Hello. I’ll be making an artist’s book one month at a time. It’s a project to explore working quickly and making art intended to be widely distributed. Most of my art has been sculptural, which is neither quick or easy to distribute.

Every month, I’ll make three pieces of art for the book:

a 2D piece (a photo, a drawing, a print)
a written piece (a poem, a tiny story, some text art)
an audio piece (a song, a soundscape, a drone).

At the end of each month I’ll mail a new page of the book to each subscriber with those three pieces attached. (The audio piece will have a download code on the page).

It will look something like this. [ photo ]

When you subscribe, you’ll get a three-ring binder in the mail. Each monthly page that you receive will fit in that binder. At the end of the year, you’ll have a body of work that is itself a piece of art. I’ll send you physical media that includes all of the sound pieces to add to the binder so that all the work is in one place.

I’ll also keep a running work log on this site.

I’m still ironing out the pricing, but it will probably be around $25-$30 for the first month to cover the binder and the first page of art, then $6 or $7 month after that, including shipping.

If you want to know more about the project and what prompted me to go long on something like this, read on.

Why

Art wants to be made …

I get a lot of ideas. Too many to follow through on all of them. Or is it too many? I’ve learned over the years that I am actually more productive when I have more things to work on. When I’m required to schedule my time and prioritize which thing gets my attention, I know that the I am working on at any moment will get my full attention.

But I haven’t been doing the scheduling and prioritizing work. Nothing has deadlines, so I’ve been chipping away at a few projects for the last couple of years in an unstructured way and nothing is done. This is frustrating.

Don’t get me wrong — I do make art for the joy of making it. I’m one of those artists for whom the process is as important as the product. But I don’t make it to just for the work to sit there in my garage or on a shelf in my studio. I want people to see it.

… and wants to have an audience

There’s a theory of art that says a work isn’t complete until it’s been seen/experienced because it needs the audience to give it context. It’s been expressed by a few people in slightly different ways, but the first place I learned about it was from the text of a talk given by Marcel Duchamp called “The Creative Act.” You can read the whole thing here, but the last sentence explains the core principal.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his con- tribution to the creative act.

That makes sense to me, and for the kind of art that I make. The interaction of the audience with the piece is part of the piece. A lot of the work I’ve been scratching at for the last couple of years has been explicitly interactive: The spectator has the opportunity to alter the work while they’re viewing it.

Thus,

That’s where this project comes in. At the intersection of my need for deadlines and my belief that my art is only finished when people can interact with it is an artist’s book that takes a year to make and gets into people’s hands as it’s being made. It’s a symbiotic relationship: you get art, I get to make art, and the art gets to be seen and heard. And paradoxically, as explained above, this will give me more time to spend on my bigger pieces.

It’s an ambitious project, a year long and covering a lot of territory. I’m going to be experimenting with different media and different processes. I’ll keep a running log of things that I’m doing on the project web site.

I’ll also write more about how this project came about and how I landed on this format.

Why a book?

An artist’s book is a piece of art created in the form of a book. It’s a form that’s been explored pretty extensively since the early 20th century. Creating a book not only allows the artist to go into depth on their subject, but it creates a level of intimacy for the viewer that can be difficult to achieve with larger works. They’re mostly very portable, which again can be difficult with more traditional forms of art.

It’s worth noting that “book” is a word that can sometimes be defined loosely in this context. To be sure, many, maybe even most, are books that look like what you probably imagine when you hear the word: pages bound on one side with a spine and front and back covers. It’s not uncommon for the artist to play with this form, though. Books stored as files, books that are a single, long accordion-folded page, newsprint, glossy photos, etc.

You can learn a lot more about them and see lots of examples at Printed Matter] and the Smithsonian Libraries.