Arnaud Desjardins
Interview realised in spring 2023
Arnaud, you’re an artist and a publisher, you lead workshops, curate shows, write books on books… The book is at the center of your practice. How did you come working with artist’s publications?
Books were always part of my interests and ways to understand art but it took me a while to find myself on the publishing side.
I originally trained in sculpture at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris in the early 1990s and moved to London in 1995 after getting my diploma. I then got an MA in Visual Culture at Middlesex university in the UK in the late 1990s. I started working part-time in a second hand art bookshop and got to handle and learn about a lot books by artists, in particular the productions of the 1960s onward. I also got involved in book fairs and the general distribution of art publications so from the start I should have known better than to start publishing my own books, from an economic perspective it’s a sure way of losing money rather make a living. There were also many encounters with artists, collectors, dealers involved in books and their passion proved communicative.
Since 2007, you run The Everyday Press, a publishing house through which you publish multiple kind of works, and most of it, different formats. All of this is possible thanks to your appetite to work with new peoples. As an artist, how did you decide to create your own structure and publish other artists’ works?
While teaching at Kingston University in the mid 2000 I got an opportunity to do a Doctorate focused on artists’ books production and distribution, I suggested starting an experimental imprint in that context and that’s how The Everyday Press was initiated. The original funding for the research provided the necessary finance and it grew from there. There wasn’t an intention to have an identity from the start but rather to create a new channel alongside existing publishers, bookshops, archives and collections and the networks that had been built from the 1960s onward.
Collaboration seems important to your ethic, for example, when we check at your website, we can see the name of the former editorial and design collaborators you worked with under the name of The Everyday Press, your publishing house. The latest is also the opportunity for you to work with various artists, graphic designers and authors. Would you say collaboration is an important thing to you? How would you define your relation to collaboration?
Publishing is essentially the result of a series of interactions, first between skilled individuals (artist, designer, printer, author, whatever) organised towards the production of an object in multiple copies, a book, and then of exchanges (intellectual, economic, etc.) with literate individuals who receive the books and participate in their distribution and dissemination. The process of editing a book at The Everyday Press is mostly slow, concerned with finding an adequate form to the ideas in the knowledge of a particular context and the need to find funds for the production outlays (paying the designer, finding the right printing quote). Graphic designers play an important role in the editorial and production process, defining the roles of each participant isn’t really a concern of mine though giving credit where it is due is. I’m personally quite useless with digital layout tools like InDesign, it isn’t part of my skill sets but I understand enough to have a conversation about why something should be laid out in a particular way for a particular purpose.
Since a couple of years now, you also run another project called Bunker Basement which is visible through its Instagram account. Could you please tell us a bit more about this project? Its origins, its form, etc.
This started almost as a joke, the bunker is a real space: an underground storage unit in the center of London under the Barbican. Originally taken on to store the everyday press stock it developed into a sort of dealership for rare books and an archive of sort. The public face of the bunker on social media is the least satisfying aspect of it as I’d rather meet people and talk in the way it happens at book fairs. Digital technologies have been devastating to the ecology of book distribution, I can’t stand the fact that Amazon is a de-facto monopoly that actually doesn’t care if it sales books or cabbages. For now we are still captive individuals in systems that would be much better off expropriated from the Tech Barons but that is another story.
In some ways the Bunker is an act of tactical retreat from the current book distribution situation, the pressure on real estate, bookshops closing, etc. it is a contradiction that it is getting most of its visibility through a platform that is manipulating its users. Do get in touch for a visit in the real bunker.
You also had the occasion to curate shows, when it comes to show books, there is this question that comes again and again, do we put them under a glass, making he manipulation of the object impossible, or do we allow the public to manipulate the object, taking the risk of damaging the work. I would have been curious to know your post of view on this question.
There are many inventive solutions to this problem. Books exist in multiple copies of the same and I like to have the ability to handle and “read” books in the context of exhibition even if it means having some used/damaged copies at the end of the process. these is also the possibility to make new ‘‘fac-simile’’ copies or systems of display where the books are actually accessible but the emphasis is on the fragility of the object and the need for care in handling. The best book show is a shelf full of books one can pick from but i also understand the display tropes that project the object into its “thingness” in order to turn it into an example, an idea, an artwork.