Broadsheets
2005
Shown at Parker's Box, New York (May 2005); Whitney Museum ISP show, New York (May 2005); Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn (Sep 2005); Swiss Institute, New York (Sep 2005); Artfayre, Newcastle UK (Sep 2005); PrintROOM, Netherlands (Spring 06); LMCC workspace open studio (November 2005)
This is an ongoing newspaper series printed in runs of 1000, usually in 8 page B/W standard size. The newspaper is largely a stream of text drawn from up to date (the paper is printed the night before the show) spam e mails to the artist, with the specific sales pitch of the message mostly removed, to leave only the language used to get past the filters of computer software - or perhaps human scepticism. Interspersed with the Dickensian pseudonyms, doggerel, pleas, aphorisms, story fragments and accidental poetry which make up this text, are other fragments 'packed' in this material: eg accounts of a Japanese seaweed called Undaria which has been clogging up harbours world wide, largely by being inadvertently carried by ships' ballast tanks; texts and visual interventions by other writers and artists (the first edition featured an original text by Ryan Holmberg and graphic inserts by Sam Lewitt, who also had a significant input on the layout of the papers - the template remaining constant for all of them); a 1971 memo sent to the US Chamber of Commerce by soon to be supreme court judge Leo Powell, outlining a plan of action which was to become the virtual battle plan of the right in the subsequent years; early 20th Century texts on the expansion of the railroads and the crimes which followed this expansion; aphorisms and insights of populist spectral 'theorists' from P.T. Barnum to W.S. Gilbert.
Occasionally the transitions are jarring, occasionally the segue is hard to spot. These newspaper projects try to operate as both uncanny objects and as texts that veer from broken absurdity to having a seemingly indexical, affective quality of a moment. The images below are links to PDF files.
spamnewspapers@grahamparker.info
