New projects about old events
Lots of exciting things are happening this year, but there are two formal projects that are super exciting because they stem from successful applications.
Howard’s End (fun working title)
Melinda Smith and I applied for a Creative Australia grant to continue a collaborative poetry project that explores Australia’s political history. And we were successful!
This project continues on from a major body of work produced as part of my PhD. Melinda and I received a Craft ACT opportunity to work with the Museum of Democracy and respond to its Sign Room, which resulted in Be Spoken To. Then we decided to keep going, and produced 1962: Be Spoken To, which explored a year in the life of Canberra’s Old Parliament House. By choosing 1962, we had a lot of social events and political issues to play with. Robert Menzies was in power, Gough Whitlam was a junior politician learning the ropes, Canberra was staring to shaping up, and the world was ramping up and powering on. Out of that project came a formal large-scale letterpress artist book edition, and a commercial poetry chapbook called Members Only. This is a deliberate strategy that I devised in my Phd: limited editions of artist books for me, public-facing product for the poet. That way, we all get to eat.
This current project, formal name TBC, is firmly looking at the John Howard era, and specifically his Cabinet Papers. We’ve got funding for 2 years, which is officially our Development Phase. This is because JH’s papers are still being released, and we want to be there for all of it. And the beautiful thing about art and poetry is that we can also address the missing cabinet papers…
Melinda’s credentials for this are impeccable: in 2014 she won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award with her excellent volume Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call.
For she’s a jolly good Fellow
Part of my PhD exegesis was a chapter contextualising my history with the book as art. And the genesis of that was my decision to go to art school to be in the Graphic Investigation Workshop (GIW), purely to access their letterpress equipment. Of course, when I got there, I had to do all the art things as well, and by the time I graduated, I was completely derailed from any thought of having a straight-track life. The GIW was an extraordinary pedagogical entity in Australia. With a curriculum that centred upon a loose definition of drawing and an emphasis on collaboration, GIW staff and students produced books that utilised literature and poetry, sometimes in multiple languages, as a springboard for visual interpretation. They were made as traditional codex formats as well as more experimental structures.
The National Library of Australia initiated a relationship with the GIW in the early 1980s, after the Canberra School of Art hosted the First National Australian Bookbinders Conference, and I’ve been pitching a research fellowship application to the NLA to explore that relationship and its ramifications for Australian artist books in general. Now, Melinda and I got our Creative Australia grant on our first application – we didn’t plan to, we did it as a practice run, but obviously people like the idea of interrogating John Howard. My NLA application has been submitted five years in a row, and FINALLY this year I was accepted, which is SUPER-EXCITING. It’s an Honorary Fellowship, because I decided that this would be the last time I tried, and desperately ticked the box that said ‘I don’t need the money’ – but hey, I’m used to camping out with and being fed by friends (THANK YOU ALL) when I hit Canberra, now that I live in the countryside. So that will be happening in the second half of the year!
If this sounds like a dry sort of project, just think a minute about the weirdness of artist books, and if you’ve been hanging around my website you’ll know that they have no real boundaries other than a sense of bookness. Imagine that you’re a 1970/80s librarian, trying to catalogue something that really pushes the boundaries of books. Your notion of a rare book is that of a private press volume: a codex, printed using letterpress with some original illustrations, and it sits on a shelf neatly. Like this one, which I printed once upon a time:
Rosemary Dobson, Poems to Hold or Let Go, 2008. Ampersand Duck: letterpress & relief polymer plate printing and binding by Caren Florance, wood engravings by Rosalind Atkins. Edition of 200.
Now imagine that the book you are being asked to catalogue is unbound, or sculptural. Like this:
Adam Blackshaw, Bone Abacus, 1989, unique. In the GIW/Petr Herel Collection, Menzies Library, ANU
How on earth do you catalogue it for a public library collection? Do you make it fully accessible, or, down the other end of the access spectrum, put it in the locked Strong Room and only let people touch it with a guard present? Granted, none of the artist books collected by the NLA were as physically radical as Adam’s, but there were (are!) many interesting formats and processes, and the internal debates over the cataloguing, storage and access seem very interesting from the little I’ve seen (and I’ve also had some great conversations with retired NLA staff).
And all of that started with a closed-door conversation between some NLA staff and GIW Head Petr Herel in 1984. I want to investigate the hell out of that moment in time… Hold that thought.
