Bleu Notes: A Conversation with Warren Lehrer

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Warren Lehrer is one of only a handful of makers of past few decades who have consistently created longer-form works claimed as part of fledgling field that is sometimes called books. His projects might more aptly be described as what Fluxus artist and Something Else Press publisher Dick Higgins called intermedia--works of art between media or genre. Lehrer's works fall between theater and design, fiction and musical notation, and oral history and poetry. Illuminated is what he calls his most recent project, A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley (2013), published by Goff Books, and over past year Lehrer has been giving performative readings of excerpts synced to animations, video, sound effects, and theatrical lighting. A Life in Books tells story of fictional writer, designer, raconteur, entrepreneur, and eventual prisoner Bleu Mobley, and 101 books he created in his lifetime. After reading novel and attending one of Lehrer's readings, I wrote questions below and he responded via email following his two performances as a visiting artist with VSW in late 2014. TATE SHAW: A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley relies upon what you call Design plays a pivotal role in novel's storylines and illuminations, as well as in written descriptions of novel in press releases and marketing blurbs. What is authorship? WARREN LEHRER: Most historians agree that began in early years of twentieth century out of revolutionary artistic, literary, cultural, and political movements. Writers like Stephane Mallarme, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Futurist and Dada artist/writers like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Tristan Tzara are cited as pioneer thinkers and practitioners that spawned modern(ist) typography and graphic design (coined as a term in 1922). Over time, what we generally think of as evolved into a professional practice that mostly serves corporate, industrial, and commercial masters. Yet throughout past century there have been people (albeit on fringes) who continued to use tools and methodologies of to create their own art and literary works. In 1980s, term authorship was coined to describe a growing movement of people around world who write, design, and produce their own books, zines, products, installations, performances, and multimedia works. Over past two decades, influence of artists' books, text-based art, activism, digital technology, rise of entrepreneurship, and all manner of interdisciplinary crossovers have inspired numerous articles, symposia, and books on authorship. There are even graduate programs, including MEA Designer as Author program at School of Visual Arts in New York City, of which I'm a founding faculty member. TS: What is your writing process like? Are you designing as you go, or is writing separate from design--is it all one process or done in different stages? WL: Writing and have always been organically intertwined for me, starting from when I was a kid doodling word-pictures in margins of textbooks and penning letters that spiraled, zigzagged, and careened across pages (or bunches of postcards). Bleu Mobley--my protagonist in A Life In Books--says he composes his books, mostly because he began writing with aid of a in letterpress shop of his junior high school. For Mobley, act of composing a text was part and parcel of printing process, especially after he discovered the real power of composing stick one day, after he forgot to bring in typewritten text of an article he had written for school newspaper. So I grabbed a composing stick, opened up a drawer of nine-point Garamond type, and began plucking out letters, and letters formed words, and words formed sentences, and before he knew it, Mobley had composed his first fictional story, based on a true story, morphed by forgetfulness, imagination, and a burgeoning relationship with materials of print and book craft. …