Artists' Book Not Artists' Book

Artists' Book Not Artists' Book

Wednesday, Jan 18, 2012 - Sunday, Feb 12, 2012

Location:
Boo-Hooray (Canal Street)
 265 Canal Street, Suite 601
New York, NY 10013

“Artists’ Book Not Artists’ Book” featured books that are, and/or, are not, artists’ books. The exhibition included work by Chris Burden, Ira Cohen, Richard Meltzer, John Baldessari, Seth Price, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Richard Hell, Tina Lhotsky, Sue Williams, Tom Sachs, Richard Prince, William Gibson, David Wojnarowicz, Dara Birnbaum, Jim Shaw, Ed Ruscha, Sean Landers, and others (not to mention, Various, Anonymous, and Unknown).

The exhibition was a collaboration between Johan Kugelberg/Boo-Hooray and Jeremy Sanders/6 Decades Books. Jeremy, as most of you know, is a noted enthusiast, expert, and dealer of artists’ books. His previous publications in the field have been splendid yardsticks of scholarly merit. Johan, on the other hand, is a caffeinated perpetuum mobile of dilettantism in the field, so hey, a natural collabo was in place.

Jeremy curated the artists’ books in this show, and Johan curated the not artists’ books. But alas! Sometimes Johan curated artists’ books, and sometimes Jeremy has curated ‘not artists’ books.’ Presto chango!

“How does one tell the difference?” the curator asks the curator.

Well naturally we had to ask a bona-fide art expert to provide all the answers. At great expense, 6 Decades and Boo-Hooray hired a famous international expert of great dignity and renown who perused the exhibit* and provided us with the correct answers as per what constitutes an artists’ book and what constitutes a not.

The egalitarian component of all this demanded that a kindly gallery representative provided attendees with a card with little boxes where they could check either “artists’ book” or “not-artists’ book.” The same representative then gathered your card upon completion and compare it to the resolve provided us by the Certified Art Expert. Anyone who completed the card correctly got a Dollar!  – Johan Kugelberg

* The Art Expert was found to be wearing a gorilla costume.

BOO-HOORAY exhibits both at home in New York City as well as internationally. We also stage collaborative exhibitions with the Hayward Gallery and Rough Trade in London, Tsutaya Daikanyama, Hysteric Glamour, and United Arrows in Tokyo, Galleri Operatingplace in Stockholm, Colette in Paris, PopMontreal in Montreal, Mishka Los Angeles, Printed Matter at both MOCA/LA and PS1/NYC, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the New York Public Library, the Grolier Club, and Milk Gallery in New York.

Boo-Hooray exhibitions have included shows featuring Larry Clark, The Velvet Underground, Ray Johnson, Afrika Bambaataa, Jonas Mekas, Ed Sanders, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage, Spencer Sweeney, Houston Rap, private press vinyl, Wallace Berman, anarcho-punk group Crass, Jason Polan, Jack Smith, cult-filmmaker Ed Wood, and Situationist Times editor Jacqueline de Jong.

The exhibitions are drawn from cultural archives that Boo-Hooray excavates, organizes, and places in institutions such as Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Cornell University’s Division of Rare Manuscript Collections, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.