70 Camberwell Church Street, London, SE5 8QZ
020 7358 4475 house-gallery@hotmail.co.uk
25 Years of Liver and Lights?
John Bently
8 May - 20 May
For a quarter of a century John Bently has annually (sometimes bi-annually!) catapulted a new book at the world, under the pseudonym Liver & Lights. This exhibition celebrates these books, being a selection box of the most flavoursome bits from those 25 years, including prototypes, original paintings, illustrations, text experiments, invitations, begging letters and the books themselves.
A constantly evolving species, these books have ranged over the years from very handmade to very machine made. They have been sold in galleries, shops and at performances. Back in their beginning in the cold war eighties, they were a kind of ongoing manifesto, plotted and planned by Bently and likeminded colleagues Stephen Jaques and James Blundun, mutating into a chronicle of the Deptford underworld. The books became a strange kind of history textbook, filled with acutely observed London characters, found objects; books in boxes, parodies of Livre d‹artiste.
Extended into the art world on gallery walls, they got political and railed against injustice. They got banned from galleries and even one whole town. They became community projects &endash; records of people and places; the homeless, Harrow, Fife, Dundee, South London. Eventually, some of them got collected by museums!
Liver & Lights celebrates low tech printing and is a kind of deposition of discarded reprographics ?Print Gocco, stencil, rubber stamps, letterpress photocopies, silk screen, lino, inkjet. They are made to perform, in the hand and beyond the pages. They became plans for music, most recently with the band Afterrabbit ? (Alan Outram, Phil Outram and Oliver Briggs); a collection of musicians brought together by the books themselves. Sometimes they contain CDs aping the style and shape of records, fanzines, illustrated books.
Most recently they have been celebrations: of a DIY lifestyle, of a campervan, mundane household objects, late fathers, children, friends and neighbours and the useless beauty of printed money.
They have been many things, but never the same, neither in shape or motivation or purpose
A lifelong celebration of the book.
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