Indeed, paper was less the topic than the central metaphor, its material processes, physical features, and cultural uses providing points of departure for philosophical ponderings. It is no wonder that those who anticipated exchanging ritual handshakes and trade secrets with international colleagues were dismayed to find themselves in the midst of strangers--philosophers, critics, and would-be philosopher/artists--speaking the different, secret language of contemporary critical theory. However, papermakers who listened during the three days should have come away with a sense of satisfaction. Paradoxically, while it avoided materials and technique, the conference celebrated the physical matter, the physical making, and the physical experience of the medium and argued against the lament, shared by craft-based artists (paper, print, glass, ceramics, etc.), that they are stranded on the periphery of the art world. The conference itself was the product of a singular coincidence. Two international organizations of artists using paper as medium, two organizing committees for two international conferences scheduled in the same city on the same date--it seemed sensible to get together. On the other hand, when any single committee has the forward mobility of Dr. Dolittle's pushme-pullyou, collaboration between delegations with similar goals but different constituencies had the potential to turn into a large-scale light bulb joke. Fortunately, it did not. The event was a success, but some of the strain showed. The dilemma shared by IPAC and IAPMA organizers was to cooperate on the project while preserving their individual identities. If the differences of purpose between the groups were not obvious to the outsider, bureaucratic distinctions were confusingly evident. Each had its own registration procedures and information packets, separate exhibitions and receptions, membership meetings and meals. Some of these were open to all registrants, some were not. The speaker's presentations took place in an auditorium at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The first two days were organized for IPAC and the last was the product of IAPMA. Although there was no formal integration of programs, all registrants were welcome at all sessions, which were simultaneously and competently translated. The IPAC organizers, intent on linking paper artists to the wide world of critical discourse, invited twelve participants from three continents, with experience spanning art, art history, music, and philosophy. Only four were artists. IAPMA, with a less ideological objective, enlisted eight participants: five artists, two museum professionals, and one critic. IPAC offered a combination of long lectures and recapitulating panels, while the IAPMA session consisted of a day-long round table, punctuated with brief talks by the individual panelists. Among IPAC's featured lecturers, the stars were Sarat Maharaj, from London, and Daniel Charles, from France, who offered inspiring approaches to the two important themes emerging directly and indirectly throughout the conference, thereby proving, especially by comparison with dilettante deconstructionists on the roster, that contemporary philosophy is not merely chic jargon and tortured prose. Maharaj addressed the battered, tattered subject of margins and mainstream, while Charles affirmed the communicative power of the physical art object. Another IPAC lecturer, Canadian writer Allan Pringle, proposed to dispose of the mainstream/margins issue with his somewhat depressing version of a postmodernism in which paper art emerges, by default, as a survivor of a collapsed hierarchy of art and craft forms. This was supposed to be good news, but the undifferentiated artistic democracy resulting from the forces he described seemed merely monotonous. Agreeing with Pringle about the relaxation of media rankings and barriers (perpetuated by museums, she admits), Louise Dery, curator of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, admonished the assembly of "paper" artists for clinging to the material and media subdivisions at a time when, not only is art to be found in ideas rather than substances, but the forms of visual information historically associated with paper (images and text) are electronically dematerializing. These arguments, among others, exposed the contradiction inherent in the organizers' intent to ignore the material common denominator binding the conferees and to launch them into the global context of artistic practice and discourse. Why come together at all as paper artists? Fortunately, for those disinclined to abandon papermaking colleagues and dive directly into the mainstream, Sarat Maharaj's eloquent and entertaining presentation (although somewhat convoluted, woven as it was with strands of James Joyce, Richard Hamilton, Salman Rushdie, Piero Manzoni, Alfredo Jaar, and eating disorders, among other subjects) maintained that the margin (paper puns absolutely intended) is an advantageous location. Comparing the technical language of papermaking to that of contemporary cultural anthropology (i.e., maceration and moulding to assimilation and identity formation), Maharaj argued that paper, because of its unique physical and cultural characteristics, participates in high art without being digested. Physically it can be recycled, and culturally it occupies various sites--as the art inside the frame, as information and packaging in everyday life, and as the matte, or passe-partout, that mediates between the two. In Maharaj's terms, paper resists assimilation by its self-transforming and migratory powers, and because of these it can, better than traditional, purely art media, question the authenticity of the art experience. Similar issues reverberated in the IAPMA sessions. Ben Wong, an artist who works with a traditional Chinese waterleaf paper, discussed his fascination with reversibility, the repeatable process of sheet formation and dissolution, integration and disintegration, during which mutation occurs to produce change. His example provided a nearly perfect illustration of Maharaj's principle of self-transformation. Migration, although he did not use the word, was a theme of Jean Dumont, former critic for Montreal's daily newspaper, Le Devoir, who spoke about the art of "informed matter," or works which address cultural constructions and historical memories by using as a medium books, magazines, newspapers, and other printed products of the popular culture. A relevant question had been raised by Francine Perinet, Toronto museum director and IAPMA panelist, with regard to Laurent Roberge's assertion that his sculpture made from Harlequin Romances could make a strictly formalist statement. Perinet had argued that recycled cultural materials cannot be alienated from their original purposes and meanings, or, as Dumont later said, they inevitably "inform" the art in which they are used. The debate almost seemed scripted to provide an example of Maharaj's point concerning paper's unique ability to occupy all positions on the low-art/high-art spectrum. In a conference devoted to language and ideas about paper art, it seems almost comical that perhaps the most important idea to emerge concerned the supremacy of the material object and the insufficiency of language in determining or describing artistic experience. Daniel Charles, a philosopher, musicologist, and art writer, using books made of paper as subject and music as analogy, argued that contemporary art, like John Cage's music, increasingly refuses to be understood in abstract notations. His disarmingly humorous and casually orchestrated lecture was dense with content, but its point was to show that artists are regaining control of their work from linguistic theory. As in poetry and music, and as Dadaists and Surrealists knew, visual artists can create nonsense, a deliberate incommunication which shatters structures of meaning and forces the viewer to attend to bodily or sensory rather than intellectual events. The result, as for all art, is what Charles calls "sonority," an experience beyond meaning, beyond the limitations of language. On the IAPMA panel, Leslie Dill, a New York artist who respectfully borrows phrases from Emily Dickenson's poetry and creates sculpture fashioned from their individual letters (often handmade paper), shared a wave length with Charles. Dill regards language as a flexible membrane of variable density and transparency that, like skin, hides as well as conveys emotion, prevents as well as facilitates communication. In her work, as well as in her thinking about it, words have a tangible reality--a pounding barrage of street noise, the warm breath of a whisper, the protective enclosure of polite conversation, a barrier of incomprehension, a starkly naked truth. As Charles had said, a word is a thing as much as a thing is a word, and things can be manipulated in relationship to each other to alter their linear and temporal sequence. Dill overlays, crumples, and bends physical (paper or metal) words, thus disrupting direct communicative power and engendering auras of poetic imagery related to, but distinct from, those created by Dickenson. Although Charles and Dill went farthest to affirm artists' power over meaning in art, many speakers accepted the current dogma that the structures of knowledge (how and what we think and know) are controlled by language which is in turn controlled by power interests in the society. Their discussions tended to concern strategies of resistance. Maharaj celebrated paper's ability to slip out of categories. Dery advised artists to resist institutional definitions. Perinet criticized universities for adhering to the restrictive nomenclature of technical divisions and of progressive competency (beginning, intermediate, advanced painting, sculpture, etc.), which not only prevent effective learning, but create media straight-jackets for their graduates. Ingrid Bachman, on the IAPMA panel, took a different approach. She is very concerned about the power to define reality, and much of her work addresses this issue as well as the role art plays constructing cultural ideas. Anticipating with Dery the ascendancy of electronic communication, Bachman came to opposite conclusions about material practices and hand technologies. Instead of considering "hand papermaker" as a label condemning one to obsolescence and isolation, she sees hand practices as antidotes to an increasingly bodiless culture which privileges sight and hearing to the exclusion of the other senses. Indeed, with electronic "virtual" reality, bodily experience can be synthesized. Useful as this may be (hers is not an apocalyptic vision), it also has limitations, and hand technologies can reassert the complicated reality of the body's senses, not only in the making and the experience of an object, but in the physical communication between or among people. Physicality and community were issues also raised by IAPMA speakers Ben Wong, Claire Van Vliet, and Kathryn Lipke. Wong's paperworks are about the physical behavior of the substance but, simultaneously, they are the product of his body's memory of everyday gestures. Claire Van Vliet, a maker of handmade books as well as a paper artist, emphasized the collaborative nature of her production, which requires working with papermakers, binders, printers, and the community that develops as a result of the long and repetitive labors required to achieve a finished product. Lipke, who is a professor and administrator as well as an artist, has an expansive notion of community and communication which includes traveling to work with people of distant cultures. In the end, what did the conference have to do with hand papermaking? In some respects, the discussions validated the questioner's implied complaint by underscoring the importance of material, of physical making, and of physical experience over words about them. However, the conference did expand the community beyond the circle of those who create with paper, by involving scholars, museum professionals, and journalists, most of whom conveyed fascination with the conceptual richness and metaphoric power of paper art. On the other hand, the conference planners emphasized by exclusion the tendency of paper artists to divorce themselves from the non-so-called-art aspects of the material. "Craft" had no official place in this forum devoted to "art" ideas, even if the most tantalizing thoughts concerned the relationship between utilitarian and artistic usage. While it has been typical of many craft-based artist groups to erect barriers between themselves and industrial and artisanal producers, that was not the case in the early years of the contemporary paper movement (e.g., Paper-Art & Technology, 1978 in San Francisco, and IPC '83 in Kyoto) which embraced all technologies, histories, and applications. It does seem odd that now, when contexts and connections are at the center of art critical dialogue, the planners of this conference excluded precisely those contexts and connections, celebrated by their speakers, that supplied energy to the early meetings. In all, the conference should have given paper artists a large dose of self-confidence for which the hard working organizers deserve credit and compliments. By bringing participants from outside the immediate circle of practitioners, they showed that paper is considered to have vast physical and fathomless expressive possibilities. Some were touched; some were excavated; some were left for future consideration; some were ignored. One hopes that the questioner was able to find among the discussions some provocative ideas, but above all that he or she and organizers of future paper conferences will develop a yet more universal attitude about their splendidly ubiquitous and ambiguous material. </div>

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