Note posted April 10, 2020: the Arts & Sciences Projects website will be transitioning entirely to Tumblr as of May 1, 2020 due to our web host shutting down. We are posting images and texts from previous exhibition, events, and publications.
Mies [Muse] - at Printed Matter, New York - new books by Aaron Krach and Philip Tomaru
Sat. April 16, 2016, 5-7pm
On the occasion of Mies van der Rohe’s 130th birthday, Aaron Krach and Philip Tomaru present three new publications that reckon with the architect's place in history, popular culture, and the modernist canon. Cake will be served. It wouldn’t be a birthday party without it.
Aaron Krach’s new book, Dark Pools (Almost Everything) is a shadow of Mies van der Rohe Furniture and Drawings, the catalog for a 1977 exhibition at MoMA dedicated to the architect’s furniture. Massimo Vignelli designed the slender paperback with brutal simplicity. “I found a dog-eared copy and lingered over its beauty,” Krach explains. “But I could not shake a sense of dread. Something dark lurked between the pages. The utopia imagined by Mies and Vignelli never arrived. Machine production rendered craftsman irrelevant. Minimal forms did not improve daily life. Innovative designs became ordinary, now filling bank lobbies and corporate boardrooms. Dark Pools inverts the original. Black is white. Shiny is matte. The cover is screen-printed by hand instead of machine-printed. The book is still elegant and stark, but the darkness is clear. Much is obscured and yet more, perhaps, is revealed.
Philip Tomaru releases two new publications. BLINDS and WALLS are the first and second volumes in a three-part series, concluding with WINDOWS. The photographic-based series explores issues related to public-private space, transparency, and cognitive-affective processes as Tomaru negotiates the messy terrain of the modernist architecture program inter-mingled with his own lived-experience in one of Mies van der Rohe’s last residential buildings. Each book in the series is published using a different method, including risography, photocopy, and offset.
Aaron Krach is an artist based in NYC. Recently, he has worked with people, books, rocks, text, vodka, Purell, and a taxidermy goat to make books, sculptures, prints, and installations.
Philip Tomaru lives and works in New York and Baltimore.
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WALLS (2016) and BLINDS (2015) - two new books by Philip Tomaru.
Released at Mies [Muse] at Printed Matter, April 16, 2016.
On the occasion of Mies van der Rohe’s 130th birthday, Aaron Krach and Philip Tomaru present new publications that reckon with the architect’s place in history, popular culture, and the modernist canon. Cake will be served. It wouldn’t be a birthday party without it.
Philip Tomaru releases two new publications. BLINDS and WALLS are part of his on-going series of Mies-related zines that draw from his experience of living in one of the architect's residential apartments. Previous titles in the series include Approaching Mies (Plano, IL), Young Man with International Style (Berlin), Modern Language, and Mies in Baltimore (Polaroids). Ranging from formal abstract studies to photographic-based essays, Tomaru's publications explore the phenomenology of place embedded with rich historical context. With each publication, Tomaru experiments with different formats and processes, ranging from offset methods to simple photocopied zines to his use of risography for his recent book BLINDS.
Dark Pools (Almost Everything), by Aaron Krach, is a shadow of Mies van der Rohe Furniture and Drawings, the catalog for an exhibition at MoMA dedicated to the architect’s furniture. Massimo Vignelli designed the slender paperback with brutal simplicity. Yet the longer I lived with the original, reading and studying it, I could not shake a sense of dread. Something dreadful lurked between the pages. I think that is because the utopia imagined by Mies and Vignelli never arrived. Machine production rendered craftsman irrelevant. Minimal forms did not improve daily life. Beautiful, innovative designs became ordinary filling bank lobbies and corporate boardrooms. Dark Pools inverts the original. Text has been erased except for years and page numbers. Time remains while context is erased. Black is white. Shiny is matte. The cover is screen-printed by hand instead of machine-printed. The book is still elegant and stark, but the darkness is clear. Much is obscured and yet more, perhaps, is revealed. –Aaron Krach, 2016
We first learned about your work when we discovered one of the suicide stamps you’d placed in a book we’d checked out from New York Public Library. Your record of this intervention was realized in a book you made that assembled scans of each of the stamps you’d placed in each of the books. When you start a new project, are you crystal clear as to the final form that it will take?
Usually. Mostly. Not always. I’m more comfortable when I know where I’m going. That way I can pace and plan, plot and strategize. I’m good at worrying and terrified of failure. In my heart I know how productive failure can be—one of my heroes, Jack Halberstam, wrote an amazing book about it called the Queer Art of Failure. The truth is I’m better when I know exactly what I want.
This is Water by David Foster Wallace (from The Author of This Book Committed Suicide), aaronkrach.com
You published a novel, Half-Life, in 2004. What’s the first book you ever read? What is the last book you’ve read?
I remember so clearly a favorite Bugs Bunny book. He builds a rocket ship and blasts off but crashes minutes later. Bugs thinks he’s on a new planet but really he exits his crushed spacecraft on a busy construction site. He thinks the huge cranes and earth-moving trucks are aliens. I remember I thought this was hilarious and magical. I do not remember how the book ends.
Right now I’m reading the Diary of Anne Frank for the first time. The last book I finished (and loved) was Hold Still, the memoir by photographer Sally Mann.
Are books dead? If they are, how are you contributing to their death? If books are still relevant, how are you contributing to their relevance?
Can they be dead and relevant? Or neither? New technology keeps threatening to kill off what came before. Television vs. Radio. Yet radio is still here and amazing. Radiolab is genius. Now it’s streaming vs. cable vs. movie theaters. Same with books. Massive change, no doubt. And yet there is nothing like taking a book in hand and letting the world disappear. Digital reading is useful and faster and distracting. I can click away and leave the magic realm. If I read a paper book I can get lost, become devoted, and trapped, wrapped in a story and a whole new world.
Bachelor’s Jam (aaronkrach.com)
Last year I started a series of book sculptures called Bachelor’s Jam. I preserved books by writers who abused alcohol in the alcohol they drank. For example, vintage John Cheever paperbacks are sealed in glass jars filled with vodka. Truman Capote’s books are sealed in gin. The books are preserved and destroyed simultaneously. I’m very interested in these contradictions.
When did you know you wanted to be an artist?
I think I always wanted to be an artist. Even as a kid I saw artists as people with special permission. They could do things the rest of the world thought was crazy or considered taboo. I’m sure it’s the values artists are allowed to claim and promote that hooked me: experimentation, an open-mind, asking questions, and finding the magic all around us.
Do you want to be famous?
Yeah, why not? Then again, have you seen what fame can do to people? Yikes. I am sure that I want my work to be seen. I think about my audiences and what they may get out of my work. Reading Anne Frank’s diary reminds me that I could never write one because: What’s the point? I need an audience for feedback. I need viewers to see and read and respond. Hopefully each new work contains a response to previous audience reactions.
Is art important? Or even necessary?
Completely. But I know it is also useless, which is why art is so damn special, and exceedingly important.
If you weren’t doing art, what would you be doing?
Supreme Court Justice. Doctor. Maybe landscape architecture, which is also known as gardening.
What’s your current project?
I just finished a new art book called Almost Everything (Dark Pools). It’s a shadow version of a 1977 book I found, a modest paperback catalog from the Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition of Mies Van Der Rohe’s furniture. It was Massimo Vignelli and is ridiculously elegant. But something about it felt so bittersweet the longer I studied it. I think the utopianism of Van Der Rohe’s furniture is heartbreaking in light of how awful the 20th Century turned out to be. Design didn’t save us from our own worst impulses.
Interior pages from Almost Everything (aaronkrach.com)
For my new version, I inverted the book in every possible way. Black is white. Matte is shiny. The cover image is screen-printed by hand instead of machine-made. I removed all the text except for numerals. The result is quite strange and lovely, dark and seductive in a very different way than the original.
