Hubert Kretschmer | Various Small Dicks

Hubert Kretschmer
Various Small Dicks
Munich, Germany: Verlag Hubert Kretschmer, 2013
16 pp., 15x10 cm., staple-bound
Edition of 1000

Probably the funniest titled of the numerous contemporary artists' books which parody/pay tribute to Ed Ruscha's classic bookworks of the sixties and seventies (see January 2012 post, here, for more examples). The work also serves to illustrate how increasingly redundant the collected found image book is in the age of Google. The images, primarily of women holding their fingers together closely in the presumably universal symbol of "you have a small penis", are low resolution and heavily pixelated, as if they were the first returns on a simple net search.

To further hammer the point home, a web initiative by Karolis Kosas calling itself Anonymous Press was recently set up to allow any visitor to the site to input the title of a book, which it then auto-populates with content. A cover and title page are instantly created, and the imagery for the remaining (few) pages are generated by a relevant google search. Every search creates a book, and all of the titles are archived. One can buy their own book, or any of the hundreds of others, none of which are credited to their 'creators'. All of the titles are b&w and cost $3.00.

I couldn't resist remaking Kretschmer's book using the program. Images below.

Various Small Dicks is available from Amazon, here, or to download, here.

Visit Anonymous Press, here.