johndoe@gmail.com
HANDICRAFTING AND TEXTUAL MATERIALITY
One significant trend in experimental writing is the emphasis on the materiality of texts themselves. This can take the form of found texts that have been physically altered, manipulated, or recombined. For example, some works palpably snip, paste, scissor, scratch, whiteout, doodle on, write over, bend, fold, or desecrate the page; in other cases, the printed page features a reproduction of such manipulations. Another avenue that experimental writers have explored recently is to emphasize textual materiality through an array of unique page formats, design elements, typefaces, hypergraphics, bindings, and layouts, including: the advent of multimodal texts, the rise of creative book arts, and the reemergence of zines. In some instances, new embodiments of text have reoriented the very notion of writing, ranging from avant-garde conceptual writing to popular publishing ventures, configurations such as board games, pop-up books, adult coloring books, View-Master reels, dioramas and immersive environments, Japanese-style accordion binding, artifacts with tactile elements, assembly kits, star maps, cootie-catchers, galleried artworks, installations, experiments with textiles, and sui generis book-like objects à la McSweeney’s. Frequently aligning with DIY sensibilities and “maker culture,” this emerging genre of handicrafting encompasses book arts and artist books, novelties and ephemera, mail art, museum installations, and new frontiers of material science. Through handicrafting artifacts, designing chapbooks, and displaying work in experimental settings, we encourage readers to get messy and have fun while thinking of their writing as a material production in which the embodied shape and physical substance of their texts potentially affect their writing’s structure, audience, and the conventions by which it may be read.
Links
● Augusto de Campos, “Poemobiles”
● Kyle Waugh, “History of the Chapbook”
● Austin Kleon, “How to Make a Zine: A Tutorial”
● “The Popularity of Broadsides” (Library of Congress)
● San Francisco Center for the Book
● Minnesota Center for Book Arts
● Jonathan Callan, personal website
● Johanna Drucker, A Century of Artists’ Books
● “Iliazd: Publishing as an Art Form”
● Megan N. Liberty, “Craft & Conceptual Art: Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books”
● Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “A Life in Handkerchiefs:A Selection”
● Sonja Johanson, “A Folio of Erasures”
● Mary Ruefle, from A Little White Shadow
● Christopher Knowles, Typings (1974-1977)
● Douglas Kearney, “Ease My Mind Shell”
● Tim Keane, “Ray Johnson: Zen Master of the Social Network”
● Trinie Dalton, personal website
● Jennifer Josten, “Mathias Goeritz and International Concrete Poetry”
● Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony Installation
● Abraham Burickson, Odyssey Works
● Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (Istanbul)
● David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, The Museum of Jurassic Technology(Los Angeles)
● Jen Bervins, Silk Poems Installation
● Christian Bök, The Xenotext Works
● Riccardo Boglione, Ritmo d : feeling the blanks
