Printed Matter launches Open by chance & appointment from Antinomian Press, an ‘agency’ which publishes and distributes books and ephemera connected to Ben Kinmont’s project work. Open by chance surveys Kinmont’s antiquarian bookselling enterprise which he has run as both a business and an art project since 1998, started under the title “Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family.”

Like the business itself, Open by chance & appointment is an hybrid undertaking, examining the life of the project with an overview of its operations through bookshop locations, book fairs, library collections with bookshop publications, press about the bookshop as an art project, exhibitions where the bookshop was presented as an art project, museum collections with work from the bookshop, and bookshop publications. The long-running work offers a place to consider the value structures that surround an art practice and what happens when that practice is displaced into a non-art space.

Also newly available is “The Antinomian Press”, a bibliography of the first twenty years of the imprint, 1996-2015. As a catalog, the publication traces the details relating to the many multiples, special editions and books Kinmont has published over the years in relationship to various site-specific actions. Many of the works are informed by a 17th Century English Pamphleteering tradition, objects of incitation that have been produced to be easily moved through a distribution networks.

At the launch Kinmont will have an extensive selection of Antinomian titles available, and will also produce Project Series: Lee Lozano on site at Printed Matter, available in a landscape format, staple-bound publication with tipped in illustrations.