For my Art of the Book class, we were assigned to make a book using non-traditional materials (i.e. anything but cardboard and paper) and any binding technique we wanted.
I chose to create an unbound book in the form of a tin of cookies to be sent to American soldiers still stationed in Iraq. This is as close as I get to political, and of course, it's rather complicated. My professor said reading the collophon helped immensely, so perhaps you'd like to do so as well:
To create the cookies, I made cornstarch-based dough using this recipe, which actually dried more like porcelain or very fine clay... good to keep in mind for future (non-cookie) projects. I kneaded the dough and rolled it out, then used four different sized star shaped cookie cutters. I cut out exactly 50 stars.
You know how Elmer's glue dries to your hands? Yeah, they've got nothing on this stuff.
I set the cookies out on wax paper to dry.
In the meantime, I worked on the tin.
I purchased a plain white tin at a craft store, then used masking tape to mark off stripes. To make things easy on myself, I used the width of the tape to determine the width of the stripes.
I also figured out how to tape off a star. I was quite happy about that. Sometimes it's the small things.
On hindsight I realized that this arrangement more closely resembled a Puerto Rican flag than an American one, so even though I was going for the patriotic feel, I should have stuck with my original design (solid blue top, letting the 50 stars come from inside).
I used enamel paint to give the tin a slick, industrial finish. Unfortunately, this bled all over the place and evaporated the adhesive on the tape (whoops), so I needed to paint in the white areas with acrylic.
I was unhappy with the finish, but it certainly had a strong impact - I got quite a few strange looks walking around with this tin while transporting it to and from my studio.
Because the enamel was still soft days later, it got budged up a lot in handling, which added to the rough feel and the sort of shabby care package concept.
I used text culled from various sources around the internet to give an assortment of mixed messages and cultural commentary. I deliberately presented positive, supportive views, negative or cynical ones, and ambiguous, complicated statements.
Lettering was done with a thin blue Sharpie, though my professor felt it should have been in different colors and handwriting. I'd considered this and opted for the misleading effect of uniformity... but because it was personalized by my own handwriting and not machine printed text, this was a little problematic.
I arranged the cookies in the tin in a randomized way. The collophon (seen above) was adhered to the inside of the lid.
The sequence of the book is determined as the reader reaches in and selects cookies, with meaning accumulated through the ways the messages conflict, influence, and alter one another, a metaphorical replication of the cultural consciousness encountered by soliders faced with the landscape of varying opinion about them and our country.
In making this project, I was obviously not trying to insult soldiers or anything like that. The book is meant as a reality check for the reader, raising questions about what it means to be an American (or global) citizen, what kinds of mixed messages we give to those we ask to defend our way of life, what kinds of hipocrisy that lifestyle may entail, and similar.
It was an interesting challenge for me because in addition to working the physical materials, I really had to think about fitting the content to the format and vice versa. I considered the politics of these statements and how to compile them in such a way that they would have an impactful accumulation. In doing this, I've gained a lot of respect for book artists and those rare political artists who really make you think without veering off into propaganda. Neither task was anywhere near as easy as I thought.
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