Fair use : notes from spam

by Graham Parker

For almost a decade, Graham Parker has been making art from and about spam e-mails. Fair Use presents his ''notes from spam'' - five books, each written about a different time and place, collecting essays, artworks and fragments that arrived, unbidden, in the artist's Inbox. Parker uses his growing archive on this most despised contemporary phenomenon and its historical analogues to create narratives in which Nigerian scammers mingle with medieval beggar gangs and 19th-century railroad con artists. Presented as five separate staple-bound mini-books in a cardboard sleeve, Fair Use is a fascinating journey through criminal brainstorms, from Wall Street scammers in Gilded Age New York to penis enlargement in the present day.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009