Introduction for Susan Bee & Johanna Drucker (by Tim Peterson & erica kaufman)

Tim: If collaboration is a process where individuals interact and use their own knowledge and creativity towards a common goal,

Erica: yes I like that definition you've come up with,

Tim: Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker are the perfect example of the genius that can be produced when collaborations go right.

Erica: Erica, this is a great point, and what impresses me most about Bee and Drucker's work A Girl's Life from Granary Books

Tim: is how it offers a radical re-assessment of girlhood as grrrl-hood, freeing our received clichés about identity

Erica: through a collaboration between individuals working in different media, here word and image. For example, I just read an interview

Tim: where Susan Bee talks about how she favors "an oblique associative relation between image and poem."

Erica: and perhaps that's a point for which we don't need an illustration.

Tim: I'd like to add a quote here, Tim, "Lived between paradise and compromise, a girl's life is never performed completely unaware."

Erica: and collaboration is a continuing theme in Susan Bee's work, including artist books done with Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and Jerome Rothenberg

Tim: Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker are significant artists with impressive careers.

Erica: Absolutely! And, both are impressive in how they bridge genres, genders, mediums. Bee is a painter, editor, and artist known for her bright colors, reinvention of contemporary culture,

Tim: and to quote Drucker, she is "unafraid of kitch images." That's a good quote you picked there too, and I want to also point out that since 1986 Bee has co-edited with Mira Schor the very influential journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G,

Erica: which has provided a vital voice for women artists and a locus for discussing f eminist issues in contemporary art amidst the existing boys' club atmosphere.

Tim: Great point, Tim. Bee's work as a painter is a playful, complex critique of contemporary culture. She is known for recontextualizing borrowed noir and kitsch imagery of women

Erica: so that a recent show at A.I.R. Gallery for example, featured images of femme fatales and other figures perched in the branches of a sort of mystical tree.

Tim: Johanna Drucker is a renowned critical writer, book artist, and visual poet.

Erica: One of our most prominent theorists on visual texts, Drucker has shown us that words are not only objects,

Tim: but can also be seen as ways of conveying experience. There's something feminist about her awareness

Erica: of the multiple ways to articulate an experience through language, and her multi-voiced texts play out this dynamic,

Tim: with the semiotic getting full license to romp with the symbolic. Drucker's work as printer and bookmaker further complicates the situation

Erica: by demonstrating the importance of the embodied object of the book in textual production. Thank you for that, Erica.

Tim: I'd add that this complex understanding has led to a variety of books, some of criticism, some poetics, some multi-genred,

Erica: from The Century of Artists Books to the recent Figuring the Word. To quote from Drucker's essay, "Writing with Respect to Gender,"

Tim: "to come to terms with the social shape of the feminine as I experience it requires that I continue to investigate the way my own writing

Erica: negotiates the relation between the orders of language and culture and the realms of my life as a subject."

Tim: And here for Drucker and Bee, in the old collaboration between painting and poetry, the roles of both have been transformed

Erica: and blurred a little in the process.

Both: Please welcome Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker