About the Book
UPSTAGE — a words + visuals combine, juxtaposing Bruce’s disjunctive mosaics of language collaged out of signage from Asbury Park, NJ & Sally’s photographs capturing that town’s distinctive looks & textures & pandemic-era atmosphere.
Author
Praise
A caladatious omnisomantic extravagantorium
— Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee
With a choreographer's eye for pattern and pratfall, Silvers' photos show us the local at the end of its rope, anything standing in for everything. Andrews' blocks of word energy invite us to experience the thrill of canny juxtaposition. There's a constant sense of 'Who knew?' leading to 'Now we do.'
— Bob Perelman
Thank you two for ruining my breakfast with gut-curdling, unpretty photos, & heart-burning, clotted prose. Knocked out by its daring.
— Douglas Dunn
I love this book. If someone put Set and Reset, the dance/photography collaboration of Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg, between covers, it might look something like Sally and Bruce’s collaboration, but Upstage is funnier, livelier, more urban, and way more portable. It demonstrates that poetry resides in how we see and how we listen.
— Elizabeth Zimmer
Up-stage, down-stage, in-the-round-and-through-stage, this is a pandemonium for the pandemic. It’s also a paideia—an education system, a fun house, a co-imagined conflictual co-labor-ation. It’s a world. Go there. Carefully.
— Dee Morris & Wendy Deutelbaum
Bruce and Sally deliver the flowing cut-up cortex graffiti with enough deadpan winks to have one more for the rowed. Everyone from Krampus poop stompers to hatriotic Batman fans will find something to super judge in this meditation on where public verbiage ends and body surfing through thought gelato begins. It's hilarious and fun and it's all right in front of you, strolling on the boardwalk at sunset.
— Drew Gardner & Katie Degentesh
Kudos to Sally and Bruce; A very personal travelogue; a perfect blend
what? a textual sublime
what does? raw material
what does it mean? abc
what does it mean to look? consumption
what does it mean to look at the world? what
what does it mean to look at the world around us? ideology
what does it mean to look at the world around us - and record what we see? witness,
beauty, and not. a social sublime.
— Bill Jacobson & Emily Feinstein
Axiomanic irrigating yuppie! Flummy oxen antiself hipper
mothfafuckle pupurati of minimuumuu? Wrunkle my future!
Potting syrup! Uranus is wa. Bungalover! Expedian monetizer
orgono-speculum yellidae intwail efulger myopus. Whose
vagaborgi corgi evangel! Oh moron oh plagiaroo ah choo-chortly
meh fish neckoroo! Improviz-a-cow, now! Zonker doe umbral
plasma.
Fertility godlessness snorkels.
Yahoo! Simply the best we have!*
*at the present moment
— Nada Gordon & Maria Damon
Sally Silvers and Bruce Andrew’s Upstage captures the essence of Asbury Park in sight and sound, seemingly random as a composition, but rack focused on what was, is and will be, dumpster diving through the past, present, and future with razor-sharp attention. 'Suntanning sawtooth amp &…more beautiful than your mirror will admit.' This powerful collaborative book reveals - to paraphrase John Cage - that signs are all around us, if only we had ears to hear them…
— Nora Ligarano & Marshall Reese
Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers’ collaboration offers a portrait of the bleak, systematic chaos of pandemic times. It’s like wandering through an outdoor haunted house that is simultaneously scary and hilarious. The photos provide the anatomy while the pulsing text supplies the 'hopnotic' heartbeat. To borrow a phrase from Katerina Kolozova, this book captures 'the syntax of real.'
— Elaine Equi & Jerome Sala
Upstage burns the bra in bravura!
— Melanie Neilson
In a consummate marriage of the sister arts Silvers and Andrews have produced a psychogeographical tour de force that demonstrates the pleasures gained from a 'one-park stand.'
— Steve McCaffery & Karen MacCormack
It was the pandemic and we'd all been waiting for a sign—for the signs—to get us through. Leave
it to Sally Silvers and Bruce Andrews to have found them in Asbury Park. Through photos and found signage texts reconfigured, deconstructed, and juxtaposed, they give us the welcoming
maze we all need to make our way.
— Jeffrey Lependorf
uncanny hearkening harkening wanderers no minors
want to be there!
— Linda Austin & Jeff Forbes
These two wunderkind have been collaborating on complex projects for god-knows how many years and can still come with comparable results—I raise my glass to them for their latest accomplishment, a book no less—Read and enjoy —
— Yvonne Rainer
I have followed the work of Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers for nearly three decades always marveling at their commitment to make it new (yes, Mr. Pound, that’s how it’s done!). Most importantly I have been lucky to have seen them collaborate on stage and also to have commissioned an incredible performance at the Bronx Museum with Hitchcockean music and Merce Cunningham dancers. That is to say that they just can’t seem to do anything wrong. This marvelous book is further proof. For them the entire world is just a big stage.
— Sergio Bessa
In the process of being alone together,
through a familiar estrangement,
photography enters the sign age
as the sign ages into photography.
—Fifty years after Thirty Things
— Matt Hofer & Michael Golston
Sally Silvers’ imagery + Bruce Andrews’ text = The tragic poetry of us.
A candid, fully frontal collaboration with reality crashes our senses into a sublime nod.
This is it! This is us!
I love this book in the same way I love and need the marriage of hard truth with the uncanny.
— Annie-B Parson
A haj to a temple of rock’n’roll, a poem blender and a photo of memory, this hybrid book unassumingly imparts geography as text. Nostalgia disrupter? Can opener to the future? Both of course at least. I think synesthetic synthesis, where meanings dance and play your mind’s music, where to read means to immerse.
— Bob Holman
A true rarity: when a picture’s thousand words are so worth reading. An endless chain of signifiers float, meet and disperse in this mesmerizing interaction of L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. & I.M.A.G.E., revealing Asbury’s unique strangeness to the world.
— Zorica Čolić & Michael Schumacher
Asbury Park in Upstage is for lovers and thinkers: action-packed pandemic stylings, the mighty pair Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers in full shine on the Shore.
— Sarah Bernstein & Stuart Popejoy
Details
ISBN: 978-1-946604-03-3
Artist Book, Trade Paperback, 72pp, W:7in x H:9in
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Related Events
January 31, 2026