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History for the precariat: The Believer on Signs of Change

Posted on January 31st, 2011 in Reviews of AK Books

Have y’all ever read The Believer? It’s a literary magazine founded in 2003 in San Francisco, by Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s fame. (Incidentally, Eggers’s What Is the What? has one of my favorite book cover designs in recent years.)

The idea behind The Believer was to provide a space for writers to talk about reading, to plug the books they actually enjoy, and to talk about writing and literary practice. Amy Sedaris wrote an advice column. Nick Hornby writes a “What I’m Reading.” And, in a self-referential nod to one of Hornby’s novel, Greil Marcus writes a “Real Life Rock Top Ten: A Monthly Column of Everyday Culture and Found Objects” list that doubles as a go-to for finding out about the weird and wonderful world of the everyday. Plus it’s in color. On matte paper. With lots of space for the text to breathe. With a colored border around the pages so that when you look at it from the side, you don’t just see the same boring white pages that grace so many journals of its kind.

At a time when lowering production costs means cutting corners left and right, and increasing consumer value means cramming as much crap onto a page of a magazine as you possibly can, The Believer’s attention to aesthetics, and tounge-in-cheek self-referentiality is always welcome.

And, February’s issue of The Believer features a joint review of two books that I think share that same attention to detail, to composition, to materials: Josh MacPhee’s Celebrate People’s History Poster Book, and our own Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures from 1960s to Now, which Josh co-edited with video and public installation artist Dara Greenwald. And the review is phenomenal. I won’t post scans of it here, because the magazine is out on newsstands, and you should really just go and buy a copy, or at least go & read the review in person. But here’s a few gems to whet your appetite:

Taken together, these two books represent a departure from history as most of us learn it, both in form and content: Celebrate People’s History is a radical retelling of history by contemporary artists; Signs of Change is a visual record of historical events themselves.

And further down:

[T]hese books do not only look back into the past. In a collection of contemporary EuroMayDay propaganda reprinted in Signs, you’ll find stark Ikea-looking images of single-color figures against a white backdrop that represent workers in the recently dubbed precariat. If you are a writer, an artist, or a freelancer of any sort, you fall into this category, which is defined by economic precarity, “a concept commonly used in Europe… to describe the lack of security or predictability in contemporary labor conditions… a life where workers have no social safety net… including ‘flexible’ workers in creative industries, temporary workers, day laborers, immigrants working ‘illegally,’ and service sector employees.” This is the new look of protest: clean, slick, sophisticated. This is history in the making. Both of these books offer images of where we have been, not only in an attempt to record an alternative history, but also to encourage readers to imagine how we might forge our future.

Fuck Yeah. Go get a copy of The Believer and read the rest of the review. Then get a copy of Signs of Change & CPH.

(EuroMayDay Poster by bildwechsel/image-shift. Reprinted in Signs of Change by permission of the artist. Find out more here: http://image-shift.net/)