distracted-reader #3: Time to Think Like a Mountain

By Louise Menzies with Allan Smith
published by split/fountain, 2018

Combining magazine fragments, archival images, interviews, collages and newly commissioned texts, Time to Think Like a Mountain documents New Zealand-based artist Louise Menzies’ distracted meanderings through one of the largest collections of underground and self-published material in the United States. Drawing directly on content from the Alternative Press Collection at the University of Connecticut, where she was artist in residence during 2014, this third issue of distracted-reader continues Menzies’ attention to the printed world of the historical fringe.

Contributors Pat Arnott, Dan Arps, Elle Loui August, Jon Bywater, Amy Howden-Chapman, Tessa Laird, Barry Rosenberg, Allan Smith, Graham Stinnett, and George Watson provide contemporary responses to aspects of North American counterculture and its echoes in Aotearoa New Zealand. Publication design by Narrow Gauge.

distracted-reader seeks readerly parkour through selected terrain of art and design. We see rhythmised literacy of image-text-concepts. We do thinking as making, and publication as speculative thought. With the general art monograph as coffee-table artefact, and university presses not funding experiment, our printed project marshals conjecture, scattered reflections, and textured locale. Less clarion call to a vanishing new, more through-lines with incidents and discernible increments, writing and thinking as marked-up copy, stuttered narration; material view.

Published by split/fountain, 2018
ISSN 2350-3165
128 pages, colour ill., softcover

Purchase distracted-reader #3 here

This publication has been made possible by generous support from: Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut; Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland; The Chartwell Trust.

Special thanks to Barry Rosenberg, Curator Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut, who invited Louise Menzies to Connecticut, and Allan Smith to write.

Image: (publication cover) design by Narrow Gauge, images courtesy of Allan Smith, George Watson, Alternative Press Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.