The Waste Maker: 1926-1961 / Bern Porter

The Waste Maker: 1926-1961 / Bern Porter

Perfect bindings


FA.B117.2236
22 x 14 cm
1972
Bern Porter
Abyss Publications
Perfect-bound offset-printed artist's book by Bern Porter. Consists of "found" poems, or typographic and graphic collages sourced from fragments of advertisements, forms, textbooks, dictionaries, and crossword puzzles. "Bern Porter is a 20th century Walt Whitman, a sometime printer and publisher, a long-time servant of both U.S. letters and his own very American muse. THE WASTEMAKER represents an assiduous discovery of America writ large in the smallest 'found' details, as Porter collects native waste into artlessly designed pages, not only reflecting his own love and bitterness, but exposing cultural insights and perspectives that are indigenously true. As haste makes waste, so patient composition, by contrast, makes art of waste; and this book does 'junk art' before anyone could conceive of art, or even insight, in garbage."--Richard Kostelanetz, from introduction.