In 2007 I designed a book, Frances Stark: Collected Works, to coincide with the opening of a retrospective of the artist’s work, “The Fall of Frances Stark,” at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. The title was partly influenced by the fact that Frances, myself, and the show's curator Philip van den Bossche were all big fans of Mark E. Smith and The Fall, to the extent that we had floated the prospect of getting the band to play in Eindhoven on the night of the opening. 

As deluded as this idea was, we anyway produced a poster that appeared to advertise such a show, but on closer inspection actually advertised the exhibition.

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We had a small number of these A1 posters silkscreened for a gang of us to paste up around the city on the night before the show opened.

The same design also appeared as an advert on the final page of the book, along with this small block on the previous page depicting three such posters on a cartoon wall.

In the actual fall of the same year, the exhibition traveled to the FRAC Bourgogne in Dijon.

No actual poster was made this time, but a new version of the wall image was used as an invitation, produced as an A6 postcard with the new location and dates superimposed *as if* crudely printed strips had been sloppily pasted on top of the previous ones.

The exhibition made its third and final stop at Culturgest in Lisbon the following spring. This time we imagined crossing out the former details with a broad brushstroke and adding an A4 sheet at top left. meanwhile the right-hand corner appears to have come unstuck to obscure the previous year and reveal the wall behind.

A new A3 invitation for Lisbon now duly depicted the three generations of posters as produced for the the three locations—which nominally required ripping off the strips from the one on the left in order for the set to make temporal “sense.”

It was now decided to reproduce all three portrait posters as new A1 silkscreen prints based on this most recent invite. These were framed and hung as the last new piece of work in the final instance of the exhibition—a triptych titled False Advertising.

Yet another version appeared when Dexter Sinister reopened their basement bookstore in September later that year, now as if superimposed with custom green packing tape to announce the shop’s seasonal return to irregular opening hours. 

And finally, for now, this Risograph-printed A4 flyer was made for a talk by Frances on “The sycophancy of (the) Contemporary Art(ist) or The Impossibility of reaching Out to Mark E. Smith,” which took place at The Mandrake bar in LA at the end of 2009. A fragment from the wall’s first appearance in Collected Works—which happens to be the source of the talk’s title—again obscures the outdated details, with other bits and pieces rearranged, ripped off or newly written in Frances's hand. Which surely amounts to some sort of full circle.

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