Election Day in America

Speaking of small-press publications, we are still waiting for Carl Weissner’s Le Regard d’Autrui to go live in a new posthumous trade edition, as promised. But Amazon KDP has been doggedly screwy. Please pardon the delay. (It is now available.) Meanwhile, Printed Matter, the best place in New York to find artists’ books, has just made General Municipal Election, available in the original edition. A multimedia work by yours truly, it was published in 1969 by Nova Broadcast Press in San Francisco. It includes a doctored ballot from the city’s election of November 4, 1969, remade with collage materials and satirical text from a pornographic novel with names of candidates taken from the supermarket meat counter’s “Great Burger Bonanza.” Such prescience! Have an enlarged look.

The ballot folds out to three feet in width (a facsimile of the municipal ballot) and is accompanied by a 33 rpm vinyl record (“Election Day Tape”) intended for broadcasting near polling places. These are enclosed in a pamphlet with a front cover illustrated by a filmstrip collage of Richard Nixon superimposed on a clip from the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. The back cover has photos from an election “happening” and a cut-up text about “E-Day in America.”