The book/play presents a day in the life of the original DREAM QUEEN restaurant (a restaurant that grew to become the third largest burger chain in the western hemisphere). Before the book/play begins, 83-year-old Gertie Greenbaum is found dead in a pool of blood and ketchup. Four customers and three employees (each set in his or her own typographic voice and color) give testimony to how Gerite died as well discuss food, money, religion, politics, love, loss, and aspirations. The text is illuminated with icons and images that evoke the fast food tableau and the internal projections of the characters.
Published in 1984 by the Visual Studies Workshop and EarSay, long out of print, French Fries has been written about and its pages reprinted in scores of books about artists’ books, design, typography, performance, and experimental literature. Exhibited internationally including at the Georges Pompidue Centre’s L’image Des Mots exhibition, as a solo exhibit at the Pieter Brattinga Gallery in Amsterdam. Copies of French Fries are also in the collections of the MoMA, LA Country Museum of Art, Tate Museum, Getty. Museum, etc… -Publisher
“French Fries is one of the most fascinating books I have ever seen or read… The pages throb with energy and graphic vitality… French Fries proves that the book can be a movie, an existential feast, and a pastiche of literature and art…” AIGA Journal Philip Meggs
A graphically elaborate transcription of a play set in the original “Dream Queen” fast-food restaurant. At the “Dream Queen,” “the walls are lined with gossip, soft drinks are laced with suspicion, whispers of tragedy circulate underneath the usual smorgasbord of talk, food preparation and a continuous drone. -References: Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, 1995.
