Center for Book Arts

I went to the Center for Book Arts today to checkout their exhibition. I wasn't really sure what to expect, I guessed I would see a number of handmade books and small letterpress type. And that was there, but most of the presented work was much different. There was a diversity in the work, from digital to traditional methods - and tension in that range, Some work was heavily critical of the focus of other methods of working, the transition to e-books was heavily criticized.  Other works, especially in the mini-show Once Upon a Time, This Was the End,  was deeply pessimistic about the future of printed matter and distributed information.

An example of this is Loren Madsen's work, End Of... from 1998. It shows the google search of End of... with the filler of the autocomplete. As far as I can tell, this work shows all this different things which we worry are ending, and reflects those as specifically worries which we ask through google. Looking at only this example of the series, in which Madsen presentes other googled words, I can't say whether the placement of the words on the page is appropriate. However, for a google search, these words are underwhelming, surrounded by huge white space, they seem to show that little is ending at all. In addition, the "end of ..." placed into the text is unnecessary, we can figure out pretty quickly what these phrases have in common. Other than that, it is hard to tell what else, if anything, may be in common among these searches. 

A project I really liked was this one about "Pulse" a made up start-up that digitized and protected your library. If this work was meaning to be sarcastic (images of nuclear explosions and spaceship libraries for example), I don't think it was totally successful. After all, I think this is a good idea for a company. I did like seeing the examples of possible logos for the company, while some make more sense than others (the archer?) it is cool to see how the logo can really change the mood of the company, from intellectual to energetic. 

Finally, I liked this work that was a set of 5 grocery lists. Rather than present mini-narratives in each list (bottle of wine, roses, ring) or a story across all the lists (a descent into junk food) the artist assembles a small window in life of a person, herself, in a way which becomes both mundane and informative.