CREDIT: Installation at LACE

photos of the artist talk and performance by Harold Abramowitz

CREDIT: Installation at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions LACE, August 5-26, 2010.

Les Figues Press presents Mathew Timmons CREDIT: Installation as part of Not Content, a series of text projects that investigate the ways in which language functions within public and private spheres and within the tenuous and transitory space between these real and imagined realms. Not Content will take place as a series of writers-in-residence. Most residencies will last for three weeks, during which time the writer will engage in a project that considers the physical and temporal space of the gallery/residency. Presenting Writers: Vanessa Place, Divya Victor, Douglas Kearney, Maxi Kim, Gaby Torres and Jenny Donovan, Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin, Mathew Timmons, Yedda Morrison, Johanna Drucker, Marco Huerta, Sawako Nakayasu, and Christine Wertheim.

In late spring 2007 as an irrational exuberance and promise of financial fortune hung in the air, mailboxes were filled with generous and gracefully worded offers of credit. Just over two years later, in midsummer 2009, the shape of the financial environment changed radically and mailboxes still filled up with statements of credit. Something had to change, offer turned to obligation.

Mathew Timmons installation at LACE, CREDIT, is based on his book of the same name. Published by Blanc Press in Los Angeles, CREDIT is an 800 page, large format, full color, hardbound book—the longest, most expensive book publishable through the online service lulu.com. Divided into two sections, Part A: Credit–26 parts (a-z) and Part 2: Debit–10 parts (1-10), CREDIT is a highly revealing and emotional work chronicling a personal tale of credit.

Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT has been roundly endorsed by a number of artists, writers, editors and critics. Holly Myers has said, "Rarely has the mind-numbing banality of consumer capitalism’s fine-print underbelly been employed to such elegant effect. Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT is a timely epic in this crumbling age of debt." Willam Moor has said, "This book is a must have, along the lines of the Arcades Project, the OED, any crossword puzzle in the U.S. between 1982 and 1995, finished or not, the Bible, and of course the definitive attempt at something without reason, Marienbad." Robert Summers has said, "Timmons enacts a redistribution of the sensible that disrupts the common of the community: he shows what has been present but in a way that highlights the twisted irony of it all." And Dan Richert has said, "CREDIT's operation is ravenously lossy, feeding on filtering byproducts and mistranslation; emphasis on information loss/breakage makes the text self-genotoxic and it sprouts mutant poetry from attractive shapes and corners. The text can be rotated. CREDIT is unreadable and CREDIT is a vibrant autobiography and CREDIT is a rainbow dream."

Timmons' CREDIT: Installation at LACE will engage with excess through the layering of elements from the book. Beginning with the recreation of a few iconic images from the book at the scale of 1 inch = 1 foot (achieved with the help of scenic designer Sarah Krainin), the installation will develop as Timmons attempts to read aloud the entirety of the book CREDIT and record an audio version of the complete text. A software program will be used to turn the sound recordings into a new text, which will be released at the end of the residency as the paperback edition of CREDIT.


View a short movie of the CREDIT: Installation in process...