Interview with Mark Wagner

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview #1856 WAGNER, MARK WAGNER, MARK (19-) Book Artist At UW: 1991-1995 Interviewed: 2018 Interviewer: Sarah Lange Index by: Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 1 hour, 45 minutes First Interview Session (July 2, 2018): Digital File 00:00:00 SL: So today is July 2, 2018. I'm Sarah Lange with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking today with Mark Wagner. He's a UW alum, book artist, and founder of Bird Brain Press. And I'm talking from Steenbock Library at the University Archives. And Mark is talking in New York City today. So, Mark- MW: No, that's a lie. Actually I'm talking from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where I currently live. SL: Okay. Okay. Thank you for correcting me. MW: That's okay. SL: So, Mark, I wondered if you could start off by telling us where you grew up and what your family life was like. MW: Sure. Thanks, Sarah. I grew up in rural central Wisconsin. In Edgar, which is a small farming community. And it's still a small farming community today. I think the population sign on the town still says like 1200 people. Which is what it was when I lived there. I grew up there, the youngest in a family of thirteen. And didn't have a lot of exposure to art while I was growing up. But did have a lot of exposure to people making things. Family that crafted. Mom sewed. I remember Mom taught me how to sew when I was five on the sewing machine. My dad did woodworking. I had brothers and sisters that were always making stuff. So that's sort of the stuff that led to making art for me. SL: And Mark, what was it like being the youngest of 13 children? MW: It was probably, well, you don't know when you're the youngest of 13 children, because it just feels normal. But probably roughly equivalent to other people have uncles and aunts, except they were my brothers and sisters. You know, like a lot of them had left home by the time I was born. I saw them occasionally. I had two brothers, Romy and David, that I would always get confused. When one would come to visit I would use the wrong name, since they looked alike. SL: (laughs) Uh huh. MW: Yeah. Probably an important thing is that I didn't have much exposure to art then. Like I was a pop culture guy. I watched a lot of television. I don't remember going into a lot of museums. Didn't really think of art as an option when I was growing up. But it was something that I got hooked on maybe my second year in college. Which I didn't start in the UW, Madison. I did two years at the University of Marathon Center in Wausau. SL: Okay. MW: And started by studying math and chemistry there. Which I did okay at. But in my second year, I decided to take a drawing class as a reward for doing well my first year. And then it was in the 00:01:00 drawing class where I realized that 20 years from then, I would probably be enjoying that more than I would be like hanging out in a lab. So that's really when I kind of made the switch to art. Year two. SL: And when did you decide to go to Madison? MW: I sort of always knew that I would go to Madison after I was done at the Marathon Center. That's a two-year program. You're meant to get an associate's degree and then sort of move into a four-year college. So I always knew that I was going to go to Madison when I was done, when I was done in Wausau. SL: And why did you chose to Wausau first? MW: It was very close to home. I could live with my mom and drive to college. Which was important to me, coming from rural. If I'd just come from Edgar, which is a tiny town, and moved directly to Madison, I may have freaked out by the change, and being on my own. So Wausau was just a comfortable first step. You know, it was tiny town to big town is a big change. You know, so Wausau is a small town. Madison is a big town. And then I ended up moving to New York City. Even bigger town. And like my family 00:02:00 that's still in Edgar was kind of freaked out at the thought of a big city like that. So it was kind of stepping stones. I mean, I didn't know I was moving off to New York from Madison, but that's what ended up happening. When I did go to Madison, it was really pretty astounding. I loved it there. It seemed so cosmopolitan, with students coming from all over the place. Different cultures in town, and the big Capitol in the middle. When I moved there, I thought it was super-duper cool. And still think it's super-duper cool. SL: Can you think back to when you were there and what it was like, like what was going on then? MW: What was going on? SL: When did you come to Madison? MW: I came to Madison in, I graduated from high school in '89. My first year in Madison was 1991. And for me, it was just absorbing the city and the big campus, and being in all the art classes. I was pretty drawn in by what was on the desk in front of me. I wasn't really reading the newspaper or super outgoing. I've always been kind of a homebody, working on my projects. So it was like going to art school and getting to do etching, and then getting to do painting, and then, you know. I was-I wasn't much for 00:03:00 attending functions or going to lectures. I never went to a football game when I was in Madison. For me, it was all about the projects. And the group of people I was hanging out with were like that, too. We were all kind of obsessed with what we were working on. Working on stuff in class and then, you know, always having projects at home. I remember I was at a party once and I was talking to someone, a friend of a friend. And I asked him what projects he was working on. And like he didn't understand what I was asking him, because he just had a job that he went to. And you know, enjoyed watching television. So, yeah. I was making sculptures in my bedroom out of garbage. Dumpster dives. Sort of recycling furniture and drawings, etchings, paintings. And then eventually kind of got-well I guess my first step towards working in the book arts was got a part time job working at the Memorial Library repairing books in the basement. SL: Who were you working with? MW: With Jim Dast was the guy who ran the conservation lab there. And I met Marta Gomez down there. I think she ended up taking over the lab there. SL: Yes. She works there now. MW: I'd been interested in, I'd been writing some poetry, and sort of got it into my head that I would publish my own poetry, rather than trying to find a publisher for it. And so I saw that on the jobs listings that you could get a job repairing books. And I thought that was cool. So I got a job there. I worked there on and off for a couple of years. And then it was 00:04:00 there that I heard that there was a guy in the art department who taught book arts. Walter Hamady. And so I signed up. It was probably a year into being in Madison that I signed up for a class with Walter. Thinking that I was signing up for a class that just taught book binding as a craft. And then it kind of started to become a bit of a wild ride after that. Because I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know about the book arts. I thought I was learning something traditional. But Walter, you know, the diversity of forms, and variety of subject matters. And sort of intertwining of the two. And so when I was, I think I had beginner's luck when I was a painter. My first two semesters as a painter, I was making good paintings. And then semester three of being a painter, like I just started sucking. So it was while that was happening that I started going to class with Walter. So book arts kind of took over for me. And has remained consistent for a long time. Partially because it's just such a 00:05:00 versatile form. Like you know, if you want to focus on the content, you can focus on the content. If you want to focus on the structure, you can focus on the structure. If you don't want to do something, you can always find someone to collaborate who wants to do that part of it. So it really became a fun home that I enjoyed for a long time, making books. SL: Did you end up going back to painting? Or did you really then focus on book arts? MW: You know, I tried to go back to painting. This is 30 years ago, I guess. Almost-no, not quite that long ago. What is this, 19, 20, a while ago. Twenty years ago, and change. I've tried to go back to painting like five or six times since then, and like have never really gotten into it. I always think that I'm going to find it easy. I buy all the materials. And then I try it and then I give up on it again and give my materials away. Yeah. Not ever going to be a painter again. But I still use all the stuff that I do-I mean, I'm not making very many books these days, either. But I still use all the techniques in the collage work that I am still doing. And do get back to working on books every once in a while. SL: And you mentioned collaborating in the book arts. What were the parts of book making that you really enjoy, that you like to focus on? MW: It depended on the project. Sometimes I did everything. But then I was fortunate enough to be in a peer group with some 00:06:00 really super smart and capable people. So sometimes, you know, if I can work with Jen Benka, with her doing the writing, I'm going to work with Jen Benka and let her do the writing instead of like slogging away at it myself. Not to mention that she doesn't know how to make books. So when she slaps a manuscript in front of me, that's awesome. I sort of get covetous and start to salivate and tell her to let me make that into a book. So probably when, eventually I got together with a group of people and we worked Booklyn. SL: Before we get to that, can I just 00:07:00 ask you a follow-up question about Jen? MW: Yeah, sure. SL: Was she a student here at UW Madison? Is that how you met? MW: No. She went to Milwaukee. SL: Okay. MW: And I didn't meet her until, she was introduced to me in New York by a mutual friend when she was visiting. Yeah. She's an awesome dynamo, really. Excellent writer. SL: And I understand she worked for Poets and Writers at one point. Does that sound right? MW: Yeah. She was the managing director, I don't remember her title. She was the managing editor, managing director. She did a lot of their fundraising. Jen is a nonprofit bigwig. Like she gets really responsible jobs for really awesome organizations. And they pay her a lot of money because she's really good at doing her job. She's dynamic and super smart and like knows a bunch about poetry. Knows a bunch 00:08:00 about nonprofits and administration and fundraising. Yeah. SL: And you said that you were also interested in publishing your own poetry. Can you talk a little bit about that? How did you start writing poetry? MW: That was sort of one of the high points of me going to school at UWMC was a creative writing teacher there, J.D. Whitney, who was sort of, if I was going to start listing sort of important mentors, like Walter might be the fourth person that I mentioned, and J.D. Whitney would be the third person that I mentioned. He was super charismatic, great poet himself. And that was sort of, before I got the art bug, I'd taken a creative writing class and thought that I had the writing bug. I didn't. Or rather, it was something that I didn't pursue. Like I write today when I need to. But I'm not a facile writer. I can write today, but it takes me a while. And it's not poetry. I don't pretend to make poetry anymore. SL: But you did make a number of books that had stories in them. And you wrote a lot of those, right? MW: Yeah, yeah. While it lasted, it was fun. I've written maybe a dozen short stories that I like. I've written a couple dozen essays that I like. A lot of those come out in, I 00:09:00 put out in artist book form, or in zine form. I just went back to making zines recently, to sort of tie in to the work that I'm currently doing, which is collage work, cutting up money. So just, I like writing as a tool. One thing among all the things that I can do. And I can write enough for an artist book, you know. Like probably some of my most successful attempts at writing were ones where I was writing just a little bit, and then working it into something that had illustration and design. And it was all working together. In that case, it made sense that I was writing, because I could play with my writing in a way that I couldn't if someone else was writing on the project. So when I was working on my book Smoke in My Dreams, which is, I guess, my best seller among my artist books, like I needed to fill a gap for design purposes. And so I could come back and write more material to fill that gap. SL: Mark, you did Smoke in My Dreams 00:10:00 while you were here, right? Is that correct? MW: Yeah, I was living in Madison still. I didn't do it for a class. I was done with my education at that point, but still kind of-I graduated, and then I kind of stuck around the program and around town and around campus for a couple of years after that. Always had roommates that were in the program. Sort of poking my head around the art department exhibits and you know, stopping into classes, and visiting people on campus. So it felt like I was still in school, but I wasn't. And that's when I did, Smoke in My Dreams was sort of my first project outside of school. SL: And which, like where does that fall in your artist books? Like what number was that, like approximately? Do you know? MW: That was my second editioned book. My first editioned book was, I think it's in the Kohler collection. I know it's in the Kohler collection. Travel by Dancing. Just a skinny little 00:11:00 thing that did as a class project. That was my first editioned book. I think I made 20 copies of that. And when I was done, I took it to show Bill Bunce at the Kohler. I remember I was really nervous. And Bill is a great librarian who really built the collection of artist books, or started building the collection of artist books at the Kohler. We'd gone to visit him in the book arts classes. Real, real awesome character. But I was nervous because I knew that Bill sometimes bought work that he saw. And like my clothes weren't very good, because I was a sloppy college student. But I wore the best of them. (SL laughs) Sweating on the way. And Bill looked at the book. And I thought at best he was going to tell me that it was worth maybe 30 dollars, or 20 dollars. And when he said, "If you told me this book cost $120, I would not hesitate to acquire it for the collection." And I thought that like $120 at the time seemed like so much money to me. I thought that I-like that day was sort of the first, that was setting 00:12:00 the hook for me to being a book artist for a while. Because it was really, like the indication that it was viable. That people not only thought it was cool, but valued the activity. So I sold my first book to the Kohler for 120 dollars. And like that's really an important motivation for me having spent the next 15 years pretty much just making artist books. And also just making a living off of artist books. And for me, selling books is an extension of making books. I never, I taught classes occasionally, but not very often. You know, like my living money for 15, I wasn't born wealthy, I don't have a trust fund. You know, like it was making books and selling them that paid my rent for a long time. SL: And what did your family think when you told them that you sold one of your artist books for 120 dollars to the Kohler Art Library? MW: My family was kind of inattentive about my art career at the time. My dad died when I was a kid, so I never had like a father who would disapprove of me being an artist. I heard people say that, like, "My dad didn't want me to be an artist." My dad didn't have anything to say about it. And my mom-- SL: How old were you when he died? MW: I was 13 when Dad died. And Mom 00:13:00 was, miscellaneously supported. She didn't go to college herself. So couldn't really advise me on careers or education. And was, you know, I'm sure Mom would have just been proud of me no matter what I had done. And the rest of my family didn't, if they were bothering to disapprove of my career choice, they weren't mentioning it to me at the time. SL: Did they help you when it came time to go to school? With like applications or anything like that? MW: No. No. You know, I've got one sister, my sister Mary, Mary Wagner, who when I was in school, I always called her my cool sister Mary. (SL laughs) She would be number three on my important mentor list. Mary was always supportive. She's a graphic designer herself. So it was seeing her work as a graphic designer that made me kind of interested in art when I was six and five. No, not quite that young. When I was ten and eleven, it was seeing Mary's portfolio from when she was in college. Where I was like oh, that's kind of cool. It was like my first exposure to typography as art. And just assignment work for her. But super cool when you're stuck in central Wisconsin, you know, in eighth grade, for me. So Mary was always supportive and like would give me actual feedback, and would come to my art shows in Madison. Because she lived in Chicago. Yeah, Mary was a good bolster all along. And then I returned the favor to her at several points in her life. At one point she wanted to quit her marketing job, so I taught her how to do hand bookbinding. So she had like a cottage industry making fancy journals for rich people for a while. And now she's got a burgeoning art career. I call her my protegee now, because she's really in the past four or five years, she started making these drawings. After years of being out of art school and a couple of years since she had been making her journals for people. And now she makes these abstract geometric drawings. 00:14:00 And she's getting really good at it. And she's doing a lot of them online, and she's selling work all over the place herself. Yeah, Mary has been a constant. My whole life. It's awesome. SL: So you've mentioned a few people who are on your list of influential people. Who's number one on your list? MW: Oh, I don't, I just pulled the number five out of my hat. SL: Okay. (laughs) I didn't know if you were thinking of somebody, if there was somebody that was like, kind of that you had in mind as being at the top of the list. MW: Well, you know, the top of the list kind of shifts around from day to day or year to year. SL: Sure. What about-yeah? MW: There've been great people in my life, you know, and great people connected with the book arts, too. Like Hamady was great to work with. Christopher Wilde was really important to me in Madison, and sort of as a friend, mentor and collaborator. Marshall Weber, who, I'm not sure if talking to Marshall would be in your sort 00:15:00 of purview of Madison artist book makers. Because he wasn't making artist books in Madison. But like a month after he left Madison, Marshall taught non-static forms in art departments. I took a video art class and performance art class. It was just a non-static forms class. So we did a portion on installation art and a portion on performance art and a portion on video editing. And video arts. And Marshall was a, sort of became a key figure in my life. And is still, I'm still interacting with him and learning from him to this day. It's funny, because book arts and non-static forms, they seem like they're far apart, technologically speaking. Because it's like printing and book binding are very object-oriented. And like performance and video are so like electron ephemeral. But Marshall's class was literally the classroom 00:16:00 right next door to Walter's classroom. And the two things both are time-based, and the two things are both subject, not subject shy, like you can really get into subject matter in an artist book in a way that you can't in like a painting. And the same with like a performance or a video. So I remember Marshall had moved to New York City. And Christopher had moved to New York City. I think that would have been in like 1998 that they both moved. And I remember the phone call from Christopher saying, you know, "Marshall decided he's a book artist." (SL laughs) And at first it seemed ridiculous. And then it made perfect sense. Because he was. He just wasn't, hadn't been making books until that day. And so Marshall and Christopher and myself, you know, I moved to New York City. And Booklyn started to 00:17:00 form around that time. And we became a core group, the core of the core, I guess. Christopher and I lived together in a loft in New York and Booklyn happened in our living room. That's where we took the meeting, that's where the big shelf of books was. That's where the curators would come by to look at books. That's where the sales calls would be made from. And, yeah, Christopher was sort of, Christopher was instrumental in starting that. And Marshall still, that's his job to this day. He's been working solely for Booklyn for the past 20 years, selling artist books to hundreds of institutions around the globe. SL: And Christopher did share his story about how it started. But would you like to talk about what you remember, how it started, how Booklyn started? MW: Yeah, sure. The niche for Booklyn was that there were loads of people making loads of different kinds of books, and institutions who were interested in collecting those books. But dealers sort of failing to bridge the gap. My own work looked 00:18:00 traditional enough so that I had other book dealers. Califia Books sold my work, and the Hellers out of DC sold my books. But like Christopher's artist books didn't look like traditional books. They looked like zine, mashup, trippy, gorpy. Like they weren't, they were more vigorous than well-mannered. Prior to, I would say 1990, we were sort of, most book arts were sort of still focused on the fine press tradition. But like all of these other things were starting to inform book arts. It was the start of desktop publishing, and you know, the start of the internet. So people were even kind of questioning whether books were going to survive. So there were lots of people kind of getting experimental and weird. Christopher among then. You know, before Christopher was taking classes from Walter, you know, Christopher was publishing his own like Xeroxed zines. So I told, Christopher and I were in a painting class together. And I think we were both becoming disillusioned painters at the same time. And I was like oh, you're making these books? There's this guy at the other end of the hall who's teaching people how to make books. You should go take classes with him. It's 00:19:00 great. So that's where he sort of crossed over, maybe. And then we were all working on them together. After that, Christopher's series called The Tragic Book, which was sort of the opposite of a comic book was a tragic book, that are so tragic that they're beautiful or funny. You can see in his series of books. Like made at Kinko's, made at Kinko's, made at Kinko's. And then he takes book arts classes, and then it's like the first stitch binding that I did for him. And then the next one has weird metal covers and a lot of hand attentions. And then the next one is triangular and has hard covers and foldouts. Like it sort of goes from this little seed into this like gigantic thing that you could hurt somebody with if it fell on their head. That's a digression. Oh, so Booklyn, like a lot of the people that were selling artist books to institutions were just like selling things that looked like normal books. 00:20:00 They were kind of, would I say too well-mannered? They were well-mannered. Like the letterpress was nice, the binding was by some famous binder. They were pretty. But then people like Marshall and Christopher were making like kind of edgy, maybe, might be close to the right word. Their books, the bindings were a little bit jenky sometimes, but like the imagery was compelling and the subject matter was compelling. And some of them got political. Some of them were weird. But Booklyn became sort of a conduit for stuff like that. So all these artists that didn't have representation sort of got together and loaded up the suitcase. And then Christopher or Marshall or Sean would call up the institutions and make the rounds and show what was new. And that's 00:21:00 where Booklyn started. Being located in New York City is a good place for something like that. Because in New York City, there's probably 12 collection in that city that acquire artist books of one kind or another. Like one institution likes poetry, so you pack the poetry for that place. Another institution likes one of a kind book, so you pack one of a kind books. So, yeah. Booklyn, nonprofit organization that serves the artists that it's selling. And Booklyn put a lot of money into a lot of artists' pockets. That was sort of our main raison d'etre. We also had an educational bent. We wanted to educate the institutions about other kinds of books that they weren't seeing in other places. So at different times, different people at Booklyn, it was important that we brought along the weird books, even if the institution didn't necessarily think they wanted to acquire them. Maybe the third or the fourth time they saw it, they were like, "Oh, well, we better have one of these for our collection, because obviously this person means what they're saying." Yeah. At different times, 00:22:00 Booklyn's dabbled in things tangential to artist books and the distribution of artist books. You know, like almost everybody who makes artist books, it's not the only thing they do. They make artist books and they make paintings, or whatever. They make prints. So Booklyn sometimes is like sometimes like another art dealer. So showing things tangential to the artist books, it's served as a curator to [unclear] and shop around exhibitions. Institutions. A couple of years ago, Booklyn curated the first ever exhibition of artist books in Beijing, at the university there. Which is pretty astounding feat. SL: Yes. MW: They actually had to, I don't know the correct terminology for how their cultural affairs organization works over there. But they actually had to create a word like a letterform word for "zine." SL: Oh, cool. MW: In order to complete the wall text. Like they didn't have the word "zine," so someone created the word. And now that's the word "zine" over there, because Booklyn organized this exhibition and put a zine in it. Yeah. It's been pretty cool. Cool in the same way, I imagine, that having like a grown child is cool. Like hey, my kid's out there and he's doing that, that's crazy. I haven't been directly 00:23:00 involved in running Booklyn for a while now. But, yeah. Glad that it's still out there. SL: Can you talk a little bit more about your role kind of when it started, and how your work fit into what was going on there, too? MW: I always thought of myself as like the Marx brothers, like the boring one, Zeppo. (SL laughs) Like I was the, I was probably the most technologically savvy in the group. I could bind a book. I knew design, I knew traditional design and could apply it better than some of the others. So in a lot of the collaborative projects, I would clean up messes and sort of rope in like the, rope in the, what's the right word? Exuberance? Rein in the exuberance a little bit to make it a little bit more palatable to normal book lookers. I did 00:24:00 some of the boring things in the organization, like I ran the finances for a while, and wrote checks to people. Did some of the technical writing for the organization. Like writing mission statements and like communications. I never did the, I didn't like, I went on a couple of sales calls, but it wasn't my forte. I did a lot of the letterpress printing. I brought a press with me. It was a press that Christopher and Shon Schooler and I purchased from Karen Heft back in, I want to say, 1996, that I sort of got better at than the others. So I brought that to New York and printed business cards and printed covers for people. And at one point, I sort of stopped publishing my own artist books and just thought I would publish artist books for Booklyn. 00:25:00 I did that for a couple of years. At one point I was the, we were all on the board of directors, but that was kind of mushy. You know, we all just shifted roles for a while. Like Christopher was our main sales agent for a while. And then he put that in the backseat, and Marshall was our sales agent. And we were all, you know, when it's your organization, you can call yourself whatever you want. So I was director of publications for a while. I was associate, sometimes we just called each other Booklyn. "Hey, Booklyn, how's it going?" "Oh, fine, Booklyn." It was sort of a, I remember we all got lucky when finally cell phones dropped in price and we could get cell phones. Because for years, I picked up my home telephone and said, "Hello, Booklyn." SL: Oh, wow. How long did you do that? MW: I want to say for like four years. Three years or four years. Which, I tell you, when you pick up the phone and you say, "Hello, Booklyn," and it's your other book dealer on the line-(SL laughs) And they think of Booklyn as the weird guys that are encroaching on their territory-it becomes a little bit awkward. SL: So the number that if people wanted to contact Booklyn, they contacted you using your home, they were contacting you at home. MW: Yeah. They contacted Christopher and I at home. 00:26:00SL: Okay. So you were roommates. MW: Yeah, yeah. We were, Christopher and I were, when I moved to New York, it was a little bit like me moving home. Half a dozen people that I'd loved in Madison had moved to New York. Christopher had a great loft apartment that he was living in in Brooklyn. And a couple of roommates moved out from that loft apartment just when I realized that I should move to New York. So I moved right into this awesome loft. Which I didn't know how awesome it was until I looked around and saw the shitty places people were living in in New York. It was very much like a homecoming. You know, moving to New York was easier for me than it should have been. Years later, having to actually look for an apartment in New York, and go through that grueling thing, I was like oh my God, I'm so glad that arriving here was easy. Because this is not an easy place. SL: Mm hmm. Was it just the two of you, then, in the loft? Or were there other people, other roommates as well? MW: It was the two of us in the loft, in a space that had 00:27:00 been occupied by three people. So there was enough room for Booklyn there. For a while. I don't remember exactly what year we finally kind of kicked Booklyn out. And they moved to an office down the street that they only just now moved out of. Like they were in the same little office for, it must have been about 12 years, 15 years. Finally Booklyn's moved a little bit further out in Brooklyn. SL: Well, I kind of want to go back a little bit, Mark, if you don't mind. I understand that you were an assistant to Ruth Lingen for a little bit. Could you talk a little bit about that? MW: Yeah, sure. I started working for Ruth when I hit the ground in New York. SL: Okay. MW: I had heard about her in Madison. I think my understanding was 00:28:00 that Ruth is sort of a little bit second generation Walter Hamady. Because Ruth worked for Joe Wilfer, and Joe Wilfer kind of worked for Walter, or studied under him. So in a way, I think of myself as like third generation Walter Hamady because I-I mean, I studied with him directly. But then being in New York, like Ruth and I had Walter in common, and could talk about sort of the greater circle of the formerly Madison book arts world. You know, which was really a thing in the outside world. Because so many of Walter's students had gone off and like formed their own institution, or gotten jobs at this institution and that institution. Like I think it would be tough to overstate Walter's effect on the book arts world. Because he was like, people loved him, people hated him, people had great stories about him, made great work. And so when I moved to New York City, I'd met Ruth before. But Christopher introduced me and we hit it off. Ruth 00:29:00 liked to hire Midwesterners because they had good work ethics. So like that got me halfway in the door. And then I helped her out with her own projects. Ruth works for Pace Prints, and has for a long time, and still does. And she's an awesome master printmaker with amazing kung fu moves in regards to all things relief printing and papermaking. I was lucky to work with her. I had a great time working with her when I was working with her. I did letterpress printing and a little bit of bookbinding and a little bit of box making. I would go in, she would have her regular day job at Pace Prints. And then I would go in around four o'clock or five o'clock, when her regular workday was done. And she would be engaging on her second workday, which would be 00:30:00 switching to her own projects. So I would work from like four or five until like nine or ten with her, printing some project, one of her own publishing projects. And it was awesome because there we were at Pace. On the other side of the room was some gigantic Chuck Close print that someone had been working on for a year and was still working on it. And Ruth would always toss off these stories of working with all of these amazing artists. Like blue chip artists. You know, stories about Jim Dine and Louise Nevelston and like Claes Oldenburg. She knew those people. She worked with them. She made some of their best art. So it was kind of really like a magical New York thing. But also, Ruth is like such a straight shooter, so Midwestern herself, and like no bullshit. And then on top of that to be getting money. You know, she was paying me to work for her. Awesome. But then also to be able to pick up on what she knew a little bit. So, yeah, I had some good times working for Ruth. I worked on books, like Chuck Close books that she was 00:31:00 publishing. I went out with her on the tip of Long Island one summer for a couple of weeks, working on a paper pulp project. A Chuck Close paper pulp print that she was editioning. I mean, don't tell her, but I would have worked for her for free. (SL laughs) And just the best boss ever. Ruth would let us, we would start drinking beer after I got the last set up on the letterpress for the day. Yeah. Excellent. SL: And how long did you work with her? MW: I worked with her off and on for three years, four years. Part of me wished that I'd just, you know, I like my job as an artist now, like making art and selling it. But part of me wished I would 00:32:00 have like just signed up with the Ruth Lingen sort of cause, and been like a good technical person. It's something that I've always enjoyed. I like letterpress printing, and making it look nice and kind of perfect. And sometimes when I go and visit Ruth and she shows me like the awesome project that she's troubleshooting with Shepard Fairey, then I'm like oh, that would be so fun, it would be so fun to be Ruth. Or to be Ruth's assistant now, and be there doing that. SL: So, Mark, I just want to clarify. It sounds like then for the daytime hours were you working on Booklyn projects? And then in the evening hours you were working with Ruth during that time? MW: Yeah, I would work for Ruth maybe two or three nights a week. And during the daytime hours I was working on my own artist books or working on sort of Booklyn-related matters. I wasn't very employable outside that. I didn't pick up any 00:33:00 computer skills in school. So like a lot of my friends moved to New York and they all had part time jobs doing computer work at like banks that were lucrative. But I didn't-sometimes I would do letterpress printing, like job work for people for money. But you know, at that time in New York, with Booklyn going, I was just making artist books and selling artist books. That was my paycheck. Sometimes I would get paid from one of my other book dealers. But we were living cheaply for it being New York. Young, didn't have very much, I didn't have an expected lifestyle. But because, like I couldn't, there was no job I would be able to find on a job listing. Like people didn't need letterpress printers at the time. People weren't looking for book binders at the time. So it was just self-employed, which is kind of what 00:34:00 I've been, apart from working for Ruth. Apart from like a brief stint doing job printing at a letterpress shop, I've been self-employed since Wisconsin, since living in Wisconsin. That's what it is, being an artist. You're self-employed. You're an entrepreneur. You're a small businessman. SL: How do you kind of deal with the ebb and flow of money and I guess projects and everything? MW: You try to keep money in the bank. You try to make-I mean, what I did was I'd look at all the, I'd do things that you don't learn in school. Like in school, it seems like a lot of teachers tell you to follow your whim and make the artwork that you feel you need to make, and make artwork for yourselves. Walter used to say something that drives me crazy. And I think it was just bad advice from him. He used to say that if-I 00:35:00 don't even remember how he put it. Like if you don't need to make it, then go do something else. Like for him he thought there needed to be like a drive, like an unstoppable drive, the need to make art, in order to make it. Which I don't think is, it's not right. I can list more artwork that I want to make than I have time to make it. So I just make that list. And then I go through and I pick out the things that I consider to be the best bets on selling. You know, the things that would be the best bets on most popular. That's what I've always done. One of the reasons why I made books about libraries was because the librarians selected the books to go into the collection. (laughs) You know, and it's a common enough area where lots of people's Venn diagrams cross across this subject matter or that subject matter. So that's how I do it. I just try to, you're just practical about 00:36:00 whatever you're doing. If you've got money in the bank, then you can spend some time experimenting and finding something new. If you don't, then you're just like look at your list and see like oh, I bet people would really like this. And then do that. Eventually it was economics that led me away from making books as my main income source. Because my collages started to be successful. And when I can make a collage and sell it for the same price that ten of my books would cost, I was like okay, now I'm doing this, mostly. But still, still, I apply the collage to book making, too, you know, and have some projects that are collage plus the books, you know. I make catalogs from the collage work. I make zines about the collage work. I do some overprinting on currency that expresses itself as a book or as a portfolio print. I put 00:37:00 books in the collages, in some of the collages. A lot of the collages have text, like the book works. SL: Did you specifically take collage while you were in art school? MW: I did. It was a direct influence from both Christopher and Walter. Walter made those awesome assemblages, which I really loved. I really loved the design of those, I loved all the materials. And so it was sort of, I had been collecting garbage for years. Just like pulling stuff out of people's trash that I found very interesting. Like broken chair parts and machine parts and clocks that I would take apart. So I had all these things around that I liked, but I had no idea what I was going to do with them. And sort of when I got exposed to Walter and saw his assemblages, I thought oh, I could make stuff out of those. That's a good reason to have them around. So back in Madison, I did a lot of experimenting. I was making some sculptures that looked like knock offs of Hamady sculptures a little bit. And I was doing collage with a whole bunch of different materials. And then I ended up doing a lot of collages with Camel cigarette boxes, because I had a bunch of friends that smoked. So they had Camel packaging, Camel cigarette packaging, that just piled up. Like a package a day from three people, and you have a lot of materials. So I started using some 00:38:00 of those. Both individual collages, and then I used those as like the basis for materials, in a couple of books. Like Travel by Dancing had some little elements from a Camel package. And then Smoke in My Dreams was sort of about smoking, and about the Camel package. And each of those had a complete disassembled package in each one, including there was one part that I didn't fit into the illustrations of the book, so I glued it underneath. You can see it, underneath the back cover, you can see the silhouette of the piece. And so it was the classic, it was using the repeated Camel package that sort of eventually led into what's taken over my creative life for the past 15 years, which is cutting up dollar bills. SL: Would you like to talk about that now? Or would you like to break here and talk about that next time? MW: I could talk about it now. SL: Okay. MW: Or did you have a time limitation? SL: No. We can keep on going if you would like to talk about your collage work. I'm interested. MW: Now's a good time. I was making collage out of a whole bunch of different things. I wanted to do some super formal pieces. 00:39:00 And for them, I wanted super recognizable pieces of paper, and also very formal pieces of paper. So the first one that I made, I cut up my diploma. SL: (laughs) You did? MW: From the UW Madison. Into little thin ribbons. And then bent the ribbons down as I was gluing them back into place. And made it sort of warp, as though they were blowing in the wind. And then I cut up my high school diploma. (SL laughs) And then I settled on the dollar bill as a super common piece of paper. And didn't know what it was leading to. Just made a bunch of little horrible- they all, the early pieces looked like they were just Photoshopped dollar bills, because it's 00:40:00 twisted or bent in half. But it's all cutting the bill into thin ribbons and then gluing them down in a shaped manner. SL: And what made you choose diplomas and currency for your collages? Because I think most people would consider those off limits. So what made you go for those? MW: I wanted something official. I wanted something-it should be no, no commentary on my time at UW Madison, I know this is about that. My piece of paper, my diploma, never did anything for me, because I didn't get an academic job. I didn't get a job. My education there was awesome. Like I loved my peer group, loved the classes. Had a great time. It was affordable education. Great setting. Yada, yada. But the piece of paper was kind of nothing to me. But I realized that to lots of people it represented something important. So that's why I chose 00:41:00 that. And the dollar bill, kind of the same. People liked the Camel collages I was making because they knew the Camel package. Especially the Camel smokers. So if cigarette smoking is a smokers' thing, dollar bills are everybody's thing. We all need to interact with that piece of paper on a daily basis. At the same time, no one ever looks at the piece of paper. Like if you ask someone to draw a dollar bill from memory, their drawing would look ridiculous. They don't know what's where. They know that there's a guy in the middle, and an oval. Or is it a circle? So it's this, it's an interesting piece of paper that we have in our hands. It's a publication, you know, it's like a little handbill. It like advertises America every time you glance at it. It's a really storied little thing. I wasn't thinking about any of that when I started cutting them up. But it became apparent to me. I'm a slow learner. I thought I was just making cool little formal pieces when I started. But then showing them around to people along with the other work I was making, people were always 00:42:00 gravitating towards the currency work and sort of ignoring the other things that I was showing them. So that just started to take over more and more. I'm a big fan of the market, and letting the market decide. Partially because I've had contact with Booklyn. Like oh, Marshall comes back, he unpacks the suitcase. And I'm like, "What did they think of this?" Or you go to a meeting and you can see someone ignoring something, or someone paying attention to something else. And I think, you know, people's pocketbooks are interesting tells on what they're interested in. So I used to make loads of different art. Even my artist books, they're like, put two sequential artist books of mine on the table, and if you can't read my name on them, they're like oh, that's a super formal little thing. And this one has a lot of painting and hand attentions. And this one is conceptual and this one's just photographs. But I was happy switching from one thing to another thing for a long time. And then the currency collage just like kind of wiped everything else out. Partially because it sells very versatile. Like the little formal things that I was making out of individual dollar bills turned not doing portraits. And those turned into doing like little allegorical scenes with George Washington. And those turned into doing crowd scenes. Like doing a 00:43:00 portrait turned into doing full body things besides doors. And I realize that anything that I can draw, or anything that I can't paint, I can render out of like little scraps of paper, little scraps of currency. So that's what I've been doing for 15 years now. SL: And can you explain your process a little bit about that? How you put those collages together? MW: There's a sort of laundry list of approaches that I've added to just from longevity. I used to think that I'd sort of reached the end of it. Like when I was making, I remember when I made my first portraits, and they were like, it was basically like an 8 and a half by 11 inch board that I was working on, and it took me 30 hours to make. I used to think that was like the pinnacle of care and concern and attention. And then I realized that oh, no, no, I can scale up even further. Sometimes, most of it starts by taking dollar bills, or a stack of dollar bills, and cutting them down into their sort of constituent parts. Separating out line work, long, skinny line work, into the cubbyholes and the little tackle box and separating out the leaves 00:44:00 into another little tackle box. And separating out the little seals, the treasury seals, the Federal Reserve seals, into another little compartment. And then, you know, pieces of the bill get subdivided. Like George Washington, in the heads box there's maybe 20 little sub drawers. One of them just has foreheads, because his forehead is a certain shade of gray that doesn't appear anywhere else. And another one has just his cheek, because his cheek has a dark gray to light gray fade that doesn't happen anywhere else. So it's a process of breaking down and then putting them back together. Like all of those pieces can be involved, assembled in multiple ways, multiple different textures that are useful here and there in the backgrounds. There's little images that I use over and over again. Like I assemble pieces into hands. Left hands and right hands for Washington. And stock those. And so after breaking down, there's like a putting back together slowly. And then a lot of those materials I keep in three-ring binders. Extra swatches on thin, Japanese paper, so that when I'm filling in the background, I can cut a section out of those to glue onto the panel that I'm working on. SL: Do you know how much money you go through to cut up all these pieces and do all these 00:45:00 separate works? MW: I've got a vague notion. I used to have a more specific notion. Back when I started to do the work- SL: Sure. MW: I would keep time sheets on the back of a collage I was working on so I could know how many hours I'd put into it so that I wasn't shortchanging myself the day when I told somebody the price. Other collages, I would keep track of the dollar bills that went into that particular collage. Just for conceptual, you know, conceptual angle on the piece. Not because I was actually concerned about how much it was costing me. SL: Sure. MW: The materials don't end up costing that much, ironically. Because most of them are used in a single layer. A panel that's twenty inches by eighteen inches probably only has about 50 dollars' worth of dollar bills used on it. SL: Okay. MW: And you could spend that much money on paint if you were making oil paintings that size. The currency work, I 00:46:00 like it because it could engage in multiple worlds. There's a gallery that's, Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City that's done good by me selling them, selling the original collages. But also, most of the work that I make, the images are useful as illustrations on book covers or magazines illustrating articles about the economy. So I like that there's a sort of-the fine art world is a good place to get a big paycheck from, because people will spend a lot of money buying something to hang in their third house. But I like that I can also make a poster 00:47:00 and sell it for cheap on my website to people of modest means who are just fans of the work. SL: When you make an illustration, are you making it a smaller work, then? Or how does that work? Are you taking, are you getting an image of the actual collage that you're sending to the magazine, for example? MW: If I can, if they've got the budget and the timeframe, I'll make a collage, if I can. Like portraits. Like people have a couple of times hired me to do portraits for their magazines. But if it's like, a lot of times if an art director comes to me, I'll just send them my catalog of available images. And they can go shopping for an image, if it's an economic, they can, there's a selection. There's probably something that would work for them. If they're looking for like a positive image for a corporate report, they can go through and pick out trees and flowers or whatever, and use a piece 00:48:00 from a larger piece. The work is pretty detailed, so even the big work has got lots of little, you know, when I'm done with a piece, I go through it and kind of mentally hold up a little four inch by four inch window and kind of try to make sure that it's interesting every four inches by four inches. So if an art director who's looking for something, it's likely they can use something, like repurpose something that I've already made. SL: Okay. That makes sense. MW: And if not, then I would consider doing a smaller thing for them, or portraits. The portraits that has, they've gotten reproduced a couple of times. Like I made a Lincoln portrait maybe four or five years ago. And everybody, I didn't realize everybody loved Lincoln that much. I've made more money licensing that image than I did selling the 00:49:00 original. I made a portrait of Trump during the election. Because every US election, during the election, I have a voting booth that I put up and then make portraits of the two candidates sitting inside the booth. And then beneath each candidate is a separate box with a slit in the top. So it's sort of like, it takes the voting box and turns it into the donation box. SL: Okay. (laughs) MW: Because elections are so about funding. But the Trump portrait I burned before the election because he's such a jackass. (SL laughs) And I didn't want it to be confused. Like I'd done portraits of people that I'd respected up till that point. But, yeah, his portrait has been licensed a couple of times. I scanned it before I burned it. It's been published a couple of times. And someone bought the charred remains of it, too. SL: (laughs) Who bought that? MW: It was a, I don't know the guy's name. SL: It was an 00:50:00 individual? MW: Yeah. He owns some of my other work. I talked to his art consultant when I'd sort of sent out the email with the portrait during the election and said that I was going to burn it. She emailed me back and said, "I've got a collector who's interested in buying it, so I guess you're not going to be burning it." And I wrote her back and said, "Wrong. No one can stop me from burning this piece. I hate the guy." And then she wrote back and said, "Oh my God, my collector loves it even more. He really wants it now." (SL laughs) So he paid full price for it, like it was an intact collage. Fair amount of money. And I framed it and sent it to him. SL: Well, it has a story now. (laughs) Would you like to talk a little bit about your crossing books? Is that how you pronounce it? MW: Crossing books? Oh, Xing. SL: Xing. It is. See, I said it wrong. (laughs) MW: Yeah. No, yeah, that's, Xing is a name that came out of conversations with Ruth Lingen, actually. Ruth and I in New York in the early aughts, like especially with computers sort of like becoming so ubiquitous, we used to joke about people calling themselves designers. So like she would say stuff like, "Oh, 00:51:00 we're in New York City. You can't throw a fucking rock without hitting a designer. And throw it hard." (laughter) And we had a sort of standing rule in the press room that-you know, one thing is that Ruth is a better designer than designers are. Like Ruth's setting lead type makes more beautiful words than people calling themselves designers. So we had something against "Designers." "Designers" in quotes. Ruth would be hired to do the printing on a job that was designed by a designer, and it would look so much worse than the stuff that she would be capable of doing herself. So anyway, we had a standing rule in the shop that you could never refer to a designer as a designer. You had to call them a fucking 00:52:00 designer. So eventually I started dating Amy Mees, who's a designer. She's my wife now. We've got kids and all that. But when I started dating her, it was like, "Oh, Ruth, I'm dating a designer." And she was like, "You mean a fucking designer?" (laughter) I was like, yeah. And then ever since then it was like, "my fucking designer girlfriend." And so when Amy needed a name for her job, she started calling herself Xing Design, with the X replacing the "fuck" part of "fucking." So that's kind of where it started from. Xing Design was sort of the first iteration. And Amy and I would collaborate on projects. She would take care of the computer part, and I would print the covers 00:53:00 for it or consult on the binding of the projects. Amy and I were, until we had kids and the kids started taking up all of Amy's time, Amy and I were a good sort of dynamic duo of publishing. So Xing Design started publishing books that were, they weren't Booklyn books anymore. Amy was involved in Booklyn, too. She did a lot of the design on a lot of Booklyn's, at least a handful of Booklyn's publications and the catalogs and printed ephemera from, I don't know, probably circa 2008 through circa 2012, maybe. Amy and I started publishing, we hooked up with some poet friends and published some poetry chapbooks, a series of chapbooks called The Agriculture Reader. And a couple of books of poetry. And we started using the name Xing Books. So, yeah. I guess it makes it a little bit confusing for some people who might know Birdbrain Press. But then I publish things under Booklyn's name, and then I publish things under Xing Books. A little bit of consistency may have served my career 00:54:00 better. There were some things that, like when it came to publishing the preamble with Jen Benka, the re-visioning of the preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America, which is one of my favorite books, like when it came to publishing that book, it seemed like too good of a book to put the word "birdbrain" on. I thought it was important. I could have gone either way when that book was on the table. But having Booklyn's name on it seemed like a firmer, better standing for that book than calling it Birdbrain. SL: And how did you come up with the name Birdbrain Press? Which is a little bit of a tongue twister. I'm sorry. (laughs) MW: It's a bit of a recalled expression. It's like an insult, calling someone birdbrain. And I like that it's a little self-deprecating. Like that made me comfortable to be like oh, 00:55:00 whatever, I'm a birdbrain anyway. But at the same time, bird and brain are both two positive things. And it was alliterative, you know, like Perishable Press sounds good because it's alliterative. So that probably had something to do with it. And yeah, just sort of random words at the time, kind of. It could lead to some nice logo ideas that never really came to fruition. I have drawings of brains with wings coming out of them. One really gross one that my friend Scott Teplin made for me. Because he draws brains that look really gruesome, anatomical. And then my friend [Zack Sara Barron?], who's a drawer and comic book writer. I traded her some printing for her drawing a logo. Her logo was a person with a birdcage for a head, and they're sort 00:56:00 of opening up the door to their head and the bird is flying out. So, images like that. That's where that name came from. SL: Were you and Amy in New York during September 11? MW: Amy wasn't. She was living in Boston at the time. We hadn't gotten together then. I knew her. She was a friend. I was living in New York September 11, 2001. And was on my way home from staying at my lady friend's house that night. And on the elevated train, on the N train. And we could watch the towers burning on the N train. SL: Oh, wow. MW: And I went, you know, I headed home and woke Christopher up. Christopher was a late sleeper. Christopher would stay up until like six in the morning and then sleep until two in the afternoon sometimes. So I woke him up. And the towers were right outside our, you know, we had a, on Commercial Street, Booklyn's first home, 70 Commercial Street, we had a wall of windows, a wall of factory 00:57:00 windows, that looked out at the, it was, we were half a block away from the East River. And our windows were the New York City skyline. And the towers were out our window. So we were there when they fell, and with the stuff that followed. SL: What was that time like for you? MW: Depressing. Everyone was depressed. The entire city was depressed. New York is-New York is, I mean, for people that haven't been there, it's got some psychological problems, New York City does. There's a lot of Type A personalities there. There's a lot of people who thought they were over it like two days later. Like oh, ready to go on about our business. But then just bad feelings rippled through the city. So if you got in a good mood one day and you went out on 00:58:00 the street, you were going to run into someone who wasn't in a good mood and then pick up their bad mood again. You know, it was completely depressing that our country used the city's grief to, as an excuse to wage war against people that didn't have anything to do with it. Yeah. We thought the Bush, second days were horrible, until Trump was elected. SL: And you made books that were about September 11th, too. Did you want to talk a little bit about that? Were you seeking out work, or did it just happen organically? MW: I ended up making two books about 9/11. One was, the first one was with Marshall Weber, called 12/11, that was a collection of photographs that Marshall had taken of flags around the city. Which were really kind of great. Because he photographed all these like sort of ridiculous flag arrangements. Like 00:59:00 there were all these tattered flags. Like people had put up flags and then they just got dirty and tattered, and it seemed to be some commentary on the disposable patriotism. Or like patriotism was just like another variant of consumerism. So it was a real simple book. It was just prints of his photos contrasted with America the Beautiful. The lyrics. And the lyrics that people aren't as familiar with, which get really wacky. Like I can't remember the name of the woman who wrote the song, but like the less popular verses of that song-like look it up. They get kind of weird. And so it was just a simple little book, but I liked it a lot. And then the other books that I published, again, using Booklyn's name because the subject was just like too serious to say birdbrain on it anywhere, was a collection of drawings by Mac McGill. And that just had the Roman numerals of the date, just to give people a little delay. Like people had become so used to seeing like 9/11 and thinking they knew what was going on. Just presenting the date as Roman numerals. And they were like still piecing it together as they got to the title page. And there was a little bit more of a reveal of subject matter. And Mac's drawings, he had made sort of independent of thoughts of making the book. And he had made like a little Xeroxed zine. I was like, Mac, these drawings are too good to just be in like a little Xeroxed thing. Like let's do this up. And I think we found a nice version of the book that was fancy with letterpress, but also kind of a little bit punk squatter with rivets instead of a traditional stab binding. And that's Mac's aesthetic. Mac lives in a squatted building 01:00:00 in New York, and has for decades. And is sort of known as a provider of graphics, and like punk squatter like housing activist circles of New York in the '90s and the zeroes. So I wasn't looking to make that book. But when it was in front of me I was like, we need to make this book. We need to make it like this. SL: Mm hmm. Is there anything else that you would like to add about that time? MW: Is there? [pause] Yeah, no, no, I don't think so. I mean, I remember at one point, maybe it was like a couple of days after, and the Booklyn crew was sitting around in the living room. And I remember someone saying like, "Oh, are people going to make art about this?" And I guess maybe it was because we were young. We didn't quite know. And then on retrospect, like yes, of course people are going to make art about it. That's one of art's jobs is to think about stuff like this. SL: You mentioned that the book that you made with Mac was originally a zine. And you had earlier talked about how you were getting back into making zines. Could you talk a little bit about that? MW: Yeah. Zines were one of the things that, you know, the book arts collection and the sort of institutional collecting world 01:01:00 was maybe not attuned to, that Booklyn helped them become attuned to. So one of Booklyn's things early on was that we would put the five thousand dollar book by Chuck Close on the table. And right next to that we would put a five dollar zine, like Xeroxed zine. It was that whole array. You know, there's so many nights, so many nights spent at Kinko's Xeroxing pages because you didn't have access to a press. Or you did have access to a press, but it was too much of the wrong kind of work for the subject matter. And there's cross-pollination between zines and artist books, like the traditional, traditional fine press books. You know, it's like they've had children together now. So you see the innards are a little bit more disposable. But if you pay attention to the covers, they have a nice, letterpress-printed cover, or a cover that has more hand attentions, then it draws people inside. Currently I like zines as sort of-for a while, it seemed like zines had become a little bit too common. But then in the 01:02:00 early aughts, blogs had become so popular. And everybody had their blogs and they were publishing online. So I thought oh, it might be time for zines to be zines again. How nice is it to hold something in your hand, instead of staring at your phone. So I had had a little blog for a while, and it didn't feel right to me. Because it, I liked getting my thoughts out, but I had no idea if people were reading it. And I was like you know, the things I was writing about were my collage work or things tangential to it. So I was writing about material handling and process, and the nature of circulating currency from one hand to another. And I was like you know, a blog isn't the right place for these thoughts. You know, like in your hand is the right place for 01:03:00 these thoughts. So I just sort of dubbed a zine title and I'm working on issue number three now. It's called Love Me Tender, and it's about the nature of art and money. (SL laughs) The interaction of those two worlds. So I've got, the first issue is about collage, and the nature of collage. It sort of describes a critical framework for discussing all collages. And sort of breaks down making a collage into its rudimentary stages. The second issue is about the smell of money, called What's that Smell? The Smell of Success, What's that Smell? The Smell of Democracy. It's like how money smells like the ink that made it when it's all new. But then if it circulates around, it starts to smell like gym socks. And that's 01:04:00 everybody contributing something to it and making a stinky thing that we've all worked on together. And issue three, it's more lighthearted than that. Issue three is about money and magic, sort of relating sleight of hand and sort of confidence games and theft with money, drawing parallels between magic like black arts, occult magic, and sleight of hand. You know, card sharps and cheating, and also finance, the world of finance. It feels really good to be making them as books. Like, this is great. SL: Are you planning to continue the series? MW: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got the next two planned out after that. And just, I'm releasing them about two a year is what I plan. And pretty much just to my list. I might put them up for 01:05:00 sale on my website. But otherwise I'm just sending them to collectors, and sharing them with my gallery to share with their collectors. SL: And how many copies are you making of each issue? MW: Two hundred or three hundred. SL: Okay. MW: Something that I can do in the studio. Something that I can run off on my home Xerox machine and make them feel a little bit disposable. I like my printed materials to feel a little bit disposable these days. So like I like a catalog that has a soft cover that people are likely to fold in half, or, you know, jot notes on, something with thin paper, something that's a little bit more usable than like art worldy fancy. Since my collages have gotten pretty fancy, I like making the things about the collages less fancy. SL: And what about artist books? Do you think that you'll return to making some artist books? Or 01:06:00 you don't know, necessarily? MW: I would like to. You know, I've got some artist books that I would like to make, specifically. I just unpacked my letterpress. It's been in storage for five years. So now I'm looking at it, rather than thinking about it. Literally right now I'm looking at it. I walked to the other side of the studio. There are some things that are involved, overprinting on dollar bills, that I would like to get back to, some projects, that I would love to make artist books about. And if the sales in the art world ever pick up again and buy me a little bit more time to pursue those projects, then I will turn to them. But yeah, the art world hasn't been kind to us white chip artists recently. A lot of people who are spending their money these days are spending it on old art from the resale market, or things that have deeper sales. Records. Yeah, things are changing in the gallery world in New York. Galleries are changing shape and function. Closing their doors, reinventing themselves. Yeah. So if the sales pick up with the collages, I'll be happy to devote more time to my fun book 01:07:00 arts projects. SL: Sure. I was wondering if you had any kind of final thoughts. Perhaps kind of looking back at your time at the UW and how you think that it affected your career in any way? MW: Definitely. I mean, I would say it's all about the people that I met. Like you know, it's tough for me to imagine how things would have turned out if I hadn't met like maybe half a dozen people from time that I spent in Madison. I don't know what things would be like if Christopher hadn't come into my life, or Marshall hadn't come into my life, or Walter hadn't come into my life. I still work with some of them. Like I've got some plans going on with Scott Teplin, who went to Madison. Yeah, it's almost a question that I can't answer. It's like asking what it's like being the youngest child. It 01:08:00 happened that way, and I can't think of it having happened differently. It was great. Part of me wished I'd stayed in Madison. But Madison, Madison's great. Patrick Flynn, another guy, another Madison guy. I don't know if people have brought him up. He was the art director at Progressive magazine for years. The Progressive. Great guy. Super dedicated to artwork. Super happy to help out, give feedback. You know, regularly appeared in Walter's classes to give advice and give assignments. Also, I mean, not directly involved in the university, but another sort of Madison character that I can't imagine you know, like how I would have turned out if he hadn't made an appearance in my life. SL: And how did you, you had mentioned Karen Heft earlier. How did you connect with her? MW: Through Amos Kennedy. 01:09:00 Christopher had told Amos that we were looking for a press. And Amos told us when Karen had one for sale. She had two Vandercook SP 15s. And sold Sean and Christopher and I one of them, for not very much money. It was like 250 dollars at the time. SL: Yeah, that's not very much money, is it? (laughs) MW: I mean now a press like a Vandercook, I've seen them listed for seven thousand dollars. But that was mid'-90s versus now. That was before Martha Stewart wrote about letterpress wedding invitations. That was the early '90s. And there were lots of trade schools that were just then getting rid of their printing equipment. And high schools, a lot of high schools had like sort of letterpress rooms where they were teaching people the trade at one point, because that was so important to like imaging typography for a couple of decades. A couple of decades for like, I don't know, probably more like half a century. So it was a viable career to learn letterpress printing. And then it stopped being a viable career as sort of optical imaging took over, and computers took over. But those rooms with the letterpress equipment were still sort of moldering at high schools. And then at one point, people were just giving that equipment away, just to get rid of it. So getting a 250-dollar press was like a thing of that decade. And then, you know, no one was making that equipment anymore. And more and more 01:10:00 people were using it, and wanting to use it. So that's how you get the price hikes with the press. And I think that might be a good place to stop for today. SL: Yeah. Thank you so much.