Holiday Recommendations Guest Post #8: Harley Spiller

"Three new artists' publications I've read have been resonating like crazy.

On Trepanation and Human Nature: Perspectives from Paul Broca to the Present by Melissa Monroe (March, 2014  www.smithandbrown.org) is a 46-page poem about scraping, boring and hacking holes in human skulls.  Monroe patched together words and phrases drawn primarily from 28 historical, medical, and scientific sourcesto form this eloquent, melodic, and meditative collage on a fascinatingly freakish human practice.  Though I cannot definitively divine whether trepanation helps or harms (or whether this poem is more science or art), I do know this is a beautiful, smart and intricate bit of "Skull Magic."

In 1979, Minnesota-based performance artist Billy X. Curmano got a note from a stranger, Paul Hartal, the Hungarian-Canadian founder of the Lyrical Conceptualist Society. Hartal proposed a collaboration and Curmano, being the open-hearted humanitarian he is, replied with a detailed 16-page plan for a performance. The piece was faithfully executed in Quebec and Montreal the following year, but Billy has still not met any of the Lyrical Conceptualists. While combing through his archives in early 2015, he came across photographs of the performances Hartal had sent and was inspired to whip up the hand-stitched PERFORMANCE For an UNKNOWN SPACE With LEMONS. The first of these two slip-covered booklets reprises Curmano's original illustrated instructions; the second presents documentation of the performances. It's kooky fun with serious underpinning - not at all unexpected from the noodle of an artist who betters our world with challenging work like swimming the length of the Mississippi, fasting for forty days in Death Valley, and performing for cows and dead people.

The Winter 2015 ish of Raconteur presents true stories written and illustrated by cartoonists Isabella Bannerman, Brian Fies, John Klossner, Mike Lynch, and Mark Parisi. (http://mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/2015/02/buy-raconteur-6.html ) Like mini graphic novels, each tale takes us into the mind of its creator as they parse things that happened to them in the real world.  Bannerman, for example, shares the emotions she felt when her teacher and classmates laughed derisively upon learning she thought God had created Mt. Rushmore. Her "Miracle of Mt. Rushmore" carries me back fifty years to the morning before my first day of Sunday school, when I panicked because I was sure they'd ask me to draw a picture of God and I didn't know what he looked like. Careful readers of the deceptively-potent "Raconteur" may derive similar solace from these aesthetic explorations of the difficult experiences we all hide in our brains.

The mark of great art is that it keeps coming to mind well after the original encounter.  These three inexpensive artists books do just that."


Harley J. Spiller is the Deputy Director of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., and author of KEEP THE CHANGE: A Collector's Tales of Lucky Pennies, Counterfeit C-Notes, and Other Curious Currency
https://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781616892562

Billy X
Lemon Performance Booklets
Winona, USA: Self-published,
16 pp., 8 pp., 5.5 x 4.25", hand-stitched, hand-coloured slipcase
Edition of 65 signed and numbered copies

Available at http://www.billyx.net (under 'Store').

Holiday Recommendations

I typically refrain from my own holiday recommendations, but two titles I have recently posted:
Harley Spiller's Keep the Change (November 18th) and John Cage's Diary: How To Improve the World [You Will Only Make Matters Worse] (November 28th) would certainly be on my short list.

The New York Times Holiday Gift Guide Art Books agrees:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/multimedia/2015-holiday-gift-guide-books.html?_r=0

Harley J. Spiller | Keep the Change: A Collector's Tales of Lucky Pennies, Counterfeit C-Notes, & Other Curious Currency

Harley J. Spiller
Keep the Change: A Collector's Tales of Lucky Pennies, Counterfeit C-Notes, & Other Curious Currency 
Princeton, USA: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015
112 pp., 5.5 x 8.5", paperback
Edition size unknown

"Harley J. Spiller began collecting money at the age of five when, home sick from school, his father tossed him a sack of pennies and a Whitman coin folder. In the five decades since, author Spiller has amassed one of America's most extensive collections of unusual financial artifacts as well as a wealth of anecdotes and quirky historical details about U.S. currency. In Keep the Change, Spiller takes an irreverent look at our most uncommon coins and bills.

Readers learn why greenbacks are green; what happens to worn-out bills (compost is involved); how artists navigate the fine line between art and mutilation; whether it's ever acceptable to burn money (short answer: maybe); and how coin clippers and counterfeiters through the ages have profited by manipulating money. This highly selective tour through currency legends and lore will inspire readers to look with a new sense of wonder at the bills that pass through our hands every day."

- Press release

Don't miss Spiller's talk tomorrow night at Chester Station, at the Artists' Newsstand.

Harley Spiller presentation

A week from today at the Chester Station Artists' Newsstand (see tags for details) I will be launching Born on A Train, the newspaper project in the below post, from 5 to 7 pm.

Following this the station will host a talk by Harley Spiller. Spiller is a collector whose collections have been displayed in museums around the world, and whose writings have appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker. They are primarily of things with no monetary value.

His archives of 10,000 Chinese menus, which date back to 1879 and come from over 100 nations, is now housed at the University of Toronto Scarborough Library as part of their new Culinaria food studies program.

We saw him speak in an alley in front of mmuseumm a couple of years ago, talking about his collection of defaced currency (see above). There were only a couple of dozen people in attendance, but one of them was David Byrne, who rode up on his bike (see post here). Spiller was smart, funny and engaging.

At the newsstand he will present the talk "Newsstands, Mutilated Money, Dim Sum & Then Some" and then sign copies of his new book Keep the Change. He will also be "Newsie-in-Residence" at the kiosk on Friday November 20 from 4PM-7PM.

It's worth the trek to the east end of the city, and you can get there and back on one token.

Newspaper Project for Chester Newsstand

Dave Dyment
Born on A Train
Toronto, Canada: AN/CN, 2015
8 pp., 11 x 17", tabloid
Edition of 1000

Born on a Train (& other Stories about Subways, Cinema and the City) is the second subway project offshoot from a film I'm working on called Substitute City (a title Philip Monk graciously allowed me to steal). It will be a feature-length film comprised of clips from cinema and television where Toronto is the location but not the setting. A kind of answer to Thom Anderon's Los Angeles Plays Itself.

Excerpts from the narration were previously published as a poster by C Magazine called Cinema is Not the Station, which was distributed at Villa Toronto, at Union Station in January. This longer text (approaching 10, 000 words) is accompanied by film stills from American productions shot at Bay Lower platform, one of the city's two "ghost stations", and images taken of the rarely-seen platform by myself and Lee Henderson earlier this year.

The newspaper name, USA TODAY - Tomorrow the World, repurposes my all-time favourite graffiti, which I saw scrawled on a newspaper box years ago. Echoes of Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan (Then We Take Berlin)." But here it refers to Toronto's regular role as stand-in for American cities (New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington, Detroit), and international ones on occasion. Also, the logo helps suggest an actual newspaper, and USA Today is also the only paper mentioned in the text. Next to the American flag (and wire mesh trash cans for NYC), the USA Today newspaper box is perhaps the most common prop used to help Toronto appear as an unnamed American city.

The project was produced for Jess Dobkin's Artists' Newsstand (see tag for previous posts), where it will be distributed for free to commuters. I see it as a site-specific text. It attempts to tell the intertwined early history of cinema and the train, the portrayal of subways and stations, the use of Bay Lower for countless film productions, etc. etc. It can be read as individual articles, or as a continuous essay. It's somewhat timed that riders travelling west would be reading about Bay Lower as they cross above it.

The launch is set for November 19th, a week today, which will also be host to an event with New York collector Harley Spiller. More about that tomorrow.

Harley Spiller and Mmuseumm

This is Harley Spiller, and he has more menus than you.

Also known as Inspector Collector, he has amassed record-breaking collections of a variety of items (spoons, autographs, chopsticks, take-out boxes, flyers, postcards, shopping lists), most of which have no actual financial value. The Harley Spiller Menu Collection consists of more than 10,000 items, spanning predominantly from 1981 to 2009. The collection totals 40 linear feet and has been recognized by Guinness as the world's largest. If ever challenged, he claims he will happily relinquish the title rather than re-count.

We saw him give a presentation on counterfeit and altered currency last Sunday. It was hosted in an alley, in front of mmuseumm - a 60 square foot gallery space housed in an abandoned Tribeca freight elevator. A garage door opens at street level to reveal a decked out miniscule museum. The artifacts and found objects are typically on loan from hobbyists and artists, and have included items from Californian prisons, newsstand paper weights, paper left behind in photocopier machines, and discarded food photography. The prisoner inventions (curated by Baron Von Fancy) ranged from artworks carved with a pencil out of soap, to functional items like a pair of dice made from bread. The collection of pages left in copiers comes from the archives of artist Leah Singer and the food photography, collected by Alexandra Eaton, was a series of rejected shots for a Cambodian menu. Last year Tom Sachs presented 'moon rocks'.

Mmuseumm's gift shop consists of three shelves, and its cafeteria is a pot of coffee.

The display when we visited last week included bullet proof Disney backpacks, personal artifacts from Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein, New York tip jars, and a surprisingly diverse collection of fake vomit from around the world.

It's an incredible space, and the talk (though we had to leave half-way through, to catch our flight) was a highlight of the trip.

Visit their website here: http://mmuseumm.com.