Bartalos

The stats are in: Unbound: A National Exhibition of Book Art was the Bedford Gallery‘s best-attended show ever. I’m pleased to have had three artworks in this exhibition and that my team at the Imprint of the San Francisco Center for the Book was represented by editions we produced with artists Gail Wight, Nigel Poor, Emory Douglas, Ward Schumaker, Allison Weiner, Daniel González, John Hersey, John DeMerritt / Nora Pauwels, and Kay Ryan / Tucker Nichols.

The survey ran from July 11 through September 19 at the Bedford, part of the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek CA. It celebrated the book as art form, featuring 65 book and visual artists from coast to coast across the U.S. and Canada. The works ranged from printed editions and one-of-a-kind books to artworks in diverse media that incorporate, reference, and alter existing books.

PDR by Cara Barer

The wide variety of artists’ interpretations of the book offered a lot of surprises and intro-
duced me to a handful of new names. Cara Barer‘s work was particularly striking for its transformative and other-worldly nature. As she explains: “With the discarded books that
I have acquired, I am attempting to blur the line between objects, sculpture, and photo-
graphy.” I appreciated her disclaimer as well: “No important books have been injured during the making of any of these photographs.” Do click on the image above for a better look at her photograph.

The Cabin of Count Dracula by Marcel Dzama

Another intriguing piece was well-known artist Marcel Dzama‘s The Cabin of Count Dracula (2005), a suite of 20 lithographs in a custom hand-made cabin/box fashioned from logs and lined with faux beaver fur, casting Dzama’s hometown of Winnipeg as the vampire’s origin.
It was issued in an edition of only 10 sets which include a 9-inch colored vinyl EP by Dzama’s musical project Albatross Note.

Left to right: Andy Warhol's Index Book; Business Cards, Royal Road Test, and Every Building on the Sunset Strip by Ed Ruscha

Books from the 1960s by Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol provided historical perspective to the show. Three of Ruscha’s self-published editions were on display: Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), an accordion-fold structure of two extended panoramic photographic collages of each side of Los Angeles’ iconic boulevard; Royal Road Test (1967) which photographically documents an art experiment with Mason Williams and Patrick Blackwell in which a vintage typewriter is dropped from a speeding Buick Le Sabre along the desert sands south of Las Vegas; and Business Cards (1968) which photographically documents an art collaboration between Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston, culminating in a business card exchange.

Foreground: Every Building on the Sunset Strip; Background: Andy Warhol's Index Book

Also exhibited were softcover and hardcover formats of Andy Warhol’s Index Book, a 1967 interactive chronicle of The Factory. Both formats contain interviews with Warhol and other Factory personalities and include interior pop-ups, assorted folding elements and inserts, a melted balloon, and a Lou Reed 45 RPM picture flexi-disc with a Nico interview and music by the Velvet Underground. The hardcover version has a lenticular boards and the softcover has mylar covers.

Vishnu Crew Stews Vindaloo Anew by Michael Bartalos

My own editions in this show were Vishnu Crew Stews Vindaloo Anew, a sculptural book edition inspired by my travels in India; Vostok, which speculates on hidden micro-organisms in Antarctica’s subglacial Lake Vostok; and 29 Degrees North, an accordion-fold travelogue depicting six destinations along the earth’s 29th parallel. All three books are shown and described in greater detail in my website’s Books section.

Vostok and 29 Degrees North by Michael Bartalos

Big thanks to curator Carrie Lederer for including me in this landmark book arts show, and congrats to her and chief preparator Erik Mortensen for its success and popularity.

On my travels I’m always on the lookout for all things polar and printmaking, and I did well on both accounts in China recently.

On the polar front, my wife and I managed admission to the Polar Research Institute of China, the government’s main polar science agency. That visit is described on my Long View Project blog over at the CalAcademy site.

In the printmaking department, we made a pilgrimage to Beijing’s China Printing Museum,
located as remotely on the outskirts of town as the Polar Research Institute is. Consequently it was just as empty of visitors, and all 5,000 square meters (16,000 square feet) of the world’s biggest printing museum was ours alone.

The China Printing Museum’s displays are distributed over three floors, with modern printing methods on the first floor and the origins of printing on the third floor. We took the stroll up and backwards in time, though it’s perfectly possible to do it backwards (which is to say forwards), depending on one’s chronological inclination.

The first floor’s Hall of Digital Technology — a misnomer since it actually focuses on the transition from letterpress to offset printing — includes a specialized exhibition area of commercial packaging samples, and its most recent printing equipment appears to date
from the 1980s.

The second floor, or Modern Printing Hall, is more interesting. It traces the development of technologies since 1949, showing the evolution of relief printing, planography, intaglio and stencil printing. There are also special exhibition areas on paper currency, postage stamps, and printing in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

The third floor’s Ancient Printing Hall is better still. It describes the development of printing from the late New Stone Age to the early 20th century. Most intriguing are the stages of technology and material leading up to Bi Sheng‘s invention of movable type between 1041 and 1048. Samples of his clay type reveal both their revolutionary nature and fragility which limited their practicality for large-scale printing.

Johann Gutenberg, who resolved those issues 400 years later, is acknowledged in a special area that covers the history of printing in Germany and Europe from the 15th century onward. A model of Gutenberg’s wooden hand press and early presswork are included.

As we were leaving the building, a staffer casually offered to show us another exhibit hall downstairs. We nearly passed on it; then acquiesced. Good thing, because The Under-
ground Hall of Printing Machines turned out to be our favorite part of the museum. These
last three photos are of this space.

This cavernous basement is lined with literally hundreds of old presses and pieces of printing equipment dating from 1865 to the 1990s. The space resembles less of an exhibit than an orderly junkyard where the relics are free to be handled and inspected up close.

One of the coolest items was the 1926 American double AO size two-color offset press shown above, weighing nearly 50 tons (99,208 pounds to be exact). The staffer told us that the behemoth’s painstaking disassembly in the U.S. and its reassembly in China was fortunate, for today it remains the only surviving press of its kind.

The China Printing Museum’s unique holdings makes it a worthy destination for printing aficionados. Others may not get past the the fraying displays and poor lighting. Here’s hoping that Beijing’s monument to one of China’s Four Great Inventions gets an upgrade, some visitors, and a more central location sooner than later.

Till then, the China Printing Museum is located at No.25, Xinghua Beilu, Huangcun Town, Daxing District, Beijing, China (北京大兴区黄村兴华北路25号).
Call ahead for hours: 8610-60261237 or 69245559.