Artist Elisabeth Tonnard interviewed by art critic Agnieszka Gratza.
Agnieszka Gratza: Could you tell me about your background and how you came to work with the artist book format?
Elisabeth Tonnard: My background is mostly literary; I studied literary theory and comparative literature for my first degree in the Netherlands. A study of the classics of Western literature: not very experimental at all. There was no component in it on artist books or conceptual literature. After that, I started writing myself but only with great difficulty. You study the classics so much that at first you think, ‘There's so much out there already, what can I contribute?’ As time went on, spontaneously I began making some works that had a more visual component but they were literary and had to do with language. My first book is the reworking of a poem by T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It's a series of poems I developed out of one strophe by applying Tipp-Ex, the correction fluid, to the existing text and seeing which meanings would come out when you covered up some parts. I could turn the word ‘what’ into ‘hat’ by making the letter w white, for example.
Let
us go then, you and I. Acquoy, 2003. Image courtesy Elisabeth Tonnard.
That work was made very quickly; I then spent two years
trying to get it published in Holland. It did not fit any literary publishing
house, nor any art publishing house. At the time I did not have much knowledge
of artist books at all. I knew artists but not artists working with books. I
come from a family of artists yet I've always kept away from art, focusing on
literature instead. After commenting on my work, an uncle who was an artist
suggested that I apply for a grant to publish this book myself. After two years
of trying to publish it with a publisher, I got a grant and I was able to
publish it myself. I
worked with a printer and a binder but I designed it, determined the content
and chose the paper.
Let
us go then, you and I. Acquoy, 2003. Image courtesy Elisabeth Tonnard.
AG: Thinking about your wider publishing practice,
the books that you make are largely, if not exclusively, self-published in
Leerden, your home town. How do you go about publishing them?
ET: They are published wherever I am living. I
published some in Berlin and some in Rochester, New York when I lived there. It
works differently from book to book. I am currently working on a book I printed
myself and that I'm also binding myself, regrettably, I have to say, because
it's really too much work. I have a type of inkjet printer that I like to work
with. I never used any kind of letterpress or traditional printing press
techniques. I mostly have books printed at printing houses and most of the time
it's digital printing.
AG: Your catalogue of books lists over 40 items
that appeared between 2003 and 2018. Some books are published in limited
editions, others as open editions. What dictates whether they are one or the
other?
ET: It's sometimes a matter of what I felt like at
the time, I have to confess. It's also down to practical issues. I once made an
edition where I thought I would make 30 books and I got stranded at 29. For
technical reasons I wasn't able to make any more, so then it became an edition
of 29. On another occasion, I bought a stack of paper at the paper factory and
I could only make so many books out of that one stack. I like the idea of an
open edition in the sense that it is then not limited though in a practical
sense it may be. You can do it when you do a digital print run. You could make
a hundred copies, for instance, and if they're sold out you order more. But the
paper you used in the first instance or the printer may have changed, so it
ends up being different to the original run. Over the years I've found that
it's actually really inconvenient to keep a book available. You just want to go
on to the next project when it's sold out and not have to think ‘How did we do
that, again?’
AG: Although technically you're not a publishing
house, it's very much a business that you manage yourself. You have a webshop
and you process orders. Nine of your titles are listed as sold out. The books
range in price from 0 euros for The Invisible Book which sold out
instantly to 985 euros for the special edition of Song of Myself, which
stands out because the other ones are much more reasonably priced. What is
special about it?
ET: The special edition of that project I printed
myself. It's also quite large, A3-sized, and it comes in a portfolio. It's a
very limited edition of seven copies only. That all adds up to a higher price.
It's also the last copy that's left now. The price was actually raised. The
book version was printed by a printer as a cheap small paperback.
Song of Myself. Leerdam, 2015. Image courtesy Elisabeth Tonnard.
AG: Song of Myself was presented at Friends with
Books in 2015. It was at once installed, as part of the group exhibition curated by Savannah Gorton, I
have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library, and presented
on a book stand alongside other books you've published. For me, one of the
appealing features of a number of your books is that they come in bound
versions that can also be deployed as installations. Could you explain how that
worked at Friends with Books?
ET: It was a special edition of the A3 sheets that
was shown there. I should first say a little bit about the content of the book.
It's called Song of Myself: American Renaissance and it's based on
Facebook status updates. The title is a quote from a poem by Walt Whitman. I
first found one by Edgar Allan Poe that read ‘Edgar Allan Poe likes his own link’. So I started collecting those updates by Edgar Allan Poe but then I
also thought of other authors from the time when he lived, the American
Renaissance: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne. I found it extraordinary to
think of all those authors doing these very shallow things. Just imagine Emily
Dickinson posting a photo of herself. But then what would they actually do if
they lived now? The installation at Friends with Books, which took place at the
Hamburger Bahnhof that year, was spread over a single wall. I really liked the
fact that I could install those sheets of the special edition as a grid on the
wall because where people post their updates on Facebook is also called ‘the
wall’. So it made sense to show it like that.
AG: Your books strike me as both formally and materially inventive in so far as you experiment with format, typography, layout and even paper brand which all have a meaning you attempt to convey.
Above and Below: Song of Myself (special edition). Leerdam, 2015.
Installation view in the exhibition I have always imagined that paradise will
be a kind of library,
Friends with Books: Art Book Fair Berlin at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2015.
Images courtesy of Elisabeth
Tonnard.
AG: Your books strike me as both formally and materially inventive in so far as you experiment with format, typography, layout and even paper brand which all have a meaning you attempt to convey.
ET: I take this into consideration with every book.
At the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, which is where I began
to learn about artist books, I worked with an archive – the Joseph Selle collection
of photographs – housed in the same building. I made a book out of that
collection called Two of Us. It combined digitized materials from the
archive in which I saw a pattern of doubles walking next to or behind each
other in the street with a poem by Baudelaire about seeing the same old man
several times over in the street and how uncanny that was. The double is a
literary motif, that of the doppelgänger. Going back to the materiality of the
book, Two of Us was designed as a novel, in other words not published or
printed on shiny coated paper that you see in an ordinary photo book, which
would have been great for showing the images. But I wanted the whole book to
have a literary feel, to look like a novel on the outside, with the kind of paper that evoked a novel. It also has text on the
same pages as the photographs.
Two of Us. Rochester, NY, 2007. Image courtesy
Elisabeth Tonnard.
AG: A collection of your poetry in Dutch recently
came out published by het balanseer in Ghent, not self-published in other
words. Is that the direction you're heading in or are you still excited by
self-publishing?
ET: I will definitely keep self-publishing but I see
the poetry work that was published by that publisher as a separate thing.
Within the field of literature, at least in the Netherlands, it's definitely
not regarded very highly to self-publish. That means nobody wanted to publish
your poetry. It's best as a writer to publish through the regular channels and
in literary magazines. But for artist books that's different; I find that the
best work is self-published. Of course it's really developed now, much more
than when I first started. There are a lot of artist book fairs now where you
can see work. That wasn't so much the case when I started self-publishing.
AG: Joachim Schmid's name crops up in some of your book
projects, like The Invisible Book, The Lovers and Joachim
Schmid Works, but have you ever worked together or collaborated on a
project?
ET: We haven't been able to do that yet. We've
responded to each others' works. For instance, he made E-Book, based on
a letter he wrote to me. He left only the e letter and everything else
he made white, referencing my procedure with Tipp-Ex. He then photographed es
in the cities we visited together. And then I published Joachim Schmid Works,
showing photographs of him working on that E-Book. He's known for never
taking any photographs, so it was a little joke on my part to show that he's
constantly taking photographs. But we haven't done an actual project together.
Joachim
Schmid Works. Leerdam, 2016. Image by Elisabeth Tonnard.
Joachim
Schmid Works. Leerdam, 2016. Image by Elisabeth Tonnard.
AG: Do you ever work collaboratively with people
on your books?
ET: I don't think so actually, other than with poets
who are already dead. (Laughs.)
AG: Why is that? A book project, at least in my
experience of editing an artist book, can be a deeply collaborative experience,
for better or for worse. Because of the nature of that particular project, I
ended up working closely with all the contributors, the graphic designer, the
printer, the binder. And suddenly the project felt out of my control.
ET: That's exactly what I try to avoid though I do
collaborate with binders and printers. But I don't have them say how it should
be done. I ask for their advice and sometimes they have good ideas but I try to
keep it within my vision.
AG: Would you say that's one of the advantages of
the artist book format? That you can go with your vision?
Indirections #1-8. Leerdam, 2018. Image courtesy of
Elisabeth Tonnard.
Indirections
#1, inside view. Leerdam, 2018. Image by Elisabeth Tonnard.
