ST. JOSEPH, Minn. (AP) – The deluge of digital in our everyday lives seems to be unstoppable. E-readers and tablets are increasingly popular.

What, then, will become of the book, a durable technology that has contained and conveyed knowledge for centuries?

Much, say some professors at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University.

Staff in the art, history and English departments and Literary Arts Institute have worked to create a minor in book arts, an art form that attempts to transform what’s possible from a book, the St. Cloud Times reported.

Established in fall 2011, it’s believed to be the only such minor at a Minnesota college outside of art schools. The course draws on rich experiences of the nearby Saint John’s Bible project and resources of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library.

Membership in the national College Book Arts Association, a national organization, has exploded in recent years. Its membership has grown 1,319 percent, from 31 in 2008 to 440 today. Its institutional members have more than doubled.

At St. Ben’s and St. John’s, there are classes in papermaking, printmaking, computer art, publishing and editing, basic design, art of the printed book and history of the book.

“There’s apparently a real strong interest here in the book as an artifact, as an artwork,” said Rachel Melis, associate professor of art and co-coordinator of the minor.

For the most part, students in the book arts minor stumbled upon it, because it’s so new. The schools are just starting to see people seeking out the program.

When professor Scott Murphy got involved, they expanded the program to include papermaking and printing. Students learn techniques as well as theory and history. The classes use a full book arts studio donated to the schools 15 years ago. The program also requires an internship with a letter press print maker, a paper maker, or a designer.

“It helps them see this isn’t just an academic idea, this is a concrete activity and that the two go together,” Melis said. “Internships help students also see how strong the field is.”

Murphy’s handmade photography is an elective in the book arts minor. Students create photography in nontraditional ways, drawing on techniques from the past combined with today’s technologies. Digital methods are being used alongside analog techniques.

Jeff Rathermel, executive director of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, thinks a lot about the creations.

“In terms of artist books, they’re much more than just words and pictures, it’s about everything that we do … put into the creation of the book, we think about and we want to reinforce that content,” he said. “So the texture of the paper, the colors that are being used, the font, the binding style, the shape, all of those decisions are important … and that’s what separates us from an e-book or something that’s simply digital.”

Book art has the potential to engage a viewer for a longer time than a painting or print.

“In doing that you can slowly reveal your ideas, the content of your work. It’s an intimate experience that you’re having with your viewer, the reader,” Rathermel said.

Melis’ path perhaps illustrates a possible future for graduates. As a kid she loved picture books. Initially, she thought she wanted a career writing and illustrating childrens’ books. In college, she discovered people make books for adults that have really elaborate illustrations.

“I realized … the audience I wanted to communicate to were adults,” Melis said. “I could communicate more through combining images and text and handmade paper and book binding than I could on their own.”

“(We’re) so used to seeing the book as the transmitter of information that we don’t really examine the book as a piece of technology,” said Mark Conway, executive director of the Literary Arts Institute. That’s one of the things students in the book arts minor do: examine the benefits and deficits of a remarkable technology that has lasted so long, Conway said.

St. Ben’s graduate Anna Boyer is interested in book arts and returned to the college to create a small broadside that will be included in the admission packets of next year’s accepted students. She made the paper, designed the plates and made the prints.

“I like the tactile quality of the printed page and of the press itself,” Boyer said. “It’s all made by hand. … Things can be changed along the way.”

“You’re always problem-solving a press,” she said. “There’s always a solution.”

Part of the work was done digitally as well.

The fact that St. Ben’s and St. John’s is involved doesn’t surprise many. It was the monks in the Middle Ages who copied and preserved manuscripts.

“We keep running into our own history,” Conway said.

The convent also has a history of being self-sustaining, by, for example, making its own paper. This summer, the sisters grew flax to make paper.

“Benedictines have always been at the center of the preservation of history and knowledge, book arts themselves,” said Tim Ternes, director the Saint John’s Bible project.

“By commissioning the Bible, it revives that tradition,” Ternes said. “The Saint John’s Bible is the Cadillac of the book arts.”

It’s created using traditional tools and materials and is a fine example for students, he said.

But the Bible also required the digital – Skype to connect artists across oceans, computers to design and lay out the Bible, email to plan.

“That shaved off years of work,” Ternes said.

The process took 15 years and the Bible still remains unbound.

Students also have access to the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library’s examples of early printed books and more recent rare books as well as a huge photographic archive. It has more than 130,000 complete manuscripts.

“When you put all those pieces together, it makes it a pretty unique place to work,” said Columba Stewart, executive director of the library.

The Minnesota Center for Book Arts knows of only two similar organizations across the country, one in San Francisco and the other in New York. There are also a number of smaller book arts organizations throughout the country.

“We’re dedicated to using the book format as a means of expression,” Rathermel said. And they have a very broad definition of “book.” It has to start with the essence of a book: a contained narrative. It can fit in the palm of your hand or be as large as an installation or a suite of printings. The nonprofit offers programs to youth and adults in the Twin Cities and outstate Minnesota.

“We’re the largest and most comprehensive in the country,” he said.

The center is seeing more higher education institutions across the country putting together book arts programs, including masters’ programs, either independently or as part of an interdisciplinary program.

At the center of all of the work in the book arts program is the question surrounding the changing role of writing and books.

“What’s a book going to look like in 500 years?” Murphy said. “Where does analog fit?”

“In terms of digital books … people kind of ask me if the book is dead,” Rathermel said. “I think it has a new life, in terms of a greater appreciation for the object.”

A lot of people believe the field is growing precisely because digital books are gaining ground, Melis said.

“Maybe it’s a craving … the relationship between turning a page,” Melis said.

“This very elegant piece of low technology is almost perfect. The book itself, it’s portable, it works when the power goes out … you can share it,” Ternes said. “At the same time, it’s very fragile … you drop it in water and it’s gone.”

“I don’t think it’ll ever go out of style,” Ternes said.

___

Information from: St. Cloud Times, http://www.sctimes.com

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-12-13-12 1619GMT

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BEIRUT (AP) – Syrian filmmaker Joud Said was planning to attend the world premiere of his latest work at the Dubai International Film Festival when the bad news came: His movie had been yanked from the program.

“I knew right away it was for political reasons,” he said.

The film wasn’t overtly political, but it was produced with help from the regime of Bashar Assad, drawing protests by opposition artists that got it thrown out. Two other Syrian offerings at the festival suffered the same fate.

Syria’s civil war has driven wedges through many parts of society, with violence that has killed more than 40,000 people exacerbating differences in class, ideology and religion.

Reflecting how deep these divisions run is the near complete split of Syria’s artists into pro- and anti-regime camps. Although Syria’s writers, musicians and filmmakers fight with sharply worded statements instead of guns and tanks, their mutual animosity bodes ill for reconciliation should Assad fall.

After 20 months of conflict, many can no longer tolerate their former friends and colleagues with opposing views.

For decades, the Syrian government has supported artists with state funds while strictly monitoring their output to make sure it remained acceptable to the regimes of Assad and his father and predecessor, Hafez.

Surprisingly, this produced very little art that was straight government propaganda, said Rebecca Joubin, a scholar of Syrian culture at Davidson College. Instead, artists worked inside the system, often criticizing the regime indirectly or showing the painful effects of its policies in ways that didn’t run afoul of the censors.

All seemed to accept this as the only way to work.

This changed with the outbreak of the anti-Assad uprising in March 2011 and the country’s descent into civil war. A number of prominent artists, like singer George Wassouf and actor Duraid Lahham, have stood by the president. Many consider him an essential symbol of the nation, support his anti-Israel positions or fear that the mostly Sunni Muslim rebels will replace his secular regime with a conservative, religious one.

Some who joined the uprising paid a high price. Political cartoonist Ali Ferzat had his hands smashed by masked gunmen last year for drawings critical of Assad’s family. At least two filmmakers were killed, one while teaching activists how to make better videos. Others were detained or fled the country.

As the violence grew, opposition artists lost patience with those who didn’t publicly break with the government.

“Before the uprising, a lot of Syrian intellectuals were more understanding that there is a game they have to play to survive,” Joubin said. “But right now when so many writers, artists and directors – so many Syrians – have paid with their lives, people no longer accept this.”

This split has been especially harsh in the film community, driven in part by old grievances over who received approval and scarce government funding, Joubin said.

Early last year, a group of filmmakers launched an online petition condemning Assad’s regime and soliciting signatures in “solidarity with the Syrian people and with their dreams of justice, equality and freedom.”

Soon after, more than 100 directors, actors and musicians posted a statement echoing the government line that foreign meddling fueled the uprising and calling for “steps toward reform and change” under Assad’s leadership.

The statement also pointed out that Israeli filmmakers had signed the opposition petition – implying collaboration with the enemy, a capital offense in Syria.

The opposition considered the statement a betrayal and worried that Assad’s intelligence services would target those who didn’t sign.

“When you are in these circumstances and making ideological attacks on people and calling them traitors, in a way you are calling for their death,” said opposition filmmaker Meyar AL-Roumi, who lives in France.

Meanwhile, filmmakers on both sides continued to submit their work for competition, and eight Syrian films were scheduled to be screened at the prestigious Dubai International Film Festival, which opened Dec. 9 and runs through Dec. 16.

But when the lineup was announced, opposition filmmakers were horrified that three of the works had been made through the Syrian government’s film association by directors who had signed the pro-Assad statement. The other films were made with private, mostly European funds.

“They made their films with money from a state that is killing its people,” said AL-Roumi, whose film Round Trip is being shown in Dubai. “It was like they were inviting Bashar Assad to the festival.”

So he and others complained to festival organizers, who canceled the films.

A statement on the festival’s website said the films would not be shown “in light of the tragic ongoing situation that the people of Syria face every day and in accordance with the politics of the United Arab Emirates in advocating for the Syrian people and their ambitions.”

Veteran Syrian filmmaker Abdellatif Abdelhamid said he was informed that his film The Lover had been pulled right after receiving his official invitation and airline ticket.

A week earlier, the same film had been pulled from the Cairo International Film Festival after similar complaints.

“Their talk makes me laugh: ‘They work in this association and they made their films there,’” he said of the opposition. “Who are we supposed to get support from, Burkina Faso?”

Said, too, was surprised that his film My Last Friend was pulled, a move he called “political exclusion.”

He said he couldn’t believe he was being punished for a statement he signed a year and a half earlier when so much had changed in Syria since then.

“The situation is far beyond that now,” he said. “Now we have a civil war and they want to say this is all about some statement? It’s a stupid excuse.”

All agree that the dispute has nothing to do with the films themselves. None were overtly political, and none of the opposition filmmakers had even seen them. Instead, the fight is deeply personal.

AL-Meyar said he had worked closely with Said before the uprising but now couldn’t bear to have their films screened at the same festival.

“The films will live on and people will see them and say that my film is crap and his film is good,” AL-Roumi said. “But for human reasons, I can only deal with these people as monsters and I have to be very cautious.”

Joubin, the Davidson scholar, criticized the cancellations, saying that all films have to be funding by someone and that even those produced by the Syrian government provide insights into society.

“If every time a film is produced by the Syrian government it gets pulled, there will be a lot of very beautiful films that people are not going to see,” she said.

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-12-12-12 2110GMT

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NEW YORK (PRNewswire-USNewswire) – Anything Can Substitute Art: George Maciunas in SoHo, a singular exhibition that has brought never seen before Maciunas pieces held by the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius, Lithuania to the United States opened at The Cooper Union Gallery in New York on Dec. 11. Lithuanian-born artist, architect, designer, and “chairman” of Fluxus, George Maciunas (1931-1978, Cooper Union School of Art graduate 1952) radically challenged the idea of avant-garde art – as object, concept, or commodity. Fluxus, an international community of conceptual artists, poets and composers, redefined the role of the artist by substituting art for everyday tasks, experiences, actions, and sensations. The works of Ay-O, George Brecht , Geoffrey Hendricks , Alison Knowles , Larry Miller , Mieko Shiomi , Nam June Paik , Ben Vautier , Robert Watts , and Emmett Williams are included in this exhibition. Also included are rarely exhibited early works by Maciunas: his self-portraits, the entire Atlas of Russian History (1953), Fluxus manifestos, charts, interviews, and plans for artists’ housing in SoHo. “Lithuania is very proud of George Maciunas and that the Fluxus movement had such a profound impact. Every day presents us with opportunities to see things as surprising, unusual or unexpected. These Fluxus moments bring us out of complacency and foster creativity and imagination. We should all have a dose of Fluxus every day to get ourselves fired up for coming up with new ideas and solving issues,” stated Arturas Zuokas, Mayor of the City of Vilnius. Visitors will also be able to view films by the legendary avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas who was a close friend and colleague of George Maciunas. Vice Mayor of Vilnius Jaroslav Kaminski and the Director of Administration of Vilnius, Valdas Klimantavicius, were at the opening to celebrate this important event. ‘Anything Can Substitute Art: George Maciunas in SoHo’ was created in collaboration with The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center and The School of Art at The Cooper Union and was curated by Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt . It was generously supported by The City of Vilnius, Lithuania, The Consulate of the Republic of Lithuania in New York, Anthology Film Archives, Ukio Bankas, Akropolis, and LAWIN. The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center, founded in 2007 in Vilnius, Lithuania holds a large collection of Fluxus and is dedicated to promoting the art of the avant-garde. # # #

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