Disturbing the Peace: The Blue Book on Truth

“Disturbing the Peace” holds a special place in my book arts work. Not only was it conceived as an homage to Vaclav Havel (the Czech dissident writer turned statesman), thus exploring the notion of truth, but I got to use my favorite old-fashion printing technique that renders images velvety blue.

Before jumping into the process of making the book, it is important to note that this artist's book was commissioned by the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation in New York City (now Vaclav Havel Center) as their literary award, Disturbing the Peace Award to a Courageous Writer at Risk. Because art commissions can be tricky. A client with sensitivity to the nuances of various art media, who opted for an artist’s book instead of the typical award trophy made of glass or metal and who gave me a blank slate, is a rare species, and I very much enjoyed our collaboration.

Upon reading some of Havel’s essays (such as Disturbing the Peace, and The Power of the Powerless), I proposed this quote: “I’m a writer and I’ve always understood my mission to be to speak the truth about the world I live in, to bear witness to its terrors and its miseries.” I found the seemingly simple idea of speaking the truth intriguing and relevant particularly in our post-truth era. The quote became the central component in the book’s design.

An artist's book can have any format, it can be bound or unbound, it could be a sculpture or an arrangement of objects (read this article about contemporary artist's books if you want to know more). I thought a stack of cards, loosely bound by string and stored in a slipcover, to be the best system to present the content, allowing me to interweave variety of visual elements and create a multilayered narrative that echoes Vaclav Havel’s words.

In this way, readers can engage playfully with the book’s content ­– either flip through the pages (cards) in a sequence designed by me, or untie the binding, shuffle the content and create their own ‘reading’ order. This capacity of the content to be reorganized (and, thus, re-narrated) plays with the idea of truth, for readers can order the words as they see fit and find their truth.

As a reference to Havel’s creative time as a dissident writer and the whole typewriter culture in the 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia, photographs of old-fashioned typewriters pop up as you flip through the book. They’re developed using cyanotype, my favorite printing technique (now), and pressed on hand-made paper. Cyanotype prints are immediately recognizable by the color that the 19th century photographic development process yields – a range of velvety Prussian blue hues and tints, depending on how long is the paper left exposed to UV light.

Cards coated with Cyanotype emulsion – a UV-sensitive, non-toxic photographic formula – are sandwiched between sheets of glass (since I was printing on both sides) and exposed to the sun (the process is also called 'sun printing'). It takes only a couple of minutes to complete the process in the NYC summer sun.

Another batch of images being exposed outside to the sun – the process is complete when the coated paper turns gray. It's time to go back to the studio and wash off the coating.

The final prints, drying in the studio.

The Havel’s quote is divided into groups of words, printed digitally on transparency sheets of various sizes. These transparent text pages are then placed over the blue photographic images, or printed in multiples and layered on top of each other.

The third visual component in the book’s design is text, again (text is a reoccurring element in my work). It’s the name of the artist’s book, Disturbing the Peace, carved repeatedly in lines into a linoleum block, and printed by hand, in blue. And finally, the overall blue tone of the content is extended onto the slipcover, clothed in a fine-looking, shimmering teal blue paper.

If you find artist's books a fascinating art medium, check out this article by Polish art historian and curator, Dorota Folga Januszewska, A Subconscious Key to Ordering the World: The Artist's Book in Poland.