Book-newspaper Alcools, issue 8, page 4

On the last page, the loner is very small, but Guillaume, fortunately, fell asleep under the inextinguishable prison lamp.

Behind the walls of loneliness, the sadistic metranpager has set up a big test for the online reader. A hefty piece of prose from the publisher turned upside down. And there is no chance to read it, except to drag it into Photoshop and forcefully flip it. Be patient, the deadline will end soon.

Meanwhile, in LiveJournal (at the request of one visitor of the exhibition that happened at that time), the concept of the publication was published. Frankly, I was directly jubilant, remembering Pushkin’s “at least late, but there is an introduction”, and at the same time exercising in malice towards Moscow conceptualism along with the Swiss school of design and in the troika with a curatorial approach to art. Let this text be here (and not in the introduction to the project) - this is very in the style of the author.

About the concept

Issues of Alcools are similar to each other, like children of the same father. True, their mothers, you see, are different. And finding a direct connection between issues, seeing them hanging on the wall, is not so easy. The pictures are sometimes “manual”, sometimes computer, the technique does not change rhythmically, the layout is careless, or even completely upside down. Comments are almost not isolated from the text array, their hierarchy is not drawn in any way in a layout. To put it briefly and simply, there is no single system, there is no "book".

But this is only if you look “in an exhibition way” - with a cursory glance and at all at once. There is a connection if you look at the newspapers separately, read without hurrying anywhere.

If we consider the issues slowly, it will become noticeable that the first and last pages are always connected with each other either plastically or in meaning.
What is the rhythm in the organization of the front pages - it is textual, and "newspaper", and book.
The collection is divided into parts in a non-random way, the initial and final verses are always "shock".

Between releases there are also a lot of tie-ins, but they are not specially accentuated - whoever wants, he will find. In general, one of the main principles of my work is not to poke a finger at a quote. For example, I hardly talk about what verses of other poets sound in my head in parallel with Apollinaire's.

In the way the poems are illustrated, there is also a strong connection with their form and content. Alcohols contains very dissimilar things: the almost medieval "Ponte Mirabeau" and the avant-garde "Zone" stand side by side, but require different pictures. The newspaper form makes it possible to circumvent the "unity of place and time" dictated by the book.

Perhaps, if you really need to find a “concept” in Alcools, then it is in complete freedom of form, limited only by the format, fonts, the tool chosen for drawing (pencil + Photoshop and / or Illustrator) - and the fact that the newspaper is made by one artist in a limited time period. Stylistic diversity in different editions is part of the game with subscribers (but not with the audience at the exhibition :). Within one issue, the style is maintained, it should be noted, rather rigidly.

Well, I saluted conceptualism honor? Though it's late, there is a discourse-schmiscourse :)