SPARK
SI-017, from issue 4, 2022.
Consider Everything an Experiment
Ben Denzer is an artist, designer, and publisher interested in how information is catalogued and preserved.
BD I studied architecture and got a certificate in visual arts. On the architecture side, I had to write a long research-based argument. I was writing about Herbert Bayer, who came from the Bauhaus and worked at the Container Corporation of America. Even I got to go to Aspen to visit one of the key figures in the Container Corporation who started this corporate retreat called the Aspen Institute. At the time, all the ads were designed by Herbert Bayer. Being surrounded by mountains, it’s definitely an ideal setting in the summer for a corporate retreat. It was almost a summer school for business executives where they talked about the classics and so on. Now it’s turned into the Aspen Ideas Festival. However, my visual arts minor was the place I was interested in books as content: I was putting nails in books and wheels in books (...) I found it helpful to find a process that ends up making stuff. In that case, I found books around and collaged them with what was available in the sculpture shop. Design (and art-making) usually is a process of collage. It’s basically starting with something that actually exists and modifying or responding to it. Eventually, I found a container for all these experimental objects: a pop-up shop. I put prices on everything because I am also interested in how people commercially engage with art objects. Bear in mind that I was also graduating, so some of it was also a yard sale where I was getting rid of all my stuff. You know how that goes as a student.
UDÖ You have an interesting approach where books are self-published and self-marketed under the title of Catalog Press, where the pop-up shop is now on the web! How did that come about?
BD I took a book-making class in the Center for the Book Arts and applied to their residency so I will have access to the studio spaces and take more classes. Luckily I got it, and my pitch to them was I would make these book projects that are kinda related. So Catalog Press served as the container for all these projects during the residency. If you look at a self-published book, there is no mark on the spine that tells you the publisher. That’s really all the difference between a legitimate book and someone putting a book on Amazon. I wasn’t making a lot of books: some were editions of 10, some were 20. But there are some Universities with Artist’s books collections, so I got interested in how you get your book to be in the University of Michigan collection, etc. You basically email them, and if it is cheap enough, they might end up buying it.
BD They first bought the cheese book, and their librarian wrote this funny article about it. So I visited the school, and I pitched the idea of the meat book. So I made the meat book in their book arts studio.
UDÖ How do they even preserve such an object?
BD This was actually right at the beginning of the pandemic. I was actually giving a talk to a class, and all the students got a buzz on their phone saying: “OK, this is your last class, go home!”. It was also when I just made the meat book, and we were trying to find someone to inject it with plastic to preserve it (maybe), but the world was collapsing. Eventually, we found someone from a nearby biology lab whose job was to take a rat brain and preserve it for scientific imagery. He started the process, but he got kicked out of his lab because of Covid, and he was old enough to retire. He still wanted to finish the book, so he yanked something in his garage that didn’t go entirely according to plan. It’s now this shriveled thing inside a plastic that sits on the shelves of the University of Michigan Library. Hopefully, I will go and remake another one.
UDÖ What about those Hermès bags made out of Asparagus?
BD When I was working at Penguin Random House, I noticed a lot of book cover designers also do editorial illustrations. Eventually, I did some little drawings for the New York Times, and I think the Hermès people found me through there. It was an open brief saying that they wanted to get silly on their Instagram. So I pitched many ideas, one of which was making bags out of vegetables. Luckily they picked it. It goes well with the meat book, but they came from two different places. The nice thing about doing these very disparate things is that they can connect in very strange ways before you even know it.
UDÖ Was there an experiment that you did years ago that resurfaced itself?
BD When I was in school, I noticed book cover design was a job, and I got
a job at Penguin. Unfortunately, the room that I was in wasn’t that great. I was in the copy room: the room with the printer where all the designers would come and print their iterations. Someone asked me: “Can you scan this feather in really high definition?”. That made me realize that scanners are really fantastic tools. So now, scanning plays a big part in my work.
BD I first used that technique around 2016-17, when I had a friend who went to Yale and was in the student-run journal. She asked me if I could do an illustration for this issue on facsimiles. So I printed out photos of famous buildings and stretched them in Photoshop so that when I fold them (or crunch them), they feel like the original again. Although I came up with that technique because of that assignment, I revisited that a few times. It’s also a fun way to collaborate with people I know. So I just made these illustrations, where my dad sent me photos of all these cardboard boxes. I take the images, make them perfectly rectangular, print them and fold them back again. That’s why my dad is credited for the art in the New York Times too.
UDÖ I love that an assignment from a major newspaper can become a game between you and your dad. I always believe art should advance our daily happiness. So how do artist’s bring joy into this world?
BD If you are enjoying the work, it comes through in the results. For example, one of the books by Braulio Amado has this opener essay by John Gall where he talks about how design can get to the point of mundanely pushing bits around, and somehow Brauilo’s work exudes fun in its energy.
UDÖ When people find ways to enjoy what they do, the energy they create is contagious.
BD It’s tricky. I was so lucky to work at Penguin because I had time to have fun. Sister Corita Kent wrote these 10 rules for teachers and students, and some rules are like: “Consider everything an experiment.” or “everything is lighter than you think.”.
BD Lightness and humor can also be a good entry point for people to engage. The cheese book: people find it funny because it is American cheese slices, but also it is disintegrating over time just like all of us are dying. You don’t think about books breaking because books typically last longer than you. However, the cheese book lasts shorter than you and, therefore, reminds you of your mortality. Funny projects also have multiple levels of reading it.
UDÖ It’s funny that a cynical object can launch existential thoughts. We are getting into Albert Camus territory here: death is inevitable, therefore, life has no meaning. So by making a book that lasts shorter than us, you are also making us feel better about our death. Maybe I am stretching it. Do you have anxiety as an artist?
BD It depends on what I am doing. I was way more anxious when I just started at Penguin, just like every newbie with impostor syndrome. Being in a community of other designers really helped me in those moments. Even though there were designers that made excellent book covers one after another, they also said that they were scared every time they got a new assignment. Embracing the unknown in the process always helps me a lot.
UDÖ What is the “Anxiety of Influence”? How did it make it into the cases of Guggenheim?
BD During freshman year at Princeton, I took this intro to sculpture class from the artist Marta Friedman. In the first class, she said: “We are going to make a valid contemporary sculpture,” and I asked: “What makes it valid?”. In a conversation, she suggested that the book by Harold Bloom talks about poetry but essentially talks about the anxiety of making new stuff. He comes up with procedures that he sees people use to find the precedence for what they are doing. The references you are interpreting are your poetic fathers. For Catalog press, I have two websites with two different spellings. The American English one is a set of books, while the British English one is a set of objects. I gave instructions to a fabricator to cast some books that influenced me in plastic for Catalogue Press. Luckily, this book ended up in the Guggenheim Library. Artist’s books are also a sneaky way to seem legitimate because all these institutions have a library component. It is much easier to get your work into the library than to the actual collection because the library has shelves. And this way, it still keeps the objects able to be interacted with.
UDÖ Anytime we go to the RISD Museum book room with a class, I get immense pleasure by sneakily touching the Andy Warhol print or the Ed Ruscha book they pull out.
BD Further down history , but I had a similar moment in Princeton where
I got to touch a copy of a Gutenberg Bible, but I told that to a friend, and he told me that he knew someone who licked it. So it’s crazy that we have these intimate encounters with these objects, which are either historic relics or art ephemera from famous artists. When they were made they were just objects after all.
UDÖ This reminds me of your Instagram account where you smash ice cream into books.
BD If you put ice cream on a book, people will be like you are ruining the book and have an emotional reaction to it. In reality, you are ruining its objectness, not the story or the novel. Only the cover and paper… There is a history of burning books or destroying books, and the information is still widely available in another copy of the book. But also realized publishers send out lots of free books for people to review, primarily to bookstagrammers where they can take photos of them with latte art and matching socks and whatever. I wanted to participate in that world and make fun of it in a joking way at the same time.
BD I listen to a lot of non-fiction books while making my projects. The nice thing about being a book cover designer is that it is like being in a book club that you get paid to be a part of.
UDÖ I can also see you as a person owning a bookstore. Any plans?
BD The third thing with Ice Cream Books was that it could be a long-term retirement plan where I open a bookstore-gelato combo.
this interview is edited for clarity and concision.
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interview by Utkan Dora Öncül
Spark Interview-017