Publish and Be Damned
Carrie Braman
Having spent a six-month stint as a copy editor for a self-published "journal of ideas and acts of love," which reproduced inspirational quotes and trite watercolors for the New Age group, it is clear that there’s a lot of stuff out there that wouldn’t and perhaps shouldn’t find its way through traditional publishing routes. Yet, for writers particularly, it is difficult to build an audience or to find a peer group outside of writer’s workshops and journaling clubs. Self-publishing, though a bit of a fraught term, is a viable and pedestrian option for writers and artists, open to all motivated enough to pursue it. Informal and uncensored, the work can bring fresh perspectives or simply offer another muddied variation on an old theme.
Technology has been its boon. The Internet offers a magnificent opportunity, into which artists dive energetically. It is a virtual gallery lacking only the shared intimacy between artist and audience that interacting with art in real space brings or the seriousness of that relationship. Its virtualism can pepper the work with uncertainty and unreality in the same way that emails can lack the purposefulness and pulpiness of the old-fashioned letter.
Which is not to say that the internet is not a useful tool to the self-publisher. It is one of the things that give artists relevance as individual entities, not wedded to agents or dealers, large white gallery walls or the competitive market. Rather, there’s room to explore and to share informally. In an art world that leans toward the competitive and insular projects focusing on sharing information and converging ideas are welcome by me. For writers and artists getting the word out can be a damning exercise in rejection or a damnable process of making appeasing work or, at best, the opportunity to share ideas amongst peers, namely to dialogue.
"Publish and Be Damned," a London-based project, addresses both sides of the self-publishing paradigm and in that sense has captured a welcome balance between collective dialogue and artistic independence. The mission of the project is to bring publishing artists, exclusively those outside of the commercially driven realm, together for publishing fairs and to build an archive of contributors’ work. Participants in the fair produce and share art in the flesh and are specifically interested in involving others in their practice and so in many ways the main audience is the publishers themselves.
Collective endeavors on fair days speak to this theme of cooperation. There is a "biscuit bakery" for participating artists on the fair day as a way of facilitating collective creativity. Which, along with the ad hoc approach of the organizers, has the effect of basing the whole thing squarely in reality. The inevitable cyber-aspect is an online zine including written entries by self-publishers, but, refreshingly, its printed form is available as well and reflects the community feeling of the organization.
Situated somewhere between London’s Artist Book Fair, which can be surprisingly expensive for vendors and the Anarchist Book Fair, which can be rather polemic in both location and approach, the Publish and Be Damned Fair is free to publishers and to a wide smattering of arts and ideas. Participants have both collective and individual goals and the structure of the fair has a similarly communal and personal organizational direction, few rules, and few expectations on the whole a noncommercial informal environment.
Thus, Publish and Be Damned, in both name and structure, addresses the role of traditional publishing in the art world head on. The project’s title emphasizes the individualism inherent in the work of an artist and it implicates the established publishing routes. Publish and Be Damned exists in a realm outside these standard methods of distribution–it’s grassroots, but not primarily cyber-based, and its organizational style is in keeping with the nature of art making.
Is publishing truly damning? There is something to be said for being put through the wringer, for being challenged by critics who have no personal investment in the work, or whose critique of the merits of the work are more rigorous than a simple assessment of sincerity or relevance. Still, if the Publish and Be Damned project is successful, dialogue between arts and between artists (as opposed to dialogue between critics, dealers, and publishers) is primary in the active process of self-publishing. It’s a reminder to the publishing world that the whole point is getting the word out.
