Two Upcoming Book Events

The  second annual Boston Book Festival will be held in various locations in Boston on Saturday October 16th from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.  Admission is free. The festival will include writers’ and artists’ presentations, book signings, workshops, booksellers and exhibitors, children’s events and activities, a street fair, and live music.  For the complete schedule of events got to  http://www.bostonbookfest.org/2010_schedule Read more about the book festival in a recent article in the Boston Globe.

Another event taking place in Providence, organized by the Rhode Island Center for the Book, is the 2010 Art of the Book Program: Bound in Leather being held on Saturday October 30 from 2:00 to 4:00 pm, which is free and open to the public.  At 2:00 pm Phoebe S. Bean, Printed Collection Librarian at the Rhode Island Historical Society, will give a lecture entitled “Original Skin: A History of Books and Leather in New England”.  Ms. Bean will present an illustrated history of leather bindings, both imported and domestic, and discuss their integrated role in the development of Rhode Island and New England society.  This lecture will take place at the RIHS Aldrich House, 110 Benevolent Street in Providence.

In conjunction with this lecture there will be statewide exhibits of leather book bindings in Rhode Island Collections at the following locations:  David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University; the John Carter Brown Library; the Providence Athenaeum; the Providence Public Library Special Collections; the Redwood Library and Athenaeum; the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Fleet Library at RISD; and the University of RI Special Collections.

Hopital Brut

Recently acquired by Special Collections, Hôpital Brut is an international anthology of printmakers and comics artists produced by hand in Marseilles by Caroline Sury and Pakito Bolino under the press name, Le Dernier Cri. Dozens of international artists are represented, including Stéphane Blanquet, Jonathan Rosen, Henriette Valium, Fabio Zimbres, Moolinex, Leif Goldberg, Brian Chippendale and C.F., to name a few. A combination of silkscreen and color offset printing is used, with varying paper stocks. While I recommend this book to fans of Juxtapoz magazine, RAW Magazine, and lowbrow pop surrealism, it’s filled with extremely disturbing and explicit graphics. Blood, meat, mutation, sexual deviation and dystopian futures abound – and there is admittedly a prurient quality to much of it. A spirit of protest against establishment sponsored abuses such as torture, cruel slaughterhouse practices and erosion of civil liberties saves this collection (or at least the stronger pieces) from becoming shock value for its own sake. The artist Fredox, for example, in a particularly gruesome photo collage piece, depicts Michael Jackson and Neverland Ranch, drugs, torture, false religion and cruel scientific experimentation in a mish-mash of truly horrific imagery as a satirical comment on American culture. In the fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, The Snow Queen, the troll (the devil) makes a mirror which reflects only the ugly and evil aspects of people and things. When the mirror shatters, a splinter gets lodged in the little boy Kai’s heart, making him susceptible to abduction by the Snow Queen. Hôpital Brut is a Snow Queen’s mirror of sorts – making lovely landscapes look like “boiled spinach” –and magnifying the most horrifying aspects of modern culture while failing to recognize anything beautiful or good. Still, if you like your art like boiled spinach – earthy, tangled, not exactly beautiful – Hôpital Brut is a lot of fun.

posted by Ariel Bordeaux