Project 1 * AND Publishing

From Eva Weinmayr Wiki
Revision as of 07:53, 25 August 2020 by Eva (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search

⟶  see website: AND Publishing, London

AND is a collaborative publishing activity, co-founded in 2010 at Byam Shaw School of Art in North London by Lynn Harris and Eva Weinmayr and joined by Rosalie Schweiker in 2015. Without an official mandate, but supported by colleagues and occasional university research funding [1] AND operated as a kind of indy university press exploring the immediacy and new social, creative and economic possibilities of the at the time emerging print-on-demand technologies.[2] AND's purpose in the context of the academic institution was to conceive publishing as an artistic as well as a pedagogical tool of experimentation and articulation and to institute a critical approach to publishing at the art school that worked equally with students, staff, and alumni confounding the prevailing hierarchies and roles (student, alumni, teacher, professor, etc.).

After several years working at Byam Shaw Shaw School of Art, which was eventually merged with Central Saint Martins - AND was deemed "a free-floating anomaly" that was positively acknowledged as generative but had not been given a place in the newly merged and streamlined institution – AND moved into a collectively-financed studio and worked independently with institutions, collectives and individuals on a broad range of publishing projects. AND set up an open distribution platform for POD publications (AND Public, 2011-15) as well as publishing evening classes (The Showroom, 2012-13), education programs at art institutions (South London Gallery, 2018), gave talks, lectures and workshops at various universities and art spaces.[3] ⟶  See distribution platform: AND Public on Wayback machine Over time and through the multiplicity of members[4] that, themselves, form part of a diverse network of critical, feminist, de-colonial publishing activities and campaigns[5], AND's practice accumulated a broad range of social, political and artistic investments including feminist practice, radical pedagogy, informal support structures, studio collective, providing resources, advice and skills, means of production and distribution, as well as re-distributing budgets, commissioning work, and (re-), publishing material which is difficult to find.

⟶  see published interview: "UND statt ODER, die Anatomie von UND" (AND instead of or, the anatomy of AND), 2018.

This contingent and accumulative approach, indicated by the long list of "ands" on the website does not aim to produce one position, a focused brand or unified face[6] is grounded in multiplicity. This specific dynamic of different constellations, collaborations, concerns, and tactics that are defined by the conjunction "and" (instead of "or"), deliberately evades a clearcut framing. It is a practice that keeps creating spaces, both spatial (the studio) and metaphorically (friendships, alliances, collaborations) where the quality of being and working together is not (or to a lesser extent) impaired by allocated roles, questions of authorship, or cultural capital. (It is however affected by precarity, a topic that I will unpack in the chapter analysis.) Based on the internal accumulative logic of AND, I will not attempt to pin it down further for the purpose of this Ph.D. submission but point to its function as the overarching framework and context for the four practice projects that I describe, reflect on and analyze in the following chapters.


AND Publishing webpage


Notes

  1. Informal support included colleagues sharing their office space, invitations to teach publishing classes in their courses, develop long-term publishing projects with students, facilitating work-based learning internships with AND. The management quickly realized the generative and critical potential of AND for the art school and provided small research funds ("Micro-Budget Books", 2011, and Enterprise Seed-Funding, 2012).
  2. The print-on-demand model of production and distribution is based on digital print technologies that allow to print small print runs down to one copy. In the early 2000s, a range of commercial digital printers came up with an online interface that offered a range of print qualities, sizes, bindings (hard or softcover), and paper stock to choose from and a digital interface to upload a print file. The invention in this production line was its distribution. Once a book had been produced it was only printed when ordered (by anyone) via a direct link or on the POD Platform's "storefront", and shipped directly to the buyer's address. This direct distribution model does not require upfront funding since the book is only printed when an order is placed and paid for by the purchaser. POD, of course, existed since the invention of the photocopy machine in the early 60s, and AND made extensive use of the printers at the art school to produce repeated small print runs of AND published books.
  3. Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), Ontario (2012); Printroom Rotterdam (2011); Academy of Fine Arts Munich (2014), Witte de With Rotterdam (2012), X Marks the Bokship London (2010), Whitechapel Art Gallery London (2018), Rabbits Road Press London (2020).
  4. AND was co-founded in 2010 by Lynn Harris and Eva Weinmayr. Andrea Francke worked closely with AND from 2010-15 in the framework of the Piracy Project. Since 2015 AND is run by Rosalie Schweiker and Eva Weinmayr.
  5. To name just a few of our allies OOMK, London, Rabbits Road Press, London, X Marks the Bökship, London, and campaigns Keep it Complex, London, Migrants in Culture (MIC).
  6. See also Gerald Raunig’s description of transversal activist practice: as ‘There is no longer any artificially produced subject of articulation; it becomes clear that every name, every linkage, every label has always already been collective and must be newly constructed over and over again. In particular, to the same extent to which transversal collectives are only to be understood as polyvocal groups, transversality is linked with a critique of representation, with a refusal to speak for others, in the name of others, with abandoning identity, with a loss of a unified face, with the subversion of the social pressure to produce faces.’ Gerald Raunig, ‘Transversal Multitudes’, Transversal 9 (2002), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0303/raunig/en