MoMA's Print/Out Meets Andrew Beccone's Amazing Reanimation Library

The West Coast is excited about the East Coast! And rightly so: The LA Times alerts us to MoMA's new exhibition, where art meets the print world, in a big way. New Yorkers, we should all go spend our free time at Print/Out, an exhibition of more than 200 works of printed materials such as artists' books from MOMA's collection, including pieces by Martin Kippenberger, Ai Weiwei, and SUPERFLEX.

The MoMA promo copy reads:

Over the last two decades, the art world has broadened its geographic reach and opened itself to new continents, allowing for a significant cross-pollination of post-conceptual strategies and vernacular modes. Printed materials, in both innovative and traditional forms, have played a key role in this exchange of ideas and sources. This exhibition examines the evolution of artistic practices related to the print medium, from the resurgence of ancient printmaking techniques—often used alongside digital technologies—to the worldwide proliferation of self-published artists’ books and ephemera.

Jacketcopy goes on:

The exhibit will be on the museum's sixth floor. Another, Printin', will be on the second, in the Paul J. Sachs Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries. It takes as its start "DeLuxe," a portfolio of 60 works by Ellen Gallagher, and then "brings work by more than 50 artists from multiple disciplines in a sweeping chronology that extends from the 17th century to the present day, to propose a free-flowing yet incisive web of associations that are reflected in DeLuxe." Both exhibits will be up from mid-February to mid-May.

An associated exhibit opened this week: Print Studio in the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building. The independent Brooklyn-based Reanimation Library is among the projects that can be found in the Print Studio through March 9, where interactivity is encouraged. The Reanimation Library is a showcase of books that have fallen out of circulation that have strong visual components. Its "outdated and discarded" books, it writes, "have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles, and given new life as a resource for artists, writers, cultural archeologists, and other interested parties."

Speaking of the Reanimation Library! We were just reading about them on BOMBLOG, where Zack Friedman has interviewed lead reanimator Andrew Beccone about "how to put life back into works ranging from taxidermy to a million random numbers to a 19th-century dentist’s rewriting of the Bible." They also chat about how the library situates itself in terms of "cultural detritus," finding inspiration in the DIY music scene, the MoMA show, how Beccone tracks down his books, the library's home in Brooklyn's interdisciplinary Proteus Gowanus, and the visual art that's been generated from the collection, which includes a Jen Bervin weaving "for a show that the library did at GRIDSPACE. In that show, each artist was asked to respond to the RAND Corporation’s 1955 book, A Million Random Digits. Jen’s weaving was an abstracted facsimile of one page in the book."

Beccone, Friedman writes, is "a Minnesota transplant, library school grad, and occasional post-punk drummer. Beccone is interested in cultural detritus, things we as a culture created but have discarded, and the Reanimation Library is a way of figuring out how to put them back into (a kind of) circulation. More than archaeology, the library also aims to be a space for generative projects of all kinds, a resource for artists and the discerning public." Beccone also discusses the current branching off of the library:

To date, I have set up four branch libraries of the Reanimation Library in other cities: Philadelphia, London, England, Carlisle, PA, and Chicago. I am currently working on a branch in Providence that will run in March and April of 2012. Branch libraries are temporary, site-specific manifestations of the Reanimation Library that provide a way to engage people who might otherwise be unable to visit the main library in Brooklyn, and to exhibit library-generated artworks. Like the main library, branches are hybrid spaces that contain elements of libraries, galleries, and studio workspaces, without fitting neatly into any one of these categories. Each branch library contains a collection of books that has been gathered from sources in its local community; I usually arrive in the city a few days or weeks ahead of time to collect and catalog as many books as I can. I like the idea that Reanimation Libraries can exist anywhere, and that the raw material to assemble them is just sort of scattered around. It’s simply a matter of bringing it all together. More info about branches can be found here.