Damaged Spring: Pink Noire. Johanna Drucker. Druckwerk. 2003.

Damaged Spring: Pink Noire.

Druckwerk, 2003. Item #580

Hand-sewn in boards, 7 1/4 x 8 1/2,  with attached jacket which includes original collage. This is no. 39 from an edition of 75 copies on Mohawk Superfine paper, signed by the artist (there are also 25 copies printed on Rives also with original collage cover). Near fine.

“The exhibition ‘Love and Terror,’ announced for Fall 2003 in Arizona, helped provoke the production of this work. But the texts were already being written, and the sensibility with respect to the look of the book, my longstanding desire to make a distinctly neo-expressionist response to current events, had long been developing the vision that manifest fully in this work. Only the raw, edgy, harsh high-contrast of cuts, in this case, linoleum, long a favorite medium of mine, seemed sufficient to express the cruelty of fate and injustice being wrought by the current administration. Trying to figure out what was going on in the world was so difficult. All the lies and rhetorical obfuscation of media reports coupled with the anecdotal evidence of daily lives of real people, friends, family. And then the weather, with its own cruelties, seemed to damage every new bit of spring growth in one round after another of bitter winter. No way to know what happens, except by transforming all of that into form, into expression. And the shrill, almost hysterical pink-ness of the cover papers, torn and pasted, were the other gesture meant to register anger in the aesthetic of production. People have read this as a story of personal anger, sadness, and difficulty, but it was not explicitly so. Rather, a composite of all I saw around me, felt, and processed. The events in my private life seemed like another symptom, not the cause, of the mood of this book.”
–Johanna Drucker




ABOUT JOHANNA DRUCKER: Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited-edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her published titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide with Emily McVarish (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition in 2012). In 2012 she published Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schnapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick (MIT Press) and in 2014, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press). Her work was the subject of a travelling retrospective titled Druckworks: Books and projects 1972-2012, and recent titles include Stochastic Poetics (Granary and Druckwerk, 2012), Downdrift (Three Rooms Press, 2018), and The General Theory of Social Relativity (The Elephants, 2018). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received an honorary doctorate from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016. Read more at https://www.johannadrucker.net/.

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