SQUATTERS' BOOKS

Most of the books in this section are available from Printed Matter, 77 Wooster St., New York, NY 10012 unless otherwise indicated.

Inside Out: The Art World of the Squats documents an exhibition (outdoor and indoor) curated by Alan Moore, Clayton Patterson and Laura Zelasnic about squatters on E. 13th Street in Manhattan October 15 - 22, 1994. Inside, the artists in question scheduled a multimedia exhibit including video and performance. There were events that accompanied the evenings including a special tour of historic sites in the East Village, etc. What has evolved is a study of a squat culture over the years, engendering a visual art that both expresses and transcends its material and social conditions. There are manifestos, press releases, posters all documented and many articles and essays about art of the homeless. Those of you familiar with the Rivington School, the Neoist connection, and squats throughout the world should add this highly charged subject to your collection. $4.00

Not for Rent: Conversations with creative activists in the U.K. by Stacy Wakefield and Grrrt (Amsterdam and Seattle, Evil Twin Publications, 1995) is an extensive publication with black and white as well as color illustrations, as well as a glossary of terms which are visualized. The book covers Squall Magazine, projects by artists from London to Leeds that show the ingenuity, creativity and drive of these artists who are iconoclasts and believe that they are creating alternatives. Music, bike unks, anarcho-collectives, punk, raves, road protests, and hip-hop are included, among so many more aspects of a drive for independence. $15.00 This is a great book for its bibliography, with names and addresses of distributors of zines, books, magazines, etc., and publications. This is a publication that must be in any socially-conscious art collection--that means all of them. The scene is so volatile that some of the names and addresses have been changed--over the course of the year and the months.

Malleable Cast by Spencer Selby (Mentor, OH, Generator Press, 1995, $10.00) is the first in a series, or 72 images which require a triple reading: the iconic or the imagery, the verbal which must be read; and the interactive, which must be experienced or felt. The first two inform us with linguistic meaning; the third experience creates emotions in us and is idiosyncratic, depending upon the individual. There is a fusion of image covered by texts, where one intereacts with the other in a field of mutual meaning and constraint. Drawing from a pool of familiar images, the artist has found texts which seem to weave in and out of the images, never totally clear, never totally erased. A kind of disquiet appears because of the inability to grasp the whole, but the artist is trying to tell us how hard it is to grasp the ordinary, yet more than not the image always wins the conflict between text and image-and just sometimes they come together into a wondrous whole.