The Brooklyn Rail

Ulises Carrión is something of a legend in book art circles. From bookstores named in his honor, to tote bags adorned with his texts, to numerous quotations of his seminal essay “The New Art of Making Books” (“A book is a series of spaces” and “In the old art the writer writes texts. In the new art the writer makes books.”). It’s hard to imagine more could be said about his work. And yet, a recent exhibition at Princeton University Library and its accompanying catalogue reveals this to be the case.

Carrión’s popularity in the field of book arts stems from his blend of conceptual thinking (derived in part from his background in literature), with innovative publishing and distribution strategies. His essay “The New Art of Making Books” re-envisions the relationship between the page and the book, and in turn between literature, art, and bookworks. Aptly titled Bookworks and Beyond, this exhibition, and perhaps even more so the catalogue, looks beyond these known aspects of Carrión’s practice to focus on his interest in networks. The essays, by the curators Sal Hamerman and Javier Rivero Ramos, as well as Mónica de la Torre, Felipe Becerra, and Zanna Gilbert, highlight the ways that Carrión’s unique approaches to publishing, archiving, and distributing bookworks both use and escape institutionalized systems. These systems included postal, publishing, administrative labor, archival, and many others. The catalogue, which also serves as a standalone monograph, examines the ways in which he used and circumvented these systems for his networked art.

The design of the book prioritizes encounters with Carrión’s work and thinking. Block quotes of his writings appear in large orange text, standing out within the rigorously researched essays. Images of his artists’ books and ephemera are often reproduced against black pages, allowing the graphic nature of his typography to come out, and placing the margins of his reproduced books at the margins of the catalogue, a successful trompe l’oeil to make us think momentarily that we are holding his works and not a collected catalogue of them. Though expansive, the reproductions are by no means comprehensive, encouraging the reader to seek out the materials. In addition to his own artists’ books, Carrión produced hundreds of pieces of mail art and ephemera, in addition to serial periodicals. (For an extensive catalogue of his publications and ephemera, consult the catalogues dedicated to Carrión from Jonathan A. Hill Bookseller). As a nod to this vast production, rather than include a traditional exhibition checklist, the backmatter instead includes lists of holding in Princeton’s collection. This also emphasizes the book’s usefulness as a reference to track down these scattered materials.

The exhibition and catalogue explores his work through four primary lenses: Books as Time-Space Sequence, Library and Archive as Cultural Strategy, Mail Art And Erratic Networks, and Mail Art and The Big Monster. Within these frameworks we see an artist driven by an interest in networked connections and community. Becerra’s essay highlights two of Carrión’s earlier bookworks created using the mimeograph, Sonnet(s) (1972) and Arguments (1973), which “allude to different tasks, documents, and administrative workers associated with the bureaucratic apparatus by foregrounding the office technologies involved in their production.” As he notes, “Carrión was attracted to the typewriter precisely because it stimulates a form of writing dissociated from any subjective expression.” This shifted towards a visual and concrete manipulation of language.

Carrión’s work building Other Books and So as an archive also provides new insights. As Hamerman writes, “Carrión’s archival practices ultimately arrive at a paradox, positing the creation of an archive as a kind of culmination of collaborative art production while also pointing to the fallacy of the archival dream of organizing the totality of culture's ephemeral traces.” In this way, his interest in collaborative archival strategies is similar to his approach to mail art and networking. Rather than a more intimate mode of communicating, Gilbert suggests, mail art instead offers another opportunity for shared authorship: “Carrión’s interest in plural authorship and artistic polyphony to create a community and queer the art world's systems was at the heart of this unusually trenchant engagement with mail art projects.” Throughout the essays in this book, Carrión emerges as a figure who teaches himself systems and technologies (such as the mimeograph) in order to dismantle or destabilize them as a means of rebuilding a more open network, one that emphasizes plural authorship, community, and artist-led creation.