The Curse of the Plastic Arts

The Dexster Sinister bookstore is re-opening with it’s regular Fall hours (Saturdays 12 to 6pm). They will be launching two publications and an exhibitions, with a party tonight to celebrate.

General Public Library

This just in: Mylinh Nguyen, Designer in Residence at Art in General is curating a space called General Public Library. Nguyen has been designing six ‘New Commisions’ publications for AIG during her residency. General Public Library opens on September 16th and will be in the storefront space at AIG for two months.

Here is what the AIG website says about the project:

“From September 16-November 13, 2010 the Storefront Project Space gallery will be made into a reading room, which will be accessible as an online resource as well. To start the library, Nguyen invited designers, publishers, curators, artists, galleries, and musicians to contribute publications to the project that reflect the donor’s practice, methodology, inspiration and interest. Visitors are encouraged to donate a favorite book to the library during the exhibition.

Nguyen approaches the idea of a library with a unique focus on participation and the formation of community. In contrast to a traditional reading room–which can only be accessed for the duration of the show—the online catalogue of the General Public Library allows each visitor to browse and curate their own library within an existing and continually growing catalogue, beyond the physical installation. Each donation, as it is made, will be logged into the library cataloging system. As libraries begin to form and overlap, each book becomes a link between the book donor and other participants in the library. Inversely, when viewing one book, it is possible to see the interests of other participants.

Throughout the course of the exhibition, as visitors create their own selection of favorite books, the library will filter all donations into a catalog of the top 200 most popular books. These books will be added to the General Public Library permanent collection after the duration of the project.

Contributing participants include Art Metropole, aaaarg.org, Ooga Booga, Fillip, Printed Matter, Nieves, 2nd Cannons Publications, Capricious, Hassla, Golden Age, Medium Rare, Oslo Editions, Gottlund Verlag, Eastside Projects, Bedford Press, Stripe SF, New Jerseyy, Matt Keegan, North Drive Press, split/fountain, STUPENDOUS, The Holster, Bart de Baets, Christian Brandt, Task Newsletter, Robin Cameron, Dante Carlos, Espen Friberg and Aslak Gurholt Rønsen, David Horvitz, Zak Kyes, Kingsboro Press, Manystuff, Radim Pesko, Laurel Ptak, Peter Sutherland, Vance Wellenstein, Jessica Williams and YOU.”

ZineView

ZineView will be a “Pop up Reading Room,” opening on September 20th at  The Well Gallery space in London. The reading room will showcase the LCC zine archive, and takes place in conjunction with the release of Fanzines (Thames & Hudson), by collector and graphic design professor Teal Triggs. The open call for submissions takes place until September 8th.

Here, There and Everywhere

A 1997 Bookworks project by LA artist David Bunn. It’s pretty, it’s multi-volumed (always an aesthetic plus), the vocabulary is “finely controlled” and it breathes a proper and poetic afterlife into the Los Angeles Central Library card index system.