Brooklyn Rail Art Books editor, Megan N. Liberty - who has previously reviewed the Siglio Press reissue of John Cage's Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), Blurred Library: Essays on Artists’ Books, Richard McGuire’s Art For The Street 1978 – 1982 the Steven Leiber Catalogs, and many other titles that readers of this blog would likely be interested in - published a review of Derek Sullivan's Evidence of the Avant Garde Ex-Library, yesterday.
She writes:
"Within the field of artist publishing, there are several dividing lines between cheap and expensive, multiple and unique. Against this context is the work of Derek Sullivan, an artist who engages in a “distributed art practice.” Interested in ephemera (which is sometimes an artist book and sometimes not), networks of distribution, and how materials are activated through circulation and use, Sullivan’s latest book translates an exhibition catalogue documenting ephemera (audio tapes, manuscripts, buttons, and books), from a 1984 show at Art Metropole into an artist book.
In 1984, to celebrate their 10 year anniversary, the “artist-initiated” bookstore, distributor, and publisher Art Metropole, founded in Toronto by the artist collective General Idea, held the exhibition Evidence of the Avant Garde Since 1957 showcasing ephemera gathered from their archives that illustrated the avant-garde art and publishing ethos of the 1960s onwards. Using the materials they gathered over the years, Art Metropole presented a story of conceptual art featuring artworks and ephemera by Constance De Jong, Ulises Carrión, Nam June Paik, Jenny Holzer, and many others. As the accompanying catalogue notes, “fragments, ephemera—‘evidence’—of a network of ideas and phenomena which came to be known collectively as Conceptual art, and the manifestations which continue to give life to many of the principles activated by that network of ideas.” The show was grounded in the archive: “to call something an archive is to impute authoritative and definitive organization of material and information, and yet the material under discussion was in large part realized in this form in order to bypass the validating and authorizing mechanisms of gallery and museum (and likewise archive).”
Continue reading at Brooklyn Rail, here.
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