As a graphic designer for a print publication, I am heavily invested in the question of whether print will ever die. (No!) One way I reassure myself is by looking at the niche market of art books, which appears to be alive and well.
For example, the first L.A. Art Book Fair, which opens tomorrow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, will feature hundreds of presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists and independent publishers from 21 countries. The fair is being put on by the New York book store Printed Matter, which hosts the annual New York Art Book Fair (last year more than 20,000 people attended over three days to check out real books!).
So what's the point of moving this New York institution across the country?
For one, California has a rich history of conceptual artists working in book form. To me, the prototypical Californian artist book is Ed Ruscha's "Nine Swimming Pools," from 1968.
Adam O'Reilly from Printed Matter says that the fair will feature a "huge selection" of books by artists using the same format as Ruscha. (Other examples of his photography-driven publications include "Some Los Angeles Apartments" (1970), "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" (1966) and "A Few Palm Trees" (1971).) O'Reilly's pick for a quintessentially "Californian" artist's book is "Life Size," by Sam Falls.
The book fair will also feature two California-themed editions commissioned by Printed Matter, one by the photographer David Benjamin Sherry, "Self-Portrait as Golden (Death Valley CA,)" and another by the artist Andrew Kuo, who has designed graphics for the Times Magazine.
Kuo's project, a print called "Reasons to Move to L.A.," provides metric visualizations of the relative merits of living in New York versus moving to Los Angeles. Among his reasons to move to Los Angeles, my favorites are "Finally spending time with Moby Dick (the audio version) while idling in traffic" and "If humans were meant to live in cold weather, we'd be covered in fur or hibernating."
Kuo says he was honored to make a print for Printed Matter, one of his favorite places, though he isn't really considering moving to Los Angeles. "The thought of never leaving New York is scary, but so is driving!"
The L.A. Art Book Fair boasts other West Coast touches like yoga studios alongside the fair's publishing symposiums, and an homage to the late Los Angeleno artist Mike Kelley. There will also be a Larry Clark pop-up shop, a project devoted to the California rare book dealer Steven Leiber and lots of international exhibitors, including Alec Soth's Little Brown Mushroom project from St. Paul, Minn.; Ed Varie Gallery, Swill Children and Aperture Foundation from New York; Art Metropole and Bad Day Magazine from Canada; and Frieze Magazine from London.
The L.A. Art Book Fair opens tomorrow and runs until Feb. 3. It is free and open to the public.
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