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Service industry in the field of art

First of all I like to thank you for inviting me and the possibility for this talk. There will be some forty minutes in serious German accent ahead, but I hope you will nevertheless bear with me. We are here to discuss what chances books can provide these days and what opportunities have arisen in projects I have already worked on.

My talk will mostly focus on SPECTOR, which is the context for all of my design work. Now, what is SPECTOR? A couple of things, for instance an office, the name of a magazine, a network, a flat in Halle and a temporary cafe in Leipzig. At the core of SPECTOR is work on publications about contemporary fine art. The structure, however, isn’t comparable to a conventional publishing house. One might not necessarily end up with books; according to topics and situations the result could be other products too.

Nevertheless, the book plays a crucial role in the documentation and distribution of fine art. Since fine art with limited life span is developed, it’s survival is depended on documentation through photography, video and still the book. But how can one document fine art which has left the two-dimensional environment, which is neither sculpture nor artefact, which is happening in space, with a sense of location and duration, and uses sound and kinetic effects? Image material can usually only convey certain stages or details. Photographs are sometimes detached from the work and might give a different impression. There seems to be a gigantic gap between original and documentation. In the projects which I’d like to introduce you to we have tried to solve some of these problems  by editing, design and artistic means. Of course, this is an interpretative process which always brings about the danger of misinterpretation as well.

But let’s get started

SPECTOR IS A STUDIO BASED IN LEIPZIG
Before we set up SPECTOR Jan and me had worked in 1997 together on a book project with Ilya Kabakov for the Museum of Contemporary Art which went on for roughly one and a half year. What probably had rather to do with our unprofessional approach. Occasionally the layout was finished earlier than the text. The author could so get an impression what the text would finally look like. What had started as a student project turned into a satisfying working relationship which we felt like continuing after the Kabakov book was finished. 

SPECTOR is hosting a shared studio with an arts and media profile. That is design, research, fine art and film. Altogether there have been about nine different graphic designers temporarily working on a project basis. Founding Members are Anne Koenig (writing), Jan Wenzel (writing) and me (graphic). Over the last couple of years SPECTOR has been a place where up to six people (at the time) have worked on projects.

SPECTOR IS A MAGAZINE
Founded by the three of us (Jan, Anne and me) in 2000 SPECTOR CUT&PASTE tries to address issues in all cultural areas in a way which truly integrates critical writing with grafische formgeving – something we felt didn’t happen in most other comparable magazines.

As far as our idea of cultural topics are concerned we felt rather drawn towards a somewhat classical greek idea of culture which ranged from various sections of fine art to literature, theatre, architecture, film, media and sports. Graphic design is not only understood here as mere visual translation or embellishment but is pivotal part of the argument and editorial filtering and processing.

Whereas in a conventional, if not commercial setting, graphic design becomes only involved with already finished material and is merely concerned with combining and juxtaposing but usually not altering/ editing – not to speak of producing contents – the supplied material, with SPECTOR it becomes a joint effort. From the outset the graphic designer is part of the editorial process including selection and commissioning.

Only a synchronised effort of images systems and writing will be able to convey complex issues and in order to convey topics graphic surfaces provide a range of stimulating options which might also be tools to avoid redundancies occourring in the delicate relationship of words and pictures. What graphics should be concerned with is a sense of appropriateness, the idea of being capable to abandon safe conventional and approved formulas and configurations in favour of options which question. If a design can be its own yet not self-indulgent documentation, rather an insight in its own self and reveals its economies and production processes, it could overcome the dilemma or the disparage between  purpose and form.

Some examples:
Our second issue was concerned with fiction and documentation and was produced in a laptop format to reflect this; we felt the prevalence of the computer today blurs the line between reality and virtuality. The card cover is blank but for repetitive pattern mimicking the metal exterior of a laptop; open it and there’s the screen and keyboard: open the next leaf and there’s a cut-out mouse.

Another example from the second issue. The author Torsten Kraemer describes in a reportage style the work of  the made-up bollywood director Mbuti. The used illustration mimick material from a film manual and are also operating in the grey area of reality and fiction. The opening spread shows in a timeline design | key movies by Mbuti | next to landmark films such as Taxi Driver; the text are accompanied by illustrations describing sets for particular scenes which are also referential – for instance to the famous shower scene in Psycho.

In the third issue we published an interview with the russian author Vladimir Sorokin who belongs to a group of Moskow conceptionalists and deals in many of his novels with the cannibalistic appropriation of texts. For this we artdirected a picture sequence of recipies for brain dishes which were photographed by the famous Hans Hansen. The approach of the author Sorokin was so visually translated.

Now a few words about some practical implications of our rather idealistic setting. Our possibilities are limited; none of us neither wants, nor is capable of, working only on the magazine. Therefore we can’t garantee regular publication intervals. That means there are plenty of difficulties in distribution, funding and ad-acquisition. The topics we address can’t have a short-lived quality about them, themes | with an expiry-date attached to them | wouldn’t make it into the bookshops in time. All these restrictions and problems are bound to generate frustrations externally as well as in the team. After the experience of the last four years | we are getting slowly closer to accurately analysing time and other resources and adjusting processes and investments accordingly.

SPECTOR IS COLLABORATION / RELATIONSHIPS
As a good example for collaboration I’d like to talk about some projects which happened together with the artist Olaf Nicolai. We had recorded an interview with him for the first issue of SPECTOR (topic: Remake) where we discussed quoting and referencing techniques in his work. For his personal show at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Leipzig he asked us work with him as a research/ editorial and design consultancy on a reader | specifically produced for this occasion. He and seven commissioned authors selected a bibliographical list each, which in their new order manifested a new narrative in themself. The whole physical production process would happen inside the gallery space (scanning/ printing/ and binding). The book would be published and distributed via SPECTOR.

This previous project made clear that there was some kind of trust or even complicity and so we also worked on the catalogue which was to chart work produced by him over a period of eight years. This book is a good example for how an approach to translate artistic concepts – which we had developed for an article in the magazine – was applied later in a book project.

As Olaf had showed a clear affinity for off-set litho print it seemed rather fetching to me to make this principle a main point of the design concept as well; so most of the printed matters created previously by him did then re-appear in the catalogue in one shape or form, but rather as a original cropped down material sample or reprinted piece | than a photographically reproduced image. Reference material to particular works was also reproduced and incorporated as facsimile insert in between pages describing the work. 

For instance a page of Immanuel Kant’s »Kritik der praktischen Vernunft« with the famous sentence » the stared sky above me and the moral law within me« which was referenced in Nicolai’s work for a golf park using the star map of the northern hemisphere.

A postcard for a museum which shows a tortured Jesus Christ by Jan Baegert – the drop of blood inspired Nicolai to design a wallpaper. As the editing of text material and specially commissioned articles was managed by SPECTOR through Jan, I was continuing the referencing chain started by Olaf, and appropriated and transformed material in a graphic fashion, like in the case of the architecturally inspired Dresden lamp piece which turned out to be the inspiration for the cover texture. 

Beside these more complex projects there have been also a range of small-scale ephemeral printed matters produced for him for various occasions.

At the same time I was approached to design the catalogue for the annual exhibition of fine art students by the ministry of education and research at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. As we thought | the ministry’s idea of providing opportunities to the students by such a show | is extremely naiiv, we exactly copied the very successful catalogue by the Paris graphics studio M/M. 

I had noticed that many curators appreciated the catalogue only for its design. The artists showcased in it constitute the most important artistic positions of the 90s. 

The accompanying text used the format we had developed for the SPECTOR MPTV column. Besides a freelance curator from Berlin and a Leipzig art historian we also interviewed Olaf Nicolai. The text worked like a Trojan Horse and addressed the design, mechanisms of the art market and the limitations of art education in Germany.

SPECTOR IS A FLAT
The next project is not entirely without a sense of irony, as the reason that the Halle project came about is actually a rather economical one: Anne was travelling to Halle to work on ...  just to make a living; the work didn’t seem very fulfiling. So she was travelling two weeks every day for forty minutes to Halle and work as an assistant in radio broadcast. The experience did result though in a project which wasn’t motivated by financial gain at all. Eventhough both cities are extremely close – and form a kind of twin-city economical zone – they appeared to be in an entirely different situations: where Leipzig made the only serious East-german effort to compete globally for jobs and investment, Halle faced in the meantime a sense of infrastructural deflation. Now, what happened then was | that in Halle she was coming across the phenomenon of Shrinking Cities. Halle was the centre of the chemical industry in socialist East-Germany. After the unification jobs were reduced to a tenths in the region and a quarter of Halle’s citizen left. In order to pursue this issue | it needed a place, a location which could work as a meeting point, office, and laboratory. A flat was rented in one high-riser between city centre and  Halle-Neustadt, a large modernist estate built for 100.000 people.

There artists were invited to stay at and work on projects which looked at ways to record that very situation and document the shifts and changes in architectural or social ways. By providing accommodation | we made sure | that whoever was staying there at the time | had the chance to develop some kind of rapport with the place and its people | and it also became a place to meet people | who were living in the neighbourhood and showed up at some Open-Day activity | where results of the investigative work undertaken was displayed. What SPECTOR did was to facilitate rather than producing all the contents. The flat was equipped with kitchen, basic sleeping and a specialist library on Halle, comparable cities and related issues. 

Practical outcomes were a photo documentation, an artist’s film, a radio programme and a participation at a major national exhibition about Shrinking Cities. Furthermore two research projects resulted in this | which got funding from the local government.

SPECTOR IS A CAFE
There is a completely different project, or event, which has been triggered rather by a sense of boredom or frustration: I’m talking about running a cafe in an abandoned shop over a period of two weeks. However, the idea is very closely linked to SPECTOR as it was born in the studio and all the participants who contributed to it are somehow associated with it. 

In a sense it was an attempt to answer a question of an ideal cafe where one would feel really comfortable with and which would create a sense of community although theset-up was all self-organised. 

About 40 friends served over this period behind the bar, baked cakes,  played records and mixed far too many cocktails. It was to provide a modell to explain that there were some infrastructural shortcomings at the time  – that’s Leipzig, East Germany in 2003 – and we were referring back to a much more vivid situation back in the mid/end nineties which had more or less collapsed by then.

The title of this project was »Illegal Summer« which just pointed out a certain continuity to the situation existing previously in enthusiastic, start-up, baby-boom, lucrative, entrepreneurial, gold-rush post-socialist Leipzig of the mid nineties.

The project was, overall, about providing a facility, a frame work for identification. A sense of belonging which can even be created though the existence of a place like a cafe, a place to share.

A very practical idea of citizenship. What has all of that to do with the book of tomorrow? Perhaps that’s easiest explained with the »Rewind Forward« catalogue for Olaf Nicolai. The very complicated and elaborate production was only made possible as the editorial and design work, as well as printing and binding, was payed for with plenty of idealism and self-exploitation.

The funding was not coming from the publishers which rather worked like agents but the arts venue. The book was very quickly sold out and received a couple of awards, amongst others the »golden letter« for in the competition »Most beautiful books« The publishing house Hatje Cantz was planing a second edition and asked for printing and bookbinding which were now asking for realistic fees. Ten minutes after I had emailed the publishers the new quotes I received a reply that they found a new edition financially not interesting. This example points out very nicely, what kind of dilemma we’re dealing with if we raise the question of tomorrow’s arts publications. Are we talking about the investigation of the tactile, conceptual and design possibilities of books, or are we referring to the things the publishers feed us for economical reasons at the bargain counters.

At least for the first scenario I would dare to make the following prediction: Book production of tomorrow will be – not unlike the situation in electronic music today – represented more and more by small, idealistic production units – a globally well connected group of enthusiasts. It would be great to count  you  in.

Thank you very much for your patience.