Printed Matter

Montez Press Radio takes its broadcast experiment to the west coast for Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair, Apr 12 – 14

12 April 2019

Montez Press Radio is taking up residency for this year’s Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair at Los Angeles’ Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, running April 12 to 14.

Described as “an experiment in radio broadcasting which plays in the boundaries of conversation, performance, distribution, and access through the lens of contemporary art,” the project is headed by New York, London, and Hamburg-based publisher Montez Press. Their first summer residency program ran July 19 to August 19, 2018, and included the likes of Hard to ReadNYC Trans Oral History Project, Triple Canopy and Berlin Community Radio, as well as AQNB’s own Content Prole: A journey into the depths of the online gig economy collaboration with Matthew O’Shannessy.

Montez Press Radio has since broadcast from an RV at the New York Art Book Fair, done a takeover on Food Radio and returned to their original location in NYC’s Chinatown. This will be their first time in California, featuring shows with Amalia Ulman, X-TRA, Shevaun Wright, Lila de Magalhaes, Ana Iwataki and many more.

See the Montez Press Radio website for details.**

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unbag publication releases Issue 2: End with an night of readings at Printed Matter, Inc. Jan 11

10 January 2018

The release event for unbag Issue 2: End is taking place at New York’s Printed Matter, Inc. on January 11.

The digital and print publication unbag (that “promotes dialogue concerning contemporary art, cultural practice, and political action”) is releasing their second issue of visual art, critical essays, web-based projects and other literary works that explore the idea of ‘end’ and featuring 19 contributors including Morehshin AllahyariJesse DarlingShawné Michaelain Holloway, Baseera Khan, Precious Okoyomon and Ashwin Ravikumar among others.

The evening will feature readings and performances by Justin Allen, Thea Ballard, Shawné Michaelain Holloway and Baseera Khan.

Visit the Printed Matter, Inc. website for details.**

Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Unbag Issue 2 Spread (2018) Courtesy the artist, unbag + Printed Matter, Inc. New York

 

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A tattoo parlor, Teen Angels, an after party + more at Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair, Feb 23 – 26

23 February 2017

Printed Matter‘s LA Art Book Fair is on at Los Angeles’ The Geffen Contemporary of MOCA, running February 24 to 26, with an opening preview on February 23.

For its fifth edition the companion event to NY Art Book Fair invites over 250 international presses, booksellers, artists’ merchandise distributors, antiquarians, and independent publishers into its space.

There will be an opening night preview at Geffen with special musical performances by Seth Bogart and Kembra Pfahler & Christian Music from The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, as well as a keynote address by artist, General Idea co-founder and past Printed Matter director AA Bronson called ‘MY LIFE IN BOOKS.

An exhibition of art, issues and other miscellany by the late Teen Angel — the Lowrider artist and writer behind Teen Angels Magazine focusing on life in the streets of the Varrios of California and the Southwest — will be on show, including unpublished, never before-seen original pieces of artwork. 

Gagosian Gallery will present an exhibition as tattoo parlor called FLASH FLASH FLASH, and Slow Culture & Deadbeat Club have a pop-up installation of a vintage drive-thru photo kiosk with 24-hour film developing services called ‘THE FOTOMAT.’ XE(ROX) & PAPER + SCISSORS will be presenting over 100 international artists, zines, and small presses, while some publishers and titles to look out for include Dirty Looks, Hesse PressHonor Fraser, Sternberg Press, an audio project by Linder & Maxwell Sterling at Blum & Poe, Emalin and many more.

The official after party, on February 25, will be at The Regent, and feature performances by SophieYves Tumor, Bill Kouligas, Juliana Huxtable among them. 

See the FB event page for the full programme and more details.**

Image courtesy Maxwell Sterling.

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New York Art Book Fair, Sep 15 -18

13 September 2016

In its eighth year running, The New York Art Book Fair will take place at New York’s MoMA PS1 in Queens, opening September 15 and running to 18.

Run by Printed Matter, a non-profit organization specializing in artist books, the fair will kick off with an opening preview featuring a live performance by Beat Detectives. In addition, the rest of the weekend will also see a series of special events take place, including The Classroom who curate engagements of “informal conversations, workshops, readings, and other artist-led interventions”, as well as The Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference (CABC) who will be dissecting art-book culture and its relationship to emerging practices.

With a range of artists’ books, catalogues, monographs, periodicals, and zines, the event will be host to over 370 booksellers from twenty-eight countries, including the affordable Small Press Dome and the zines of (XE)ROX & PAPER + SCISSORS and Friendly Fire who focus on art and activism in particular.

Also opening September 16 and happening alongside the NY Art Book Fair is the inaugural Independent Art Book Fair (IBAF) at Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse and including artists and publishers like Daniel Temkin, Ditto Press, FOUNDATIONS, Montez Press and more.

See the NY Art Book Fair website for details and the full programme**

NY Art Book Fair, Promotional Flyer (2016). Courtesy of Printed Matter.
NY Art Book Fair, Promotional Flyer (2016). Courtesy of Printed Matter.

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LA Art Book Fair, Feb 11 – 14

10 February 2016

The fourth LA Art Book Fair presented by Printed Matter will be in the MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary space, opening on February 11 and running February 14.

The fair invites 250 international presses, booksellers, artists’ merchandise distributors, antiquarians, and independent publishers into its space.

Included in the line up are several familiar names such as Semiotext(e), Mousse, Arcadia Missa, Sternberg Press, Onomatopee, Flash Art and Kaleidoscope, as well as others such as Juxtapoz Magazine, Kiosk, Kill Your Idols, Ooga Booga, Le Roy and Glum Magazine.

The LA Art Book Fair opening after party will be held at the Roosevelt Hotel, hosted by 207 projects and featuring SFV Acid, Yung Jake and Never Press on February 11.

Another afterparty on February 13 has an amazing line up and is on at LA’s Resident venue. Printed Matter, How Many Virgins? and Berserktown share the hosting for this one.

Outside the fair’s extensive premise and party is a concurrent event by label Fade To Mind, featuring Jam City, also on February 13.

See the LA Art Book Fair website for more details and full line up of exhibitors.**

Yung Jake, 'Both' (2015). Install view. Courtesy Steven Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles.
Yung Jake, ‘Both’ (2015). Install view. Courtesy Steven Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles.

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An interview with Beau Rice

25 February 2015

“The first time I masturbated was on the internet and I learned to recognise my desires”, says Beau Rice from his home in LA. He’s a 25-year-old first time author who’s written a book composed almost entirely of his private text messages. Published by Penny-Ante Editions, TEX includes Gmail subject headings and Google Docs, emails and emojiis (“[corn] dildo in the corner”), some prose and a poem that literally looks like a butt plug, all centred around an endless discussion of sex, love and normativity.

“Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum”, reads Rice through his webcam, from an online document where he’s saved the quote by writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. It’s from a collection of aphorisms aptly titled Monogamy, dissecting and deconstructing the notion of a ‘one and only’ on very critical, often alienating terms. That’s just one of countless literary references that Rice shares with ‘Matt G’, the unrequited object of his affection and focus of the thread of private texts, chats and selfies that is TEX. Reading it, you not only witness an intimate conversation between two people getting to know each other, but gain an insight into the treacherous terrain of love long-distance in a highly networked world.

No surprises then, that a conversation with Beau Rice is a conversation about relationships; relationships that are shaped, facilitated and maybe even fucked up by the devices through which we conduct them (“I thought that was harsh, force-quitting me”).

Do you think you were able to form this relationship with Matt G via text more easily than you might have in person?

BR: I think that the relationship is just completely different from whatever that would have happened in person. Really the relationship is nothing more than what’s in the book, except from the very beginning. They’re just these sort of words in two phones. There’s nothing more than that. That’s what it is.

There’s some poetry in the book and you said before that it comes from a place of longing, do you think that in the case of Matt that it was exacerbated by this form of communication?

BR: I totally do because before texting was so normative I think that I would have overcome these feelings when I returned to LA. I probably would have still been affected, I certainly would have still been affected by meeting him but we sort of had this ongoing dialogue that was very future-oriented somehow, but in what way? I had no idea when I was going to see him in real life again. It’s all in the book.

I’m really interested in that fact that in TEX you’re completely open about your sex life and even your insecurities and taboos within that.

BR: I think also it’s important to note that it’s totally unglamorous. There are no protections. It’s still difficult for me to have this out there. It’s not something I feel really confident about. It’s something I feel really open to thinking in different ways about but it’s especially weird because my coworkers at the book store have been reading it and they’re all straight. I mean they’re across the board intelligent people and they like it but it’s very weird for me. It’s not easy. It’s not like I feel this bold, assertive, simple feeling about it.

It makes you think how much you embed yourself in a certain persona, especially if you’re too public online. If you were showing nudes at 19 and you tried to get a job at 30.

BR: Yeah, but maybe that’s changing. I feel like people my age, a lot of them would have no problem hiring someone who has appeared in porn or something. I admire people who appear in porn and I’m hoping that attitudes about privacy are changing as the nature of privacy is changing. Recently I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to literally not have a private life.

I always feel like I don’t have a private life, especially with the publishing of this book, because I’m so disclosing and self-humiliating in my speech and I’m wondering what the limit is or what it would be like to have no private life. Not that I don’t have one, but I’m thinking about that.

texts spiral

 

Like posting on porn sites like it’s no big deal.

BR: I find these sites so interesting. There’s this one called Chaturbate where you can set a goal. I’ve done this before with this straight guy actually who’s really a strange person, but you set a goal and whenever you get a certain amount of tokens, which equates to money, you have to perform the goal that you set or else you’ll get bad ratings and eventually you won’t be on there. There are also these weird imperatives provided by the website too, like, ‘do this erotic labour for these viewers’. I think that out of these websites, that are so lurid and so hard to take seriously, new languages about erotics are being born.

When you say ‘erotic labour’, if there was no such thing as privacy maybe these sites wouldn’t need to exist.

BR: Sex and the internet sort of confounds our thinking about privacy and it’s neither positive nor negative. It’s just something that we should talk, and write, and think about. I’m interested in feminist porn, I’m interested in ways that maybe in the future these porn sites wouldn’t be so lurid and ‘porn-y’ and coded as that, but they are. And I think that that’s because it’s a serious threat to heteronormative cultural imperatives. These sites are coded as ‘porn-y’ because we want to create a visual realm on which pornography is different from everyday life.

cali collar selfie

What are your thoughts on monogamy?

BR: First of all, I’m not a participant observer because I’ve never really been in a monogamous relationship and I want to try it. I’m in thrall to whatever cultural forces compel us to get into monogamous relationships but I also question it. I wonder what the desire for monogamy is a desire for. I don’t have first hands experience.

I think that it’s easier to be monogamous but I don’t know whether it would be advantageous to me as a writer [laughs] I think that there’s something that’s sort of an opiate about it in the long run… but then again I’ve no experience. I’m concerned that noone has ever really wanted to be in a monogamous relationship with me, and that made me sad for years but then I became accustomed to it and I’ve derived self-worth elsewhere. I’m concerned that no one ever will want to be but, you know, at least I can keep writing and having friends [laughs].

I guess I ask because in the book you’re not monogamous and quite open about it with Matt G.

BR: I’m interested in the ways that my entity in the book seems to argue both for monogamy and non-monogamy and is incoherent about it. I think that that expresses my own feeling that it changes all the time and having just one attitude about it is not something that… it is a pose.

I’m personally fairly ambivalent about relationships and monogamy, and I get the feeling from the book that you have this desire for this potential of monogamy or love but are also horrified by it.

BR: Yeah, I mean my desire is irrational, and I try to be as undeluded about it in my thinking. I think this is a sort of conflict because these desires are not rational. That’s a very basic statement but I think that we lose sight of that and think that we have to take that desire more seriously than we actually need to.

I’m interested in impersonal versions of sex, even if it’s with someone you care about because I think that there’s something inherently impersonal about sex [laughs]. It’s confusing but it takes me work every day not to feel like I have to listen to cultural dictates on love and monogamy. And especially love because it’s easy for me to not want monogamy but to not want this version of love that’s described all over culture that’s almost impossible… I don’t’ know if I like what I just said.

screen shot 1
Graham Kolbeins, TEX trailer. Video still. Courtesy Beau Rice.

I’ve been thinking a lot about romantic comedies and how dogmatic the cult of love is, even to the point of dictating how people have sex.

BR: They have this sort of absent centre that is love, but it’s not recognisable from actual experiences of love, which is often so violent and messy.

Maybe that violence and mess is the central to love, or desire? If it’s not challenging and dramatic then it’s boring.

BR: I see what you mean and I think it’s crazy that people have been able at times to sustain this sort of messy passionate sort of attachment. It seems almost unsustainable to me, or unliveable. Do you know what I mean?

That’s your rationality coming through again.

BR: Again, let me say that I don’t know what I’m talking about and that I’ve never been in a long-term relationship at all.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot too. A lot of the people I know who end up in a straight, or normative long-term relationship seem bored by two years.

BR: Yeah. I think serial monogamy is the norm right? And serial monogamy is a sort of paradox, anyway. But at the same time, I always come back to this that you can’t discount the experience of people who find relationships that remain sexual and really work that are also friendships. One does witness that but that’s difficult and rare, you know?

I think Matt from the book is doing that now. I mean they haven’t even been together for a year yet so we’ll see what happens, but I was able to witness their sort of simple domestic life and I was like, ‘wow, this is really boring but it seems like you really fulfil important roles to one another’ [laughs]. **

Beau Rice’s TEX, published by Penny-Ante Editions, launches at New York’s Printed Matter on February 26, 2015.

Header image: Graham Kolbeins, TEX trailer. Video still. Courtesy Beau Rice.

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Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair 2015

13 January 2015

Printed Matter‘s third annual LA Art Book Fair is running at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown LA from January 29 to February 1.

As the sunny twin to the bi-annual NY Art Book Fair, the 2015 LA Art Book Fair is opening the weekend with a three-hour preview featuring special musical numbers from No Age and Prince Rama. And running throughout the weekend is (XE)ROX & PAPER + SCISSORS, a “super-sized subsection” of the greater fair, which is bringing in more than 125 artists, zinesters, and small presses for a survey of independent publishing.

Other programmes include: The Classroom, a curated series of workshops, conversations, and readings, as well as the seventh annual Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference (CABC); “1 Image 1 Minute” which has 50 artists, writers and curators present a single image of their choosing for one minute; and even an exhibition of the great Dorothy Iannone’s artists’ books.

There’s a whole lot more and the LA Art Book Fair FB page has the details. **

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Deanna Havas poem launch @ Printed Matter, Sep 11

9 September 2014

NYC’s Printer Matter is hosting the launch of Deanna Havas‘ latest poem, ACTUAL PERSON, on September 11, 6:30-8pm.

Comprised of content sourced from various internet sites and communities, including Reddit AMA (Ask me Anything), Experience Project, and Whisper App, ACTUAL PERSON takes the classic cento approach and applies it to the shifty and intimate logic of the internet.

The long-form poem, published by the artist-run Social Malpractice Publishing and to be read aloud as part of the launch, was developed by the NY artist during her residency at the LUMA/Westbau Foundation in Zurich and part of the 89+ series.

See the Printed Matter event page for details. **

Screen shot 2014-09-09 at 1.32.02 PM

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