Printed Matter runs annual art book fairs in New York City and Los Angeles and I sometimes go to the New York one. For those unfamiliar, Printed Matter is a long-running artist bookshop in Manhattan and is a fantastic space for folks interested in a myriad of international, often below-the-radar, artist projects. I get there once every couple of months and the constant rotation of titles along with various exhibits and talks make it a consistently worthwhile trip.
I find the art book fairs less exciting though. It may be the nature of these kinds of events where there’s a ton of people, not a lot of space, and an unbelievable amount of stuff for sale, sometimes from counter-cultures and movements I personally experienced/participated in at what feels like outrageous prices. Sometimes it’s the grouchy and entitled people who make it difficult – like the woman who snapped at a Printed Matter worker not scanning her ticket quick enough this year while (almost) no one in line said anything, or, last year, the guy who almost punched me in the face after he stormed out of the space, smashing past me, huffing and puffing about who knows what. It may also be that I’ve never felt much comfort with “art” as such and have been inspired more by the anti-art work of Henry Flynt, the art strike effort of decades past, and the brilliant writing of Gustav Metzger. There was some of that kind of thinking present at the art book fair, but not a lot. For those inclined and able, though, one could spend over a thousand dollars for a poster from the Anti-University in London.
That said, the folks at Printed Matter who put the fair together do a truly heroic job and the workers are incredibly patient throughout the day with a lot of people. And a lot of great artists and publishers and second hand sellers (and some not so great) put a lot of time and attention into their tables, and there is a geographical diversity that is really neat. Finally, this year had many tables that drew attention to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which was really solid.
My main interest in attending this year’s fair was the one-room exhibit on the Detroit Printing Co-Op put together by Danielle Aubert and based on her remarkable book The Detroit Printing Co-Op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing (we briefly mentioned that work in the past, here). The exhibit on the Detroit Printing Co-Op, which has taken place at least a couple of other times in other parts of the US, was in a very large room at the fair, which was held at MoMA PS1 in the (almost unbelievably, at least to me), gentrified neighborhood of Long Island City in Queens.
The Detroit Printing Co-Op grew from and was immersed in the radical struggles of the 60s and 70s and printed many important works, including the anarchist and situationist journal Black and Red, many issues of Radical America, and the first English translation of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. I am mainly making this post for people who cannot get to the exhibit and might otherwise be interested so they can see what it was like. Photos below.
New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism 