2021: WritingBoekie WoekieEVB
We have gathered together to talk and eat lunch around a wooden table in the back of the bookshop. Runa and Jan from Boekie Woekie, Karin and Nadine from PrintRoom, Rotterdam and myself (Eleanor) who is visiting from London.
EleanorWhat would you say to someone thinking of opening an artist bookshop?JanWe are riding the wave. Several reasons have led to amazing increase of the scene and opportunities for artists to avoid a potentially corrupt gallery system and go into something which has until now has kept its innocence. And this is penetrating into other circles. We are in great times and anyone who could possibly think of starting an artist bookshop – please do it now! I’m fully for it. It’s even feasible, it’s not even as totally ridiculous anymore as it was. (Laughs)
JanIn the 80s we sat in this chicken coup of a bookshop with a window to the street. It was so small that there’s one person in there, a third person would hesitate to come in. One Sunday I was sitting in there and a man comes in and I think, I have recognised this person, I have seen this person, and later it came to me who it was, and he said to me - he declares ‘Don’t you know that artist books are out?!’ – that was in 86. The 70s had passed and a big oil painting campaign was going on – neu expressionism – and they had taken the other works down and out them in storage. So, artist books were out.
When we began there were six of us. Runa and her husband, Pieter, and Saskia and Hetti and Jan. They were the first 5 years. Peter and Saskia left to start their family and had two daughters and one is 27 years old girl who is now working here, and she has been doing our Instagram.
Karin–and she does it really well! In Boekie Woekie style, with personal observations, excitement about the books arriving. She also makes Lou (the cat) the star of the shop. Lou is all over Instagram. But she does it really well - It fits. Sometimes I think that it’s you that are writing it.
EleanorYou updated your old website recently to include a webshop. What affect did it have?
JanRuna has a son who is an internet specialist. He is in his early 20s and came to visit her, and as a punishment for misbehaving she made him make a Shopify website for Boekie Woekie! I mean, Shopify! If I hear the word! (Laughs.) The thing is that the old website was a drag to maintain. You are busy for hours and your progress is very slow. The old website is still there but praise be to modern times.
EleanorI enjoyed reading the shop diary that you used to post on your old website. For me it was a nice document of the shop, a way of recording things, that I learnt more from than seeing a photograph.
JanFor one hundred years before then I kept a diary which is in books now at home. I am a diarist. The observation of the daily life, I came to a certain end there, at least in publishing it. The relevance - ‘this guy does not know what he is writing about - I’m looking for potentially creating something that could fill another half page, stands in contrast with how relevant it is what I really would have to say. I think that instantaneous publishing brings with it a calamity that I finally chickened out of. I have important things to say but I write to a public that I cannot fathom the least bit who and how they are. Instantaneous publishing is a bit of a difficult thing. I write something but out of carefulness I avoid writing about what I really would have to write about. Politically as well, I don’t want to be in a position where I feel like I am avoiding that. So, the diarying came to an end.
EleanorYou don’t often talk about what is happening in the shop, more events that happen, or trips away, or the weather or about people coming in, special events and occasions.
JanWhen you sit on that shop seat there (points to behind the counter). You see the window in front of you and it is somehow as if you are the projectionist of a movie going on out in the street.
KarinYou are a street animator!
JanI have photographed also from that chair, whenever a truck was filling the window. I have a few hundred photographs of trucks stopped outside – that could be a gif animation, but it could also be at the right upper page of the book – like a projection – like a ‘Lástwagen’ A double meaning in German, it means a lorry, but also to ‘to dare to take on a load’. A heavy weight, or taking on a burden.
EleanorBut this is what makes it an artist bookshop isn’t it? Those moments where you make work out of the shop.
JanYes – definitely. If there is going to be a book on Boekie Woekie one day – if nothing happens, I may have to do it myself. That LastWagen picture and all sorts of other material would be in there.
EleanorThe book is not just about the documenting the books in the shop, but about documenting these art works, and the people, the time, the ideas circulating around, bringing together this material...
JanIt’s like a dough –
KarinBeing in a shop like this all day, you have many interactions which gives you ideas. People come in – they get ideas – it’s like an idea generator.
JanIt’s almost got nothing to do with the books!
KarinBut it is what the books bring. The books bring more than themselves.
JanYes, they are like a medium. Like basically everything else also is, but here books are the medium for things to happen, for things to occur.KarinYes they are - they are they are instigators.
EleanorThey give ideas, and those ideas end up back in a book again.
....
EleanorIf books were ‘out’ in 86, when were they ‘in’ before?JanUntil the end of the 70s when there was a political move - there was a concerted action by a group of museum directors who decided that what people were making was too boring it was not visual enough to get lots of people into the museums, for which they would get money for. People go for colour and there was no colour here and had not seen any for ten years or so. They got tired of conceptual art and instead the made popular and gave exhibitions to painters and a new wave of expressionism. Then for ten or twelve years no more conceptual art, instead dripping oil paint.
EleanorYou stocked some of your own artist books in ‘Other Books and So’ before opening your own shop. Did that shop inspire you to open your own bookshop?JanYes, it gave us at least some sort of backing. Other Books and So existed for 3 or 4 years. When we opened Boekie Woekie we didn’t thing (pause) well if you had told me that you are going to spend the rest of your life here, I would have laughed!
Other Books and So was a pioneering artist-run bookstore and gallery founded by Ulises Carrión in Amsterdam from 1975-1979.) Carrión conceived of Other Books and So not as a commercial enterprise, but as an artwork in itself; as he stated, "Where does the border lie between an artist's work and the actual organization and distribution of the work?"
EleanorDo you think Other Books and So opened because there were other artists like yourself making books in Amsterdam? Was there an artist book scene happening here at that time?
JanI was, more or less by coincidence a student of Dieter Roth in Dusseldorf, and he of course had book making pretty high on his list, and he came with an offset press to the Graphic department of the art academy of Düsseldorf. It was sacrilege! I mean that was unheard of! How can he!
KarinWhy was it unheard of? JanBecause offset lithography, at the time even Screen Printing was not quite acceptable. If you were in a traditional academy, you had etching and (stone) lithography.KarinSo he came and installed the Litho Printer in the academy.
JanYes, he came with a rotor print
EleanorWas that because of Hansjorg Mayer?
JanI think his relationship with Hansjorg started around 64, but in the years before Dieter had worked especially in the years in Iceland, he had started relationship with book printers and letterpress printers there. He had made a link into the printing work on his own. And then Hansjorg came, who was the son of a printer, and said can we work together.
EleanorSo, you were inspired about meeting Dieter to use the Litho.
JanI do, yes. you see the book that Karin has, that is done on a litho press – that is a reproduced drawing. And this is the book that fell into shit, so it has not only become damaged by wet but by sewage (it has dried out a long time ago)!
Detour, Jan Voss, 1989Amsterdam/Köln/Stuttgart/London/ZürichBoekie Woekie/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König/edition hansjörg mayer/Edition StähliEdition of 1000 numbered and signed copies
JanI made it in 4 months, it was day in day out drawing the whole day.I would not be able to do that today! Even if I had nothing else to do. Things have changed. KarinNow you are interested in other things.
JanHere I am interested in drawing. Then I got interested in printing. Then I got interested in how to get rid of what you have printed!(Everyone laughs!)JanThe thing is I have never really got rid of anything, we have just made more, we have just got fuller, and further and further away of getting rid of the stuff!NadineBut then this space, if you are looking at a drawing as a composition, you are also making the same decisions as when you figure out what goes in the shelf.
JanOne builds on the other
NadineSo maybe you have never stopped drawing
JanYes, the artist activity is not limited to a certain kind of technical approach. It is a big understanding that we think that we have to describe being an artist with things that are already art related things. Like painting or drawing or filmmaking or acting or sculpture making or traditional forms of art making. Nothing wrong with these but not the one.
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Conversation with Jan Voss, Rúna Thorkelsdóttir, Nadine Ghandour, Karin de Jong, Eleanor Vonne Brown at Boekie Woekie on Sunday 12 December 2021 for PrintRoom's 'Holiday in the Archive' project. Books and images we collected that day were used to make Riso printed wrapping paper at PrintRoom.
