"Institutions cannot prevent what they cannot imagine." – Information As Material, 2012
This solo exhibition closed Information As Material’s one-year tenure as the Whitechapel Gallery’s Writers in Residence for 2011–12, and simultaneously marked IAM's tenth anniversary as a determinedly independent publisher.
The exhibition expanded on a commissioned essay written by the collective's co-editors – Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris, and myself – for the Foreword to the 2011 London Art Book Fair. The first part of that essay offers a miniature history of self-publishing by writers now canonised by the English-language literary industry, whose DIY actions have been covered over to negate the stigma of ‘vanity publishing’. The second part of that essay is a concise polemic, advocating a DIY approach to publishing in the current digital epoch as a praxis against the drives of ‘vanity publishing’ and a positive socio-political choice. It concludes, quite simply: “Don’t wait for others to validate your ideas. Do it yourself.”
The exhibition re-presented that essay as an over-sized, vinyl text installation circling all of the gallery's walls. It also featured cabinets of some self-published, first edition books cited in the essay, alongside a free-to-handle selection of their contemporary mass-market re-issues. Together, these components make for a set of ideas and artefacts that reveals the concealments required by the value structures that underwrite our culture industries.
The show also toured to Shandy Hall, former residence of the eighteenth-century novelist Rev. Laurence Sterne, whose secret self-publishing of his most famous work – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – opens IAM's miniature history. There, at the Laurence Sterne Trust, the exhibition material was reproduced as twenty-six book-like placards that were strewn around the popular, NGS-listed garden.
In conjunction with the touring exhibition, the first edition of Do or DIY was re-issued as a standalone handbook, self-published by Information As Material to be distributed at both exhibitions. A PDF version of this edition is retrievable for download below.
