Getting Away With It
Getting Away With It, 2021
Caren Florance and Peter Lyssiotis.
Booklet with A3 poster insert, digital print on acid-free recycled cartridge. A5 landscape: 15 x 21 cm, 24pp. Open edition containing the exhibition posters + extra collages with digital text.
Folio of 21 posters, letterpress on acid-free newsprint & digital print on acid-free recycled cartridge, 10 pairs + title page. 42 x 60 cm ea. Edition of 7.
Collaboration with artist Peter Lyssiotis towards a folio/artist book for the exhibition Extraction: Overburden (Sydney, Shop Gallery, 23-28 April 2021), inspired by classic newsagent daily splash banners and projecting a Murdoch-media tone.
The booklets are available from my online store, to be launched for Discover Paper, as part of the 2021 Sydney Contemporary art fair, November 11-21, 2021.
Shameless, that’s what we called the first iteration of these letterpress posters, printed in desperate haste in the days before the first COVID lockdown. It felt like the apocalypse that we were always headed for. Peter had made a notebook full of angry, frustrated collages, and looking at them all we could think of was the wilful, deliberate damage that the Murdoch conglomeration has achieved over the last four or five decades, and it doesn’t even feel like it was only for profits: there’s a sense of pure arsehattery about it, a tinkering for the fun of it. And that applies to anyone who plays with anything that screws things up for the rest of us: oil, bitcoin, minerals, water rights.
Before Twitter, the best use of textual creative constraint was on the caged splash banners outside every newsagency each day where the headline would be succinctly laid out to grab the eye. Having access to blocks of splash banner letterpress type gave us a challenge: here’s hoping these Murdochian/Machiavellian messages are short enough and sharp enough to get the message across: we’re fucked.
They’re getting away with it.
What are we going to do about that?
