http://www.tipitin.com/shop/slide-shows-by-charlotte-cheetham
https://guides.ecuad.ca/artistsbooks/charlotte-cheetham

Design-based Templates
Japanese and Riot Grrrl punk-style fanzines; Charlotte Cheetham’s Slide Shows, a “landscape of independent art publishing”; the work of Dutch designers Mevis & Van Deursen, Karel Martens, Jo Frenken of the Charles Nypels Lab, Van Eyck Academie; and the bi-monthly Baltimore focused music and art zine True Laurels.

Shifts in Context Promote Shifts inForm and Content
Students are provided with concrete examples of high-quality products, towards the creation of their own original works. These provided templates for navigating the artist book are living plans. Texts are updated and amended in retrospect, and a variety of layouts and printing techniques are employed by each student, in direct response to the changing conditions of their daily lives. This room for responding to shifting context is demonstrated through one particular example of an artist book: Charlotte Cheetham’s Slide Shows, Phil Baber’s Cannon Magazine.

Course Structure
Course Structure includes a comprehensive introduction to basic design principles, along with daily applied step-by-step lessons in digital software and hand-made construction methods; an introduction to creative strategy and narrative outlines; assigned readings; class discussions; and in class and out of class projects. Critical thought processes are demonstrated through writing, presentations, and book draft reviews. Through a series of creative projects, readings, lectures, and critique, students gain knowledge of the history, theory, and practice of digital and handmade creative practices and develop skills to expand on their personal history and aesthetic. Written assignments encourage independent research and critical thinking and enhance communication skills and approach to the story. Personal narratives are cultivated through the use a form of self-reflection and writing that explores each student's personal experience and connects this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. Students develop online portfolios that are tied to their personal profiles, allowing them to collect and document their educational experiences, submission, and projects.
After introductory lectures and readings about contemporary and historical literature and cultural events, students will spend the term mapping individual paths of research through the collection of personal and broader data. Students develop a central proposition and research objective and then document the principles and visual language of "the artist book," along with their own interpretations of concepts related to their chosen areas of focus. At the end of this course, each student presents a 20-minute video presentation to the class, along with their personal book. 

Guest artists and writers have included poet Melanie Noel, publisher Aidan Fitzgerald of Cold Cube Press, Short Run press founders Eroyn Franklin and Kelly Froh, and artist Matthew Offenbacher.

Publication arts explorationsfor in-hand booklets and final course book include everyday printers for the body of the books, and Risograph technology for book covers.

The curricular activity for this course tracks the idea of the ‘archive,’ including Charlotte Cheetham’s artist book archive, Slide Shows: OEI: https://vimeo.com/77608756, as well as on shifting context, tracking as a primary example, from Slide Shows: Phil Baber’s Cannon Magazine. https://vimeo.com/58288812.

I’ve taught iterations of this course at Cornish College of the Arts, Edmonds Community College, and Seattle University.

[1] Cheetham, Charlotte. Slide Shows: A Landscape of Contemporary Independent & Art Publishing. Fillip Issue No. 18Spring 2013: The Swedish OEI.

[2] Ibid: Insert.

[3] Cheetham, Charlotte. Slide Shows: A Landscape of Contemporary Independent & Art Publishing. Fillip Issue No. 18Spring 2013: Cannon Magazine by Phil Baber.

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