What's in a Name? Who Owns Primo’s Reviewed

We certainly like reading lists. Thankfully, we have Gauss PDF Editions to roll 'em out. And at the Volta, Andy Martrich reviews Andy Sterling’s latest book, Who Owns Primo’s. To begin, Martrich needs to describe the look of the book to understand what said book is doing:

Who Owns Primo’s is minimalistic. Its pages contain more space than text, consisting of anywhere from one to nine double-spaced lines descending from the top margin. The text is predominantly composed of names and references to names that seem to mask a broader and unnamed conspiracy at work. What or what isn’t behind them becomes an obsessive quality of the piece, because in Who Owns Primo’s masks are the only certainty—even Sam Tierney’s cover drawing suggests this foundational premise. It is the book’s mask, nodding to corollaries within.

A list and a conspiracy? We're intrigued! Martrich reminds readers of Sterling’s previous book Supergroup, also with Gauss PDF, which is comprised of a list of album credits from Virgin Records up to the letter L (all gleaned from Wikipedia and Discogs). With Supergroup, Martrich writes:

In Supergroup, names and roles appear severed from their previous commercial context, functioning solely as terms in a hypothetical directory. Like Supergroup, Who Owns Primo’s is onomastic, highlighting proper names, but where Supergroup has a specific conceptual bent regarding the usage of names (i.e., as credits), Who Owns Primo’s is dislodged from this constraint, free to cite names in the context of the title line, which appears on page 13:

Who owns Primo’s?

Sarah.

Grey Black.

Du Pont.

Schulz. (13)

The esoteric quality of Who Owns Primo’s makes it more unsettling than Supergroup. Although both pieces illustrate the strangeness of names, Supergroup plays with an established order toggled loose from its original context, but still methodically and smoothly. On the other hand, Who Owns Primo’s is indicative of an intangible breakdown, a deficiency that persists throughout the work. This is articulated in gaps, pauses, and large spaces interspersed throughout the text, giving it a porous, ephemeral look and feel. The content, as well, is terse and fragmentary. In the above example, the cryptic quality of the question “Who owns Primo’s?” is enhanced by the names and gaps that follow, equally dim signifiers.

Before finding out who owns Primo’s, it’s necessary to define what Primo’s is. Early on it’s not so clear. At first, Primo’s seems to be a kind of restaurant, given lines like “Primo’s dinner” (12) and “Have you tried Primo’s?” (14). But this definition quickly becomes inadequate when considering the long list of mysterious suspects regarding its ownership, a list that extends well beyond Sarah, Grey Black, Du Pont, Schulz. Despite the textual brevity of the piece, there are over 190 proper names that appear throughout. Google searches on individual names rarely provide helpful information, and one wonders if Sterling purposefully uses popular or common names, Robert Adam for example, in effort to widen the anonymity of possible entities tied to names; however, occasional hints are provided [...]

Keep searching over at the Volta!