With 2009 Sally R. Bishop Faculty Fellow Johanna Drucker.

A book is a space that structures relations among elements of text, image, page, margin, material, color, texture, tone, type, gutter, and other features. Understanding the ways to create intertextual play is crucial to the design of a book if it is going to do more than serve as a vehicle to present pre-exisiting work. This workshop is designed to explore fundamental concepts of development, sequence, and intertextuality (or the way things talk to each other inside a book-- images, text, graphics, etc.) It is structured to provide some basic lessons that can be used for teaching or in one's own practice. The first day consists of a series of individual exercises that work with scale, image, text, and content across a book's spaces with special emphasis on development, sequence, turnings, and intertextuality. The second day, which builds on the first, will take the lessons of the first day into a single, sustained exercise in creating a fully worked-up dummy. Everyone will select from the same texts and images so that the individual solutions are in maximum contrast with each other. This is a class meant for advanced, or at least sophisticated participants for whom the relations of critical issues and production concepts is central to their thinking about book art. The class will work together and independently on various exercises, with the goal of increasing sensitivity to the ways elements "talk to" each other within a book's finite continuum. Through basic exercises in layout, students will create a series of dummies that focus on each of several crucial issues. A final exercise will allow the class to work with shared materials towards individual solutions so that the ways formal engagement creates significance differently in each instance becomes strikingly clear.

Application only. Participants must have previous bookmaking experience. Please contact the Center to register.

Johanna Drucker
November 7 - 8 , Saturday and Sunday, 10am - 4pm

Johanna Drucker is the 2009 Sally R. Bishop Faculty Fellow. Drucker is internationally known as a book artist and experimental, visual poet. Her work has been exhibited and collected in special collections in libraries and museums including the Getty Center for the Humanities, the Marvin and Ruth Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and many others. In addition to her artistic work, Johanna Drucker has published and lectured extensively on topics related to the history of typography, artists' books, and visual art. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA.