“New Monkey City” is a one-of-a-kind phonebook for an imaginary city.
The project had three main sources.
Theoretically, in college I was deeply influenced by the Soviet literary historian Mikhail Bakhtin. In particular, I was interested in his theory of genre, which holds that the broad historical categories we often rely on (for example, “naturalist” vs “postmodern” novels) are trivial stylistic differences that obscure the significant fact of the the novel as a genre — which, he argues, is set apart by its capacity to absorb any other genre. So, for example, it can be written entirely in verse, or present complete legal opinions, or have no letter “e”, or take the form of diagrams or be written in ASCII art. Thus, in a classical romance novel — not the “teen paranormal romance” of the Twilight series but a story that follow the travails of two people who are separated then eventually reunited — it doesn’t matter whether they’re lovers or siblings, or whether they’re separated by seas or wars or time travel . All that matters is what Bakhtin called the chronotope, a formal construction of the time and space in the novel that allows for key dramatic events — near misses (say, at an inn or a fair), misrecognitions (due to disguises or costumes at a ball), and so on. Similarly, an idyllic poem that features a shepherd singing about the woman he loves, where the two are is of no account, as long as they’re separated. In this view, a telephone book — something that barely exists anymore — can be seen as a novel. So I set out to “write” the world’s most boring novel, with endless characters and settings at different scales but no discernible plot: a phone book.
The, second, discursive source is simpler: the Infinite monkey theorem, which (per Wikipedia) states that “a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare.” I have a thing for monkeys, particularly in costumes, and especially in professional costumes — scientists, programmers,
The third, personal source is more “complicated,” as they say. A few years earlier, when I was still making works for presentation in conventional venues like galleries, I collaborated extensively, including with Rirkrit Tiravanija, a close friend at the time. When the MoMA approached him about doing a project in their lobby, he told me — with Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in mind, which then was just a decade or so old — that he wanted to do a similar memorial for the Vietnamese who had died during US aggression. Rirkrit knew that, at that time, I was developing a specialty in editing books about US postwar military/intelligence issues, so he asked me if there was any source for those records. I laughed and told him no, there wasn’t, in part because records of that kind were a feature of colonialism, which was what the war was about. I gave him a brief overview of Viet naming conventions and suggested that he could generate a corpus of names — which, in many cases, would be “accurate.” I don’t remember what he did, because we parted ways soon after that for personal reasons, but the idea stuck with me.
To make New Monkey City, I bought a set of CD-ROMs that claimed to offer the first telephone-and-address listings for the entire United States. Through a painfully laborious process, I extracted all the data then broke it into its arbitrary components: first names, last names, street names, and street types (for example, street, road, drive, parkway, etc.). I ordered each category by frequency and generated an “average” listing of streets, assigned minimum and maximum numbers to each one, populated the ranges with street addresses (complete with credible numbers of residents), generated statistically probable combinations of first and last names, and assigned them telephone exchanges (complete with credible distributions of phone numbers). I then typeset the result in what then had become the standard phonebook font — Centennial Bell, designed by Matthew Carter for AT&T in the mid — 1970s — printed it on newsprint, and hand-bound the result.
The only extant copy was bought by a collector. I had no interest in making it an edition of multiples or in creating more, different permutations, so the terms of of the sale stipulated that I wouldn’t make another; the collector liked its singular status, and as a final, almost offhand term of the sale required that I share only verbal descriptions of the work.