Pretty Conceptual
curated by Angie Waller

November 30, 2012 – January 13, 2013
OPENING:  Friday, November 30  (7-11pm)
HOURS:  Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, noon to 6pm and by appointment
closed for holidays December 23 – 30

Present Company is pleased to announce Pretty Conceptual, the second iteration of our ongoing Present Projects series. Hosted in the back room of our gallery, these temporary invasions by guest colleagues serve to compliment our exhibition programming through experimental entrepreneurial endeavors. .

Pretty Conceptual is a concept store tailored to pretty conceptual lifestyles. It appeals to those who analyze the semiotics of greeting cards but never end up sending one; crave the latest gadgets but fetishize glitches and outmoded media; and enjoy products that poetically fail to live up to their grandiose promises.

Products span numerous lifestyle categories, including mind alteration, self-improvement, cutting-edge technology and fashion. You will find things that you didn’t know you needed. Prices will defy expectations.

Pretty Conceptual features products by  Angie Waller, Badlands Unlimited, Eric Doeringer, David Horvitz, Katarina Jerinic, Kristin Lucas, Sarah Nicholls, Yoshua Okón, Emily Spivack, Squareeater, Ryland Wharton, and Julia Weist.

PRETTY CONCEPTUAL EVENTS:

ARTIST TALKS: SAT DEC 1, DEC 8, DEC 16, JAN 5, JAN 12 3pm

SQUAREEATER RAVE and CLOSING PARTY: SAT JAN 12, 7-11pm

(see prettyconceptual.com for more details and announcements)

Every time I start a new pamphlet, I pretend that this one won’t be so wordy, but clearly I’m failing at this.

If I could just restrain myself, I’d be done by now. When I bought the type I’m using for the series, it was just about enough to set the whole thing. Those days are long gone. Each pamphlet gets wordier, which means more type. When I run out of letters, I have to print what I have, put everything back, then set the next bit, etc. At this point, I think I’m going to have to set, distribute, set, distribute, and set, distribute, set in order to get this one done.

Which is ok, I mean, obviously I like setting type. This is what I willingly did with my holiday weekend. I hope yours was just as pleasant and productive.

Meet my new friend Clanky.

Woodcut interior printed on our new press.

Take a look at this: type high rule-

Look Ma, no lockup! Type high rule with Sculpey.

Presto! Red squiggly lines!

There’s words, too:

I’ve got a ways to go with that part. I just keep getting wordier.

In the meantime, there’s some pie to make.

Have a fantastic Thanksgiving!

New prints are now up in my shop, here. 

Bowne & Co. Stationers in the South Street Seaport have had a rough couple of years; the latest is the three feet of flood water that damaged their collection of rare nineteenth century type:

Bowne & Co., Stationers and Bowne Printers took just under three feet of salt water in superstorm Sandy, submerging around 230 cases of wood and lead type and lots of letterpress miscellany.

Robert Warner, Ali Osborn, and Gideon Finck are leading the rescue; wonderful and brave volunteers have been working every day to rinse, clean, and dry the type.

Robert Warner at Bowne is welcoming volunteers to help wash and dry metal and wood type. The museum has made progress cleaning up but still doesn’t have power and may not until November 11.

Prospective volunteers should contact Franny Kent at fkent@mcny.org to schedule a full afternoon shift (12:00pm-4:30pm). Checks can be made out to South Street Seaport Museum, designated for Bowne in the memo line, and mailed to 12 Fulton Street, New York NY 10038. To make a gift online, click here.

1. You know why I’m writing this post? So that I can distract myself from hitting ‘refresh’ on nytimes.com over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Why does the internet turn me into one of those lab rats they feed cocaine to?

2. Hello, I’m fine, my family’s fine, everything’s fine. I survived the natural disaster fine. Many other people aren’t fine; please consider helping them. No, I’m not sad we didn’t have a marathon.

3. Commuting:

Why I hate the bus:

New Pamphlet!!:

3. I’m going to try to concentrate on working on a new book tonight, if I can keep myself away for long enough from election results.

4. Also, this:

Don’t even start with that “Only boring people are bored” crap. I went from frantic overwork to enforced home confinement. The rush of relief from having some time off is starting to wear off. Damn slow moving weather event! Weather.com has this huge red notice on the front page of their website saying “DEVASTATION IMMINENT!”

And me stuck here for the indefinite future without pie-making ingredients.

In the meantime, enjoy these images of the results of our live-action bookbinding demos at the Designers & Books Fair this past weekend. Not bad, huh?

I don’t know, whenever I finish one of these I feel a little let down.

My last 20 mile training run is done; I’m ready to go for the Marathon. Bam! I took 10 minutes off of my half-marathon time last week at the Staten Island Half and am feeling good. Well, sore at the moment, but in a good way.

I started making pamphlets because I live in New York, and something that we have a lot of here are people who stand out in public and scream and yell about something, the thing varying, but the tone of voice generally similar. And when I pass these people if I am not paying much attention I generally find myself agreeing with them, at least in intention, if not in detail. There are many reasons for this, some of them being:

1. Aesthetics. I come from a family that is full of mentally unstable alcoholics, who spend most of their time shouting and gesticulating wildly, so when I come across strangers in public acting similarly, it’s like home.

2. Often, what they are shouting about is generally related to Our Imminent Death, and How We Should Think About These Things. Which I really do completely agree with, even if I’m totally paying attention. I’m 100% behind the idea that we are all going to die really soon, and we should all be thinking about that, because that’s really important. I think I probably come to different conclusions that they do on the subject of what to do about that fact. But still.

3. They often have printed materials that they would like you to read. This one really gets me: Because usually it’s religious printed materials, which means that they are trying to give you a pamphlet because they think it is going to save your soul. Think about the level of faith in the printed word that that demonstrates. I love me some print, but I have never run something through a press and then taken a look at what I have done and thought, Now this is going to get someone into heaven.

I really have only half the amount of faith in print that the average proselytizer has, but in honor of that staggering leap of faith I make free informational pamphlets. I’m working on a new one right now, based on the 17th century, a heyday for the pamphlet in many ways. Hopefully it will be done this fall, fingers crossed.

Phosphorescent Face Highlighter‘s going to be in an artist book show this fall, opening next Friday:

Feminism and the Artist’s Book
Related to Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art at The Brooklyn Museum

October 19 – December 30, 2012
Reception: Friday, October 19, 6 – 8pm

This past weekend was the NY Art Book Fair, which means I got to table-sit amongst the finest in artist publications, and their legions of fans. Look at all of these people who came  to Queens just to look at paper books with pages and obscure content in person!

It makes me think there’s still hope. And this was on the less crowded third floor. Below us was a hot sweaty madhouse. Is there a portal to hell in PS1? Because it’s always so damn hot at the book fair.

I promoted the Center and its programs and sold some pamphlets, and talked to nice people that I like. I bought this, my one and only purchase, which I love:

From Lubok Verlag, whose books I always love and have been coveting for the past two fairs.  From their website:

Since 2007 a series of original graphic linocut books is published by Lubok Verlag. For each volume publisher and artist Christoph Ruckhäberle invites about 10 contemporary artists to realize their own artistic signature in linocuts. The artists happily accept the challenge and often use the Lubok series as an experimental field. The results are correspondingly manifold….Lubok books thereby continue a russian tradition of the same named popular broad sheets: inexpensive originally printed graphics that were sold on funfairs well into the 19th century. Like then art should become available for broad sections of the population, should become democratized without losing the pleasure of an original, its colours, its haptics and its smell.

My book, by the way, smells wonderful. Look at the beautiful press they print on!

I love everything about this. I should start sending them pamphlets. This is what the insides look like:

The names of the artists are printed on the fore edge in red:

Wonderful.