How to Build a Wall in 12 Easy Steps
This book is crazy but clean, with a red cardstock cover, straight line drawings, and the title set in an inferred brick wall. It’s a How-To on laying bricks to build a wall. There’s a woman photographer documenting the process; which makes sense in a totally cerebral way, as no real-life brick-layer guys I’ve met are artsy and sexy like this guy. The scene is unlike any she’s previously documented: it’s a female gazing on the construction site, constructing her own photographs… (it brings back pleasant memories of spending time out at my dad’s dusty construction sites – romantic, like smoking dry ice at an Italian wedding reception). Brown states, “While working at a publishing house, writing a How-To book on walls, our hero gets caught up in the theatre of the absurd.” It’s true, it’s true! Exactly why the hero’s driving around the country with a wall on a flat-bed truck, I’ll probably never know. But he comes in a red package, held together by silver clamps – the construction of the book itself – and sporting black and white photos of woman, wall, and man skilled and not yet skilled. I’m not so sure that’s how it is for Brown, but it totally works for me. (PVP)
chapbook, 1999, $3, 24 pgs, Andy Brown, Conundrum Press, Montreal