NYArtBookFair

Yesterday (Friday) I took in the first day of this year's NYArtBookFair with pal Lawrence Giffin. The thing is like a high-end, poopless AWP. The rate of interesting people per square foot is also significantly higher than that of AWP (which is in turn way higher than any ol' place). I ran into friend Thomas Evans & chatted nicely while looking at a one-of-a-kind Ian Hamilton Finlay piece. Thomas mentioned that he had heard about a long lost (or something like that) Clark Coolidge piece that featured pages rolled up inside of a shoe. At the Information as Material booth, I met both Nick Thurston & Jarrod Fowler, picking up Thurston's lastest, Historia Abscondita, a treatment of a certain portion of Nietzsche's The Gay Science. Jarrod alerted me that there may be a possible reprint on the way to get the cover colors just right, which may make the version I scooped rare in the future, which tickles me all over. At another table I scored Partially Built Woodshed, which is an attractive, smallish volume on Robert Smithson printed on blue, uncut pages. The fetching operator of the Semiotext(e)/Autonomedia booth had to be told twice that I was a pushover & would buy anything recommended me. I emerged with a Science Fiction anthology with a mechanical peepee flipbook built in to the lower edges of each page, a work from the Midnight Notes Collective entitled Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992, Richard Kempton's Provo: Amsterdam's Anarchist Revolt, along with the Critical Art Ensemble's Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness & finally Pure War from Virilio & Lotringer.


Other finds include Jeremy Shaw's DMT art/experiment/experience book-o'-the-substance courtesy of the Presentation House Gallery & Projectile Publishing. The book is all black & (mostly) white & I can already see the future fingersmudgeprints that will decorate it's covers & pages. Rounding out the acquisitions are Scott McCarney's Index to The Encyclopedia, a handsome red-leathery, gold-stampy thing from Smart Books, & a small colorful duct-tape-bound volume State of the Union also by McCarney. The edition of 100 accompanies anagrams of its title along with close-up still images of the speaker, from the 2003 address.



After the fair promptly ended at 7 (there were suited men with walkie talkies telling us to scram) Lawrence & I accompanied Jarrod, Nick, Rob Fitterman & new friends Karriem & Ammiel (sorry, no last names for now) for Korean dindin & then we were joined by Kenny Goldsmith for drinks at a posh place called Keens Chophouse. Rob told us that it was at Keens where Abe Lincoln hung out a day or two before he caught a bad one.

The Phenomenon

There is a new publication, of particular merit, out of Northampton, MA: the first volume of The Physical Poets series, helmed by Lawrence Giffin. This first volume is titled "The Neo-liberal American Poetry" & it is a total & complete success. Given the price of the item, of a mere $5, it could justly be described as perfect. The singular, handsome booklet features the work of Steve Zultanski, Marie Buck, Brad Flis, & Lawrence Giffin. Some discussion of the luscious contents may be found here, which mentions the lovely Suri Cruise piece in Marie Buck's section, which opens the book. The poem in its entirety can be read at the above physpo link. Also mentioned at the Pioneer Valley link are Brad Flis' Digital Underground riffs, which, along with his other work, are equally not to be missed. Steve Zultanski's piece, "Previously on the O.C." is worth noting as well. It is an unbroken nine-page juggernaut featuring bits such as:

"What do you think about Newport?"
"I think I could get in less trouble where I'm from."
"You have no idea."
"Shouldn't her boyfriend be doing this?"
"Sure they're not doing anything we didn't do, heh huh."
"My dad's not here."
"It's just a thing with a client."
"Put him down!"
"Hey Ryan."
"Ugh."
"Welcome to the OC, bitch."

Which leaves us with the editor & helmsman Lawrence Giffin. His "A Bourgeois Interior" is a multifarious, pleasurable prose work. The section "The Touch, the Feel, of Cotton" begins thusly:

The valuables cramming the homes of the very rich cry out helplessly for the museum; yet there the meaning of sculpture and paintings, as Valery perceived, is destroyed, only architecture, their mother, showing them their rightful place. But kept by force in the houses of people with whom they have no ties, they are an open affront to the mode of existence which private property has now adopted.

The section ends, about a page later, with a nice bit of song-verse, which I will not spoil. The excerpt is indicative of the quasi-informational inexhaustable Giffinesque style that will be well known & imitated in the coming years. I highly recommend getting on board now with this excellent, highly various new item, which is one of my favorite new books, despite all the high-dollar stuff I tend to buy.