Getting Messy in the Archive at LA's Art Book Fair

"Printed Matter's Los Angeles Art Book Fair returned to the Art Center College of Design last night with over 250 exhibitors - slightly scaled back from over 300 last year - roughly a fifth of whom were at the fair for the first time. Among the lavish monographs and eye-popping, risograph-printed zines, the archive was a common thread. Publications excavated and remixed appropriated media, collapsing time and giving historical ephemera contemporary relevance across the fair's 13th edition, which runs through the weekend."

""Clothe All Animals for the Sake of Decency!" declared a sign worn by David Senior, a librarian at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who stood at the entrance to the fair on opening day, Thursday, May 7. He was a walking advertisement for Inside SINA: The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, edited by Andrew Lampert and published by J&L Books in New York this year. The well-researched book chronicles an early-1960s hoax perpetrated by Alan Abel, who invented the satirical organization that expressed moral outrage over animal nudity."

"RVB Books from France featured MAN (2025) by Erik Kessels and Karel de Mulder, a thick compendium of vintage photographs that feature a central male figure flanked by women on either side. In a cheeky subversion of male subjectivity, the man always appears in the book gutter, where the two pages meet, squeezed nearly out of existence."

Printed Matter’s Los Angeles Art Book Fair returned to the Art Center College of Design with over 250 exhibitors, including many first-time participants. Across lavish monographs and risograph-printed zines, archives served as a common thread. Publications excavated and remixed appropriated media, collapsing time and creating contemporary relevance for historical ephemera. A sign at the entrance promoted Inside SINA: The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, which chronicles an early-1960s hoax by Alan Abel and describes its enduring popularity. Other exhibitors presented vintage photographic compilations that subverted conventional perspectives, such as a book where the central male figure is squeezed into the gutter between pages.

Read at Hyperallergic