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The funk & wag from A to Z

Chin, MelBang, Mary Jo(Contributions by)Bervin, Jen(Contributions by)Flynn, Nick(Contributions by)Hayes, Terrence(Contributions by)Hutchinson, Ishion(Contributions by)Klein, Michael(Contributions by)Lentine, Genine(Contributions by)Marcus, Ben(Contributions by)Miller, Tamalyn(Contributions by)
Part of the Menil collection series series
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This striking, oversized book, designed to evoke encyclopedias, is a highly creative amalgam of collage with a political bent and poetry.

From 2011 to 2012, American artist Mel Chin (b. 1951) extracted all of the images from a twenty-five-volume set of Funk & Wagnall’s Universal Standard Encyclopedia (ca. 1953–56) and began visually re-editing. Thousands of images rendered by photomechanical reproduction that served a populist, mid-century encyclopedia are reconfigured with 21st-century hindsight and idiosyncratic connections that convey social and artistic commentaries.

Surrealism, humor, sarcasm, politics, history, and beauty permeate these sometimes raucous, often confounding, but consistently stunning images.

Over 500 black-and-white collages are accompanied by twenty-five poems, one per encyclopedia volume, commissioned by Chin and author Nick Flynn specifically for this publication.

Writers range from the well-known to the surprising.

The Funk & Wag from A to Z offers mischievous fun with pointed commentary and hilarity. Distributed for The Menil Collection

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Product Details
Yale University Press
0300204507 / 9780300204506
Hardback
709.2
15/08/2014
United States
English
328 pages : chiefly illustrations (black and white)
25 cm