STREET OUR STREET by Dana Smith and Marshall Weber

STREET OUR STREET by Dana Smith and Marshall Weber

STREET OUR STREET by Dana Smith and Marshall Weber

STREET OUR STREET
an artists book by Dana Smith and Marshall Weber
San Francisco, California, USA
2013, edition of 20

Marshall Weber has been doing solo, marathon recitals of literature in public spaces and on the streets since 1994 when he started "The Ulysses Cycle" with a 33 hour long reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The "Cycle" ended with a 23 hour long recital of Homer's Odyssey and also included a 72 hour long recital of the Old and New Testament. Weber believes that these endurance pieces are designed to challenge his physical and mental limitations as well as unreasonable constraints on the use of public space. The hallucinatory trance state attained while under the effect of sleep deprivation and fatigue blurs the lines between sleep and wakefulness, consciousness and unconsciousness, literature and reality, private and public, language and thought, and rational and mystical experience. Weber is projecting his existence into fictional space and vice-versa.
For 74 hours, from noon on May 20th to 2PM, May 23, 2013, Weber lived in the streets and parks of San Francisco, dragging a poetry wagon filled with poetry books and loose pages of poetry and reciting poetry at appropriate places throughout the city. Weber attempted to trace a small personal song line across the historic and poetic geography of San Francisco. The performance was part of "Streetopia" an art exhibition and culture festival curated and produced by artist/musicians Erick Lyle, Chris Johanson and Kal Spelletich, that was centered in San Francisco's Luggage Store gallery. The poetry wagon was designed and built by Andy DeGiovanni, Fred Rinne and Kit Young, the founding members of National Disgrace, the urban folk art band.
The white or black texts, whether typed or handwritten, are an original poem written for this book by Marshall Weber, which was inspired by a concept of and then edited by Dana Smith. The colorful texts are excerpts from poems by the poets from the marathon reading.

Artwork by Dana Smith and Marshall Weber. Printing, binding, book and digital design by Dana Smith. This book is printed with Epson pigment inks on Canson Duo Photographique Rag paper. It is bound by hand with a damask upholstery cover and canvas printed image.

Closed book measures 15” by 11.5”
42 pages and endpapers
signed by the artists and blindstamped

Copies of this book reside in these collections:
  • Stanford University, Palo Alto, California
  • The Athenæum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, California
  • University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota
  • University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware
  • Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Click here to see Street Our Street online

Click here to contact Dana with questions or to purchase the book