Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

Smith was exploring ways of bringing his work
to a wider audience and though he had shown
extensively within a museum context in the UK
and abroad, had not yet found a satisfactory
way of translating this most private aspect of his
practice into work which could be shown or
disseminated.
The work was intriguing and beautiful but how
it fitted within the framework of a commercial
gallery took a long time to resolve since its
resonance depended upon the specificity of its
location. A bookwork seemed a logical way of
containing the documentary aspect, but Smith
was anxious that the approach taken to making
the publication follow as closely as possible his
wider working methods. Thus the book Site
Unseen was conceived as a ‘page specific’ site
that would reveal a single project through a
narrative of visual images, working notes and
commentaries and a longer poetic text.
Funding from the Arts Council made the
project possible, but it also imposed parameters
that led to a different way of making the book
than in previous publications. We were
required to print in a run of 500 or above and
to explore ways of distributing the book wider
than the network of individuals, collections and
libraries that had previously bought the smaller
edition publications. Budget dictated that the
book would largely have to be printed using
commercial lithography and the most efficient
tool to bring all the different elements together
was the computer. Within the financial
restraints however there was a determination to
use material and design to mirror the working
process of the artist who had made a series of
sculptural drawings into the fabric of a derelict
house, exposing layers of its history down to
the lathe and plaster skeleton. Images were
chosen as much for their potential to convey
the atmosphere of the house as they were to
show the artist's interventions upon it while
pages of different materials were layered
together or cut through with perforations and
apertures to parallel the sense of revealed form
and pattern.
We were fortunate in the two writers involved in
Site Unseen. James Putnam, who put the project
into the wider context of Smith’s practice and
highlighted the crucial interplay between the
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“actual and the metaphorical” that runs
through all the work and Mel Gooding who
understood implicitly how his text must
function to complement and reveal in language
the sensation of the hidden site, which he did
most eloquently.
Site Unseen was published in the context of an
installation at the Eagle Gallery and was the
inspiration behind a number of the books that
followed which were approached on a much
more complex level and developed as an
extension of the work we were showing in
exhibition. It was important as a publisher to
ask what kind of an audience these works were
for, since the arena for artists’ books in the UK
is a small one and the Gallery could only
operate in a limited way as a distributor. It
seemed to make more sense to stay at the ‘fine
art’ end of making artists’ books than to
attempt to produce longer runs where quality
of purpose and print would be limited by
budget and where to make any kind of
financial returns large numbers of the books
would have to be sold.
Two fundamental questions interested me and
were born out of the experience of making
previous books and in thinking about the
context in which we were showing them. The
first was whether we could make publications as
objects that would appeal to people even before
they had read the text or properly looked at
the images. Our immediate audience was the
mixture of private individuals, consultants and
curators that passed through the gallery and
though there was interest in the books there
was a hesitancy about them as collectible works
of art. The second and far more difficult issue
was how one could commission genuine
collaborations between an artist and writer
within a framework which would allow them
the time and flexibility to develop a work which
properly integrated the various languages
involved.
In 1999 I set up a subscription scheme to
publish five artists’ books that could be
developed over a period of years rather than
months. The scheme was designed to raise a
starting fund of £20,000 which would be
supplemented by grant funding, sponsorship
and sales of the published books.