Vanishing Acts
A peek inside Collateral Magic
Collateral Magic: How the CIA Conjured Democracy from the Cold War to the Forever Wars is now available in stores!
As I mentioned in a previous post, this book will also be available at Frieze NY (May 7-11), the LA Art Book Fair (May 15-18), and the Paris Ass Book Fair (May 15-18) at the Palais de Tokyo, where ¡AGITPOP! Press will have a booth. Johannah and I will be presenting a lecture-performance on our entire body of work at the museum on May 18 at 5pm.
Although I kicked off this Substack with Collateral Magic’s introduction, now that the book is out in the world in print, I wanted to give a fuller idea of its visual idiom, which is one my artist collaborator of five years, Johannah Herr, visit in all of the work we do together.
We believe that the best way to understand American history is to unpack how it has been sold to us. For example, in The Banana Republican Recipe Book, we presented the sordid history of how the CIA worked hand-in-glove with United Fruit in the form of a Chiquita Brands cookbook. Each book we create subverts the form of the propaganda it investigates.
Our publications aim to reveal how US history has been advertised to the world, and to portray American decline as what it unavoidably is: a consumer experience. Collateral Magic continues in this vein, but takes an amateur magician’s how-to manual as a starting point rather than a recipe book (or a Sears catalog or a suburban circular, which have also served as bases for our work).
For this post, I’ve included the fourth chapter of Collateral Magic, “Vanishing Acts,” as it is laid out and illustrated, rather than excerpted from the book. (In short, that is a euphemism for “this might look better on your laptop.”)
