This exhibition is centered around a collection of my and Aaron Renier’s artist books (specifically comics, mini comics and related materials). The majority of these were produced by other artists (a combination of very established artists, our peers and former students), and are predominantly self published or printed by small presses The Infinite Library is meant to function as a non-circulating library during the duration of its installation at the Lawton gallery.
In addition to the library, the exhibition features a reading room, where visitors are able to sit and read the books in the collection, and a zine making lab, where visitors may draw and print their own publications. If you decide to make a book using the zine lab, I encourage you to donate a copy to the collection.
The kinds of books in this exhibition– handmade, small scale, easily disseminated, generally affordable, produced in multiple– are extremely important to me as an artist and a person. Cartooning is a labourious, time-consuming and poorly remunerated art form. It has none of the cultural cachet of the artworld writ large, and neither does it promise any great financial payout. In this way, people who choose to work in this artform tend to do it purely as a means of personal expression, or for the love of the form itself. Because of its affordability and the ease of its dissemination, cartoonists can live anywhere and their work can travel to corners of the world the artist themself likely will never visit. Because these works exist in print (and primarily not as rarified and prohibitively expensive artist books), it is possible for people of average means to collect and read them.
Comics (and zines) are a way of remaining connected with the world outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin (or wherever you find yourself), both by reading them and through producing and distributing your own work. It is a way to exist in dialogue with a larger world, a means by which to develop community and expand one’s artistic horizons.
Beyond the beauty of engaging in an art form that I believe fundamentally undercuts certain of the more pernicious facets of capitalism, I also believe that cartooning is a universal language, crucial to what it means to be a human being. Imagine, if you will, the cave paintings of the Paleolithic era. The oldest conclusively dated cave painting is from 43 000 BCE and shows the Sulawesi warty pig of Indonesia (though here you could equally consider the horses of Chauvet or the bulls of Lascaux). To give context, writing was developed at around 3400 BCE, or roughly 40 000 years after that pig was drawn. Imagine if, at this very moment, you were to step into a time machine, end up in those ancient caves and encounter its denizens. You would not be able to speak the same language; you would not be able to communicate through writing; your technologies would be alien to them. However, you could pick up a stick and draw a picture of a pig and they would immediately understand you. Visual communication–telling stories through pictures– is hardwired into how our minds function. It is fundamentally what cartooning is all about, and it is also, in my opinion, fundamentally what defines us as human beings.
Through this library, I’d like to share a few of these basic ideas: communication through pictures, making art that celebrates being alive merely for the joy of it, and the idea that we exist in a broader community of artists.
–Jessica Campbell, September, 2022