A Million Keys

NY Art Book Fair Recap

I spent part of the weekend at the NY Art Book Fair, one of my favorite annual events. This year I helped my buddies from Fillip man their booth with the Charles H. Scott Gallery .


Issues of Fillip


Jordan Strom, Editor of Fillip

We had the fortune to be seated inbetween ANP Quarterly and Onestar Press. Onestar installed a beautiful bookshelf by Lawrence Weiner in their booth (image below).

With over 120 exhibitors, there was an overwhelming amount of material to browse (and buy!). Picks:

/// 1% by David Jourdan and Yuji Oshima a double-CD by Pork Salad Press which compiles all music contributions (114 sound pieces / 01:50:22) to David Jourdan and Yuji Oshima’s installation for the elevators of the French ministry of Culture and Communication. According to the French government’s 1% guidelines, one per cent of the total amount spent in the construction of any public building is to be allocated for the realization of site-specific artworks. In this context, David Jourdan and Yuji Oshima were commissioned to create a permanent installation for the new building of the ministry, 182 rue Saint-HonorĂ©, Paris, completed in February 2005. The audio compositions are activated 1% of the time by visitors entering the elevator and pushing a floor button.

/// Leisure a new arts magazine by the Los Angeles-based 2nd Cannons. This issue presents a collection of artist responses to a questionnaire on “radness” (with Evan Holloway, Bruce Hainley, Lawrence Weiner, Michael Smith, Bruce LaBruce, Darren Bader, Mayo Thompson, AA Bronson, Jess Holzworth, Corrina Peipon, Brian Bress, Julie Lequin, Meg Cranston, Natascha Sofia Snellman, Monique Prieto, TRUDI, Drew Heitzler, Elk, Christopher Russell, Tom Allen, Catherine Taft, Betty Tompkins, Kathe Burkhart, Michael Ned Holte, Paddy Johnson, Ami Tallman, Daniel Hug, and lastly, Jason Meadows).



/// Slavs & Tatars, a Moscow-based collaboration project between artists Kasia Korczak and Payam Sharifi which explores the fluctuating situation in Eurasia. They produced the series of posters on the second floor wall. Their independent work is also quite interesting: Kasia Korczak /// Payam Sharifi

/// The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg – An interpretation by Luca Frei From Book Works, the book is a translation of a 1976 text by Albert Meister which chronicles a fictional radical libertarian space built beneath the newly constructed Centre Beaubourg. Elizabeth Schambelan wrote an interesting piece on the book in this month’s Artforum.

/// The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-68 by Tim Donough From MIT Press, this title is easy to pick up anywhere. I’m looking forward to reading it. Full description below:

In postwar France, the aesthetics of appropriation and collage gave cultural form to a struggle over meaning. A new wave of avant-garde experimentation used—or stole, plagiarized, and expropriated—elements from advertising, journalism, literature, art, and other sources of common discourse (the ironically named “beautiful language” of this book’s title, itself an appropriation from Guy Debord’s collaged MĂ©moires). Redeployed, often in startling or pointed juxtapositions, these elements took on newly oppositional meanings. A famous photograph taken inside the occupied Sorbonne in May 1968, for example, shows a massive academic painting altered by a clever cartoonish speech bubble that transforms the painting into a parody of itself and memorializes an event very different from the one captured by the original artist.“The Beautiful Language of My Century” describes the various forms of critical culture that culminated in the events of May 1968, and investigates the ways those forms have come down to us today.

McDonough explores the montage practice developed by Guy Debord and his situationist colleagues under the name of dĂ©tournement and its expression in the later fifties as a form of cultural theft. He addresses the influence of colonialism on these practices, examining a 1961 exhibit of torn posters of the Algerian War (“La France dĂ©chirĂ©e”), Godard’s early film Le Petit Soldat, and Christo’s Project for a Temporary Wall of Steel Drums. He discusses the French left’s adoption in the mid-sixties of the “end of art” as a theoretical position and describes the leftist idea of the fĂŞte as a Rabelaisian and revolutionary upwelling of everything that is low. This influential conception, inspired equally by the American urban revolts of the sixties and the writings of theorists Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille, coalesced into a new image of revolution, a new model of contestation, in the events of May 1968—when the struggle over language and culture merged with a broader resistance to capitalist modernization.

PS: I posted this entry earlier today and it seems to have mysteriously disappeared. I apologize for any confusion!