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Johanna Drucker is internationally known as a book artist and experimental,
visual poet. She received her Ph.D. in "Ecriture: The History and Theory of Writing as a Form of Visual
Representation" from University of California Berkeley in 1986. Her recent publications
deal with the written language, the history of the alphabet, modern American art,
avant-garde poetry, artists' books, and other visual projects and include The Visible
Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1994),
Theorizing Modernism (Columbia University Press, 1994), and The Alphabetic Labyrinth:
The Letters in History and Imagination (Thames and Hudson, 1995). In addition to her
scholarly work, Drucker has produced more than two dozen artists' books, many produced
letterpress and using experimental typography.
Using descriptions from Johanna Drucker's "A Chronology of Books from 1970
to 1999," a selection of Drucker's books in "The Art of the Book"
exhibit includes:
(Click on images larger view)Twenty-Six '76 Let Hers: Not A Matter of Permission.
Chased Press, 1976.
(Edition of 30 copies), letterpress on etching paper, originally with accompanying
abstract prints, (later abandoned–the sheets were torn down to eliminate the few
finished prints), from fonts in a double case at the Print Center, thirty sheets,
8.5" x 11" in hand-sewn cotton covered carton with ivory ring and shoe lace closing.
The text to this work was derived from a trip to Los Angeles with Rebis to
perform at the Vanguard Theater in Hollywood; the book was an alphabet
book of private letters about a journey in the bicentennial year.
Only who could tell? Different typefaces designate different registers
of language. There is an annotated version of this in Xerox which
gives the gloss on the pages, replacing the skeletal extracts into
a contextualizing narrative.
The Word Made Flesh. Druckwerk, 1989.
(Edition of 50 copies) letterpress from many handset types, wood and metal, tiny
copperplate in the red field, on Mohawk superfine, with red Moriki endsheets and
metallic Lindenmeyer-Munroe cover stock, twenty-three pages, 12.5" x 10.5", bound
with rivets.
The counterpoint to Through Light and the Alphabet, this book attempts
to halt linear reading to call attention to the physical, visual materiality
of the page. The text is all about the visceral character of language,
thus the referent is also material, non-transcendent, while the form
uses format to render the text resistant. Printed in three runs–the
black wooden letters, the black smaller text and the red. Another
justification nightmare. A play on carmina figurata of the Renaissance.
Reprinted by Granary Books in 1996.
The History of the/my Wor(l)d. Druckwerk, 1990.
(Edition, 70 copies), letterpress in black and red from handset Caslon, illustrated with
found line cuts, on Warren's lustro dull (which often causes the book to be mistaken for
an offset book), with Bagasse cover and Fabriano endsheets, handsewn, forty pages, 10" x 13".
Printed in several runs, small and large black type separately, red type, and
red and black images–about two hundred hours of printing time,
I think. The main text undermines the meta-narrative of history through
its own clichés while the red type erupts, interrupts, with a personal
memory of learning language in an intimate, even erotic, relationship
with my mother–this recounted as a critique of the feminist
position that language is always patriarchal. The captions collapse
family history with imagined history.Reprinted by Granary Books in
1995.
Prove Before Laying: Figuring the Word Druckwerk, 1997.
(Edition 90 copies) 40 copies
letterpress on Rives handbound in printed paper, cloth spine, 50 copies letterpress on
Mohawk superfine, 28 pages spiral bound in boards and hors commerce, 9 1/4" x 10".
Two texts: one on writing as a mythic and cultural phenomenon, the other generated
from a new foundry font and emerging page by page.
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