Accordion-folded book; digital print with hand-embellishing on Hahnemühler German etch paper.
#7 in an edition of 10.
“Contains selections of text from Anarchy in action, by Colin Ward (London : Freedom Press), ‘Owning the weather: the ugly politics of the pathetic fallacy,’ by Andro Arike; Harpers, Jan. 2006; & various writings by the artist. Printed by Axelle Editions in Brooklyn by Luther Davis, Brett Groves, and Mikael Petraccia.” - from the colophon
Printed on one side of a strip formed from three joined sheets folded accordion-style; first and last leaves attached to front and back boards. Unfolds to a single digital color print with hand embellishing. All text reproduced from the artist’s hand lettering.
Amy Wilson, Fair Trade statement:
“In 1997, I took a class in the Political Science department at Yale called something to the effect of Anarchy and Society. The professor – whose name I no longer remember, but whose personality, at the time, had a profound effect on me – wore Birkenstocks and raised sheep somewhere off the beaten path in Connecticut; it seems quaint as I’m writing this, but for Yale it may as well been a class in bomb-making, for as radical as it seemed at the time at that stuffy institution.
I devoured all the books he assigned, quickly and almost effortlessly becoming one of the best students in class. And then, with little fanfare, the semester ended and I graduated. I received my MFA in April of that year and faced the unpleasant task of packing up all my grad school crap and bringing it with me to my new apartment in Jersey City, NJ, which I was to share with my husband, Jeff, who I married about one week after receiving my degree.
And so, what must have seemed to the outside world like an exciting new beginning, felt to me like the crushing end of the road. All the books acquired over the last two years in New Haven got packed up into boring brown cardboard boxes, along with clothes, art supplies, and everything else I owned, all intermingled in one huge heap of unmarked boxes. They somehow got to New Jersey – the details are a bit vague in my mind – where the essentials were unpacked. Everything else stayed in its box, as the new and more pressing task of finding a job and getting by took precedent over becoming settled.
In the years since, we have moved to three different apartments before eventually settling in one that we purchased some four years ago. And so, those boxes have been with us, from one apartment to the next, their unpacking perpetually added to a to-do list that never got done. I had long ago forgotten what was in them, and yet I dutifully lugged them from home to new home, dusting and vacuuming around them without ever asking what was inside, until the end of 2005. I was finally hit by the realization that we might be in our current apartment for some time and set out to unpack them.
Nearly everything went straight into the trash as I discovered long forgotten clothes and art supplies that I no longer needed. The one thing that really leapt out at me was my old class notes, syllabus, and reading list from that class on anarchy. Finding them among the heaps of old shoes and long-expired cold medicine packets was like being reunited with an old friend. While much of the stuff in the boxes made me embarrassed for my former self (such terrible fashion choices, along with the realization that I’d been schlepping boxes of pure garbage with me for the last eight years), finding the books from that class made me nostalgic and proud of who I was as a younger woman.
The pages in those books were filled with such unbridled optimism – and I realized that I was too, as I read them. They were inspired by the idea of the goodness inherent in every human being conquering all the greed and ignorance of the world. In particular, the book Anarchy in Action by Colin Ward jumped out at me, with its call-to-arms voice firmly intact, and its considerations of things like “the theory of spontaneous order” and “a new interpretation of past and present life.” It reminded me of the arguments we’d had in class and the passion with which I had argued in favor of the goodness of man and against the corrupting power of the state – and then, over the years since, forgotten that these arguments ever existed.
It was late December as I reread that book, and the weather was shifting from unseasonably warm to below-freezing cold in a matter of days. The weather outside mimicked how I felt inside myself, as I shifted from sweet nostalgia upon finding this book to bitter regret at the has-been radical I felt I had become. As Jeff and I headed out to Boston for Christmas vacation, I read the book and – along with it – an advance issue of Harper’s that I had stuffed in my luggage. On the bus ride up, I read the article “Owning the Weather: The Ugly Politics of the Pathetic Fallacy” by Ando Arike, and the words from it became intertwined in my head with Ward’s writing and what I was seeing out the window during that four hour trip: In the past, of course, most religious and mythological traditions acknowledged the spiritual bond with the atmosphere by imagining the weather as an intermediary between heaven and earth, a carrier of messages from the transcendent or divine realm. The sky was a sort of mass medium, a scene of omens, portents, and unfolding drama through which the gods engaged us in a dialogue about our behavior and aspirations.
It snowed. As I sat watching the snow from our hotel room, feeling like my melancholy was somehow bringing upon the greater Boston area a fierce storm, and marveling at nature’s ability to change itself so completely with this one simple act of covering herself with a blanket of pure white, I started drawing and writing Fair Trade.
My book is a contemplation of my life since I packed up my radical late-teens/early-twenties and got down to the business of being an adult, and what I have gained and lost in the time since. The news is not all bad: The previous eight years have been a rollercoaster of good experiences and difficult ones, but they’re nothing I would trade for all the punk rock shows and graduate school classes in the world. It has been, after all, a fair trade. But still, I find myself after all this torturous contemplation wanting to recapture some of that spirit I once had, some of that spirit I once had, some of that radical optimism and belief in my fellow man.
This book is a step in that direction.
