ETIQUETTE IN THE ARTS, Zach Ozma

"How do you decide how much a bomb is worth? If a bomb is worth forty-four million dollars, a painting is worth—a good one—fifty million dollars."

Zero Mostel on how you decide how much a painting is worth
The Dick Cavett Show, 1971

Folded and just barely contained in this chapbook is the tension between made thing and maker, of an un-museuming of thought and of physical place. "I am thinking of a museum where everything in it is likable," indeed. What of this impossibility, of this type of utopic gesture, which is dialectically pre-charged? Something to work towards, but just as well, the impossibility of that goal. Judith Martin, otherwise known as "Miss Manners," remarked in a 1995 interview that "You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you..." Here the reader is confronted with the open pit of etiquette's refusal, its sanction, where possibility exists in "obliquely mincing thru the modes," in finding something to doubt "for awhile."

Zach Ozma is an interdisciplinary artist. Archival research, ancient artifacts, and neo-classically gay imagery inform his practice. Employing mimesis, pedagogy, humor, surprise, and reward, he works in a variety of forms including ceramics, assemblage, painting, installation, writing, and ephemera. He is the author of Black Dog Drinking From an Outdoor Pool (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019) and with Ellis Martin co-edited We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan (a 2020 Lambda Literary Award winner. Nightboat Books, 2019). Raised by folk musicians in Seattle and the Santa Cruz mountains, he came of age as an artist in Oakland at California College of the Arts and in the East Bay experimental poetry scene. Ozma holds a BFA from CCA in Community Arts and lives in the Philadelphia area.

Etiquette in the Arts, Zach Ozma. 8.5" x 3.83," 22 pages. Digitally printed on white French heavyweight text paper, folded thrice, bound with copper heavy duty staples and rubberband. First edition of 150. Set in BT Grotesk Spiral and designed by The Aliens.