Printed Matter is the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists. Founded in 1976 by artists and artworkers, it’s now a retail and distribution hub in Chelsea, NYC of very interesting things, with an online catalogue.
I like to be surprised from turn to next and this is the ideal place for that with all tones, objectives and styles mixed together. Some things that caught my eye? A photocopied Fluxus magazine. Tiny hard cover bound books. A small Japanese-stitch bound booklet of front of incoming mail. Glossy pages of polaroids entitled “Art or Fart?”, Tomoo Gokita’s The Happy Pig, a large format newsprint book of reproduced water color illustrations in various styles of drawing on facing pages by Decathlon Books, made in 2010, 500 copies $15. It tells a story without words or linear narration.
I’m much happier when I don’t know what I’m looking at or where it is going. There was something in German. I couldn’t tell title from author but it said Sprickor och Andra, Karl-johanstigmark, 2010. It is a hard cover large format book with a good many of the pages not printed on but some pages being edge to edge of decaying white surfaces, bubbled and cracked white materials. It was $30. The small amount of content changed the majority of blank content into metaphorical other surfaces of spartan walls separating the breaking plaster and cracking walls from the rest. Stunningly simple and effective.
Michalis pichler’s Der einzige und sein eigentum: Greatest hits looked fun to play around in. It looked like a score of sound using only a couple words in different arrangements on white spaces.
Xu tan made a Dictionary of Keywords ($50) of learning Chinese with a map of points of articulation and some sort of phonetic script alphabet I haven’t seen before for sounding things out (from Guangzhou, China: Vitamin Creative Space. 2008).
Kim Beck’s A Field Guide to Weeds sparked the imagination on what the confines and possibilities of books are. (Should have bought that.) (Might still.) (Might soon.)
Printed Matter helps print and distribute things. For example a scrapbook of photos made for WWI’s soldier reproduced in color to scale.
I could have have spent days there except that I couldn’t have.
There were ephemera of flyers, and buttons. There were flip books, subversive zines, books of essays, things trying to be beautiful, things trying to avoid beauty. There were a lot of last copies of things from the 80s and 70s, and contemporary from Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, China, Canada and the U.S. It made the world feel more connected somehow. Loads of human creative potential crammed in one store.