Drucker, Johanna (Ruth)
DRUCKER, Johanna (Ruth)
Nationality: American. Born: Philadelphia, 30 May 1952. Education: University of Rochester, New York, 1969–70; California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, 1970–73, B.F.A. 1973; University of California, Berkeley, 1980–86, M.A. 1982, Ph.D. 1986. Family: Married Brad Freeman in 1991. Career: Lecturer, San Francisco State University, California, 1984, and University of California, Berkeley, 1985–86; assistant professor, University of Texas, Richardson, 1986–88; Mellon fellow, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988–89; assistant professor, Columbia University, New York, 1989–94; associate professor of art history, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1994–98; professor of art history, Purchase College, State University of New York, 1998–99. Since 1999 Robertson Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Awards: Regents fellowship, 1980–81, 1981–82, 1983–84; Fulbright fellowship, 1984–85; Getty fellowship, 1992–93. Agent: Steve Clay, Granary Books, 307 Seventh Avenue, Suite 1401, New York, New York 10001, U.S.A.
Publications
Plays
First Person Singular (produced San Francisco, 1975).
Any Other (produced Berkeley, California, 1977).
Queenie and the Prince (produced San Francisco, 1981).
Family Life (produced San Francisco, 1983).
Through the Dark End of Daylight (produced Berkeley, California, 1984).
Novels
History of the/My Wor(l)d. New York, Druckwerk, 1989.
Simulant Portrait. Riverdale, Maryland, Pyramid Atlantic, 1990.
Otherspace: Martian Typography, with Brad Freeman. Atlanta, Nexus Press, 1992.
Narratology. New York, Druckwerk, 1994.
Dark Decade. St. Paul, Detour Press, 1995.
Nova Reperta, with Brad Freeman. New Haven, Connecticut, JAB Books, 1999.
Other
The Visible Word. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Theorizing Modernism. New York, Columbia University Press, 1994.
The Alphabetic Labyrinth. London, Thames and Hudson, 1995.
The Century of Artists' Books. New York, Granary, 1995.
Figuring the Word. New York, Granary, 1998.
*Critical Studies: "Johanna Drucker's Herstory" by Marjorie Perloff, in Harvard Library Bulletin (Cambridge), 1992; "Through Light and the Alphabet: An Interview with Johanna Drucker" by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, in Postmodern Culture (Charlottesville, Virginia), 7(3), May 1997.
Theatrical Activities: Director: Plays— Queenie and the Prince, San Francisco, 1981; Through the Dark End of Daylight, Berkeley, California, 1984. Actor: Plays— role in First Person Singular, San Francisco, 1975; role in Any Other, Berkeley, California, 1977.
Johanna Drucker comments:
As a creative writer I have two main concerns: the structure of narrative and the relation between format and meaning. In a number of my works these two issues have been integrated, while in others one or the other dominates.
My interest in layout and format (the structural features of the text on the page) grew out of my direct involvement with letterpress printing. My direct involvement in hand setting type allowed me to experiment with the presentation of the text in ways which are not possible within a conventional publication. I began printing in 1972 with the publication of Dark, which contained stone lithographs and hand-set type. In the 1976 publication Twenty-Six '76, a book about a trip to Los Angeles, I used typographic formats to explore ways to differentiate linguistic themes within a narrative account. Individual fonts and sizes were used to distinguish quoted language, descriptive passages, overheard conversation, and interior reflections. The pages of this work looked more like a skeleton than a book text—as if all the extraneous flesh of experience had been eroded and only the structure of the experience remained. Since that time I have produced more than twenty works whose formats and language are interrelated. My work has some connection to that of other contemporary poets engaged with the visual representation of language, such as Steve McCaffery or Susan Howe, and other writers engaged with the structure of the book or with the materiality of language in verbal or visual form, but few are producers of books. My interest in the history of printing, the alphabet, and critical concerns about the visual representation of language grew directly out of my activities as a printer and writer. In the last fifteen years the two domains—that of scholarly and critical research and that of creative publication—have worked to feed and stimulate each other.
An interest in narrative form and prose structure has always been at the basis of my writing practice. My engagement with theoretical concerns in the context of the Bay Area language poetry scene in the 1970s transformed my belief in conventional fiction and prose, infusing my work with self-consciousness about form and structure as well as language. In the 1980s I came under the influence of feminist critical theory and began to see my own experiments with received form, particularly my interest in subverting the linearity of conventional prose through complex formats, within the framework of feminist writing. Both in terms of structure and in terms of subject matter, my work from Against Fiction (1984) to History of the/My Wor(l)d, Simulant Portrait, and Narratology displays overt feminist concerns. Specifically, these include an interest in the construction of a feminist subjectivity.
* * *Johanna Drucker is a prominent experimental artist whose work can be classified under a variety of genres. A particular book might be considered a novel, a play, poetry, or simply "book" art. Although none of her books is listed above as verse, she shares with modern poets a number of concerns, including the relation between format and meaning. What her books look like and what they say interact in many possible ways so that the reader's subjectivity becomes a part of the work itself.
Drucker's name in German means "printer," and at times she calls her printing Druckwerk. Her books have an immediate visual effect, sometimes with a counterpoint of colors. In some magenta and black seem to predominate, in others yellows and blues. One "book," for example, is a blue box containing separate sheets of ivory paper. Drucker uses a variety of visual techniques—type fonts, clip-art decorations, pictures, and patterns—all of which are potentially disruptive from a more traditional point of view.
What Drucker prints can be interpreted in various ways, and in a sense one cannot read or even quote from her books. For example, when Drucker writes "S crap 's ample," should one read it as "Scrap is ample," "crap sample," or "Is crap a sample" or in some other way? Whatever the words mean, they trigger the reader's tendency to supply sounds, to fill the gaps left by an apostrophe. The reader thus becomes part of the creative process, a participant in the creation of meaning, or, to use the language of computers, the process becomes "interactive."
The printing and layout can be so spatially disruptive that, depending on the reader's physical distance from the page, the words seem to fall into several sequences. The title of one of Drucker's books is History of the/my Wor(l)d (1989). The slash in the title, used to suggest the possibilities of multiple responses, implies either/or or both. The letters of the title are printed in different type sizes on the cover. Viewed from a middle distance, the title appears to be simply a large W. The closer one gets to the book, the more the other letters come into focus, but the dominant W, positioned, or displaced, to the left, tends to pull the eye to read Word first, encouraging another response, Word History.
Drucker's presentations—in which she reads, talks, and displays her work on a screen—draw enthusiastic audiences, and her work arouses keen enthusiasm among experimental practitioners. An emerging talent among these poets is William Howe, whose book tripflea employs a black clip-art flea printed on pages of gray paper scented with the insecticide Raid. The paper can be shuffled to form different sequences. Another poet, Lewis MacAdams, has baked cookies in the shapes of letters, arranged the letters into a poem, read the poem, and thrown the cookies to the audience so that they could eat the poem.
Some might say such experiments have been done before, for example, in Ezra Pound's "Blast," by the surrealists, and even quasi-commercially in "The Tiger's Eye." One can respond, however, that these earlier works were essentially aimed at supporting a text, while Drucker's far wider use of technology shifts the attention so that neither the text nor the technology has primacy. This is not unlike Charles Rosen's finding an "inaudible" melody between the mathematical patterns of music and the sound a listener actually hears.
—William Sylvester