Big fish in a very small pond: interview with Joan Lyons

Afterimage, March-April, 2005 by Joanna Heatwole, Tate Shaw

JOAN LYONS recently retired from 30 years of coordinating the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) Press, the influential publisher of artists' books she founded in the early 1970s. Under Lyons' direction, VSW Press published more than 400 books. Lyons worked with a steady stream of visiting artists through the VSW Press and the artists-in-residency programs and taught in the MFA program while simultaneously producing her own work. In 1985, Lyons edited and published Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Source-book, one of the seminal artists' book anthologies.

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In the 1960s and 1970s Lyons was recognized as a pioneer in the use of Haloid Xerox drawing as an imagemaking process. Her work spans a broad range of media including digital and alternative photo processes, printmaking, photo-quilts and artists' books. Lyons continues to teach workshops and lecture around the country. She is currently pursuing her own new work in digital media through photographic works that examine the evolution of archetypes and myth in contemporary culture.

Joanna Heatwole and Tate Shaw, both former students, interviewed Joan Lyons about her perspective on her own recent work and the shifting tides of the digital age in relation to artists' books.

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Joanna Heatwole/Tate Shaw: You just completed a book of color photos of Mexico City walls, an alphabet book called Abece. What are you working on currently? Have you started a new project or do you work on several things at once?

Joan Lyons: It varies. When a project is well under way I concentrate on it exclusively. Right now I am working on several different things. The nearest to completion is a series of "portraits." I am photographing photographs, paintings and three-dimensional representations of individuals, archetypes and icons. This is, in a way, an outgrowth of "Representations," a work completed in 2000, in which I re-photographed fragments of historical artworks and more contemporary representations of women and men.

JH/TS: "Representations" could be seen in relation to the rephotographing work of, say, Richard Prince, who explored similar myths with his Marlboro man photos and those of bikers. But Prince seems to be interested in characters whereas you often show us the media, (television, magazines, billboards, etc.) in which the myth is presented. Another difference is that you focus more on objects: statuary, framed paintings, hand-painted signs. Can you talk about the power images have over objects in your work?

JL: You use the terms media (television, etc.) and objects (paintings, statuary), but painting and statuary are media: the carriers and disseminators of myths, archetypes and propaganda. Paintings certainly are also objects in the world as are TVs and magazines. In "Representations" I am interested in the content of the media and also in its embodiment. I want the viewer to know that s/he is looking at a selective group of mediated images. The objects are photographed in available light, often from awkward angles, usually fragmented. I have re-photographed images made over six centuries. The work is shown as a large grid of 87 images. The deliberate reductive-ness of the black and white images levels the content and, I think, strengthens the narrative connections that play throughout the piece.

JH/TS: How has changing technology affected how you work? Has digital publishing and printing affected content as well as process? For example. I've heard you relate your more recent grid work in "Representations" to hypertext?

JL: Odd that digital technology has not replaced print publishing but has changed it beyond recognition. Graphic arts darkrooms, imposition of negatives, inadequate proofing systems, platemaking-all difficult procedures requiring high degrees of skill-are replaced by your desktop computer. Nor is offset the only print option. Print on demand technologies could have been developed especially for book artists. In the commercial world new technologies supersede the old. For artists they only add new options. Process always affects content, and the tension between the two is what creates the work. I have spent years working with various difficult and obscure processes because I love the way a photographic image on plain paper erases the separations between photography, print and drawing. For me digital photography is really magical--a photographic image on plain paper in color! Oddly, digital media is bringing my work closer to "straight" photography.

JH/TS: Where do you place yourself in terms of media with the tendency to box artists into neat categories (photographer, alternative process artist, book artist)? Do you feel that you resist pressure as an artist to be defined by the processes used?

JL: My work never fit categories very well and I have often declined to be included in curator-defined projects (for example, woman artist, Xerox artist). My connections and associations have been with the photography community and the book arts community. The book arts people have no particular problem with my work but the photography folks (particularly commercial galleries) are not interested. I think that younger people are in a better position. Since photography pervades every aspect of artmaking and it is common now to work across media, they simply call themselves artists.