New York Art Book Fair

Books ready for sale at the New York Art Book Fair, scheduled to run through Sunday at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens.


By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: October 2, 2009

If you harbor even a speck of doubt about the continuing viability of hold-in-your-hand-and-turn-the-pages print publications, check out the New York Art Book Fair this weekend. You’ll find thousands of new books — smart, weird, engrossing, beautiful — that will never be Kindle-compatible. They’ll make you feel good.




The fair, produced by Printed Matter, a venerable local purveyor and producer of books by artists, began in Chelsea in 2006 but this year is at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens. The move meant giving up ready foot traffic for a big gain in floor space. Whether the trade will pay off remains to be seen, but for certain the fair, once a modest event and now quite a grand one, looks great.

More than 200 exhibitors — booksellers, independent publishers, artists, antiquarian dealers — fill three floors of P.S. 1’s cavernous premises with plenty of breathing room: some of the displays look like full-fledged gallery shows. The recession has scared off a few big trade publishers, but they’ve been more than adequately replaced by 60 newcomers from Japan, South Korea, Mexico and elsewhere, many of them low on cash but high on risk tolerance.

Not that there aren’t established names. Aperture, Powerhouse Books and Princeton Architectural Press are on hand, as are European museum presses (Witte de With from Rotterdam; Musac from León, Spain). Rare-book dealers like Anartist, Carolina Nitsch and John McWhinnie are back in force. You can spot them a mile away: their banks of bookcases convey the woody, lived-in air of personal libraries.

Mr. McWhinnie is doing double duty this year as dealer and curator, having organized the 30-year survey of books and posters by Richard Prince. Immaculately installed, it makes a suave, MoMA-ish introduction to P.S. 1’s largest first-floor gallery. But Mr. Prince, who is on the fair’s board of advisers, is not exactly news, and what makes this fair enticing is the chance it affords to see things seldom encountered elsewhere.

The main sources for such material are two related sections of the fair: one is Friendly Fire; the other, new this year, is Flaming Creatures. Both are devoted to young artists, collectives, shoestring galleries and other seriously indie enterprises.

In Friendly Fire the artist-dealer Edie Fake, for example, is selling radically cheap-looking books by solid-gold writers. Red 76, an Oregon collective, has, among other things, a freshly harvested stock of found and distressed paperbacks. This year Darin S. Klein and Friends is hawking books by the box, though very small books in very small boxes.

For collectors of gay material , there are several specialists to consult, most of them clustered in Flaming Creatures. The zine editor Billy Miller and the designer Jan Wandrag handle the queer classic “Straight to Hell” and a new zine called “No Milk Today.” Goteblüd of San Francisco is a central supplier for all manner of vintage zines — rave zines, punk zines, low-rider zines, bike-messenger zines — along with Wuvable Oaf comics and customized skateboards.

And in the fringe areas, one-man bands get a chance to shine. Charles Clough, whose paintings from the 1980s recently appeared in “The Pictures Generation” at the Metropolitan Museum, has a table by himself in Friendly Fire at which he introduces new work in the form of a multimedia package. It includes an abstract painting, a facsimile print of the painting, a book of images of the picture in progress and a movie made from those images.

His project is so much more interesting than most of the painting on the walls in Chelsea that I can’t think why someone doesn’t give him a show.

In certain sectors of the publishing industry, multimedia is now considered to be crucial to the survival of books; the fair tests the waters with a decent helping of videos. Electronic Arts Intermix has continuous screening of artists’ tapes in the P.S. 1 basement. And two veterans of alternative media, Deep Dish TV Network and Paper Tiger Television, are showing old and new documentaries in a shared first-floor space. Want a replay of recent protests against globalism in Pittsburgh? Step right this way. And while you’re at it, grab a Paper Tiger sales catalog. It’s a cool read.