New York artist James Hoff brings new meaning to the pop-up book with “Milking the Flat Cow.” In order to open the 48-page paperback, which is sealed with two pieces of green tape, the reader must inflate a balloon that’s attached to the inside cover. The blow-up makes the covers blow out! Inside are photographs of everyday objects being re-purposed – a microwave as a mailbox, a soda can as a soap dish. A suitcase hung on a wall becomes a shelf. Hoff is currently 2013 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room, where he will give a performative lecture on April 25, 2013. That’s right: performative.
Hoff is also the co-founder of Primary Information, a non-profit organization devoted to printing artists’ books and artists’ writings. Primary’s latest book is Florian Hecker’s “Chimerizations” (February 2013), which features “a radically new form of documentation and typotranslation of four sound pieces that dramatize the phenomenon of Auditory Chimaeras” – a process that Hecker is currently developing at MIT with Harvard-MIT Professor Bertrand Delgutte.