Roz Chaz, FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), The New Yorker, Feb., 1, 2021, p. 35

 

Peter Downsbrough, Hence/Here.../Or, Avarie, Paris/Berlin, 2018, ed. 150

                                             Publisher's Press Kit

All the rest of the city is invisible. Phyllis is a space in which routes are drawn between points suspended in the void... Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within, buried, erased... Millions of eyes look up at windows, bridges, capers, and they might be scanning a blank page.

                                                                                         Italo Calvino

With Peter Downsbrough’s edition, Avarie’s interest in instances of emptiness and (dis)appearance continues, together with the search for new forms of independence and resistance expressed through a composite publication, articulated and disseminated in several volumes, which at the same time explores different printing techniques.

Once the body has disappeared from the representation, the image stays alone, independent of man and reality, which it modifies and subverts in the heterotopic space of the book, making visible, with a displacement of the point of view, what is normally absent due to an inability to see.

As plastic objects, the books are mobile constructions that invite us to reflect on the transition from horizontal to vertical, from linear to three- dimensional and on movement interpreted as converging time and space. Hence, they allow deambulation between the pages, in which words and graphic signs confer dynamism to the sequence of photographs and film stills. They are also architectural projections, the editing of which varies according to how the reader connects words, images and volumes to reassemble their sense, which therefore remains always open.

This circulation is possible thanks to the discontinuity of the space, made of interruptions and intervals. The connective element is in fact a disjunction – Or – that gives the whole thing an intermittent, suspended, broken rhythm.

...Preserving their autonomy, [these] books intersect, meet and divide at once, while they follow a guiding line which delimits the space in-between them and makes the void no longer absolute and infinite, but tangible and shareable, as leporello’s form shows. Here, emptiness is an interstice, an additional place existing only if words, images, letters and books separate, an intrinsic value that often occupies the centre of books, a metaphor of the image’s abstraction and utopia.

The books’ articulation and the frequent aesthetic choice of reflected images or words have a fundamental ethical dimension, they are indissociable from a political perspective, from a statement. They propose a critique of the established order, of architecture and urbanism intended as a regulatory system that influences social relations, when it does not completely obstruct them and is a source of exclusion, abandonment and isolation.

Downsbrough’s work is a quiet subversion, showing the reader-spectator a mirror to rediscover the power of action and the value of difference through repetition. If the utopian image is a subversive image, subversion is in turn utopian yet continuously desirable. What is truly independent and intrinsic to man, is the dream, the imagination: one cannot help dreaming, one cannot stop imagining even in the awareness that the image will remain the incomplete and fragmentary sign of an absent space.

© Giuliana Prucca / AVARIE (Artbooks Vuoti A Rendere International Edition), Paris/Berlin 

2 books: Or, 2017/2018 & Hence, 2004/2018. And one accordion, Here (2018), 8 pages double-sided, individual page 9.5" (h) and 6.25" (w), and when fully open 4' 2".

Marxeso, Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, Prague, 1990

English translation

Just discovered this fun accordion that was sent to me a long time ago by Rea Nikonova (1942-2014), a wonderful Russian artist, writer, poet and publisher, and one of the main theoreticians of the Transfuturist movement.

This publication comes out at the end of the cold war and is a humorous take on a popular game in Czechoslovakia called Pexeso. In this memory game you spread the cards out upside down, and the players have to memorize where the cards were in order to pick up the matching pairs.  So in this new updated version you had to pick pairs of these assorted 'marxists'!

One of the texts on the front of this card reads, "The west wins the cold war - who will win Marxeso".

6 pages double-sided, individual pages 8.5" (h) x 6.5" (w), and when fully open 3ft 3".

back cover

Ami Moore, Don't cry onion girl!, risoprint, Toronto, Canada, nd.

A fun mini-accordion by this illustrator and bookmaker from Toronto in which we get the two stories of Onion Girl and Garlic Boy!  For more info about Moore's activities: Ami Moore Illustration

4 pages double-sided, individual pages 5.25" (h) x 4" (w), and when fully open 16".

back cover

Fly Orr, 3 accordions, New York, circa 2016-2019

Fly and I met many moons ago deep in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin and since then we've kept in contact by mail, sending each other occasional updates. A couple of months ago I received a packet from Fly with a number of these small accordion booklets. I want to feature three of them because I think they hit the mark.  

For other work by Fly check out her wonderfulI "Peops" project which is an ongoing portrait project in which she draws a portrait of a friend and also writes about that person around the edges of their portrait, its powerful and sensitive stuff at the same time:  Fly Intro | PEOPs

Fly is an illustrator, comics artist, painter, teacher, writer, musician and, since 1985 a Lower East side squatter, activist and squat historian. In 2013 Fly was the recipient of an Acker Award for "Excellence within the Avant-Garde," for her PEOPs project.

Each booklet: 4 pages double-sided, individual pages 4" (h) x 2.75" (w), when fully open 10.5".

My City, My Home, nd

Monarch Metamorphosis, 2019

Bad Hair Days, 2016

Sophie Guerrive, Batailles (Battles), ION Edition, France, 2017

pouch cover

This is a really wild 18 foot panoramic accordion that serves as a frieze for mankind's lust for war, killing, exterminating each other, and the nonstop BATTLES through which war is waged. And men is the operative word here, as there are almost no women depicted in this bloodthirsty narrative that takes us from ancient times up to the modern period. But despite this horrific history, Guerrive manages to inject a strong dose of humor, and indeed charm into the way she's drawn the people and events in this horrific history. Personally, I loved the little scenario in the bottom corner of one page in which a naked couple wake up and recoil at the terrific battle taking place outside their boudoir in the valley below, and you see them trying to work out what to do next!

Guerrive was born in  Marseille in 1983 and studied at the University of Aix en Provence and then at the School of Arts Decoratifs in Strasbourg. A lover of comics from an early age she has published a number of other books that feature her illustrations and stories: ION EDITION » Médiévales

The accordion comes in a pochette (pouch) which is also depicted here.

22 pages, single-sided, individual pages 10" (t) x 10" (w), and when fully open 18' 4".

back of pouch cover

Kris Ruhs, Untitled Theatre, Richard Green Gallery, New York, 1986, ed. 300

An accordion catalogue with hand-painted elements that echoes and mimics the form of an accordion that Ruhs published in connection with his installation at the Richard Green Gallery. 

After turning the gallery into a theatre for his Performing Characters, Ruhs describes the scene, "...there was a little stage where the audience could act out their own plays with members of the cast like the Accordion Player, the Saxophonist, the Performing Dog, the Tumbling Characters, the Magician and more. These wooden toys were joined at shoulders, waist and knees so that they could perform their intended act when manipulated." [krisruhs.com]

8 pages one-sided, individual pages 10" (t) x 7" (w), when fully open 4' 8".

back cover