Category Archives: Book Works

SMASH THIS PUNY EXISTENCE
Inventory, Book Works

SecMoCo were invited by the magnanimous Mattew Higgs, via the excellent publishers Book Works, to help design and produce Smash This Puny Existence with the artfully subversive collective known as Inventory. This resulted in the publication taking the form of broadsheet posters– large format, double-sided sheets housed within long cardboard tubes.

First published by Book Works 1999 in an edition of 1,500 copies; edited by Matthew Higgs as part of the series Publish And Be Damned; 6 x b&w double-sided sheets, 678 x 478 mm, rolled and housed in a cardboard tube

Context from the Book Works website:
Smash This Puny Existence emerged from street actions staged by Inventory in streets in London and Glasgow. Overnight, the collective fly-posted a series of newly-commissioned texts and images along with ‘found’ material, transforming two busy thoroughfares into public ‘newspapers’. The street became a discursive, polemical space, a place for the exchange of ideas and information. […] It is a significant contribution to Inventory’s ongoing determination of a ‘fierce sociology’.

Links:
www.bookworks.org.uk/node/1560
https://www.bookworks.org.uk/node/1131
https://www.bookworks.org.uk/node/1126

MAKE EVERYTHING NEW
Book Works

This was a collection of texts and artists projects, examining the possibility of a communist informed contemporary art practice

The book: published in an edition of 1,500 copies by Book Works, London, UK and Project Arts Centre, Dublin, UK, 2006; 240 x 170mm; 176pp, thread sewn; 4-colour images throughout; paperback cover

Accompanying 2-colour poster edition, incorporating extract from the text: 710 x 538mm

Context from the Book Works catalogue: ‘Communism is routinely defined as defeated and its conquest the subject of regular celebration. Caught in the disappointment and negative connotations of the past, it has become all but unthinkable. Make Everything New – A Project On Communism seeks to rescue the idea of Communism from this trap. Collaborating with artists, writers and collectives, this project has commissioned and collected counter-narratives, abstract and unrealistic ideas, engaged political commentary and satirical work, that presents neither an historical or comprehensive overview nor a requiem for the past. It is a collection of partial and subjective accounts of various creative practices, an experimental platform for ideas and an attempt to see in what ways the communist imagination can be materialised as art.’