Interview with Christopher Wilde

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview # WILDE, CHRISTOPHER WILDE, CHRISTOPHER (19-) Book Artist At UW: Interviewed: 2018 Interviewer: Sarah Lang Index by: Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 1 hours, 32 minutes First Interview Session (June 4, 2018): Digital File 00:00:01 SL: So today is June fourth, 2018. I'm Sarah Lang with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking with Christopher Wilde, book artist and UW alum, who also goes by the name C.K. Wilde. And we're at the UW archives in Steenbock Library. Christopher, you were born in Madison, Wisconsin. CW: That's right. SL: Can you talk about your early life and family life? CW: Yeah. I grew up here on the West Side. Both of my parents were professors. So I was always sort of around the university in one way or another. And traveled a fair amount to Europe because my mother's German. So I got to see a lot of European culture growing up, which I think definitely influenced me and my interests in art. Although especially after talking with my mom, it seems like I've always been interested in art and making art since I was a very small person. But I received lots of encouragement from the public school system here, for sure. SL: And did you go on field trips to like art museums or galleries? Or did you family go to museums? CW: For sure. Yeah. I mean, here in Madison, in what now is the Overture Center, they would have exhibits there. And you know, my aunt is an artist so I had a lot of exposure through her. And then yeah, traveling as a child. We would go to Chicago to see the shows there. And then all throughout Europe we'd go to see the sort of larger religious places, the churches and stuff like that. And sort of becoming sensitized to sort of that work. And then the great museums. The Louvre and the Pompidou and Louisiana in Denmark. So art and music have always been a big part of my life growing up and my family's life. 00:02:12 SL: Were there any artists or styles that you were particularly drawn to when you were growing up? CW: I really loved drawing when I was a child. So I was pretty much voracious for any kind of drawing. I think I got a lot out of comic books. And my father had an interest in, like for instance, Carl Barks, one of the original sort of Disney illustrator artists. But he also liked more contemporary comic stuff that you know, or drawing from the past, like Durer or I'm trying to think. Like he got me a Rube Goldberg book when I was a kid, which I loved the 00:01:00 sort of crazy mechanical nature of those drawing. Also George Harriman from Crazy Cat, and Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay were really sort of formative books for me, really changed the way that I saw things and wanted to draw. But yeah, I loved children's books and then eventually comic books. And would copy stuff out of comic books to learn how to draw certain things. And then I think I did my first like drawing class, specific drawing class, through a UW Extension class when I was in maybe seventh grade or so. Jay Rath was the cartooning instructor here. And so I took a drawing and cartooning class with him. And I've kept in touch with him over like 30 years. We're still friends. And we keep in contact. So that's been kind of a cool friendship to maintain over the years. But yeah, I mean I knew very early on that I really wanted to make art for my whole life. And luckily received a lot of encouragement. SL: Can you talk a little bit more about your aunt? You said she was also an artist? CW: Yeah. SL: Maybe your relationship with her? CW: Yeah. Lisa Wilde. She teaches English and art at the Wildcat School in 00:02:00 Brooklyn, which is sort of one of the last chance schools for kids who have been kicked out of other schools. And she is a painter/draftsman. She's been doing a graphic novel about her experiences as a teacher called Young Miss that's really great. It's now in its third iteration. And so, yeah, and all of my family always encouraged me. But as an artist, I feel like she was particularly sensitized to what my needs might be. So she would give me like pencils and good paper and watercolors and stuff like that. And my other aunt, Roz, was also very helpful. She's a writer. [Roz Wilvenosi?], and she also is a creative individual. Was very supportive of me in specific ways that I think she was sensitive to, being somebody who's a creative in a world that may or may not value them. 00:05:36 SL: Is there anything that you'd like to add about-did you grow up around here? CW: Yeah. I grew up in Madison over on the West Side. SL: Yeah. CW: Near West High School. Madison was a great place to grow up. It was culturally and ethnically diverse. And especially through the university, there was exposure to all kinds of different ideas. We went to like see the gamelan orchestra when I was a kid. And they did the 00:03:00 whole, I think the Ramayana and Mahabharata cycle, which took like two days straight with the shadow puppets and stuff, and the orchestra. And going to see 2001 in the big auditorium here when I was a child was an incredibly moving experience. So you know, the music on the terrace, there was all kinds of exposure to really interesting people and ideas throughout my childhood. And I feel like a lot of that had to do with the way that Madison is as a town. And still is. I mean, just growing and burgeoning since then. SL: You also mentioned music being an influence. And I know I read a little bit about some of the books that the Kohler Art Library has, and how while you were making them you were listening to certain music. CW: Mm hmm. SL: Can you talk a little bit about how music influences your art making? 00:07:01 CW: For sure. I mean, I think particularly with books, because they are durational in nature, and sequential, there is a 00:04:00 connection with music in that there is sort of a journey that one goes on with music, as one does when one is reading a book. And then some of the ideas about how you sort of radically rethink what a book can be, I think was for me informed in some part by listening to sort of more radical jazz or experimental, avant garde music. Which was using the same instruments as everyone else had, but then making some very different music with it. So, music like Captain Beefheart or Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Orchestra, or Tom Waits or Stockhausen or Steve Reich, you know, made me think about music very differently and then how I could apply some of the principles that they were utilizing in making the music in the production of artifacts. So still having some of the same recognizable elements that one would find in any other book, but then changing them around to how somebody relates to those things as the reader, similarly to the musicians using the same instruments and time signatures and all that kind of stuff, but then making radically different music. And then I think there's also like this one with Tom Waits, he has all these real narrative stories. And sometimes this would creep into the image or the story that I was trying to tell with the work. SL: And did you choose certain music in particular because you wanted some of that to seep into the work? Or was it just kind of coincidental that you were listening to something in particular? CW: Well I think there's a synergy that happens. There would be a 00:05:00 mood that I would be in that the music would suit that the art was expressing. SL: Thank you. So what made you decide to choose to go to UW Madison for art, then? 00:09:21 CW: Well a lot of it had to do with the incredible resources that are present here. And the fact that I'm a state resident meant that I would be able to go here for very little money, instead of accruing a massive amount of debt. My sister went to Wesleyan and ended up getting out with a huge amount of debt. (laughs) And I think I paid off all of my loans and stuff within a year or two of leaving the UW. But I mean, I had access to painting studios, to printing studios, to sculpture studios, to the glass lab, in addition to being able to take classes in sociology and philosophy and English and history that would all fit into the same major for me. And particularly when I was going to school here in Madison, there was just a great assembly of minds and talents in terms of all the different departments, were not only great educators but really interesting artists in their own right. So it was pretty easy to make that decision to come here. SL: Sure. Can you talk a little bit about some of the classes that you took? I mean, it sounds like you might be just talking about general classes in other departments. But did you feel like there was a lot of kind of interdisciplinary-did you feel like your education was interdisciplinary? Were you working in different departments? Or were you focused in the art department? CW: I definitely was focused on the art department. But you know, I had a pretty voracious curiosity, which was fed by the 00:06:00 university. So I was interested, I took a class on the sociology of religion, which was a fascinating class. And then classes on Oriental philosophy, which informed my thinking. So there were classes like that that maybe in a more esoteric and nonlinear ways affected my practice as an artist. But I took glassblowing here, which, you know, it's an incredibly complicated and expensive thing to be able to do in the outside world. But here they give us 24-hour access. And there was great student support. So all of the students would help teach each other in addition to the professor Steve Feren, who was pretty accessible to all of us. You know, it's not something that I've ever done since I left here. But it was a fantastic experience. And as an aesthetic exercise, it was a wonderful learning process. Because it has very specific rules, and yet it's also very flexible and can do many different things. And so it may not have had a direct effect on my artistic practice in the sense that I'm not blowing glass still today. But I think it fed in, in a sort of interdisciplinary way, with the work that I was doing in other fields. I mainly was interested in painting when I was here. And was in this graduate level painting course where they gave you a studio with 24-hour access. Which was really important, because I pretty much wanted to work all the time. And similarly, great access with other students who were as passionate in their exploration of their work. And that's where I met Mark Wagner. And I had been publishing books just on my own, like zines, basically. And I showed them to him at one point. And he said, "Well, you've got to meet his guy Walter who does book arts and can teach you how to bind books properly." And so that kind of cross-pollination was encouraged here in a way that was really wonderful and productive. And so, 00:07:00 then in sculpture, I had George Cramer, and he was great. He was incredibly knowledgeable from everything from wood to metal to more experimental sculptural ideas. And also they had a program of working on how to show your work and how to write about it. And the critique system was very active here, which helped a lot with sort of language around the work that we were doing. You know, I think for some people the production of art is as mysterious to them as it is to other people. And to sort of demystify it and build language around the critique system was incredibly helpful. And I took some art history here, too, which was good. It was larger classes than I had wanted. I liked smaller class size, or one-on-one sessions with people where I could ask them more specific questions. So people like Bill Bunce or George Cramer or Walter Hamady were really 00:08:00 great. Because I could go and see them and just jawbone for a couple hours with them. And really get some sort of inside scoop from them on technique or history, various practitioners, different approaches, different materials and how one might use them. So, yeah, and I think it all sort of fed together. There was really a lot of interesting, a lot of interesting ideas floating around and a sense of open exploration that was encouraged. 00:15:30 SL: You mentioned that you had the opportunity to show your work and write about it. Could you talk a little bit more about that? CW: Well, both the painting and the sculpture departments would have a yearly show where the students would sort of gather up the work that they wanted to show. And I believe, too, there was another one that you had to sort of apply for, that the teacher would then sort of select from and curate the show. But you know, trying to provide a, like artist statement for a body of work was not something that I had much experience with previous to that. And luckily there was some 00:09:00 good guidance there to sort of help. They wouldn't, the teachers and grad TAs wouldn't encourage boiler plate. But they would give a lot of helpful hints and ideas to sort of think about in terms of trying to express linguistically what had been expressed otherwise through artistic expression or materials. So yeah, learning how to write and think critically about one's own work was something that was encouraged. SL: Okay. And then, I'm curious to know a little bit more about the zines that you were making. I know this might have been around the time when zines were really getting popular in the '90s, right? CW: Yeah. SL: Could you talk more about the zines that you were making then? CW: Sure. I mean, it basically was an offshoot of like underground, punk, anarchist culture, to make one's own publications. Because a lot of the publications that were out there didn't look like or have anything to do with the things that me and my friends were interested in. So for instance, I had a friend who worked at the Kinko's, the copy shop here in town. And after hours, he would let me and my friends come in and experiment with the machines. So changing out the toners, trying to do multiple color registrations on single sheets just by changing the toner and the images. Moving the images as the scan was occurring, to see if we could get distortions. Copying copies of copies of copies of copies to get distortions from the lensing process and the printing process of the electrostatic machine. Trying to print black and white copies over color copies. Copying 00:10:00 onto transparencies. You know, a lot of the sort of interest for me was trying to see how multiple print processes would work on the same surface at that time. So doing a black and white xerox over a color xerox, and then doing letterpress and silkscreen over that, so that there'd be this overlay of these different print processes, each of which had their own sort of hallmarks or modes of reproduction that were very clearly different from the others. So there'd be these layering effects. And those kind of like explorations in zines were, at the time, kind of novel. And I was really just kind of into it to make these cool objects that my friends would collaborate with me on. And then there was only generally enough copies for them and a couple other people. And they were just mainly something cool that we could make for ourselves that didn't rally have anything to do with like selling them, or selling 00:11:00 ourselves, or, you know. (laughs) It was definitely a part of the sort of DIY culture of the time, because you know, I guess there was a certain impatience with the structures that were already in place for the distribution of music or artwork. And so we just were all a part of this moment where we just decided to do it ourselves. And you know, especially at that time I was traveling, you know, on my own steam, to Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Chicago. And a lot of the people who I was staying with in the sort of anarchist squats and stuff like that were just producing these zines about whatever they wanted. And there wasn't any sort of oversight, and there wasn't really any everyone attached to it. It was really sort of for the community, by the community. And some of them tended towards the more literary. Some of them more collage. You know, sort of Xerolage, like very sort of exploratory and experimental, like mIEKAL aND and Lyx Ish was from the Dreamtime Village with their imprint, the Xexoxial editions 00:12:00 came out with all these crazy looking zines that didn't look like anything else. And those were really inspirational to me, and I think a lot of the people who I was hanging out with at the time. And so what was fascinating was the collision of that DIY culture with the traditions of traditional bookbinding and book arts that occurred in the '90s that's now borne all kinds of beautiful fruit over the last 30 years or so, 25 years. Because then sort of these underground techniques of reproduction and sort of anarchist politics that were dealing with queer identity and nontraditional housing, and all kinds of pretty radical ideas clashed and confronted and eventually engaged with these, what had become basically an underground of traditional book arts whose really still in a stage where it was being revivified by people, basically from the '60s on. All of these things were going the way of the dinosaur. And a 00:13:00 bunch of artists revivified traditional papermaking and printing with the letterpress. Traditional binding techniques. People like Keith Smith cataloged all of these different ways that one could bind by hand, and then shard those with other practitioners, that they could then also share and propagate those ideas. And then when those, particularly binding and printing techniques, mashed up with the underground zine community, it then sort of made this hybrid art form with book arts and zines coming together to make some of the, I think, more interesting expressions of book arts that are happening now today. And many of the people who are making books now take those things for granted. But they were really sort of happening at the time with digital culture and more different more egalitarian or democratic ways of reproduction, meeting 00:14:00 these sort of highly elite, elitist systems of letterpress and hand binding. So people like Ker-bloom!, like Art News, Karen Switzer, who were doing zines about anarchism and bike culture and queer identity, but doing them with handset lead type and printing them in large enough editions that they were inexpensive, really fulfilling the promise of the freedom of the press, which had gotten very sort of elite and exclusive, but then also opened up with that influence and influx of sort of fresh energy from the zine culture. SL: So how did you find these zines? Did you find them on your travels? Or were they on campus somewhere that you were able to see them? 00:24:17 CW: I had a lot of friends who were creative types, musicians and artists and stuff. So we would just exchange them with each other. So my friend Matthew Rudy, who was going to school in Olympia, was really into the sort of Northwest zine scene. And he would send me 00:15:00 examples of the ones that he had made or that he thought I would be interested in. My friend Kent Winkler was living in San Francisco. And he was really into those and would send me zines that he had found from San Francisco. And then I would send those guys my work. My friend Kurt Allerslev was in New York and he would find these interesting ones on the Lower East Side and send those to me, and I would send him ones. And all of those people would collaborate with me on zines that I was making, and I would collaborate on their zines. And all of it was really sub rosa. It really was not about any kind of larger cultural exposure. It was really just sort of for us, by us. And there was a sense, I think, at the time, too, especially with seeing some of the music that had been like that become overexposed, that it was important that we had this sort of interstitial space that was hidden away from the sort of mass media glare and the commodification of our own rebellion. That we could have something that was under the radar, that we could express ourselves in as radically as we wanted to without any fear of repercussion or of overexposure. Because a 00:16:00 lot of it was so weird that it wouldn't have had resonance with anybody else anyway. (laughs) SL: Well, did you share those, then? You shared them with Mark, I take it. Because he connected you with Walter Hamady. What did Walter and the other book artists in the program think when you shared those? CW: Well, Mark was into it. He collaborated with me on a lot of stuff, and I with him on a lot of stuff. We both had our own independent work as well, but there was a lot of cross-pollination and collaboration that went on. We were really excited about what we could sort of bring, each person bringing their own skill set to a problem and then seeing what would be the final result. Not necessarily having a final goal in mind beyond the production of the artifact and then how it came about, and the process would feed into itself until we would make something. But I think Walter thought most of the stuff that we were doing was terrible. Like it was ugly and misshapen and crazy looking, and completely antithetical to his design sense. Which 00:17:00 made me think we were on the right track, you know? (SL laughs) Because his stuff was so beautiful and considered and elegant and classical. And radical, but in ways that were so subtle that it was like a burlesque dancer, or something like that. Not showing everything, just like a little hint here and there. And he was part of a dialog and a discourse with book arts that for most of the practitioners up until him, he was a complete bomb-throwing radical. I mean, he was just a wild man as far as they were concerned. But to us, who were making things with anything we could get our hands on-rubber stamps and xerox and silkscreens and all this other stuff-he was just like, this is a mess and it's completely crazy. But I think, you know, he was a good sport about it and had some constructive things that were useful for us to think about going forward in terms of craft and why certain things had developed the way that they had. It wasn't because people were uptight. It was because they tried it all these other ways, and the best way to do it was this way, because otherwise the thing would fall apart. And if you wanted to design it to fall apart, then by all means, keep doing it the way you were doing it. but if you wanted it to stay together and have some greater utility beyond a few, twenty people 00:18:00 looking at it, then there were ways to do that, too. Bill Bunce, however, I think he had a much broader vision on these things and was very encouraging to I mean, everybody in the Madison crew how was at the time, he really encouraged everybody very generously to explore the field and was always available for us in his office. He would have books that he thought we should look at that would either challenge us or encourage us. And he was just a capacious intellect, and just a huge-hearted man with a brilliant mind. And just was incredibly helpful in informing us of the breadth of what was happening, even at the time. So that we could see something that was very conservatively made with all of the sort of proper tenets of craft being manifest in it, and then see something that was similarly gorgeously considered and executed, but was radically different in its presentation. So you know, something like what Walter was doing, or something like what 00:19:00 Ken Campbell was doing. So he would show us Ten Years in Uzbekistan, which was one of the most powerful artist books I had ever seen, and still is. And the printing technique is par excellent. The design of it is spectacular. The typography is, you know, incredibly imaginative and powerful. The editing of the text and what text he chose was incredibly moving political, dealing with the history of design and publication within a publication about design and publication. You know, so there were self-referential aspects to the work that we were seeing in that way, but also in Walter's, where he was talking in the process of the book that you're reading about the process of making the book that you're reading. So there was all kinds of diversity there that we could engage with. And Bunce was just a very inclusive guy. He wanted everybody in the discourse. And would put up shows regularly for us to engage with that were incredibly well thought out, beautifully put together and provocative. And so when I came in with 00:20:00 some of my initial attempts at artist books and zines, he was very encouraging and interested and engaged. One of the things that really I remember striking me early on was that he would read every page. He would look at every page very carefully from beginning to end, no matter how crazy the book was. And you know, other people would just sort of page through a little bit here and there, and they wouldn't bother to engage with the narrative or the writing. That was not the way that Bill was. He was always very focused, and then would give a very insightful critique. Sometimes explaining what he considered to be shortcomings of the work, especially after he'd asked what the goals were for the publication, and whether those goals had been met or not, in his estimation. But then also point out certain aspects of the production that he 00:21:00 had considered to be very successful and imaginative. So all of that was incredibly helpful. 00:32:14 And I asked many of the people who were both teaching and being taught at the university to collaborate with me on books, which was incredibly exciting. So Marshall Weber was teaching a class on non-static forms, and I asked him to contribute some work into a series of books that I was putting out at the time called The Tragic Books. And he was like, "Sure, great." And he had been in the San Francisco zine scene, so he was completely comfortable with it. George Cramer collaborated with me on artist books. There was a number of different people who were teaching here who had no problem in collaborating with a student on an artwork, especially books, which seemed to have this kind of democratic, egalitarian quality to them for collaborative 00:22:00 adventure. I felt there was a lot of really good, positive back and forth between the students and the faculty. And so even works that were sort of outside of most people's normal sphere, and book arts at the time still was considered to be kind of like this strange hybrid, because it was sort of about printing, it was sort of about sculpture, it was sort of about literature and poetry. Sort of about craft. But at the same time, it was an amalgam of all of those different things. And because it wasn't spectacular in its presentation, i.e. it wasn't a 12-foot-long mural, it was a book that you held in your lap and one person looked at at a time, that intimacy appealed to me. and it was something that at the time was still pretty, I think pretty radical. It is, I think, still today. As a means of expression it's a very intimate, one-on-one kind of communication. But most of my professors really encouraged that. They were 00:23:00 excited to see it, as weird as some of it was. SL: Can you go back and talk a little bit about your relationship with Bill Bunce? Did he come to your classes and talk to you about resources in the library? Because he was the director at the Kohler Art Library. CW: Mm hmm. SL: Or were your teachers telling you to go to the library, and that's how you met him? And where did these critiques take place? 00:34:38 CW: He would, I think he would come once a semester to critique, you know, Walter had weekly assignments that we had to do. And I think Bill would come to one class a semester to act as a guest critique. Patrick Flynn did that as well. He came in and did a guest critique for the collage class and illustration class with Walter. But once I found out where Bill was, and that he was generally in his office, I would just go by there and bother him. Initially I made appointments and stuff like that. But then once we became friends, I would just 00:24:00 stop by and you know, talk with him about anything from art history to literature to the history of the press or book binding or different printing techniques. And he was just an incredible intellect with a vast knowledge base that he could draw on. And so he was an incredible resource. And knew his collection like down to the last staple. So if you were talking about one subject, he would be like, "Oh, what you need to see is this thing." He just, he had that card catalog mind where he could just pull all of these different references. And then some of them would be very like out of left field. Like I wouldn't understand why he had showed me a certain thing until much later. And I'd be like oh, now I understand why he thought of this thing when we were talking about that. So, yeah, he was an incredible resource. And he had a great staff there that supported him. And I found out later, too, that he was an incredible advocate for the book arts programming in terms of the university and its funding. Much later, with the book mobile and Booklyn, when I was on sort of the other side of the table trying to represent these different artists and their works to institutions nationwide and eventually internationally, the question of institutional support for this kind of work became much more interesting to me. And the politics of it became clearer. So, you know, it was then that I 00:25:00 started to really understand and appreciate a whole other side of Bill, and how much he had advocated for this work and these artists at a time when funding could have gone easily elsewhere. He made sure that there was funding, and twisted arms, rattled cages and convinced the administration to support this work so that there would be this incredible resource. Which is, at this point, I think, one of the best in the world. An incredibly diverse body of work here that has lots of historical precedent within it. So he has Goya's Caprichos and the Disasters of War prints. And those are right next to Ken Campbell, for instance, or Karen Heft, Jeff Morin. He was able to juxtapose all of those things and see them as being a part of a larger narrative. And his advocacy for that as a teaching resource was just unparalleled. And in almost 30 years of experience now in the field, there's very few people who are like him. He was really kind of suis generis. He was a very unique individual in terms of his vision and his advocacy for this 00:26:00 work. 00:38:24 SL: Thank you. I wondered, because you did mention the book mobile, did you want to talk a bit about the founding of Artichoke Yink Press, and then the book mobile? Could you tell me the story behind the name of Artichoke Yink Press? CW: (laughs) Well so that was the name I gave my zine press was Artichoke Yink. And I knew I needed some sort of a name for it. And I tried to make ink out of artichokes. So I tried to boil down artichokes until I got this ink. And my idea was then I was going to use that ink to print books with. And part of it was that the artichoke seemed to me like an analog for a book. So it's like you had to get through sort of all these delicious layers to get to the sort of meaty, delicious, nutty center. And I liked that. Also, it's my favorite vegetable. I think it's a beautiful plant. And at the time, I didn't really think much about it. I think if I had given it more consideration, I might have come up with a sort of more pretentious and august name for it. (laughs) But I didn't, and stuck with it. And then the "yink" sort of came from George Harriman's crazy cat. He sort of spelled everything phonetically. And he would always refer to ink as "yink." And also Dr. Seuss, there's a character in one of, I think it's "One Fish, Two Fish, Blue Fish," is also referred to as a yink who drinks 00:27:00 ink. So that's where that came from. So, yeah, I just sort of stayed with it. Once I found out about how cataloging worked, I was just like oh, it's just going to be too complicated if I change the name. (laughs) Plus it was sort of confusing enough that it sort of stuck out a little bit as being a different thing. But yeah, I mean once I started making books, because the zines were really in some ways sketches for what the books would eventually become. And once I learned traditional binding techniques and different ways to print books, and different approaches to making artist books, I kind of stopped making zines. I still put out some sort of more accessible, less expensive work. But I started to get really interested in the mechanics and craft of books and binding and printing. So the books became more complicated. And they stayed under the rubric of Artichoke Yink. And when I moved to New York after graduating from here, I looked up Tony Zwicker, who was one of only a few artist book dealers in the world at the time. 00:28:00 And she lived in this really fantastic apartment in the National Arts Building on Gramercy Park in New York. Just this incredibly glamorous woman. And just a house full of beautiful books. And most of the people who were making artist books, both in Europe and in the United States, wanted her to represent their work. And I showed her some of my early works. And she was like, "These are great. I'll take a couple of them and see if I can sell them." And I was working at a paper store at the time called Kate's Papery. And I was a paper salesman of like sort of very rare and sort of unique papers from all over the world, which was a great job for me as a paper artist and book artist. I got a discount from working there, and would do demonstrations with the paper. So I got to keep the demos that I made and stuff like that. but I wasn't making a lot of money. And then I was in this teeny apartment with Dylan Graham, who I moved to New York with. And we were making all these books together just for kicks, really. And I would keep dropping off more and more books with Tony. And she'd sell maybe a book a 00:29:00 month. Which was great, but it wasn't a lot of money. And the books were starting to pile up. SL: Sure. 00:42:43 CW: And when I was complaining to Walter about that, he was like, "Well, why don't you just go to the institutions directly?" And I was like, "I hadn't really thought of that, and I wouldn't know who to talk to." He's like, "Well, if you take some of my books along, I'll send you a list of five different institutions and the names of the curators, and see if you can get an appointment with them." So the first book mobile appointment--and when I spoke with Tony about it, she was fine with that. She was like, "Yeah, do it. That would be great. I can only do so much for you. Maybe I can give some more names." So she gave me some more names. SL: Oh, interesting. 00:30:00CW: And told them to mention her name, as did Walter. And then when I talked with Bill about it, he was like, "Oh, I know that guy very well. Tell him that I say hello," or whatever. And so the first appointment was with Bobby Rainwater at the New York Public Library. And I had a couple of months to prepare for it. And told all of my other friends who were making books, "Hey, I'm going to go and see this guy at the rare books department at the New York Public Library. If you want to, I'm taking other people's books with me." So Karen Heft sent some books, Jeff Morin sent some books, Mark Wagner sent some books, Marshall Weber sent some books, Kurt Allerslev sent some books and Scott Teplin sent some books, and Walter sent some books. So I had all of my work and their work in sort of a big suitcase. And I came stumping into the public library. And Bobby Rainwater was there. And he was incredibly generous with his 00:31:00 time. So I just showed him all of this work. And I had a little sort of list with the name of each press, the title of the book, its edition size and its price. And I hadn't worked out any of the sort of business angle of it. I just literally was like, as long as I'm going, I should show him this work, because most people wouldn't know that it even is out there. Because there was no distribution network for these works. There was Tony Zwicker on one coast and Califia Books on the other. And then if somebody was you know, engaged enough to do it, they could show them to whatever institutions were nearby them. Some people did that. Most people didn't. The would sometimes send out a prospectus to the universities and private collections that had interests in these kinds of things, which could result in them making a sale, but most times did not. But Bobby Rainwater bought like a couple of books from that first meeting. And that was enough encouragement for everybody to say, well, you should do more of 00:32:00 this. And I wanted to, because he had bought one of my books. And he bought one of Walter's. And Walter was like, "Well, what do you want as a percentage for the sale?" I was like, "I didn't do it for that." You know, like, "You were such a great teacher to me. I don't want any money." He's like, "Ridiculous. I'm giving you 25 percent of the sale." And sent me a check. And it was a big enough check that I think it paid for half a month's rent. So I was like, maybe there's something to this. I wonder if I could make a living as a book artist, and as a person representing the work of other book artists. And so, that was probably about '96, '97, somewhere in there. SL: Okay. And you graduated '95, right? 00:46:17 CW: Yeah. Yeah. So it was probably '96. So every four or five months I would go and see Bobby Rainwater. But then I also started to see people at the Museum of Modern Art, at Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, NYU, and then eventually 00:33:00 going up to Yale, Harvard, Wesleyan, Brown, RISDE. Each one of the places that I would go to would then give me more names and numbers of other places that I could go to and recommendations on who I should see. And that was sort of the burgeoning beginning of the book mobile. We found out, I think in about '98, that there was an organization in Canada called the Mobile Livre, which was also book mobile, that was doing the same thing but in Canada. That was the same time period where my friend Kurt and Stacy and I decided that we wanted to open a zine and bookshop up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And we wanted to have bookbinding classes and zine design classes and then have it be a point of distribution for artist books and zines. Because the book mobile was going along well enough that we thought we might be able to make it into an actual business. And it was when I was moving from the Lower East Side to, moved to Brooklyn with my friend Kurt. He had a truck, so we'd loaded up all of my stuff in the truck and we were driving across the Williamsburg Bridge, I misread the sign that said turn off here for Brooklyn. And I thought it 00:34:00 said turn off here for Booklyn. And I was like, Booklyn, ha ha, that would make a great name for that bookstore. And Kurt was like, "Oh, my God, that's it. That's the name. that's totally what we have to use." So then at the time what we were doing was trying to produce a catalog every year where each page would be a book. There'd be a section for each press. They could either design their page or we would design it for them. But they were just these post-bound, very simple to produce, little catalogs with linoleum letterpress covers. And then all of the contact information for each press, and then the work that they were offering through the book mobile. And that's when we changed the name to Booklyn, to the Booklyn book mobile. And one of the ideas at that time was that each press would represent each other. So sailorBOY Press with Jeff Morin here at Stevens Point would represent all of the Booklyn artists from all over the world in Stevens Point and the area around it. And Bleed Ink in the Lower East Side would represent all of the artists from the rest of the country. We would all sort of work as a collective representing each other. It didn't end up being that in actual practice. But one of the ideas, too, that we found through the book mobile explorations was that many institutions did not have direct contact with the artists whose work they had collected. So we wanted them to have direct connection with the artists whose work they collected so that there was closing of a gap there. and that they could have direct connection to these institutions meant that they could how them, hey, you have those two books, but I've made six other books in the interim, which you should see if you want to have like a good representation of my work. 00:35:00 And Booklyn didn't interfere with that, but instead tried to encourage that, just to make the whole scene stronger, and to sort of take away some of the power, too, from the institutional structures that had been built up around the distribution of artist books. So the places like Tony Zwicker or Califia wouldn't necessarily connect the artist to the institution. And they would sort of guard the institutional information, because it was sort of their, what they saw, at least, as being proprietary information. But it was a force that was sort of counterproductive for the field in general. Because if the institution wanted to connect with the artist, say, to come and do a lecture or a visiting professorship, they wouldn't be able to get to them, you know? So it ended up being this thing that we could just sort of Gordian knot cut that whole sort of issue out of the loop and just make this direct connection between the institutions and the 00:36:00 artists. And then upon moving to Brooklyn, we found that the rents were already too high to get a storefront. So we started building Booklyn at the loft space that I had built out with [Sean Skuler?] who was also from the UW here, and my friend M.T. Karthik. And we basically homesteaded an old rag factory with a bunch of other people, built out the spaces. Eventually both Sean and Karthik left and Mark Wagner moved in. And he brought the press that he and Sean and I had bought from Karen Heft when I still lived in Madison. And we put that in the living room of the loft. And that became the press for Booklyn. And Marshall Weber, who had started an organization called Artist Television Access in San Francisco had some exposure and experience with starting a not for profit. Peter Spagnuolo, who was one of the people who had initially homesteaded the building was a lawyer. So he knew how to do the sort of legal structural aspects of making a not for profit happen. And Kurt Allerslev was working at a law firm at the time, as was Dylan Graham, so 00:37:00 they knew about the sort of language around these kind of things. So we decided to incorporate as a not for profit. Because what was the book mobile, which was just a small group of fun friends numbering about 10 to 15 people was now 50 different presses and artists from all over the country and some from Europe. So we decided that it needed some more formal structure. And being a not for profit was kind of the best way to go. So we incorporated and made, basically the people who were responsible for doing most of the work in Booklyn, the sort of different parts of the structural aspect of a not for profit. So the secretary, the treasurer, president, vice president, all those things, came from this group of friends very organically that had come together but then became a formalized structure going forward as a corporation order to sort of best serve the community, both the institutions that we were taking work to, but also the artists 00:38:00 that we were representing. And that was basically in '98, '99. 00:53:59 SL: Okay. So how did Tony react when, you know, it turned from just you going to different places to a larger group? Did you hear anything from her? CW: She encouraged the whole thing. SL: She did. CW: She was very supportive of it all. She really loves, loved book arts. Loved many of the artists whose work was being represented. She didn't end up, you know, breaking her relationships with any of those people. She kept on representing them, too, because she had a different sort of clientele base than mainly institutional structures, which is what we were interested in. You know, the universities, the libraries for museums, private institutions, that was sort of the focus of first the book mobile and then Booklyn. But no, she was incredibly encouraging along the way. And subsequently there's been other artist-run organizations that have cropped up to sort of meet the need of the distribution of all of this work that has sort of come bubbling up. No, she was great. She was very encouraging. SL: What about some of the book collaborations that we have here at the Kohler Art Library or at UW Madison? Are there any ones that you'd like to kind of talk a little bit about the genesis of those? CW: Yeah. I mean, I think there's 00:39:00 actually some, when I was looking through the catalog listing, there was some that should be in there that I didn't see in there, and I don't know why that is. Yeah. I mean, for instance, there's one called Things that I made with Sean [Skuler?]. And he was doing his work here in the etymology department, entomology department. So he was learning all about bugs and stuff. But he was fascinated in book arts, and took some classes. And learned how to bind, learned how to print on the letterpress. Lived with Mark Wagner for a while, so he really learned how to do the press, keep it in good shape and everything. And he was a very mechanically minded guy, kind of a brilliant fellow. And we always just got a kick out of how different we were as the way that we thought and made things. He was always very precise, and I was like a little bit more, shall we say, improvisatory than he was. And so he came to visit Dylan and I in New York. And we decided that one of our goals for that visit was to produce a book together. SL: Okay. 00:40:00 00:56:36 CW: So we made that book together. And then I think a year or two later I was in Madison and had brought some Booklyn work to show Bill. And he liked that. And so that's just one example. And the collaborative process with him was very organic. He would sort of come up with an idea and I would problematize it for him, or come up with another idea that this could be changed in this way or so. So like for instance with that one, we wanted to make the pages have like a joined fore-edge, so that we could have materials that were embedded in the pages from the other side looking through, and then figure out how to sort of paste the book throughout that. And then how best to use non-archival materials, like collage materials from old books and magazines. How could we use those in archival ways so that they might be able to sort of have a longer life. And then using different sort of like using punches and stuff like that for illustration. How to sort of violate the page's sanctity by punching through at multiple 00:41:00 levels. Or having it reveal the narrative in larger and larger levels as you went through the book and stuff. So that there are ways that we're sort of playing with the sequencing of the physical object. So those were just sort of organic discussions that developed, and were sort of very playful. Like, for instance, another one of the books you have here is called The Willow and the Birch. And the poem came first, and then there was ideas about how it could be best illustrated. Then Mark Wagner set the type so that it would be nice and legible. And I did all of these sort of experimental processes to make the illustrations. So some etching, like dry point etchings. Some spit bites. Xerox. Letterpress. SL: Can you explain what spit bite is? 00:58:52 CW: Also know as sort of mezzotint. SL: Okay. CW: So you know, it's just like the plate has 00:42:00 a rosin on it that you know, is sort of speckled. And then when you put it into the acid bath, the resisted areas from the rosin stay risen, and then the bitten away areas are where the ink resides in the intaglio process. So yeah, there was multiple print processes on that. And then over all of it would be the letterpress sort of telling the story of the poem that was being illustrated by all of these different materials. And I think I bound that maybe with the help of one of the Booklyn interns, Jamie Munkatchy. So a lot of books lend themselves to collaboration, because somebody can be highly skilled in one area of the production aspect. So for instance, Sara Parkel, who's another person you may want to speak with for this. Brilliant binder. Just incredibly imaginative, very careful. And came up with all of these really interesting structures. And I mean, that was sort of always the thing that was great about collaborating with books is that people were excited about one particular aspect of the process. So somebody really loved the printing part of it. Somebody really loved the binding part of it. Some people really loved the typography part of it. Some people really like the casing or the making the book boxes for protecting them. So there could be all of these different ways that people could sort of engage on a single sort of editioned object. And it would be that the parts were larger than, the sum of the parts was larger than the whole. Yeah, so that's another one that was here that was pretty collaborative in nature. Regional Museum is another one where Adam Janusz did 00:43:00 illustration for it, I did illustration for it, Sara Parkel designed the binding and set the type and did the printing on the letterpress. I think the casing was done by Mark Wagner. So you know, all of these different skill sets would come in in different combinations for the production of these artifacts. SL: Great. Thank you very much. So I wondered if you, I take it that you were in New York for September 11, 2001. CW: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. SL: Can you talk a little bit about like if you remember what you were doing that day? 01:01:31 CW: Yeah. I was living with Mark Wagner at the time. And I was asleep. And he came storming in from his girlfriend's house. And he was like, "Christopher, Christopher, you have to get up." And so I got up and wandered out. And across the river from us, the first tower was already smoking. And we were both just kind of stunned. We didn't know what to think of it. And ostensibly at the time we knew something had run into it. Because he knew that like a plane, and we thought it was a small plane, like a crop plane or something like that had sort of gone off course and just run into it. And we had a telescope set up so that we could sort of look across the river. We were right on the East River, on the Brooklyn side in Green Point. So we could see sort of the whole city from basically like 34th Street, well basically up to the Queensboro Bridge at 59th Street, all the way down to the Lower East Side. We had this kind of incredible expanse, because at that point, Green Point had not been built up yet. It was still pretty wild and crazy. And so I took the telescope and 00:44:00 focused it on the building. And once I got it into focus, I could see that people were jumping out of the building, and that it was on fire. And that's when the sort of severity of it really hit. And we ran up onto the roof of the building. And I would say there was probably 20, 20 people or more from the building all up there, all looking at it. And while we're all watching, the second plane came and hit. And you could hear an audible gasp from the entire city. Like everybody had stopped doing whatever they were doing at that point already and were staring at this because it was such an incredible spectacle. Those buildings were so enormous. You could see them from anywhere. Like anywhere that you were in Brooklyn, New Jersey, Queens, Manhattan, anywhere you were, you could see them. So the entire city was already stopped, watching this thing. And, yeah, this audible gasp, like inhale and gasp occurred. And then pretty much people 00:45:00 started losing it. I mean, everyone started crying. We had figured out that each building could hold about thirty thousand people. And we had assumed that they were filled. So we were just thinking about the people in those buildings. And we were all just up there, like holding each other and crying for a while when the first building collapsed. Then it wasn't a gasp. It was like a cry or a wail. Like the whole city just erupted. Yeah, I mean it's still the most awful thing that I've ever experienced in my life. And at the time we basically thought that the building was filled with thirty thousand people. So we thought we had just sort of witnessed mass murder, basically. And then the second building collapsed. And this giant just plume of fire and smoke and glass-it was just a spectacle beyond any reckoning. And shortly thereafter, the jets came in. So the military jets started circling the island. We found out that the Pentagon had been hit as well. And pretty much everybody thought we were sort of entering into World War Three. That this was the opening salvo of a huge battle. And we had no idea where it was coming from or what the motivations were for it. And then, for the next, I don't know, four or five 00:46:00 months, everything was coated in dust, and the smell of the burning buildings and everything in them was in everybody's clothes and nostrils for a very long time. At the next Booklyn meeting, because we had weekly meetings at that point, we all just like cried together, you know. The city was really, really different. Everyone was very subdued. Wherever you would go, there was somebody crying. There were signs up everywhere for lost loved ones. And the military presence was everywhere very quickly. They shut down all of the bridges and all of the subways, and there were people with machine guns everywhere, and tanks everywhere, and anti-personnel craft everywhere. It was horrific. But out of that experience, and after we had sort of wept for a while together and tried to sort of speak some good words, we decided that we needed to make a publication about what we were going through. And so I started collecting poetry from all of the different poets that I knew. And all of them were writing like mad, trying to get the stuff out of their head. Marshall Weber started to collect all kinds of photographs. Allison Williams, who was a designer, book designer, that was working with Booklyn at the time, started to help pull together all of this work. And on her first iteration, the printing got sort of messed up so that 00:47:00 some of the pages were upside down and some of them were right side up. And when we were looking at the first bound edition, it made us like spin the book. And Marshall was like, "We should design the book to do that, so that it's constantly disorienting the reader, to give them a sense of what we were going through." Because there was nothing, it was like the floor got taken out from underneath us. Nothing made sense anymore. Just trying to get to work was insane. And you know, people would be breaking down into tears and sobbing and walking around like zombies for months afterwards. So it was a really crazy time period. There was, however, this sort of brief moment where everyone was incredibly nice to each other on the subways and stuff. And very polite and caring for each other. And random acts of kindness were happening between strangers all the time. There was also a sense of defiance, like we weren't going to let 00:48:00 this determine whether we were going to be denizens of this city, citizens with one another. So there was a lot of protection of, particularly like people who might otherwise be threatened. So that was kind of beautiful to see. But out of that experience for Booklyn, we made this book called Eleven, in which the poetry of all of these different poets who were reacting to 9/11 and the aftereffects and photography were included into this book. The covers of which just have the absence of two buildings depicted in black velveteen. And in the back of each one of the books was, I recorded all the poets reading their poetry. I think there should be a copy of that hear at the UW. In any case, it was a really powerful book and a necessary activity for the organization to focus all of our grief and process what we were going through. Yeah, it was, I mean basically nothing was ever the same after that for everybody involved. But it was, I think, really important that we reaffirmed our mission as artists and bookmakers and publishers to 00:49:00 produce an object that was able to memorialize and express the grief and the rage and the longing and loss that we all had experienced as a result of the events of 2001, 9/11. Yeah. 01:10:49 SL: Thank you for sharing them. I wondered if, because you also, you work a lot in collage, if you'd be willing to talk a little bit about how your collage work has evolved over the years? CW: Yeah. So I was mainly painting and drawing and making sculpture here in my first couple of years. And then once I was introduced to Walter and Bill, I started to focus more on my book work, which had up to that point just been about zines. And one of the things that I noticed with Walter's work is that he was employing collage, but in edition in the books. So he would edition a collage with some slight variations, but basically having something so that you could see continuity through the edition of 125 books or whatever, but that there was this hand 00:50:00 attention going on with each one of them. And I loved the intimacy of that sort of mark making, you know? And so he offered a collage class and it was really a beautiful exploration of this kind of bastardized medium. It wasn't painting, it wasn't printing, it wasn't drawing. It was its own sort of thing. And it was very much a modernist exploration of making artwork from ephemera that was going on in the age of mechanical reproduction. And you know, in the classes that I taught on collage, I would sort of put the instinct, if you will, to collage, as being a much older thing than mechanical reproduction. So the animal-headed gods in Hindu culture. So for instance Ganesh has the head of an elephant because it was placed on there after one vengeful god ripped off the head of a person. (laughs) So that idea, then, of like putting two things together that weren't the same to make a new thing is a much older idea. I mean, the Egyptian gods, too, similarly have the heads of animals but the bodies of humans. But then, 00:51:00 you know, with photography and mechanical reproduction, lithography and chrono-lithography and photolithography, printed materials suddenly exploded in a way that they hadn't before. And Walter gave us this great sort of history on that. And our textbook was Une Semaine de Bonte by Max Ernst, which had a fantastic story, both as a book art object as well as a beautiful example of collage. And so each class, we had a different assignment. Some of them were more assemblage-based, where we were taking objects. And some of them were more flat and paper-related collage explorations. And he got Patrick Flynn, who was the art director at The Progressive magazine to come in and do a guest critique with us on illustration. So we had to choose a subject and illustrate it, and then he would come in and critique that. which was great to have a professional who worked at this national level right here in Madison from this radical publication that had a great history come in and give us a very seasoned and generous critique of 00:52:00 our work. But once I started to do collage for that class and integrate it with my drawing and painting practices, it became an obsession for me. And it felt like, too, where painting had so many practitioners over so many thousands of years, collage was still new. That there was new territory to be explored with it. So I started mainly using like old magazines and ephemera. So like tickets and cigar labels and things like that. And trying to figure out how to cut very precisely with X-Acto blades, and how to mount things onto archival surfaces so that they would last longer, and how to seal things so that they wouldn't oxidize with the exposure to light or different atmospheres. So became very sort of interested in both the technical aspects of making collage, but also just inspired by the process of making things. And the first book that I 00:53:00 ever sold to the University of Wisconsin, called, I believe, Bad Luck, Nonsense, Unlisted, Untitled, or something like that, was all collage. And I had a job in New York City, an internship. And every night I would come home and make another collage. And that was my sort of artistic practice at the time. It was sort of all I could get time in for was making one collage a night. But I did it all in this book, or two books, actually, because by the middle of the summer I'd overrun the first book and started a new one. And made my first paper in the bathtub of my Brooklyn apartment with my girlfriend on the roof. You know, it was this really fun process to make those books. And when I showed them to Bill, he was really taken by them and really liked them. So he bought them for the collection. And it was like this amazing thing, like I had not really even conceived of them being something that anybody else would be interested in besides me and maybe a couple of my friends like Bill. But Bill also saw them in his professional capacity as being interesting works for the collection. And any text that was in them was used in the service of illustration. It wasn't necessarily representative. It was all sort of these rebus-like collage explorations on each page. And that sort of was a big shot in the arm in 00:54:00 encouragement to keep on going with my collage practice. And when I moved to New York, I continued making collage. And started to do things where I was basically painting with paper. So I would tear lots of different colors up and use those as sort of bits of paint, if you will. And use punches of different sizes to make different sort of chunks of color or texture and use those in addition to the reconfiguring of figurative elements in printed magazine form. Then I got an assignment from The Progressive magazine to do an illustration on political action committees, PACs. This was before Citizens United had allowed for a corporate entity to be considered an individual. So political action committees at the time were the sort of workaround for large corporations to get their political agendas through the governmental structures. And particularly this article was focused on Republican political action committees. So I thought I would do a piece that somehow represented money's influence on politics. And since it was the Republicans, I would do an elephant, also known as a pachyderm. So it was political action pachyderm committee. So I made it out of dollar bills. And the use of money as a collage material was something I had explored before. Walter had already been doing some elements of using money in his collages. And my friend and professor at the time at university, Marshall Weber, had done 00:55:00 a show in San Francisco called United States of Americana, in which the one defining element throughout all of the works in it was the use of actual dollar bills. Which at the time was pretty radical. Nobody had really ever done that. And there was some question about the legality of using legal tender in the production of artworks. So I spoke with Marshall to make sure it was cool that I used this material. Like I wasn't going to sort of step on something that he considered a proprietary, or something that was only associated with him. And he encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do. And I had been collecting bills from all over the world from travel, as well as I worked here at a place called Buy and Sell, which I don't think exists anymore. But it was like a clearinghouse for things that would, like when a house would go up for auction, Buy and Sell would come in and get all of the furniture, or all of the phones, or all of the artwork, and then resell it. So anytime that the old paper money would come through there, I would get that stuff. And I'd just been collecting all this stuff. So I did that illustration for The Progressive, for Patrick Flynn, who was the art director and sort of helped 00:56:00 me sort of figure out how it was going to be presented. And then I kind of was like well this is an interesting idea, this cutting up of money, because it made me start questioning what money was and how it affected people's relationships with one another. So from that point onwards, I started to use more and more money in the collages, until it was all money. And always with kind of a political bent to it. Because to me, I had fairly radical politics at that point that were sort of anarcho-syndicalist, anti-capitalist, more socialist if anything. And I saw money, particularly fiat currency, as being a symbolic representation of a system of power that created more separation than it created unity. That it encouraged a way of valuating life and experience and people that was perverse and anti-human. And so I tried to figure out different ways to represent that, those ideas, with the material itself. And about, let's see, about a year and a half after I started that exploration, Mark moved, Mark Wagner moved to Brooklyn. Because we had been friends since 1993 or so, and this was '99, yeah, around '99 when he moved to Brooklyn. And he saw what I was doing with that and he was like, ooh, this looks fun. And since we had done so much collaboration before, he started to work with just the dollar bill. Because I was mainly working with currencies, both from contemporary currencies from Europe and Asia, but also older currencies, sort of antique currencies. So I was using all of these different currencies. And he just was interested in the dollar bill. And then it sort of sparked a very fruitful collaboration with us. Because he had a different take on what money was, and 00:57:00 what it could be. So we made a bunch of work together. And he made his own body of work with that, and I made my own body of work with that. And ended up showing together in a number of different gallery contexts. So yeah, and now you know, some, let's see, some 20 years later, my collage practice is still mainly about using currency, although I do have a large body of work that is made from other kinds of ephemera. And some of it still very stridently political. Some of it a little bit more esoteric and oblique in its references. And some of it just purely playful and about the sort of material itself and the joy it is to do collage as an art form. And I think part of it, too, is it's just somehow how my mind works. Like the kind of music that I like to make and listen to is also very sort of collage-like. It's disparate elements that are brought into some sort of strange new harmony. 01:23:30 SL: I like how you put that. How 00:58:00 about, I know that you traveled a lot, and you mentioned that you picked up some different currencies in your travels. CW: Mm hmm. SL: Did you want to talk a little bit about teaching art? I know you taught art to children in Siberia, for example. CW: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I've had some really great experiences teaching. I've been very lucky. I worked at an ecological camp for wards of the state in Siberia. There were a lot of kids when their parents go to jail or die, the state takes over the care of them. So they live in these rather grim dormitories all over Russia. And one of these is in a town called Blagoveshchensk, which is sort of on the Amur River, which separates China and Russia. It's very close to a wetlands preserve where cranes come to breed. And the International Crane Foundation, which is from here in Baraboo, Wisconsin, sponsors a program to bring teachers from the United States every year to this very small little village and teach ecology, history, biology and art. And I was chosen as one of the art teachers to go. So I taught bookbinding to these kids from basically like age eight to 13, 14. And the idea was that I would help them bind a journal that then they would use in their other classes, and do sketches out in the wetlands of the cranes in their habitat, and then put their notes in from all the other classes. And I would help them with drawing. And they were all incredibly adept students in terms of the mechanical aspects of binding. And some of them wanted to do more binding, so we'd do other classes. The power would go out regularly, so we would do classes 00:59:00 by headlamp and flashlight and stuff like that. But nothing seemed to deter them. they were just completely voracious about learning. And this was kind of their one time out of the year that they would be out of the dormitory and in these cool little cabins and be able to have bonfires. So it was a really lovely experience. And the other teachers were really great. And yeah, it was just a wonderful experience. And then I've also taught in Bhutan, in Thimphu. There's this place called the VAAST, which I think stands for something area art something. Anyway, I can't remember what it stands for. I've got it down someplace. But Bhutanese bookbinding is very similar to Korean and Chinese bindings. So I was able to teach them some western styles as well as some variations on their own historical relation to Chinese and Korean bindings, and Japanese stab bindings. And that was just over the course of like a four-day class. And they were students, basically in their teens and twenties. And they came sort of from all over Bhutan together to work. And it was a wonderful experience. And I found out that 01:00:00 subsequently when people have gone back to Bhutan, that they've seen those techniques now being used in contemporary works that the students were making. So that was really neat. But I also taught at Cooper Union and at the Center for the Book Arts in New York and in San Francisco. And also at the Pratt Institute. And I've done some lectures at UCLA now. And you know, I love teaching. I'd like to do more of it. I haven't over the last ten years, because my sort of gallery art career has taken over to the point where I don't have as much time as I'd like. But particularly the book arts stuff, I feel pretty evangelical about it. SL: Were you mostly teaching workshops at the Center for the Book Arts and those other places? 01:28:10 CW: No, those were classes. SL: They were like semester-long classes? CW: Yeah. Yeah. Both at the graduate and undergraduate level. SL: Okay. Well, I just have one more question for you. I 01:01:00 wondered, we've been talking a lot about, I can see how the things that you learned at the UW have continued throughout your career. But I wondered if in your own words you could expand on how you think your time here affected your career as an artist. CW: This was a place that really nurtured me as a creative individual. The faculty here was imaginative and creative in the ways that they taught their subject matter. They were encouraging of all kinds of experimentation and cross-pollination between different mediums and different disciplines. You know, bringing in the experience from one area of study into another, they were very accepting and encouraging me and challenging me to explore and really push myself to find what limits I might have in any direction. The students that I met here are still some of my best friends that I've ever met in my life, who continue to inspire me. And one of them, as I mentioned before, Sean [Shuler?], is an entomologist, and he's up in Superior. One of my friends who was a philosophy major but also a chemistry major is now a scientist with Johnson & Johnson. One of my friends from here, Marshall Weber, now runs Booklyn. All of these different people with all of these different experiences and ways of engaging as creative individuals have taught me so much as an artist and as a person. And I wouldn't have met them had I not gone to school here. And I venture to say that almost none of my creative exploration that has happened subsequent to going here would have happened in the ways that it has had I not gone here. You know, getting to have access to world-class scholars like William Bunce was one of the great honors of my life. He was one of the most brilliant humans I've ever met in my life. And changed the way that I saw things and 01:02:00 experienced them and thought about how I was making and what I could make and what effects those things might have. And his exploration of life as a person sort of aside from his professional engagement as a librarian, as an archivist, as an educator, greatly informed my life afterwards. My passion for music, for food, for literature, for art, for expression of any kind, dance, performance art, all of those things were greatly informed by people like Bill Bunce, like Walter Hamady, like Marshall Weber, who were educators that I came into contact here at the university, and stayed in contact with as long as I possibly could. So those are gifts that you know, I'm desperately trying to pay forward 20 years later with teaching and art making. SL: Thanks so much, Christopher. CW: Thank you. 01:32:05 End of First Interview Session End of Oral