Handbook by Miles DeCoster and Rebecca Miles
DeCoster, Miles and Rebecca Michaels.
Handbook. Chicago: Permanent Press [School of the Art Institute of Chicago], 1978. First Edition.
Unusual oblong octavo (11″ x 5″), opening vertically to a striking 5″ x 22″ format. Original stapled photographic wraps. Unpaginated [24pp]. High-contrast black-and-white offset printing throughout.
An exceptional and unrecorded late-1970s Chicago student survival guide subverted into a major piece of Midwestern avant-garde book art. On the surface, the publication functions as a practical manual for incoming students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), indexing essential local data: art supply shops, cheap eateries, housing leads, hospitals, and emergency phone numbers.
Internally, DeCoster and Michaels completely dismantle the utility of the traditional student handbook. The layout is executed in a chaotic, Burroughs-esque cut-up style, combining gritty news photographs, concrete poetry, scale distortion, and sharp visual image puns. The result is a highly surreal, Dadaist parody of institutional literature that doubles as a vivid time capsule of the 1978 Chicago art scene.
Condition:
A near fine copy. The text and high-contrast graphics remain exceptionally crisp and clean. Stapled binding is tight, and secure; pages are completely unmarked. Front cover shows some near invisible pencil marks that show in raked lighting, (they look like scratches in the photo). Back cover has about 1″ of light sunning, slanted sunning across the bottom edge on the back wrap, typical for the light-sensitive, inexpensive paper stocks utilized for student and ephemeral press publications of this era.
Miles DeCoster is a printmaker, painter, and book artist who earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Over a 50-year career spanning interactive design and traditional printing, his experimental artists’ books have been collected by major repositories including the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Rebecca Michaels is an interdisciplinary photographer, visual book artist, and educator. Based out of Chicago in the late 1970s under her Permanent Press Chicago imprint, she served as editor for Argot Magazine and has spent decades teaching critical thinking and print-based art at institutions like the Tyler School of Art.
$ 120.00
