"Auto Da Fe," V/A
This is a "zine," that I bought solely because I thought it was funny. It's long been a staple of the bookstand in my apartments. It is a single sheet of paper, folded in half, with a plastic bag stapled to the interior. Inside? From the text~~~
"For this limited edition, WRAY Omnigatherum issued a call for "doomed" manuscripts. These were collected and submitted to the furnace. The ashes were then combined."
I acquired this bizarre artifact from Grey Matter books in Hadley MA, the greatest bookshop on earth. A substantial number of entries from when I started collecting photobooks came from there. I miss that place a lot, it's so cozy and going there felt like treasure hunting, every week I'd fine something new, and I still am kicking myself for not buying the entirety of the Nippon-Kogaku photo annual that they had for sale in a thick stack. It was a Sunday ritual for me, to wake up hungover, and go pilfer through the photography section with a drip-pot cup of coffee.
Having had this on display as a funny little fluxus style artifact for so long, I actually have paid really very little thought to it. I actually thought this would be something of a shorter, easier entry this week, because of how little there seems to be to glom on to. This really hit me when, after scanning it in, I realized there was actually text below the plastic bag, where it is stapled to the cardstock.
At least ten years I've had this and not known this! And so this sparked my curiosity, and I've spent some time briefly looking to see what I can find, out there, about the names in this collection and the person who put them together, and I've found so little. I can find nothing on a Wray Omnigatherum or Slow House associated with Cleveland, Omnigatherum are some melodic death metal band who utterly pollute the search results in any case. Most of the names of this list conjure up linkedin or facebook profiles that are unrelated. A few are unique enough to be perfect matches. A poets blogspot with no new entries since 2023, a German artist who works with fire and volcanos, a memoirist of the Cleveland music scene.
All very Web 1.0, with some broken links, dust in the corners. The Burning Press alluded to in the text as inspiration retains a Google Site, which I didn't know still existed as a platform. Their paypal buttons still work, but many of their links are dead - including their about us page, which is blank. I'd like to have known what their zine collection page used to look like.
And so my impression: many of these pages are themselves doomed. On the brink of coming apart, of not being hosted, becoming outmoded. It brought to mind my own feelings re: digital decay, of friends who have slipped away and who survived in a digital echo for some time until the bills stopped being paid, or whatever platform they expressed themselves on decided to do some tidying up. Friends who've withdrawn from public life but whose blogspots and old Gofundme's remain in stasis. This art object is a business card for a disappeared and disappearing scene, and now I don't find it so funny anymore, and I recognize in it it's grave qualities. Yikes!
