Catherine Holly / The Academy of Realness — Fuck Book

Artist publication / facsimile journal
The Academy of Realness, New York / London, 2014
40 pages including covers
Colour cover, black-and-white interiors
Offset / photocopy-derived reproduction from altered found notebook material
Edition of 25

Produced from a discarded off-licence memo book acquired during an early visit to London, Fuck Book operates somewhere between artist journal, punk zine, diary-object and conceptual facsimile. The original support — an ordinary British stationer’s memo pad — becomes a site of accumulation and interference. Price stickers, retail residue, medication labels, rubber-stamped cartoon imagery, and stencil typography are layered into a loose sequence of statements, repetitions and interruptions.

Issued under the overlapping identities of Catherine Holly and The Academy of Realness — with Rafael Melendez functioning simultaneously as author, editor, producer and displaced signatory — the publication treats authorship as unstable. The object shifts between pseudonym and attribution rather than settling into either one.

The publication draws from self-published artist books, Xerox-era zine culture, mail-art logic and diaristic forms of conceptual publishing. Rather than presenting a coherent narrative, it accumulates fragments: slogans, administrative traces, found graphics and repeated gestures that move between private notebook and public statement.

The original notebook remains visible beneath the reproduction process. Retail labels survive. Found supports remain legible. A cheap object is temporarily repositioned as journal, artwork and printed artifact.

Original period item.