Artspeak

233 Carrall St, Vancouver, BC 604-688-0051

All books can be ordered from www.artspeak.ca/publications.htm.

The books at Artspeak refuse to be books.

In fact, these objects petulantly confound classification altogether. They may be placed under the various rubrics of artist books, exhibition catalogs, small sculpture, or even works of music, but they will surely claw their way out from beneath these labels. In fact, the only thing we can say with certainty about these strange animals is that they are produced by Artspeak, an artist-run center in Vancouver, BC, to coincide with their exhibitions, and that they are inspired collaborations between writers, artists, and designers.

Artspeak began in 1986 as a series of exhibitions in the offices of the Kootenay School of Writing. During the mid-'80s, when a lot of work playing with text and image was being produced, it seemed smart to situate a visual-art practice alongside a space for writers. Today, Artspeak maintains its strong link to the writing community with its publications program.

"Exhibition catalogs historically are based on an idea of validating an artistic practice, creating a historical context for the work, or as a kind of scholarly endeavor," curator Lorna Brown told me recently. "But as an artist-run center, that's not our primary mandate. Our freedom allows us to present parallel projects [from artists and writers], and to count on an audience that is willing to draw their own conclusions as to why the two forms are prepared together."

A brief consideration of Artspeak's latest four publications demonstrates the weird science possible when writers and artists collaborate. Text is considered a material and image is read as text; together, the two create new hybrids.

In Antonia Hirsch's Lines Spoken For, the sequentiality of the average book is subverted in favor of an anxious negotiation through a labyrinth of sound and text. The project began its life as a voice messaging service: Dialing a phone number given out by the gallery, participants were directed through a message system completely anti-systematic in design and content. Despite the reassuring tone of the recorded voice, pressing the numbers as directed only led one further into a Kafkaesque machine with no graspable structure or content. In book form, formal sequencing is parodied just as in the telephone system, but instead of pressing numbers on a telephone keypad, readers are directed through an ever-changing cycle of titled pages.

Althea Thauberger and Candie Tanaka's works add voice by including CDs. Thauberger's Songstress (currently shown in Baja to Vancouver at SAM) culls from the conventions of folk music to recontextualize images of the West Coast chanteuse and the woman in nature. Thauberger gathered eight young female singer-songwriters and recorded them in the studio, then filmed them in outdoor locations and played the videos at Artspeak. The publication includes a CD of the songs and handwritten lyric sheets alongside images of the girls, who stare at us with sweetly awkward honesty.

For "No sound is dissonant which tells of life" Tanaka data-mined both the web and her surroundings to produce tracks that she thinks of as film scores. But whereas film usually works with a linear visual narrative, Tanaka's sound has no anchor: The reader/listener is suspended in a liquid sea of information. Intrigued by how technology leaves an open door for deposits inside its systems, Tanaka then left these as "messages" on the answering machines of various galleries and cultural institutions. The book combines a CD of her work with ethereal watercolors by Jen Eby.

Arni Haraldsson and Clint Burnham's Up & Down: Downtown Eastside Architecture is another new breed formed from the intersection of disciplines and mediums. The book embodies the fractured and contested character of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (a stretch of gorgeous turn-of-the-century architecture and appalling poverty) by occupying the position of area residents. The occupation happens via both image and text: Haraldsson went into area buildings and shot the architecture through residents' windows, while Burnham wrote a text in the form of messages from imaginary locals. The images and words were then joined into postcards that form the book. Opening the pristine white folio, the postcards begin to fall out, ready to spill into the city and crawl around like the cryptic and beautiful creatures they are.