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KEEPING BALANCE! A BACKWARD LOOK AHEAD 
Could Gutenberg ever have dreamed
that his invention would fan the flames of the wars of religion,
bring down empires, and preserve a detailed record, kept by the
perpetrators themselves, of the most hideous extermination of human
life in German history? Could we ever have imagined that a little
box carried around in a briefcase would achieve worldwide communication
and transfer vast stores of data in fractions of a second? But also,
dare we suppose that this ever accelerating process of digitalization
may bring to an end what Marshall McLuhan back in the 1960s called
the Gutenberg galaxy and thus, to a large extent, cause the death
of traditional techniques of book production that are still widely
practiced by today's artists and manufacturers of books? Edition Balance, a publishing firm in Gotha in Eastern Germany, gives an example of how we might approach this last question. lt was founded in Berlin in 1990, in the imponderable days of German unification when sudden breaks and leaps interrupted the flow of many lives, by Henry Günther, a former mechanic, college teacher, poet, graduate of the Literature Institute of Leipzig, and member of the East German Writers Union. Ten years later, the firm has twelve lavish publications to its credit and has shifted its geographic base to the small Thuringian city of Gotha while expanding the range of its exhibitions from Gotha to Sonneberg, Leipzig, Munich, Nuremberg, Berlin, Vienna and, on repeated occasions, New York, beginning at the "Center for Book Arts" in 1994, followed by the "2nd ArtistBook International" at the Waldorf Astoria Towers (1995), and the "Cencebaugh Contemporary" in midtown Manhattan in spring 2000. What you could call a precipitous rise, built on the publisher's practice of bringing together writers and visual artists to create artist-books impressive for their uncompromising high quality and the unified spirit underlying their diversity, which traits no doubt explain their acquisition by some of the greatest book collections in the world: the Sächsische Landesbibliothek, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the Herzog August Bibliothek of Wolfenbüttel, Vienna's hochschule für angewandte kunst, the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the San Francisco Public Library, to name only a few. Literary works by Durs Grünbein, Kerstin Hensel, Johannes Jansen, Friederike Mayröcker, Karl Mickel, Yoko Tawada and Gabriele Wohmann have seen their first printing in the congenial company of works by new and mostly youthful artists such as Angela Hampel, Helge Leiberg, Carsten Nicolai, Thomas Offhaus, Nuria Quevedo, Sabine Cornelia Sauermilch and Wolf Spies. This combination is what makes Edition Balance so intriguing. Edition Balance clearly sets no store on reproducing for the nth time a text that is no longer bound by copyright, or on creating anything short of a perfect book.
The books meet the highest standards of quality because of the solid
craftsmanship with which they are produced in the firm's own book-art
studio. But do books, printed in extremely small editions of 35,
50, 100, or - just once - 200 copies still have a future in a time
when the only thing that matters is to store, process and pass on
as much information as you can, fast and cheaply; or are they luxury
items subject to fashion that eventually will not produce the desired
thrill and will be carelessly pushed aside? Henry Günther is aware of all
the problems and is devising strategies to meet the demands posed
by the coming of a third millennium. His work now has an international
focus. The "2nd ArtistBook International" held in New
York in 1995 gave rise to the one-off volume New York with works
by Johannes Jansen, Carsten Nicolai, H. H. Grimmling, F. M. Furtwängler,
Thomas Günther, and Wolf Spies which is now housed in the Klingspor
Museum. You could perhaps explain away the desire to make a book
in New York by the lure and associated promises that this exotic
city no doubt always holds for young German artists; but the press's
next books make clear that internationalism has now become a permanent
feature. A year after the New York episode, Henry Günther published
Friederike Mayröcker's Liebesbekümmernis durch Buchenecken
hindurch with eight lithographs by the young Viennese graphic
artist Tobias Raphael Pils. In 1999, we saw the bilingual edition
of 13 by the Japanese woman writer Yoko Tawada, in a Japanese binding
and encased in a traditional box. Last but not least, in his firm's
tenth year Henry Günther launched a branch publishing house,
Balance Press, which also prints literary first editions, but in this case always bilingual. The
first volume in this series is UPTOWN 99 - Homage an Allen Ginsberg,
and the second, a text by Volker Braun with graphic works by Thomas
Offhaus, is Lyotard oder Die Leute lassen sich alles erzählen
[Eng. Lyotard, or: You Can Tell People Any Story]. Henry
Günther thus bypasses the conventions of the normally monolingual
and regionally defined artist-book and is opening his work to a
world-wide public that stretches from Berlin and Vienna to New York
and Tokyo. Another typical feature are the formal experiments in
which Günther has engaged from the outset. His second publication
includes original drawings by Wolf Spies; his eighth, original drawings
and collages by the same artist. Yoko Tawada's text in the tenth
volume accompanies stencils by Carsten Nicolai that become increasingly
concentrated and increasingly delicate as they go along. In the
next volume, Helge Leiberg masterfully combines the techniques of
lithography and etching. Finally, as Henry Günther formally
announces in his prospectus for the 1999 Frankfurt Book Fair, his
Balance Press means to exploit traditional and digital media. For
example, UPTOWN 99 contains block prints, relief prints and
stamped designs that involve the use of photographs. Along with
the novel content of its publications, the press appears increasingly
to court formal experiments, and in this respect too it bypasses
convention. The view that books and the internet
are mutually exclusive and that the internet may even be the death
knell of the book, is not shared by Henry Günther. On the contrary, the
Worldwide Web offers the opportunity of presenting a product - the
artist-book - to an international public. It is self-evident that
the press must have its own website, www.edition-balance.de
and an international forum on modern book art is being planned on
the website www.artistbooks.de.
Along with the previously existing links to dealers in Europe and
America (for example, www.artistbooks.com
and HellerBkDC@aol.com),
recent years thus have seen the development of a network that makes
the artist-book a medium independent of fashion and makes its small
editions available to precisely those collectors and museums who
are not dominated by mass tastes and the mass-media's manipulation
of opinion and have emotion and subtlety enough to show interest
and commitment to this complex art form. lt should be borne in mind, however,
that all the books printed by Balance are the products of personal
passions and that Henry Günther and Marion Günther-Bonsack
are reflected in them. Henry Günther published his own texts
under a pseudonym in the volume Das Gleichmaß der Unruhe
and actually used his long poem Uptown 99 as the starting
point for a new series. Marion Günther-Bonsack too, in her
vibrantly sensuous poem collection AUGENBLICKE, printed with the
reduced lithographs of Sabine Cornelia Sauermilch which give the
text plenty of room to breathe, shows clearly what the press is
all about: love of the word and the image, which also means love
of the human being. Reinhard Grüner |
