Johanna Drucker printed her first letterpress book in 1972, and earned what is almost certainly the world’s only PhD in écriture from Berkeley in 1986. She is the author, designer, and printer of over four dozen artists’ books. By turns she is a publisher, editor, designer, printer, writer, professor, theorist, and critic, swapping roles with disarming ease and frequency. Moreover, she owns at least one pair of sunglasses with googly holographic eyeballs printed on the lenses and is not afraid to wear them.
Drucker’s work extends into multiple disciplines, fields, movements, and genres: experimental poetry, letterpress and offset printing, binding, and the histories of graphic design, visible language, typography, twentieth-century avant-garde art and aesthetics. In several cases, and diverse cases at that, her writing has helped to found entire sub-disciplines, including the digital humanities, the study of artists’ books, and the history of the alphabet. It’s a formidable array of interests, but there is a well-developed and logical through-line to Drucker’s intellectual project. Almost twenty years ago, the poet Nick Piombino suggested that Drucker’s agenda was nothing less ambitious than the creation of a conceptual framework for the relationship between the literary and the visual arts.1
Drucker’s 2008 essay “Making Space: Image Events in an Extreme State” describes an aesthetic stance she calls “refamiliarization”:
Refamiliarization returns images and symbolic
expressions to a system of cultural and symbolic
production with which they are codependent.
It shows us what we know but have forgotten
about the dynamic processes by which value and
meaning are made. Refamiliarization is distinct
from de-familiarization (and other critical moves)
because it is fundamentally an act of recovery
and connection, not innovation, novelty, or shock
exposure. As the term suggests, it is a critical
approach, not an account of historical events
in art making (even though works that embody
its precepts are among those discussed here).
Refamiliarization is also an act of recovering
what has been eclipsed by the legacy of much
theoretical and critical writing.2
Novelty and shock are shop-worn concepts from the beginning of the previous century. Instead of repeating the now very old exhortation to “make it new,” Drucker’s projects proceed otherwise, reconnecting the things we’ve just discovered for ourselves, and the things we thought we knew, to half-forgotten historical traditions and tendencies.
I’ve always considered this to be a fundamentally generous approach, and Drucker is one of the most intellectually generous scholars I’ve ever encountered. Elsewhere, in an interview with graphic design journalist Steven Heller, Drucker says, “I think it’s best to speak theory in the vernacular, to just use ordinary language to talk about things theory gives you access to.”3 In an era where the daily deluge of digital media reminds us ceaselessly that there is simply too much to know, defamiliarization is the mundane state of affairs. A strategy like refamiliarization encourages us to look for meaningful ways to write about culture without adding to the level of ambient noise.
This impulse to refamiliarize saturates Drucker’s creative works. Their very titles suggest that there is always some sort of conjunction between the macro and the micro at play: The History of the/my World, The Word Made Flesh, Martian Ty/opography.4 At the level of content, these texts search for ways to make the highly subjective, personal, and intimate speak to the social. At the same time, as material objects, these books perform what they describe. Through careful choice of paper stock, binding, trim size, type, and ink, Drucker’s books deploy a wide range of techniques to place content and form into a productive dialogue, and the specific materiality of each of her books is designed to provide us with subtle cues about its content before we even begin reading. For example, a work of science fiction like Martian Ty/opography is hard, angular, glossy, and crisp in appearance — this is the book as an artifact of late twentieth-century technology. A more personal text like The History of the/my World, on the other hand, features earth tones, softer paper, humanist typefaces, nostalgic illustrations. This is not the abrasive poetics of the modernists that Drucker has chronicled. Nor is it the aesthetic of her early contemporaries in West Coast Language poetry, whose puritan visual aesthetics she eschews. It’s a deliberate choice to proceed otherwise.
Over her career, Drucker’s creative and critical works have usually evolved in parallel. As Drucker has commented in an interview with John Mock and others:
Academic and creative investigations have gone
side-by-side. I often think of the incidental pairings
that occurred because books were written/
produced in the same period — Through Light and
the Alphabet at the same time as the research on
Alphabetic Labyrinth, The Word Made Flesh with
The Visible Word, Century of Artists’ Books and
Narratology, SpecLab and Subjective Meteorology,
Feminae Fabulae and Digital_Humanities, or even
more recently, Graphesis and Stochastic Poetics.5
In these pairings, the critical texts provide possible explications for the creative work; reciprocally, the creative work serves as exempla for the critical texts. The tension isn’t resolved one way or another, but remains productive, revealing otherwise hidden aspects of both sides of Drucker’s practice.
The same revelatory tension extends outward from Drucker’s work to visible language in culture at large. For example, a book like The Visible Word serves as a reminder of what printers have always known, but what many artists and scholars forgot over the course of the last century: that text was always material.6 Studying experimental modernist typography is a vital part of remembering the art practices that inform much of what we see in today’s digital typography (both in print and online). Here, too, Drucker has been hard at work. Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, written with Emily McVarish, demonstrates how typographic experimentation flourished in twentieth-century graphic design even as it declined in the arts.7
JAB: The Journal of Artists’ Books is a self-reflexive performance of book art, founded in 1994 by Drucker’s long-time collaborator Brad Freeman.8 After a number of years out of print, JAB is once again in publication, with Drucker on the editorial board; and her own The Century of Artists’ Books, an examination of the conceptual and material form of the book in a single volume, consolidates and theorizes what JAB continues to practice.9 This is a prescient project because the rise of digital text and the corresponding increase in the scarcity and preciousness of physical books has made artists’ books suddenly more visible. Rarely a day goes by when some new book artist doesn’t turn up in one of my social media feeds. Drucker’s intense dislike of what she calls “book-like-objects,” sculptural books whose form has no relationship to their content,10 would rule out much of what passes through the news-feed as “artists’ books,” though.
Drucker’s massive project investigating the history of the alphabet also turns around the long and varied relationship between writing and aesthetics. The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination details four millennia of attempts to correlate the alphabet with the secrets of the universe.11 Kabbalah and linguistic forms of divination, calligraphy and alchemy, the dream of a rational language, nineteenth-century advertising, digital type — the range of the book is extraordinary, but it’s clearly also the scholarship of an artist and a poet, dedicated to the production of the linguistic history of creativity. The Alphabetic Labyrinth is difficult to imagine as being researched and completed by a single person.
Drucker’s contributions to contemporary art theory also reach beyond the realm of books and letters. In Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, she develops the concept of “complicity” as a means of describing a major tendency in contemporary aesthetics.12 Much art criticism of the 1980s and 1990s argued for the importance of self-consciously “contingent” works that established their difference from (and by implication, superiority to) the everyday objects that they closely resembled by the context of their display in galleries and other art contexts.13 For Drucker, however, the boundary between art and the rest of the world isn’t always so clear. Complicit art “is integrated with the systems to which it calls attention,” unafraid to make use of the context in which it finds itself even as it disrupts that very context.14 Complicit art isn’t here to damn us or save us, but to make us rethink our relation to the world. Though Drucker developed this concept as a way of discussing sculptural work such as Rachael Whiteread’s Water Tower, it holds a lot of promise for discussing much of the art that appears online.
As text became digital over the last few decades, so did Drucker’s practice. Because of the quality, duration, and intensity of her engagement with digital writing in all its forms, her work is among the foundational texts of what’s now referred to as the Digital Humanities. With Anne Burdick, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, she is the co-author of Digital_Humanities, an ambitious book that takes on the difficult task of mapping a field still in its infancy.15 As a maker-critic, Drucker’s own recent work has focused on how to develop tools that will allow us to know what we need to know about digital text. Echoing Vilém Flusser’s worry that critical thinking may itself be tied to making marks on paper,16 Drucker argues in an interview with Jennifer Berdan that we need to know how to preserve not just the structure of files, but the structure of argument itself: “How do you show ambiguity and uncertainty? Contradiction? How do you model the interpretative effect that produces the object of inquiry from a particular point of view?”17
Though there is no retrospective of Drucker’s critical work as yet, it is possible to get a sense of her creative work in one place. In 2012, the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago staged Druckworks 1972–2012, an exhibit of forty years of Drucker’s creative output. For those who couldn’t see the actual show, the catalogue itself is an impressive object, featuring images of Drucker’s many books and projects, with accompanying essays by colleagues, collaborators, and admirers including Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Brad Freeman, Charles Bernstein, Jerome McGann, Susan Bee, Emily McVarish, and myself. When gathered under one cover, Drucker’s oeuvre conveys the sense of an interdisciplinary artist and critic who, as Steve Woodall, director of the Center for Book and Paper Arts, notes, “is, perhaps, the brightest star in our field.”18
But Druckworks is a snapshot of a moving target. Drucker is now the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor of Bibliography in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. If anything, her projects have become more ambitious in scope and subject. They currently include ALL, a memoir of all of the books she didn’t write, or wrote and didn’t publish, and yet another monograph, titled Graphesis: The Visual Production of Knowledge in a Digital Era.
1 Nick Piombino, “The Visual-Verbal World of Johanna Drucker,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G 18 (Nov. 1995): 54–66.
2 Johanna Drucker, “Making space: image events in an extreme state,” Cultural Politics 4.1 (2008): 27.
3 Steven Heller, “Back Talk: Johanna Drucker, Art and Design Theorist,” Print November/December 1997, http://www.hellerbooks.com/pdfs/print_backtalk_johanna_drucker.pdf.
4 Johanna Drucker, History of the/my World, (New York: Granary Books, 1995).
5 John D. Mock, Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso, Ana Paula Dantas, and Manuel Portela, “‘Eye-Mind-Design-Production’: An Interview with Johanna Drucker,” Capa 1.1, (2013), MATLIT, http://iduc.uc.pt/index.php/matlit/article/view/1622/html.
6 Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
7 Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish, Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (New York: Pearson Higher Education, 2012).
8 See Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman, Otherspace: Martian Ty/opography (Atlanta: Nexus Press, 1992).
9 Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 1995).
10 Drucker, Century, 362.
11 Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995).
12 Johanna Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
13 Drucker, Sweet Dreams, 67.
14 Drucker, Sweet Dreams, 69.
15 Anne Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).
16 Vilém Flusser, “The Gesture of Writing,” Flusser Studies 8 (May 2009), http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/the-gesture-of-writing.pdf.
17 Jennifer Berdan, “The Emerging Field of Digital Humanities: An Interview with Johanna Drucker,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 9.2 (2013), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1355x2bn.
18 Johanna Drucker et al., Druckworks 1972–2012: 40 Years of Books and Projects, 1st edition (Chicago: Epicenter, Center for Book and Paper Arts, 2012).