Book Affair will function as both a fair and a temporary library and will take place within the current installation, ‘Murals and Print’ by Fiona Connor.

While books will be offered for sale, the event will also be an opportunity for local publishers and artists to share titles and editions that are not always available to the Los Angeles community.

Along these lines, each participant will bring five books for either selling and/or sharing. A comprehensive bibliography with all participants and their titles will also be compiled and distributed. There will also be a xerox machine located on the premises for visitors to use.

Textfield, Inc. will display 5 books less than 10 inches, on a shelf provided by the organizers, and an Eduardo Sarabia vase/sculpture, placed on the seat of a chair/pedestal.

Book Affair will also display furniture made specifically for the event by Tahi Moore, Joshua Nathanson, Michael Ned Holte, and Fiona Connor among others.

Participants include: 2nd Cannons, A-Z video, Chinatown: the sequel, Dexter Sinister, Harsh Patel, Henry Glover, Kaleidoscope, Ooga Booga, Prism of Reality, Semiotexte, Textfield, Inc., Works Sited, and WorldFood Books.

This important history of the artist’s book, a flourishing form which over the years has often been greeted with confusion by critics, collectors, historians and artists, aims to spell out its role in contemporary art and to claim for it a vital and heretofore unacknowledged status since the blossoming of the artform in the 1970s. Renowned scholar and curator Betty Bright takes an inclusive view of the varied field in order to redress its marginalization, identifying three distinct types: the fine press book, the deluxe book, and the bookwork. She covers crucial supporters of the form, like New York’s Center for Book Arts, Franklin Furnace, and the Visual Studies Workshop Press in Rochester, New York, as well as key organizations and figures in Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Bright examines how artist’s books have responded to specific movements, such as Pop, Fluxus and Conceptualism, and how the book arts’ own mini-art world of the 1970s was shaped by seminal exhibitions, fledgling nonprofit organizations and collectors.

dongghab traces an online search in which the point of departure is the discovery that the publication of Edward Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations and the suicide of Sylvia Plath by oven gas both occurred in 1963, the year of Kwon’s birth. Cued by Ruscha’s seminal work, Kwon unveils an uncanny cosmology of events constellated by the convergence of “1963” with “gasoline” such as the assassination of Medgar Evers (after having lead a successful boycott of white-owned gasoline stations in Jackson, Mississippi) and the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc in Saigon (in protest of the oppression of Buddhists by the Catholic administration of then president Ngo Dinh Diem), among others. The Korean word dongghab describes a social relationship between people born in the same year, so that the idea of a (self) portrait as socially contingent and historically determined as much as individuated, informs the book.

New York-based artist Sowon Kwon works in a range of media including sculptural and video installations, digital animation, drawing, and printmaking. Her recent work explores portraiture, perception, and historical memory as our bodies are increasingly submitted to and made accessible through technology. She has had solo exhibitions at The Kitchen in New York City, Matrix Gallery/Berkeley Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris (now Altria).

Since the 1960s, Los Angeles has been a hub for groundbreaking art. This slim volume features work by Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Douglas Huebler, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, William Leavitt, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Raymond Pettibon, Stephen Prina, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Williams.

Photographing the L.A. Art Scene is a catalogue celebrating the legendary artists, dealers, and friends who comprised the nucleus of the L.A. art scene during this seminal time period. Includes photography by: Charles Britton, Dennis Hopper, William Claxton, Jerry McMillan, Clytie Alexander, Gary Krugier, Ken Price, Peggy Moffitt, Jan Webb, Pat Beer, Ed Moses, Edmund Teske, Wallace Berman, Patricia Faure, Julian Wasser, Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Malcolm Lubliner and John Waggaman. Introduction by Craig Krull.

Ed Ruscha’s relationship to photography is complex and ambivalent. The world-class painter — and author of a 1972 New York Times article called “‘I’m Not Really a Photographer’” — has been known to refer to his work in this second medium as a “hobby,” despite considerable, persistent critical interest. Whether he likes it or not, the small albums of plainly-shot, snapshot-sized images he produced in the 1960s and 70s, including Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, intrigued his contemporaries and earned him an unshakable reputation. How? His subject matter was neither purely documentary nor solely artistic, in fact it was stereotypical and banal, with motifs drawn from the car-dominated western landscape. That rebellious material, along with his serial presentation, made for a mythical road-movie or photo-novel effect with Beat Generation overtones. The combination attracted artists and critics both, especially while serial logic was prominent in Pop art and Minimalism, and then retained that interest later as serial work became prominent in Conceptual art. Critics have remained attentive for decades, and Ruscha’s influence remains apparent in new work in Europe and North America. Ed Ruscha, Photographer departs from earlier collections to explore how these images — and all of Ruscha’s work in disciplines including painting, drawing, printmaking and photography–are guided and shaped by a single vision.

Real Life Magazine: Selected Writings and Projects 1979-1994 highlights a selection of writings and artists’ projects from Real Life magazine, which was originally edited by artist, writer, and curator, Thomas Lawson and writer, Susan Morgan. Published in twenty-three issues from 1979-1994 as an intermittent black and white magazine, Real Life featured artists and art historians writing on art, media and popular culture interspersed with pictorial contributions. The development of the magazine through its 15 year history, traces the influences, development and transitions of artists through the 80s.

The anthology features writings by and about Dara Birnbaum, Eric Bogosian, Rhys Chatham, Mark Dion, Jack Goldstein, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Thomas Lawson, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, John Miller, Dave Muller, Matt Mullican, Adrian Piper, Richard Prince, David Robbins, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Michael Smith, John Stezaker, Bernard Tschumi, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, and James Welling among others.