PAUL MAZIAR: Take us back to Buffalo in 2001 when Cuneiform Press began. As I understand it Robert Creeley, a key influence on your work, was there.

KYLE SCHLESINGER: Wow, that’s a blast from the past. Bob was and continues to be a huge influence on me on so many levels: the art of collaboration, poetry, poetics, grace, generosity, and a general ease of movement and insistent curiosity towards the world that is absolutely singular. He was the busiest guy in town, but when you sat down to talk he didn’t miss a beat, remembered everything, which taught me a lot about presence, giving your attention to whatever’s happening on a particular occasion.

Just before I left for Buffalo I had a stint teaching high school English in a mill town in northern Rhode Island. I was fine with the work, but a terrible disciplinarian; he suggested that I come up to Buffalo, get an advanced degree, and try teaching college, which is exactly what I’m doing now, 15 years later and a little bit grayer.

I started Cuneiform with the intention of publishing experimental work by emerging poets — very simple chapbooks by people like Patrick Durgin, whose Color Music (2002) has, to my mind, totally held up over the years. His wife’s brother made some punk collages on a photocopier and we printed the images on a Print Gocco, a little silkscreen kit that was briefly big in Japan. I’d throw a proof in Patrick’s mailbox at night, he’d make any corrections after dinner, then I’d go back to the press, make changes, and repeat for the next page.

I love the low-fi action that comes out of your printshop. The punk show posters you recently did look great. I’ve also seen Cuneiform’s phenomenal book by Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, your call for musicians’ manuscripts for Cuneiform, and heard that you’re moving into a camper on a California beach, to surf and write a book about Bill Callahan.

The Sheff book is definitely the strangest thing I’ve done with Cuneiform. I emailed him, saying that I think his essays on music are the best since Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, and that I’d like to collect them as a book.

He was very busy, but it occurred to me that books don’t always have to be published in large editions, that, as with book artists, sometimes just a copy or two can do the trick, that sometimes you make a book just because you want it to exist. So I tracked down every essay I could find, started copy-editing and fact-checking just like I would any other Cuneiform book, designed it, got it printed and bound by hand, the whole nine yards, sent him a copy and kept one for myself. Took about a year, a ridiculous amount of work, but it turned out perfect since many Okkervil River songs are about keeping it real, and the virtues of failing in a world with a conservative notion of success. That’s the first in this music series and others will follow, though they’ll be printed in standard editions, distributed properly, etc.

This failure virtue is part of what charms me about poets like Alfred Starr Hamilton. It seems to be something that we don’t find so often these days, do you agree? For instance, you took me to that Katherine Bradford exhibition in Portland, at Adams and Ollman; we were both pretty tickled by the show.

Every artist I talk to is in the same boat: how to make a living and make the art they want to make. Not just in the United States, but Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, and so on. Everyone’s wondering, maybe even a little nervous, how life can be more meaningful, but no one can say why… Or can they? The MFA and the National Endowment for the Arts killed art in America, which is why I can say that I feel a strong sense of connection to various artists of the last 40 years or so.

Lou Reed said something like, “There’s a door, and behind that door, is everyone you’ve ever wanted to meet. Then the door opens, and you stand there wondering, knowing that once the door closes, you can’t get out again.” And that’s the danger of monetary success, to my mind. Once you write a “Paul Maziar poem” you can’t write that poem again. Goodbye, Paul. The surplus of art versus the demand for art is at an all-time low, which leads us to an interesting question: Why do you want to do what you do when there’s really no social need or viable economic gain to be had? Is it personal happiness? I’m on board with that; I want everyone to do exactly what they want to do every day, all the time, but I also think that’s the real question we all must ask of ourselves, not specifically related to the day-in/day-out fact of our lives, but taking ourselves, as such, out of the equation.

I know that could sound pessimistic or jaded, but I don’t mean it to come across that way at all; it’s actually quite the opposite. The artist George Herms said, in a recent lecture I attended, “The single most important fact of my existence is that the population of the Earth has doubled since my birth.” I take the sentiment seriously, or as William Carlos Williams once remarked, “An empty space is the sign of a poor economy.” We’ve got a revolution going on, one with more talent and underutilized artistic resources than ever before. So let’s storm the fucking gates and build a world we want to live in, with history close to the heart.

I was charmed by that Creeley anecdote in The Art of Collaboration (Cuneiform, 2015), where he, having seen your letterpress printshop digs, asks why you haven’t gone all-digital, adding “If we had the internet in the fifties when we were editing the Black Mountain Review, we would never have done things this way.” It’s worth pointing out that you’re no extreme model-acolyte (you didn’t follow his line of thinking comme ça). Do you view art online or strictly in museums and galleries?

I keep a foot in both worlds. I teach classes on New Media Theory for a living, so I’m always reading up on the latest advances in technology. I think it’s something artists need to be aware of on multiple levels, but in terms of my personal practice, the more unplugged I am, the happier I am. It would never occur to me to look at art that has been reproduced digitally, nor am I partial to computer-generated art. On a recent trip to New York, I was happy to see a return to painting in the galleries I visited; no more projectors and flat-screen installations, and that’s something of a relief to me. I feel fortunate to have grown up with a typewriter and records, moved to CDs and word processors, and now I have a computer I use as strategically as possible. Mostly you’ll find me reading books, listening to records, and visiting as many artists in their studios and galleries as possible. The all-consuming pendulum of the digital age has hit its apex, at least in the art world, and for people younger than myself in particular: The tangible, sensual, real-time experience of creation is making a major comeback. The desire to get one’s hands dirty is an inexplicable fact of being.

How does your digital music listening experience stack up to your vinyl collection?

Being very much aware of the havoc corporations like Spotify have inflicted on the music industry, I’m adamant about the listener’s responsibility to support musicians because their livelihood is at risk. Needless to say, were so many musicians any less committed to their practice, we would live in a world of silence, barring only the most mainstream pop celebrities.

That said, I have a Spotify account and use it regularly to hear sounds I’ve never heard before; in that sense, it’s a practical tool to have. But if I like something, I’ll buy a ticket to the show, a record or two at my local shop or directly from the musician. It’s actually rather shocking, and saddening, to realize how popular one has to be to make a sustainable wage as a musician. If everyone at a concert threw in $10 into a tip jar, then that musician who just entertained you for a few hours might not have to get up the next morning to mow someone’s lawn or mop the floor of a brewery.

In 2006, Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer published What’s Your Idea of a Good Time?: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985. What’s your idea of a good time?

Exactly.

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The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Cuneiform, 2015) delves into collaboration between visual artists and writers, and the production and publishing of artists’ books. The complex relationships between writer, artist and audience are inseparable here, in compelling essays that bear charmingly anecdotal voices. The collection was occasioned by a 2011 symposium at the University of Caen in France entitled Collaboration and the Artist’s Book: a Transatlantic Perspective. The book was edited by Anca Cristofovici and Barbara Montefalcone.

Although many of the writers and artists speaking are American, the essays venture to other parts of the world to show a more diverse sampling of works from this and the last century. It seemed it was then that painters quit scribbling signatures on their paintings, and today, artists and writers suddenly have more interfaces than ever to co-create. The inherited illusion of medium-specificity is being forgotten; artists are working alongside one another, sharing materials, duties, and authorship. This collaborative attribute of contemporary artists and writers distinguishes them from many of their precursors. As the poet Bill Berkson has put it, “such sociability is what puts the work in the world.” It’s maybe in identifying with others through the work (often from totally different, sometimes opposing positions) that we find our current zeitgeist.

Most, if not all, of the contributors to the book are regular collaborators, whose collections are often peppered with idiosyncratic, rare, livres d’artistes. Many of the more hard-to-find artist’s books were and are still made in small print runs for small, even niche, audiences. Working to “reaffirm a sort of Renaissance of the ‘book object,’” and point out what is now often central to us as readers — collaboration in its many guises — we hear from Gervais Jassaud, Vincent Katz, Bill Berkson, Susan Bee, Raphael Rubinstein, and editor Kyle Schlesinger, to name a handful.

It should be said that poet-painter collaborations are nothing new; the Banquet Years for some of the featured American collaborators took shape a half-century ago in New York (surprise, surprise). This period constitutes the classical moment of artistic collaboration in the 20th century — with Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and others providing a lasting effect on the poetry and art that has been written since these appearances. That all this is nothing new makes following generations’ collaborations, a great sampling of which is covered here, all the more thrilling. Collaborations by Bill Berkson and Joe Brainard, Berkson and Philip Guston, Ron Padgett and George Schneeman, sparked new and wilder joint works by artists who innovated with new technologies, and concomitant new opportunities. As Schlesinger notes, “Exquisite typography, printing, editing, binding, materials, etc. even when highly understated or reserved, are an equally important form of collaboration.”

Many of the essays do a good job of describing the nuances of collaboration outside of conventional norms, with a wide range of interactions between arts, and of considering how “visibility and new reading experiences contribute to the construction of figures of thought.” The book’s handsomely designed cover bears a photograph of one of the stranger works by Alex Katz: Edwin and Rudy, cutout (1968), a painting on cutout panel, of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby and Rudy Burckhardt. The job of working “to produce non-identical books in a world of increasingly mass-produced, look-alike consumable products,” Gervais Jassaud nails in his essay entitled “New Aspects in the Making of Artists’ Books.”

Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press’s publisher and a contributor to this volume, emerges from a rich lineage of creative practitioners who’ve opted for a more collaborative mode in their work, with figures from Black Mountain College (John Cage, Robert Creeley, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) as a jumping off point. Schlesinger’s dictum, “Separate but equal. Together but not the same,” is worth repeating here or tacking up someplace at home. And his curious observation that “there are nearly as many horses in the United States today as there were one hundred years ago,” takes us by way of contextual analogy from the era of horseless carriages to one of new media. Despite certain traditional sensibilities, being a letterpress designer and a typewriter composer, Schlesinger wisely points out the necessity of adaptation to changing media forms. Collaboration is a “primal, and necessary survival instinct,” he says, “and as far as book arts is concerned, ‘here to stay.’” Schlesinger has published several collaborative books: one, composed mostly via text messages between he and James Yeary, called The Do How (Great Fainting Spells, 2014), and one between himself and Deborah Poe (GFS, 2015). He also co-edits Mimeo Mimeo, a journal that focuses on artists’ books, typography and the mimeograph format.

Katz discusses artists’ books and the tradition, which Black Mountain College had a large part in, “taking control of the means of production” so that one would be “able to put one’s own work into the world very quickly, and in the way that one wanted to.” This perspective sheds light on artistic view that seems more utilitarian, in that product was not only beautiful, but was often also useful, too. Katz’s collaborations with Burckhardt in the book Boulevard Transportation (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1997) are shown here in a couple of black and white photographic spreads, one a quotidian cityscape, and the other depicting reeds in a glinting lake. The collaborators intended to describe or interpret scenes with their chosen mediums: for Burckhardt, the photograph, and for Katz, poems (which would also interpret Burckhardt’s photographs). “I often wonder if these poems could live apart from this book, because they are really so linked to the photographs,” Katz muses, and it’s clear by the samplings given here that the two were, as the best collaborations will evince, totally in tune.

Rubinstein’s essay reminds us that collaborations are often the best at their strangest. He gives the crazy anecdote of Jacques Derrida’s unlikely collaborator the Italian painter Valerio Adami, where the latter imitated former’s handwriting to offer friendship and spark cooperation. Can you imagine someone coming to you with a piece of art wherein they’ve imitated your handwriting? Nonetheless, the inspired “collaboration” turned out a success.

Looking at my favorite example of collaboration from this book, in Adami’s imitations and Derrida’s essay “+R into the bargain,” from the 1975 edition of Derrière le Miroir, Rubinstein comments “It’s hard to think of any other artist-writer encounter where the two participants have become so completely intertwined.” He goes on to mention collaborations and artist’s books of his own, which may be unfamiliar to some readers: with Enrico Baj, Shirley Jaffe, Fabian Marcaccio, and Jane Hammond. Rubinstein worked in a spirit that was “simultaneously collaborative and anonymous, which allowed us to surprise each other throughout the process.” His comment pins down what’s best about collaboration, and goes likewise for a reader.

Dick Higgins is quoted in an essay by Montefalcone, saying, “The hardest thing about the artist’s book is to find the right way to talk about it.” This is kind of a funny insight, because The Art of Collaboration goes to endless lengths to discuss the subject’s intricacies, but it manages to avoid sounding too scholarly or droning, to which we can credit the editors’ mutual eye for stellar contributors.

However easy it is to note the limitations of handling subjects like this, its authors present scenarios and constructions that were often hitherto unpublished, in an engaging, generous manner. The contributors are at their best when offering specific collaborative and artistic illustrations, and of course the examples are contagious. Like the memories of Marcel Proust or the inventions of Raymond Roussel, the coherent examples in The Art of Collaboration seem to produce like and better examples, to make for a read that’s pretty exciting.

Cristofovici, Anca and Barbara Montefalcone (eds.) The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0-9860040-5-6. 198 pages, $40

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