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Johanna Drucker (b. May 30, 1952) is an author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital aesthetics.

Drucker earned her B.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1973 and her Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in 1986. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. She was previously the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY, Associate Professor of Art History at Yale University, and Assistant Professor of Art History at Columbia University and University of Texas, Dallas. She has also been the Digital Humanities Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, Digital Cultures Fellow at UC Santa Barbara, and Mellon Faculty Fellow in Fine Arts at Harvard University.^[1]

Research

Drucker's research focuses on alphabet historiography, modeling interpretation for electronic scholarship, digital aesthetics, the history of visual information design, history of the book and print culture, history of information, and critical studies in visual knowledge representation. Most recently, her scholarship has focused on information visualization, "which draws heavily on models from the empirical sciences, where approaches based on representation and transparency prevail." In contrast to this approach, Drucker stresses the rhetorical and performative nature of visualization, with emphasis on interpretation. She contends that digital tools should be used to "design graphic forms that inscribe subjectivity and affective judgment."^[2]

Books

In The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art (1994), Drucker contends that much art criticism of Futurism, Dada, and Cubism has failed to appreciate the fundamental materiality of these movements in relation to both visual and poetic forms of representation. Drucker emphasized, for the first time, the extent to which typographic activity furthered debates about the very nature and function of the avant-garde.^[3] Continuing with her interest in letterform, Drucker's next book, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (1995) analyzes the history of the alphabet, not just as a collection of arbitrary signs, but as the direct visual embodiment of meaning in relation to intellectual movements. For example, she shows how modern typefaces, first developed in the late 18th century, embody Enlightenment philosophy.^[4]

Shifting her focus to artist books, Century of Artists' Books (1995) is the first full-length analysis of the development of artists' books as a 20th-century art form, exploring their structure, form, and conceptualization. Analyzing such artistic luminaries as William Morris, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst, Drucker considers the book as metaphor, poem, and narrative or non-narrative sequence by situating its historical, theoretical, sociological, and technical aspects within 20th century avant-garde art movements.^[5] In Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (2005), Drucker calls for a revamp of the academic critical vocabulary to something more befitting new forms and practices in contemporary art, especially as it engages with material culture. Considered at the cutting edge of art citicism, Sweet Dreams details the clear departure of artists from modernist avant-garde movements and shows the ways in which art criticism can shift its terms and sensibilities.^[6]

Taking up evolving issues of methodology in the burgeoning field of digital humanities, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (2009) emphasizes the visual over the written system, the generative over the descriptive, and aesthetic subjectivity over analytic objectivism by building on the collective intellectual ferment of digital humanities as it developed at the University of Virginia, one of the universities where the field of digital humanities first developed.^[7]

Artistic activity

Drucker is internationally renowned for her book art, which touches on a variety of themes, especially "the exploration of the conventions of narrative prose and the devices by which it orders, sequences, and manipulates events according to its own logic" as well as "the use of experimental typography to expand the possibilities of prose beyond the linear format of traditional presentation."^[8]

Her work has been exhibited at universities, libraries, galleries, and museums throughout the world, including Museum of Arts and Design, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, New York Public Library, Scripps College, Walter Phillips Gallery, University of Virginia, Smith College, Yale University, Rutgers University, University of California, San Diego, University of California, Santa Cruz, Purdue University, University of Arizona, University of Wisconsin, Houston Public Library, San Francisco Center for the Book, SUNY, Victoria and Albert Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Columbia University, Pomona College, Harvard University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Art Institute of Chicago, California College of Arts and Crafts, University of the Arts (Philadelphia), Istvan Kiraly Museum in Budapest, Barnard College, and Parsons School of Design, to name a few.

Online exhibits of Drucker's work can be seen here:

• The Art of the Book
• A Chronology of Books from 1970 to 1994
• Artists' books online
• E-Poetry: Johanna Drucker

Selected scholarly work

• Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition, Columbia University Press, 1994. (ISBN 978-0231080835)
• The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, The University of Chicago Press, 1994. (ISBN 978-0226165028)
• The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination, Thames and Hudson, 1995. (ISBN 978-0500016084)
• The Century of Artists' Books, Granary Books, 1995. (ISBN 978-1887123693)
• Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics, Granary Books, 1998. (ISBN 978-1887123235)
• Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, University Of Chicago Press, 2005. (ISBN 978-0226165059)
• Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, with Emily McVarish, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2008 (ISBN 978-0132410755)
• SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing, University of Chicago Press, 2009. (ISBN 9780226165080)

Selected book art

Additional links

• Faculty web page
• Interview with Johanna Drucker on art meets technology:the history and effects of the alphabet
• Johanna Drucker on Joseph Nechvatal and Critical Pleasure

See also

• Language poets
• List of concrete and visual poets

References

• Eye, No. 18, Vol. 5, edited by Rick Poynor, Emap Construct, London, Autumn 1995.