Centrefold Scrapbook Issue One.

[London] Privately published by Reza Aramesh and Tina Spear [2003], 2003. The first issue of Centrefold Scrapbook. Limited edition, 37 of 60. 365x275mm. Unpaginated, [pp.32]. Centrefold is a limited edition publication in scrapbook format. This first issue is a standard child's scrapbook with bright yellow card wrappers and coloured pages stapled at the spine. The front cover has the title stencilled in black. Below it is a five pointed star cut out from a pizza takeaway leaflet. The lower cover is pasted with similar pizza leaflets out of which a five pointed star has been cut to show the yellow card underneath. It is protected by a plastic wrapper and is in very good condition throughout. Each page (or in some cases double page) is devoted to the work of an artist (there are seventeen credited) who is invited to create their own personal scrapbook out of that page. The ideas, proposals and concepts of the artists are then edited and curated by Reza Amaresh to create the book that we see. Among the artists shown here are Ellen Cantor, Francis Upritchard, who represented New Zealand at the 2009 Venice Biennale, and the 2008 Turner Prize nominee Goshka Macuga. Centrefold sits firmly in the tradition of collage, montage and papier collé and Issue One features photographs, magazine cut-outs, maps, delivery receipts, a drying-up towel and a 45rpm record (John Lennon's Woman with Yoko Ono's Beautiful Boys on the B side - some splitting to the edges of the record sleeve). The centrefold is a collection of pieces of paper on which are written responses to the question "What is success to you?" (answer include "warmth" and "a Ducati nine one six cylinder...one hundred and fourteen break horse power for hundred and sixty miles per hour - sublime"). Centrefold is an artist's book expressing the low key, low tech, random, aleatoric heterogeneity of post-post Modernism. We might struggle to discern links between the works but, as with a collage novel, themes and connections emerge when we absorb the individual elements through associative proximity. Ten Centrefold Scrapbooks have been created but this first issue set the project on its distinctive and radical path. "Scrapbook takes its cue from the childhood fascination for collecting and collating, the improvised cutting and pasting through which a constellation of interests and desires are brought together. A group show in its own right". (JJ Charlesworth)