Palimpsest Plans POP Printings

Mag Makes Mature Media Medium Modern

Fringe Arts — Published September 28, 2010

There. Don’t you feel better about all this? I know I do.

Now, I should let you know that the Literary Arts haven’t been completely neglected by POP Montreal.

Under the big-tent that is Art POP, Concordia-affiliated and design, art and literature related Palimpsest magazine is getting in on the action.

The magazine, which is hosting a vernissage on Wednesday in association with the French-language graphic design magazine Pica, has a bit more up their sleeves for later in the week. They’re planning to print a daily broadsheet paper through the duration of POP Montreal filled with up-to-the-minute music journalism and other fest-related craziness.

Danielle St-Amour, one of Palimpsest’s two co-editors, noted that these daily POP papers will be put online as PDFs after the festival.

In addition, the project will produce some content that will be exclusively available online, since Palimpsest is run by self-proclaimed paper fetishists—people who are as much interested in the production of printed paper as they are in what is printed on that paper.

The project is one that is very material-based. Matt Goerzen, a curator for Art POP and associate of the magazine, said that it’s about “the pleasure derived from wanting to hold something beautiful in your hands that feels nice and gives you some information. [It’s] about the love of a good looking piece of information that you can pick up and take with you.”

St-Amour echoed Goerzen’s sentiments with regards to the aesthetics of their work, both in the context of the magazine and the daily papers they will be producing during the festival.

“All of our projects stem from an idea of the desire for and the objectification of printed matter.”

As for the inspiration for the project, St-Amour was open about its predecessors.

The concept was based “very loosely around two publications—the first being a daily broadsheet produced by Dexter Sinister during a performance art festival. The other, a publication conceived by Maria Fusco entitled Cosey Complex Reader, which was an attempt made by a range of artists to consider the musician and artist Cosey Fanni Tutti as methodology.”

It’s worth noting, however, that this won’t be a simple case of traditional music writing. Rather, the project, “almost takes on a performance art quality,” as Goerzen put it.

“Music journalism is an integral aspect of any music festival, and by creating a vehicle for conducting our own music journalism we have created a medium for performance,” he said.

“Our role as artists will be to question our roles as music journalists, and in doing so we aim to open up new possibilities for a journalistic engagement with this music festival.”

You can find out more about these printing parties at palimpsest.ca under Daily Print.

This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 07, published September 28, 2010.