Biljana's COFA1002 Blog

Situationist Books by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn. Another historical experimental publishing example that I love! 

Top: Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, Fin de Copenhague, published by Bauhaus Imaginiste, 1957

According to legend, Fin de Copenhague was composed and printed in the space of just 24 hours. Or maybe it was 48 hours. Either way it was pulled off with a dizzying burst of speed and with nonchalantly scathing brilliance by the Danish artist Asger Jorn, credited as main author, and the French theorist and writer Guy Debord, who is named as “technical adviser for détournement”.

The book’s pages ripple with coarse trails of pigment and explode with wild energy. As the story goes, not long after they had arrived in Copenhagen Jorn and Debord stole a pile of newspapers and magazines from a newsstand, which they cut up to make 32 collages. At the printer next day, Jorn dribbled ink on to the zinc plates from the top of a ladder; these were then etched. The abstract shapes, like the frenetic daubings of a monkey wielding a paint brush, were printed on both sides of the sheet in gradated color, and the collage elements were printed in black on top of them. When the sheet was trimmed and bound, the formerly continuous marks and colors of Jorn’s carrying structure produced random collisions of colour and shape on the spreads. Pure chance completed the design. 

http://designobserver.com/article.php?id=37720http://designobserver.com/article.php?id=37720

Bottom: Debord, Guy and Jorn, Asger. Mémoires: Structures Portantes d’Asger Jorn. Copenhagen: Internationale Situationniste, 1959. n.p. [64 p.]; ill.; 28 x 21 cm. White card wrappers with Viks no.2 sandpaper cover.

Here are some historical examples of experimental approaches to publications. 

1. April Greiman 'does it make sense?', design quarterly #133, 1986 

Greiman's piece challenged existing notions of what a magazine should be. Rather than the standard thirty-two-page sequence, she reformatted the piece as a poster that folded out to almost three by six feet. On the front is an image of Greiman's digitized, naked body amid layers of interacting images and text. On the back, colorful atmospheric spatial video images are interspersed with thoughtful comments and painstaking notations on the digital process—a virtual landscape of text and image. 

2, 3. Edward Ruscha, Every building on the Sunset Strip, 1966

In the 1960s, Ed Ruscha more or less reinvented the artist’s book. By turning away from the craftsmanship and luxury status that typified the livre d’artiste in favor of the artistic idea or concept, expressed simply through photographs and text, Ruscha opened the genre to the possibilities of mass-production and distribution. The 25-foot length of the accordion-folded Every Building on the Sunset Strip affords the viewer two continuous photographic views of the mile and a half section of this landmark stretch of Sunset, one for each side of one of the city’s landmark thoroughfare.- From 

4, 5. La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France /Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France – by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk

Comprised of brightly colored arabesques, concentric circles, triangles, and rectangles, Delaunay-Terk's pochoir illustrations for Blaise Cendrars's poem and its radical format have made this a landmark in the history of the modern book. The poet and the artist conceived of this project as the first "simultaneous book." When closed, the accordion-folded volume can be slipped into a wrapper. Opened out vertically, the format facilitates the contrast of the darker themes of the poem with the vibrant dynamism of the illuminations that accompany it.Written as a stream of consciousness, Cendrars's poem alternates between his memories of a train trip across Siberia in 1904 and thoughts of his girlfriend, Jehanne. Complementing the rhythms of the poem, Delaunay-Terk interspersed patches of color with the poet's staggered text, printed in twelve different fonts. The poem and the illustration both end with references to the Eiffel Tower and the ferris wheel, two architectural marvels of Paris at that time, further symbolizing modernity and the experiences of simultaneity that urban life provided. From 

Object alchemy 

Nina Canell

Left: Remembrance (Colourless), Chewing-gum, conrete

Denis Beaubois

Documentation of Australia council New Work grant.$20,000 2011

COFA1002 lecturer Andrew Hurle’s work explores the aesthetics of value. He has been exploring the way that value is signified in paper money. His work questions how value is added to otherwise worthless pieces of paper through graphics.  

‘This subject is not simply about the depiction of banknotes, but rather how printed reproduction serves to certify value in reproduction. My specialist interest within this topic concerns the sorts of ornament that have historically been developed to secure printed money against counterfeit. These have themselves been imitated to produce value on other forms of printed securities and debased for use in vernacular promotion such as advertising.’ FROM  

1. Extrapolation (sepia), 2011

inkjet print, (un-editioned), 30 x 50 cm

2. Extrapolations (2012) Archival inkjet prints on cotton rag paper. Each 60 x 40cm.