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MacGregor Harp's RIsing Tides Lifting Yachts
Rising Tides Lifting Yachts is an exhibition by MacGregor Harp celebrating the release of his new book American Flags Portfolio vol 01. The release is accompanied by an exhibition of canvasses with printed flags that are manipulated using digital processes and out-of-the box distortion techniques which push their values to opposite extremes. These works are also accompanied by his 740 page flip book The Experimental American Flag DMT Trip, to be produced in a very short run using lulu.com. The collection considers what happens when one of the worlds most recognizable symbols is stripped of its contexts by reducing it to abstraction, while addressing questions of production and authorship.
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Pierre Le Hors Editions
Le Hors has produced four silver gelatin prints to benefit Printed Matter. The series of images, titled "Patterned Standards" explore a variety of physical and in-camera manipulations, as Le Hors overlays polka-dotted fabric and photographs with multiple exposures. Each 9 x 12” image has been produced in an edition of 25 each and is available individually.
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Appropriation
We cannot precisely say what is not appropriation. Impossible to draw a categorical line.
Appropriation is practiced everywhere and all the time, also by people who never have heard the word.
As someone said before, no author has his complete meaning alone.
The books on this list have in common that they are somewhat more explicit, sometimes strategic… sometimes indulging in borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating... being influenced, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed... quoting, rewriting, reworking, refashioning… a re-vision, re-evaluation, variation, version, interpretation, imitation, proximation, supplement, increment, improvisation, prequel... pastiche, paraphrase, parody, forgery, homage, mimicry, travesty, shan-zhai, echo, allusion, intertextuality and karaoke.
The other common denominator of the titles compiled here is that they are—or were, at some point—available for purchase from Printed Matter, New York.
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Myth
Ostensibly, myth presents reality without employing any mechanisms of the real itself. Although myth is generally considered an archaic form, surrendering to the efficacy of analysis and empiricism which, contrary to myth, take reality as their ground, it continues to characterize the work of contemporary artists and authors. The following list of artists’ book represents a dynamic preoccupation with myth, as the “Myth of the Artist” continues to be one of the form’s most enduring manifestations.
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Eastern European Artists' Books
Contrary to the common understanding of the social and artistic situation in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, which tends to ignore differences in favor of a homogeneous view that suitably supports the political agenda of the cold war, developments in art were rather heterogeneous. As in the West, the production of artists' books in the East during the 60s, 70s, and 80s was connected to differing neo-avant-garde, conceptual, performance-based and post-conceptual practices, announcing the opening not only towards innovative forms, but also towards innovative ways of presentation, circulation, distribution, and validation outside of the established art system. Practices of artists' books, magazines and so-called “pages as an alternative space” emerged as a form together with neo-avant-garde practices, in opposition to ideological instrumentalization of art as well as in opposition to a moderate bourgeois, apolitical and decorative modernism. Artists were attracted to printed matter thanks to its simplicity and functionality, its directness and effectiveness in the dissemination of their ideas.
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Temporary Services: GROUP WORK
Temporary Services has selected the following books published by or focusing on the work of artist groups and collectives as an extension of our exhibition and book release Group Work. These items are on display in Printed Matter's vitrines during the run of our exhibition so we have limited ourselves to items that are in stock. Some of these publications were created by groups that are a direct inspiration or influence on our own practice. Other items were chosen to represent the diversity of groups and collective printed matter. Where possible, we tried to include items that were among the least expensive entries for each group. Looking through Printed Matter's vast website and in-store stock has been a great learning experience for us which we hope to share with others. Also everyone knows that fancy glass vitrines make anything you put inside them look really special and important. It is our hope that a highlighted engagement with these isolated objects inside the vitrines will make people a little extra interested in learning about some of the groups that are represented. While one loses this tactility online, hopefully the juxtapositions of groups and titles will serve as another aid to perceiving various approaches to collective work and collaboration.
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Mapping
Mapping approaches the problem of representation. The map is symbolic. It indicates another existence outside itself and presents the world through a system of corresponding signifiers. This re-presentation manifests in the physical body of the map itself, which then coexists with the place or event it symbolizes. This dichotomy between the real and the symbolic mapping of the real is a theme that many artists have taken up in their work, exploring the means and implications of charting our perceptions of the physical and temporal world.
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Conceptual Comics
The comic book is generally thought of as in the domain of popular culture, or as part of the children's books genre. In the past 30 or 40 years, evolving largely from the underground adult comics of the 1960's and 70's, there has been a growing group of comic book artists experimenting with the forms and conventions of comics, pushing them in new directions and demanding consideration as a serious art form. Conversely, the comic book, or various aspects of comic book art, have been employed or referenced by a number of contemporary visual artists. Indeed, many of the basic elements of what constitutes a comic— pictorial sequence, narrative, movement, time, etc— are such common considerations of contemporary art that the comic is often evoked unconsciously or unintentionally. And this is particularly true of artists' books.
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The Late Edition: Twenty Years of Dissemination at Printed Matter
As Clive Phillpot tells the story in Artist/Author (1996), it begins here:
In April of 1963, Ed Ruscha published Twentysix Gasoline Stations 1962. It was a small paperback containing pictures of gas stations dotting U.S. Route 40, the road between Oklahoma City, where the artist grew up, and Los Angeles, where he lives and works. The work hinged on a highly personal alphabet, but perhaps the most notable thing about the book was this: it was a book.
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Yoko Ono Exhibition, Summer 2004
Printed Matter, Inc. is very pleased to announce the opening of our summer exhibition, Yoko Ono: Editions, Ephemera and Printed Works. On view throughout Summer 2004, the exhibition will feature a wide range of material from the early 1960s to the present. Some pieces will be for sale while others, long out of print, will serve as a framework for the work of this committed avant-garde artist.
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Gift Ideas for $75 or More
Spread the inside word about Printed Matter when you give a friend a limited edition book, print, or multiple from our special collection of collectable artists' publications.
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Gift Ideas for Under $75
Whether it's a birthday, an anniversary, a new pet, or a change of season - there's always a reason to celebrate, and Printed Matter is always ready to help you find just the right token of your true feeling for the occasion! Here is a sampling of original and affordable gifts for the giver in you.
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Innovative Forms
All of the books on this list, in one way or another, address the physicality of the book. Each one, in its own way, calls into question a reader’s assumptions about what a book is and presents new avenues of approach to reading. Can a card game be a book? Can cut and sewn patterns constitute a narrative? Printed on scarves, sandpaper, and postage stamps, bound with sticks, pencils, duct tape or tucked inside a matchbox, these books speak through their materials as well as about their materials and in so doing engage a reader’s associative as well as analytical mind. All of the books on this list, in one way or another, address the physicality of the book. Each one, in its own way, calls into question a reader’s assumptions about what a book is and presents new avenues of approach to reading. Can a card game be a book? Can cut and sewn patterns constitute a narrative? Printed on scarves, sandpaper, and postage stamps, bound with sticks, pencils, duct tape or tucked inside a matchbox, these books speak through their materials as well as about their materials and in so doing engage a reader’s associative as well as analytical mind.
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PhotoDocument
Although contemporary critical discourse has fully disrupted photography’s claim to truth-telling over the past thirty years, photographers continue to exploit and explore the medium’s capacity to record and document the world around and inside of them. Whether self-consciously critical of the documentary impulse, or actively engaged with strategies to contextualize images and complicate readings, the books in this list cover a wide range of photographic documents both actual and fabricated.
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Classics of Conceptual Art
The work made by artists in the latter half of the 1960s that came to be known as Conceptual Art rejected traditional modes of representation and embraced a de-materialized approach to art making. In their desire to elevate the Idea to the status of artwork, artists such as Sol LeWitt, Hanne Darboven, On Kawara, Stanley Brouwn, and Lawrence Weiner among others, employed strategies that emphasized the work of the mind over that of the hand.
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Transmissions : Asian Artists in Motion
An alternate history of East and West might go beyond conceptual oppositions to uncover a mutual (though not always mutually beneficial) relationship of East-West exchange and the circulation of goods, labor, talent, and culture. This process has become more personalized as conditions now allow for increased travel, immigration, and overseas study.
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Visio-textual Experimentation
In the artistic/poetic hybrids of visual writing and concrete poetry, the physicality of the printed word becomes an aesthetic and semiotic focus in itself.
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War and Militarism : Memorials, Testimony, Critique and Indictment
With armed conflicts raging across the world, and with the U.S. mired in its so called "war on terror", the 21st century continues where the 20th century left off. Throughout human history, art has long addressed the theme of war and its consequences, usually within the broad mythic framework of heroism and tragedy. But in more recent history, from Goya to Guernica to the Guerilla Art Action Group, the tone of the art work dealing with the theme of war has become increasingly critical and complex. This sampling of artists’ publications represents a range of perspectives and attitudes in response to armed conflict.
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