shelflife by visitor

I always loved Cynthia Connolly’s photos. Her icebox portraits were stunning–this collection of these forgotten artifacts of design, convenience and refrigeration–collected and documented with the same respect anthropologists would pay to a tribe of Algonquins in traditional regalia on a reservation somewhere. A few weeks ago, I saw one of her photos of Alleged Gallery’s last NYC group show in a Times article about Beautiful Losers. Monika asked if I was the sole person in the photo–crouched on the floor, working on a video installation. I was.

I dug up this invite that Cynthia had made for a show in SF back in 2001. I hung onto it as it was the first concrete reinforcement that came across my mailbox as to how accessible letterpress could still be in such a digital age. I remember emailing Cynthia after receiving the invite and asking her about the press and the type. She said she’d been rather ravenously collecting type sets and had a monstrously heavy press. I had always loved old dadaist and futurist letterpress work. I knew that the center for book arts here in NY had a press. I had always wanted to play around, but never mustered up the chutzpah to just do it. So, I filed this away and promised myself that one day I’d find a project that would force me to somehow experiment with letterpress.

Last week, I started pulling together all of the production components for a new book edition I’m about to release. The edition, like FORE, has two incarnations–a numbered collection of 5 offset posters bundled together and editioned at 300 pieces and a signed and numbered edition of 400 18″x24″ 15 page books–where each book has a different hand-stenciled painting atop each of the poster prints. As the posters are all riffs on a wallpaper line I’m working on, the paintings are each of something different that happens against, on or near a wall when society’s collective back is against a wall. In keeping with this theme, the project is titled, “BUT THEY DON’T BLINK.” It, like FORE, is another wayward children’s book.

Anyway, letterpress–I needed a set of bold typography to be applied to the packaging I designed for the project. Once I had decided that I would hand-stencil 6000 paintings, I figured, “what the fuck! I’ll leterpress the 400 packages too!” I couldn’t though, so I’m faking it with block printing. I laser etched a set of rubber blocks with my typograghy, mounted them on foam and then to acrylic blocks. It’s not exactly letterpress yet, but I’m getting there. I just wanted to take this post to give Cynthia props for inspiring that.

Here’s Cynthia’s invite. I’ll post my stamps and posters as shelflife 13A later this weekend–along with a great Wolf Eyes lathe that Nate traded me sometime back as 13B.

1999. The Columbine shootings and the Trenchcoat Mafia who brought the war to the cafeteria against a foreground of possibilities in a future-unknown of mind-dicing via the personal computer, FPS videogames and KMFDM records were still piping hot in the collective conscious. Aaron Rose was re-re-re-opening the Alleged Gallery in its then-latest incarnation. A group show was slated. He’d faxed out the mission briefing and the mission was Coup d’État.

As scene troubnologist, I was saddled with making a low-rent, low-tech, anxiety-inducing invitation. Aaron gave me a single photograph, a show title and basically told me to go to town. Computer viruses were in the news daily. PC users were hating life. BIOS chips were being re-flashed in a string of particularly virulent infections and people were losing everything. The invite would capitalize on that and the prevalent tech-gimmick-lust via the lure of art as interactivity.

I made a set of four fonts that weren’t. They were more like autistic etch-a-sketches that only did one thing. If a user followed the instructions, each font would draw a different picture. Type out some crap. Type it out again with caps lock on. Select everything and change the font. That was the gist.

First, they’d draw a picture of Bill Gates–”gates=ham”. Then they’d draw a picture of Gates with the Piggly Wiggly face–”ham=gates” (Bill was in the news constantly–so much so, that in ensuing years, he’d be forced to step out of the Microsoft limelight to rest a weary army of publicists and go poorly do good for the poor). When an invite recipient selected the keystrokes comprising the two portraits, they were suddenly met with a pre-Columbine to-do list and an equation declaring that guns + jocks = a trenchcoat.

All good and well. However this… convenient and completely unplanned stroke of luck fell into our laps. A vicious virus started infecting computers within days of the invite being mailed out. Anxiety came gratis in pre-Y2K America so long as your timing was right.

Here’s what we gave the people. I’m working on something completely apropos of this project right now. It involves me programing hundreds of IC chips and laser etching tons of tiny PC boards to make custom, compact, troublemaking circuits that I’m pretty certain nobody’s exploited yet…

It was a teepee teahouse. We were washing dishes in the shower of a gallery that had, just a tenant earlier, been the last gay-sex-friendly free-weight body-building gym in the not-yet gentrified meat-packing district. I wore a block-printed pink apron and fry-cook cum elf hat. Slippers–I was also styled in slippers. Maybe they weren’t so much slippers as they were oversized wool moccasins. It’s possible that they were even worn atop a pair of New Balances laced in a pair of hot pink fatlaces that I picked up in Milan. The details are as fuzzy as my prep-cook, dishwasher, waiter and documentarian job description. Anyone who attended could tell you that the only event I could possibly be describing was Susan Cianciolo’s amorphic and ever-mutable Run Restaurant.

Susan’s runway shows are rarely ever seen on anything resembling a runway. She’s always generated events just a unicorn-short of fantasy to showcase the ever-widening quiver of products she’s endlessly stitched, printed, bottled and stuffed. Run Restaurant epitomized her approach. The creative possibilities afforded by an ephemeral restaurant were ideal for showcasing clothes and a home line.

Jason Scandinaro, Susan, Mark Borthwick, Libby McInnis, Simone and Amadeo Pace and Stefano Giovannini were a few of the chefs whose grub was dished out in the gallery. I need to go thru some of the footage I recorded during that show. Mark, his kids and I made a little film–traveling around to produce, meat and fish markets to buy groceries and then filming the prep/cooking at his and Maria’s old new place on the west side as well as the ensuing cooking and eating over at Alleged. Below is the invite that Susan and Alleged sent out to announce the show. I still have one of Libby’s petit fours archived in the freezer.