Praise for CREDIT!
Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT has been roundly endorsed by a number of artists, writers, editors and critics, including: Harold Abramowitz, Stan Apps, Marcus Civin, Brian Joseph Davis, Ryan Daley, Craig Dworkin, Brad Fliss, Lawrence Giffin, James Hoff, Maximus Kim, Matthew Klane, Janne Larsen, Matthias Merkel Hess, William Moor, Joseph Mosconi, Holly Myers, Sawako Nakayasu, Sianne Ngai, Ariel Pink, Vanessa Place, Dan Richert, Ronald Quinn Rudlong Jr., Ara Shirinyan, Danny Snelson, Erika Staiti, Brian Kim Stefans, Robert Summers, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener and Steven Zultanski.……………………………………………………………………………………………………
Let’s face it, only those who see the invisible can do the impossible. However, miraculously, and right on cue, just short of a decade into the 21st century, Mathew Timmons has given us a momentous, lucid, and gripping book that makes visible what used to be, exclusively, invisible, the wide terrain of credit. Buy “CREDIT,” tell your friends to buy it, and take its lessons to heart: Credit is expensive!… Credit is not cheap… Credit is hard, not easy, to get…
—Harold Abramowitz
If you want to pay a penny for a thought Mathew Timmons has 19,999 of them, but like Master Card suggests, Timmons keeps it simple. CREDIT is a work ripped from both the headlines and the mailbox.
—Brian Joseph Davis
I will send a very special, one-of-a-kind, only-available-via-purchase-and-full-completion and proof-of-reading-of-this-book, to all who purchase and read this book. Offer not valid in Kentucky.
—Sawako Nakayasu
CREDIT by Mathew Timmons captures the entire postmodern economy under one cover. Like an avalanche of fine print, CREDIT reveals absolutely everything required to be disclosed by law. Timmons aestheticizes the angst of indebtedness into a colorful durational novel, complete with a lifetime supply of rate, fee, and grace period information, plus all the “__ _ !lI” •••••••• •••••••• & •• ‘.”~.’lf ’ CIa … “ of modern life. This is a book “that do_es lL all for you” and best of all “_.s:ard ~ith _no annu~lJee.”
—Stan Apps
Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT: Approved.
—Sianne Ngai
The output is a sprawling, modular form-letter with all the personal/financial affirmation cut down through razorbladed erasure-transcoding. CREDIT’s procedure traces an unfollowable map from the macrodistortion of mass-market advertising onslaught to a subjective microdistortion of noise stream granulation and reassembly. CREDIT is problematic in terms of numbers, transaction, hardware and software. The text’s operation is ravenously lossy, feeding on filtering byproducts and mistranslation; emphasis on information loss/breakage makes the text self-genotoxic and it sprouts mutant poetry from attractive shapes and corners. The text can be rotated. CREDIT is unreadable and CREDIT is a vibrant autobiography and CREDIT is a rainbow dream.
—Dan Richert
What kind of Art would Human this kind of Receipt?
What kind of Receipt would Art this kind of Human?
What kind of Human would Receipt this kind of Art?
What kind of Art would Receipt this kind of Human?
What kind of Receipt would Human this kind of Art?
Fuckers.
—Rodrigo Toscano
Quite possibly the oldest system of exchange, credit is almost inseparable from wealth. Credit is the laxative to the stubborn bulk of capital. Similarly, how easy can form be separated from content? Or is content itself a kind of para-form? Paraformaldehyde, even? Disinfectant indicating content’s historicity in its obliteration? Content is form not yet recognized as such. Content is form on credit. And it is to Timmons’ credit that he seems to be particularly susceptible to this confusion, bombarded as he seems to be with offers. And though credit and wealth may be interchangeable to the point of identity, still Timmons is all the more duped for believing so.
—Lawrence Giffin
Not since “The Tzanck Check” has a work so conscioned the infra-thin of capitalism—a tour de fort-da.
—Vanessa Place
This work could have easily been called “Labor”—like “Credit,” one of the least understood, least visible of our foundational abstractions. (“Milk” might be the other.) Mathew Timmons has managed to squeeze a Dummy’s Guide of both into a mere 800 pages. Sure, this is art in the age of digital reproduction, but you’re not getting anywhere near this thing.
—Brian Kim Stefans
It seems only natural that with this book I re-appropriate a blurb about another book (Fiona Banner’s The Nam):
“It has been described as unreadable.”
—James Hoff
Congratulations! You’ve been preselected to apply for a copy of the new book by Mathew Timmons at a low introductory rate of just 199.99 and no annual fee ever. Documenting the social and economic space defined by the writing that falls between bulk mailing and fine print (full color and some of it very fine indeed), CREDIT appropriates direct mail credit card solicitations and advertisements in order to explore the nature of disclosure in a series of plays between display and censorship, see-thru windows and security envelopes, financial promise and legal threat—or simply, in Guy Debord’s terms, between monologue and true communication.
Testing the limits of publishing—CREDIT is the largest and most expensive book publishable via Lulu—Timmons’ book is well beyond most readers’ means. But remember, you could always charge it and hope to juggle some good balance transfers down the road…. Respond Immediately and Request Your Copy Today.
—Craig Dworkin
Rarely has the mind-numbing banality of consumer capitalism’s fine-print underbelly been employed to such elegant effect. Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT is a timely epic in this crumbling age of debt.
—Holly Myers
You know Timmons is just saying what Patti Smith said thirty years ago, although he’s saying it even more: “And when we dream it, when we dream it, when we dream it, / Lets dream it, we’ll dream it for free, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, free.”
—Matias Viegener
CREDIT is what I’ve always wanted to write, I’m disgusting. Disapplications of Chevron, CCusage, replies, APR for april, BENE for Benzedrink. Timmons lays plain masks on the credeet fleet of antelopes. Put you-self in an envelope. What must the mailing packet feel? Payment locater? One of those lender people in distinct dress? Can’t possibly find preenable space to read about it while you’re debits refill actually automatically in? Squeeze yourself under this Santo Tomé y Príncipe’s weight…and digress awhile.
—Ryan Daley
Timmons has surfaced the excessive consumer culture that is the USA—which is also its undoing. In a day and age where banks, mortgage companies, and credit card companies are flatlining, Timmons enacts a redistribution of the sensible that disrupts the common of the community: he shows what has been present but in a way that highlights the twisted irony of it all. He demonstrates that in our current economic climate we are simultaneously surrounded by a call for “frugality” and a call to keep up our excesses: the schizophrenic nature of (late) capitalism, to be sure. Timmons, drawing on the likes of Berlin Dada to the British Independent Group and the cut-and-paste style of William S. Burroughs, reconfigures these politico-aesthetic sensibilities in a new and refreshing way, and one that is not only visually shocking and yet pleasing, but also one that is politically astute and remains honest to the ethical ambiguity that surrounds us today (and yesterday).
—Robert Summers
Like Jenny Holzer’s take on the CIA, Mathew Timmons’ position against the credit card companies is relentlessly deconstructive. Timmons perceives the seeming transparency of the surface of credit card documents and the malevolent injunction to debt, seeing them to be both intertwined and semiotically separate. In CREDIT, his new collection of “stories” and “essays,” Timmons turns his playful yet critical gaze onto himself—or rather, onto scenes blanked out from his “classified” bank statements. The result is satisfyingly perverse and effortlessly postpostmodern.
—Maximus Kim
Mathew Timmons’ America spies on itself, drowning in records of its own debt—so 2000 and Late. Where On Kawara sent postcards stamped, I woke up at…, to prove that On Kawara existed, Timmons exists only as the mail piles up, in heaps of language. Timmons consents to redact, to Mac Low notate, to circle, to reckless-reckless-rat-gnaw at what offers of credit come. Dada Matt here sings an ominous new folk song—meter: “11111111111…” Dada Matt here weeps and moans unlikely verse: “You will be ineligible / Your rating damaged / Your wages garnished, refund withheld / The DoJ will take action against you…” As Abbie Hoffman said, Steal this Book.
—Marcus Civin
I hate Mathew Timmons so much it makes me puke, but his book CREDIT is so good it makes me want to forget how badly I would like to injure him and instead maybe give him a soft kiss on the cheek and a firm but gentle pat on the bottom. Timmons’ CREDIT is so awesome, it’s like three badgers for the price of one!
—Ronald Quinn Rudlong, Jr.
The subject transcribes its shadow and redacts the skin. What happened to the little plastic window? It’s everywhere you want to be. Give me a figure. I’m not reading this. Reach for the paper shredder. Instead of reading the subject transcribes, redacts, resizes. The object is stored in the body of the author. CREDIT remains.
—Erika Staiti
CREDIT is a compendium of functional culture. With housing markets bottoming out, grotesque inhuman suffering on the rise, amber alerts, inept budgetary management, and all the other glories that grace the beautiful state of California and the union, I can seek solace within its correct pages, and be reassured that some form of bureaucracy is a part of my life too. This book is a must have, along the lines of the Arcades Project, the OED, any crossword puzzle in the U.S. between 1982 and 1995, finished or not, the Bible, and of course the definitive attempt at something without reason, Marienbad. Mathew Timmons continues to bring enlightenment to our lives by baring his analytics in the public light, and we are grateful for that and rewardful to that type of thing.
—William Moor
“Hi I was in here about 10 minutes ago? I just bought this boombox, it’s playing at the totally wrong speed, uh, i don’t want a refund, or…”
“Ah, I’m sorry son.”
“Can you just, uh give me another one?”
“No.”
—Ariel Pink & Joseph Mosconi
The power to destroy which is possessed by authority over credit, or by management of credit, is negative: it is the power to withhold credit. Mathew Timmons proposes, as counter(feit), that we first behold CREDIT, as it shreds through financial ad copy, the corporate love letter whose unscrupulous flirtation first woos us from our engagement with “a better world” at the bottom of our mail pile. The remarkable fact, however—and a great testimony to the strength and magnetism of Timmons’ poetic return—is the degree to which CREDIT resists its own financial death decrees. Unurgent and unessential, as it extends into the relentless, CREDIT regenerates the language of prolonged decay while bailing-out by-now-bankrupt notions of found text through its reinvestment in the scanned line, dissolving hackneyed metaphors of mobile language containers. On the contrary, the book’s coda, “Debit,” represents precisely what happens to individuals who are engulfed by private space but fail, themselves, to behave economically like successful city districts. You’ve been invited to participate. Approval takes only 30 seconds.
—Brad Fliss
A wild romp through the crumbling credit market, Timmons shatters boundaries with his journey into debt. This 800-page gorilla of conceptual publishing is the largest and most expensive tome one can print at lulu.com, but it is filled with content that is seemingly free of charge. A reflection on the language, layout and pitches used to move plastic money, this is a ‘must-read’ even if only for the torn envelopes, which made me wonder why I open envelopes on the side while Timmons rips them opens at the top.
—Matthias Merkel Hess
You have been specially selected to receive this offer of credit from us… How does one account for CREDIT, Mathew Timmons’ print-only personal finance omnibus? At 800 pages of pecuniary rejectamenta, this maximum-price on-demand document taxes even the most patient reader of recomposed text—yes, reader be warned, CREDIT‘s scans will indeed jam yr interpretive OCR. However, dig around and you’ll find Timmons has shrewdly invested his personal finances in the conceptually wealthy -Strikethrough- Trust, enriching the discourse founded by Man Ray in “Lautgedichte” and continued by Marcel Broodthaers in Un Coup de dés. The monumental attentiveness with which Timmons colors and recollects all his monetary junk inspires a conceptualist’s awe while slyly leaking autobiographical candor. Please keep in mind that certain creditworthiness criteria established in connection with this offer must be met or verified before Credit can actually be extended to you—the reader must be activated, processing each mundane transaction from text to appendix to envelope to book and back—remember, CREDIT rewards close accounting!
—Danny Snelson
CREDIT—identity crisis, critical mass, end-in-itself. edit—Ultimate rewards! Business solutions! Benefits to fit your life!
—Matthew Klane
As piles of credit offers litter our mailboxes, Mathew Timmons has managed to flip this ubiquitous cultural hassle into an hilarious yet sometimes depressing insight into a our financial hopes and burdens. Credit is in this time of economic downturn a glorified and vilified system of oppression masked in the wordplay of hope, convenience and escape: celebrity cruises, shiny new automobiles and baseball tickets are at your very fingertips. What CREDIT clearly points out is that all the information packed underneath this dream amounts to line after line of hardly decipherable qualifying rules that will benefit anyone but you, the cardholder. CREDIT preys on our sense of entitlement, a naïve sensibility that no one is trying to take advantage of us, and our ignorance of what is really conveyed in the small print legalese. Like a paternal, generous, cigar-smoking grandfather, CREDIT promises to provide anything the cardholder desires–just set aside the pages and pages of avaricious terms that will come to define the architecture of your debt. This act of setting aside is the body that composes CREDIT. “Trade in your hassles for simple peace of mind.”
—Janne Larsen
I pre-approve your purchase of this book. CREDIT has scans of hundreds of pages exemplifying the most successful and monstrous of all ‘pataphysical sciences: capitalism >> BRANCH >> giving you credit where it’s most often not due. Don’t show low interest in the maxed out world around you! Squeeze a few more swipes out of your American Flag Discover Card. The health of everything around you depends on how confidently you consume on a budget you can’t afford. New Nikes and a sushi dinner away from complete recovery.
—Ara Shirinyan
CREDIT is an intimate and autobiographical account of one man’s dramatic rise to the heights of consumer power. Mathew Timmons is modest enough to leave the juiciest parts of his financial adventure off-scanner, as it were. The credit reports, offers, and statements which make up the bulk of this bulky book are littered with blacked-out numbers, passages and letters, a process which insistently suggests the withholding of “information.” The juiciest part, we discover, is just this insistence—there are no surprises behind the black stripes. The only surprise is that we repeatedly imagine a “behind” where a surprise might lurk. This is reverse identity theft: the reader transfers his or her own riches to Timmons’s account. He has nothing for us to steal, so the least we can do is give him something that can then be stolen back.
—Steven Zultanski
[...] Praise for CREDIT! [...]