What happens when artists create books? We’ll soon find out

[NAME] is the brainchild of artist/writer Gean Moreno, a winner of the James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge. His is just one of the many community arts projects made possible by grants from the Knight Foundation -- in Moreno’s case, $30,000, a sum that must be matched by another funding source. Moreno is confident the grant money will be matched, and he plans to expand his project over the next five years to include a total of 20 books, each created by a Miami artist. Artists chosen for this year include Daniel Newman, Beatriz Monteavaro, and Clifton Childree, as well as William Cordova and the BASE collective.

Moreno ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) has been a fixture on the local art scene since the late 1990s, known for creating art that has been exhibited internationally. He’s also known for his extensive writing on the arts. In addition, he’s had a hand in curating numerous shows, and for years was closely associated with exhibits at the alternative art space Locust Projects.

“I’ve always done curatorial and organizational things,” says Moreno, and for him [NAME] is just an extension of that. “A long time ago I stopped making the distinction between creating and writing,” he says, hinting at the line-blurring, media-hopping approach that will inform [NAME]. But Moreno does not plan to publish his own work as part of this endeavor, nor does he expect mere artist monographs. As he puts it: “I think of it almost as a design project, where you create a system and you let people do whatever they want. Inside these structures, there’s kind of no restrictions.”

The only restrictions for each book will be a page count of 80 to 100, and dimensions of six-by-nine inches. Artists essentially will have a blank slate upon which to work. Moreno’s only job is to choose who gets to release a book. From there it’s up to the artists.

For instance, if someone wants to glue all the pages together and release it that way, so be it. The cover designs will be as minimal and unobtrusive as possible, including edition number, the [NAME] logo, and the artist’s own name. The rest will be left to the bookmaker’s imagination. Even within that broad framework, things are negotiable, according to Moreno. “If an artist comes up with this great way to undermine the design, that would be fantastic too,” he says. “The whole idea is to have this space where people can do what they want to do.”

The first book, WWW by artist Daniel Newman, should be out in May. A longtime underground Miami mainstay, Newman uses a wide array of media, from painting to sculpture to video, and now books. The multi-tasking artist, who is busy with an upcoming solo exhibition in Los Angeles as well as the [NAME] project, reveals that his will be a book about the Internet. The original idea was to create a reference volume that would catalogue oddities found on the World Wide Web, but it has morphed into a massive undertaking that hopes to convey a snapshot of this moment in our digital age.

“There’s a book that made an impression on me that I came across recently,” says Newman. “It’s titled The Complete Compendium of Universal Knowledge.” Published in 1895, it was written by William Ralston Balch, who sought to compile all knowledge of the universe into one digestible read, a feat the Internet has come much closer to achieving.

Newman describes WWW as the Compendium’s “red-headed stepchild.” In an effort to model itself on The Complete Compendium, Newman’s WWW will include text and images, most lifted directly from the Web, that highlight curious items, strange stories, hoaxes, and other forms of Web misinformation, presented in a stream-of-consciousness manner designed to mirror the mechanics of the Internet itself.

Newman may be no stranger to producing work in written form (he has created a handful of small-circulation zines, manifestos, even a book of poetry), but he freely admits that the [NAME] project is taking him outside his comfort zone. “This is a different situation for sure,” he acknowledges. “The book opened a number of doors for other ideas, too.”

The book as artwork appears to be a novel concept for Miami. Even Moreno admits he’s never seen anything quite like his project here. “But it’s also in the spirit of a lot of things that have happened in Miami,” he adds, citing some of Miami’s laissez-faire alternative spaces such the Bas Fisher Invitational and Locust Projects. Both these spaces have given artists the freedom to experiment and produce work that would probably never be accepted in more commercial galleries.

For example, last summer filmmaker Clifton Childree was offered free run of the Locust space and given two months to create whatever he wanted. He ended up with an installation called Dream-Cum-Tru, in which he transformed the space into a meticulously detailed replica (in miniature) of an abandoned amusement park, with his films interspersed throughout. He says he’s finding similar creative freedom while working on his upcoming book, tentatively titled Black Licorice.

“With Clifton, I kind of didn’t know what a Clifton book would look like, and I thought that would be interesting,” Moreno explains.

Childree’s project is still in the planning stages, but he does say he’s been thinking about surrealist Max Ernst, and imagines a multimedia book that would use two-minute snippets of noise, created by noise-music artists assembled by Childree and Rat Bastard, a veteran Miami noisemaker. Each succeeding artist would create his own sound segment after listening to a ten-second sample of the preceding artist’s work. A CD would be included with the book to accompany Childree’s illustrations.

With a going price of $15, and print runs of 1000 each, each [NAME] book will have a chance of reaching larger audiences than a single painting or sculpture displayed temporarily in a gallery. Newman believes the books will provide “the opportunity for some really great artists from the swamp to reach out beyond. Books are eternal. They carry a life of their own.”

Many art-related books, printed in very limited numbers and priced exorbitantly, never circulate outside of elite circles. “I didn’t want to make them like art books, like a 75 run,” says Moreno. “I want them to be out in the world.”

Imagine stumbling across a wildly eccentric book like WWW at some random bookstore, having never heard of Daniel Newman. Moreno delights in such a scenario: “I think it’s pretty amazing if someone buys it because it’s in the culture -- if it negotiates a place in the culture.”