Mémoires by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn behind glass at the New York Art Book Fair.

Out There: in which we dig up War of Words related works.

What would have been the classic War of Words book (mentioned in the previous post) escaped our grasp for the exhibition, but it deserves a place here on our virtual bookshelf. Take a look. Mémoires (1959), by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, was guaranteed to rub other books the wrong way with its sandpaper dust jacket. I spied it at this year’s New York Art Book Fair at PS1 behind glass and with a price tag of $3500. Also see a found image of the book opened to the title page.

Title page of Mémoires

Stills from Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Events and Détournments. Keith Sanborn came by and screened “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?” a classic Situationist film by René Viénet and one of the few extant examples of détourned film. Keith is a scholar, curator, artist, media-maker and translator and he was the translator of the film. A bit about the event can be found here. For those missed the screening, the film can be found online at UbuWeb.

I invited Keith to screen this film because there was a thread in the exhibition that owed a bit of debt to the strategy of Détournement or was a nod to the Situationists. Carrie Cooperider presented My Romance by Gordon Lish: A Contradiction, a work-in-progress that used an old German comic book as the underlying structure upon which she created a “Western” where the action and story arc centered around the library in town and employed all sorts of literary references including Proust. Some dialogue:

“It’s Jesse James!!”
“The other brother of … Henry James!!”

My Romance by Gordon Lish: A Contradiction by Carrie Cooperider

The Correct Sadist by Terence Sellers, Interactive Version by Angelo Pastormerlo

Angelo Pastormerlo’s book/sculpture loosely recalled the sandpaper-covered book, Mémoires by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn. His transgressive book not only didn’t play nice with other books on the shelves, but it was a trick just to place on the shelf without drawing a bit of blood. Entry number 2 from Angelo was his typewriter sculpture Qwertesean Typewriter (shown below), a writing device which emphatically enforces the constraint of left-handed typing.

Qwertesian Typewriter by Angelo Pastormerlo