I’m posting this for selfish reasons. I pledged $95 for a copy of Scrap Book, a 532-page 8 1/2″ x 12″ hardcover collection of found art, curated by Glenn Bray, the “renowned collector and archivist of underground comix, low and high art.” I have his other two recent art books, Library and Blighted Eye, and they among my favorites.
There are just a few more days in the campaign, and it is 25% short of its funding goal. If you like vintage weirdness, I promise you will like Scrap Book.
Bray has arranged neuron-firing, free-associative found images as a series of two-page spreads that comment and reflect upon each other. By turns darkly funny, apocalyptic and blissful, SCRAP BOOK is a subconscious flow of words and pictures that no one was supposed to save or revere. You’ll see some famous names in the art and cartooning world here alongside anonymous tabloid clippings, forgotten advertisements and bizarre things that somehow wandered into the mainstream.
From visually degraded examples of Xeroxed office humor to elegant works of full-color art, SCRAP BOOK is full of zany inspiration, moments of meditation and a constant reminder of its motto: “No Sense Makes Sense.” Wrestlers, monsters, devils, freaks, strippers, fetish models, stag queens, skeletons, body parts, Aztec sculptures, gorillas, dinosaurs, and magic will befuddle your brain and slap your subconscious silly. This guided tour through pre-computer digital-age hand-collaged scrapbooks is a kind of compact reference or visual index that Glenn Bray shares with other like-minded artists and collectors. His deliberate curating and creating of collections can be seen as a form of artwork in itself, and is largely self-taught and unique in the artworld.
