The Brooklyn Rail

Among the plethora of art book related events that spread across LA last month during the long weekend of Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair (LAABF), Pancakes and Placemats on May 18 at ICA LA offered a break from the action and alternative gathering of the book community. Led by Jason Fulford, one half of J&L Books (the other half is author and artist Leanne Shapton), the event was part of the publisher’s current Bookshelf Residency at ICA through the end of the summer. The display occupies a nearly floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and hallway reading room corner with an installation of their published titles—new and out of print—along with blank books and blank wallpaper adorned with handwritten book recommendations by visitors. At ICA, the Residency combines the idea of a traditional bookshop with that of a museum exhibition, often featuring outward facing covers and non-traditional book displays. Past residents have included Ooga Booga and GenderFail. J&L Books: Reading Room recognizes twenty-five years of publishing, featuring titles by Corita Kent, David Shrigley, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Jason Logan, David Berman, and others.

The program was inspired by an early J&L Books title, Paper Placemats (2004). The slim book is exactly what the title suggests, a book of placemats meant to be torn out and set on the table. The books were originally distributed for free to restaurants across the US, but, according to Fulford, it was surprisingly hard to give them away as many businesses were skeptical of anything really being free. The contents are mostly visual works of art, photographs and line drawings commissioned by Fulford and Shapton, but roughly every fourth placemat is a fictional text commissioned by Paul Maliszewski. The idea behind the mix is that most tables are set for four, so each table would include one text. The contributions are all loosely based around the idea of place. The opening image of the book shows a starkly white empty hotel room in Indianapolis by Fern Cogley. Other visual contributions include a doodle of the Oregon coast by Ryan Blomberg, a photograph of a blimp passing over two men and their car in a mostly abandoned Fort Tilden, and a lush orange table cloth and leather chairs at a restaurant in Tokyo by Lars Tunbjork. Most of the images don’t feature people, but when they do they seem almost melancholic, as in a grainy black-and-white photograph of two kids paddling on a pool raft captured by Lloyd Ziff.

Using these books for the program at ICA was a natural fit. Taking advantage of the timing with the LAABF, ICA hosted Pancakes and Placemats in the morning before the last day of the fair with chef Jessica Wang on the griddle and sheets of the placements as the setting.

Art book fairs, especially ones as popular as Printed Matter’s, can be both exciting and overwhelming. While an opportunity to connect with friends and colleagues in the field, there is often little time to chat while squeezing through the tables or while sitting behind one as an exhibitor. The Pancakes and Placemats event provided a moment to pause and reconnect outside of the hustle. The long tables in front of the book shelf residency were staged with pages from Paper Placemats. While flipping through these in book form, there isn’t necessarily a connection between the sequence of images and texts. Seeing them arranged on tables, however, the crux of the project comes to mind—consuming books much like we consume food—embracing the forced pause at a restaurant while waiting for food (or in this case, in the early morning waiting for the book fair to open again).