For our 2012 summer exhibition, Printed Matter hosted an ambitious instore exhibition entitled HELP/LESS, organized by artist Chris Habib. The store-wide show included over 200 works that explore the fluidity of authorship in artists’ books and multiples. A program of hands-on workshops and other events took place during the exhibition. From the press release: Including original artworks, book objects, prints and a tremendous selection of artists’ books, HELP/LESS looks to the various modes and methods of appropriation in contemporary art, including: plagiarism, re-authorship, identity subversion, copyism, substration, redaction, curation from the Commons, collective authorship, forgery, theoretical translation, narrative appropriation and reprography. The books gathered in the show represent many of the significant works that have, by choice or not, framed the conversation about fair use, derivation and the nature of contemporary practice. In the spirit of the books, ephemera and multiples it presents, HELP/LESS re-considers the exhibition space as an object to upset. It considers its viewers and featured artists accomplices. More here on the origins of the show from Chris Habib. HELP/LESS includes many classic and rare books that address ideas of authorship or gain mileage from pre-existing texts. Works of interest include Buzz Spector’s Altered LeWitt, in which the artist had made vertical tears into LeWitt’s untitled 1972 work published by Gian Enzo Sperone, creating a new sculptural book object in the fragments of layered pages. In Burning Small Fires, Bruce Nauman has set fire Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, creating a new artists’ book from the documentation of the torched pages. Brian Kennon’s Good Boy by Christopher Wool, a collection of altered Wool paintings created from Misfits song titles, is itself taken up by Visitor, who reimagines a storified version of the oversized book using Samhain lyrics. Broodthaers’ Un Coup de Des Jamais N’abolira le Hasard offers a take on Mallarmé’s 1897 poem by the same name, with the artist reproducing the original work, only with all the text redacted. Access a PDF for more on the origins of the show here