Jack Greer’s New York Fucking City demonstrates a straight-forward, memory-based process of bookmaking that has led to a bound collection of photographs that feel fraught with velocity and drama. By incorporating a familiar approach to graffiti-styled lettering on the cover, Greer situates readers within a time and space associated with the fringe, the underground, and the night. Though this graphic element does not repeat throughout the duration of the pamphlet-sized publication, the indelicate flats created by the xeroxing of nighttime scenes amidst car and street lights create a dynamism that compels and communicates a similar sense of insubordination and boundless creativity.
Jack Greer is a multi-media artist whose stylistic expansiveness is clear in regards to wide berth of subject matter and tendency towards experimentation. Many of Greer’s singular works, while not editioned or published as per the convention of bookmaking, echo a propensity to work iteratively and through a sequential form.
Greer projects the particular tonality of graffiti as a subcultural, space-and-time specific metonymy that colors the perception of the blurred-motion photographs that fill New York Fucking City. With the information received by the reader from the artist, it is possible to understand these photos cinematically, or as representation of a night in New York as seen from its legendarily prolific and historic populations of street artists.