Art Metropole

_At one time I devoted extensive time to a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. My dissertation was an extended discourse analysis of the discipline of art history, in particular looking at the rhetorical limits of art history, limits established in the acceptance of certain defining categorical concepts (style, period, and canon, of course, but by extension artist, history, work, and time) at the foundation of the discipline in the late nineteenth century.

This durance in academia was somewhat fated from the start, in that I was less interested in an academic career than I was interested in attempting, as far as possible, to stop making visual art. While the dissertation was abandoned in the final stretch, two lasting results came from this tenure. The first, academic credibility, which continues to grant me relatively easy access to various libraries and archives. The second, an invigorated studio practice that puts into concrete form much of the ideas and interests that I was pursuing in my formal studies.

In particular, my work entails a close reading of ‘classic’ texts from the Western philosophical tradition. Paying attention the structural forms of these texts (collectively as an class, and individually as specific instances), I undertake a form of rogue editing, drawing out structural themes and motifs that make the primary text possible. Important to my practice is that the work I produce is a secondary text, written ‘over top’ of existing texts. The refiguring of these texts is done through various devices of distanciation. The execution of this work is as necessary as the pre-figured thought that goes into its planning. Like many contemporary conceptual artists, I view the embodiment of the physical work as a necessary aspect of my practice.

Where possible, I prefer to display and contextualize this work in situ, as books (e.g., not as artist books) that infiltrate the structures of the dissemination of the primary texts themselves._

- Michael Maranda (from artist’s website)

Parasitic Ventures Press is a press interested in artists’ books.

By our definition, an artists’ book is a highly mutable form, which connotes a contextual framework within which a work is produced rather than as a particular physical form. As Johanna Drucker has stated, the two structural elements of a book are finitude and sequence. We agree.

Our interest is in artists’ books that extensively use text as a medium. We are intrigued by the possibilities inherent in the subversion of text, particularly when the source text is of the ‘found’ variety.

(Please see below for a list of things we are definitely not interested in.)

The press has been variably active over the past fifteen-some years. Initially established in Montreal, the press has been located over a wide geographic range, including Saskatoon, Washington, Rochester, & Amsterdam. The press is currently located in Toronto, Ontario. In the past, we primarily focussed on in-house productions, from handbound limited edition books to anonymous public-site interventions.

We have expanded the activities of the press to also produce work by other artists and collectives.

Using appropriate technologies, we hope to foster an increasing range of critically-engaged projects. We are primarily pursuing inexpensively produced print projects. For the right project, we might also be interested in producing extremely limited edition ‘fine’ books in collaboration with producers.