2012 aiga minnesota Design Show

Time Is Not Even, Space Is Not Empty surveys the influential 40-year career of Eiko and Koma, acclaimed Japanese movement and performance artists. As a multidisciplinary arts center, the Walker is dedicated to expanding its publishing program to more accurately reflect the diversity of art forms the organization presents, including major figures in the performing and media arts of our time. This volume is the first the museum has created to chronicle its long-term relationships with performing artists and filmmakers—just as it has done routinely over the years with visual artists featured in its exhibition program and collections. Conceived as a catalogue raisonné of the artists’ body of work, this seminal publication presents a complete, illustrated catalogue of their dance works, alongside editor’s and choreographer’s notes, reprints of primary source materials from their archive, and a series of newly commissioned essays that examine the cross-disciplinary nature of Eiko and Koma’s practice. This modest but rigorous designed and researched book offers new scholarship and understanding to the contemporary art world at a moment when there is great interest in those figures of modern art who routinely crossed disciplinary boundaries. We hope other institutions will be similarly inspired to dedicated resources to documenting the broader spectrum of art forms that comprise the contemporary artistic landscape.

Delivery of Work

As the artists' first and most likely only retrospective catalogue, this book needed to embody the life and work of their prolific partnership. Extensive research into the ephemera of Eiko & Koma's career—program notes, flyers, performative and editorial photography, video, reviews, and letters—yielded many of the images in the book, and also served as inspiration for everything from the stark image-only cover to the tight margins and the mix of typefaces. Excerpts from a poem by Forrest Gander were used as section dividers to give the reader a verbal play-by-play of the artists dancing, a contrast to the abundant visual documentation of their dances. Printing and production choices were made to reflect Eiko & Koma's humble and earthy personalities: uncoated paper, natural stock for the front matter and essays, simple black insert sheets for reviews and reprints, and silver edging that lent only a little sheen. The matte cover, as unassuming as it appears, required 4 hits of black ink to achieve, and the spine's text was set in dull white foil, all subtle reminders that the book, though modest in appearance, represents its subjects.

The Results

The curators and the artists were quite happy with the book, and according to our distributor, it is selling very well, especially for a performing arts book.