Document Series #4
Hardcover, 124 pages, 7.5 × 12 inches, 104 color plates
ISBN: 978-1-7327086-7-9
Designed by Brian Hochberger
Printed in Lithuania
Edition of 500
August 2020 (First printing)
November 2020 (Second printing)
Sold out
Limited edition print, To Do 2021, available here
About the publication
Every Monday in 2017 and 2019, comedic performance artist Morgan Bassichis created a to-do list. The Odd Years is a collection of those lists, which served both as a way to generate material for live performances and as a place to archive the logistical, emotional, and political business that just kept piling up throughout this two-year project. A record of routine and impossible tasks—some completed and others left unfinished—The Odd Years is one response to the oddness of times in which intensified crisis becomes ordinary.
Praise
We are lucky to live in a society with Morgan Bassichis’s to-do lists, which perfectly convey the comedic artist’s brilliant naïveté, ironic earnestness, and impressive skill for finding powerful politics within the narcissistic requirements of our age. Through these pithy and poignant observations about their own place in it, Bassichis notices the beautiful details of a shared world that isn’t always pretty. Note to self: listen to Morgan!
—Malik Gaines
This book is brilliant and hilarious. Anxieties, joy, obsessions, and the deep weirdness of the everyday are distilled to their poetic and pathetic essence. How Morgan can go from earth crisis panic to questioning the nutritional value of dates is something I don't relate to at all but I find funny to think about Morgan struggling with.
—Jibz Cameron (Dynasty Handbag)
At once moving, hilarious, and highly relatable, The Odd Years offers a cure, or at least some amelioration, for our existential loneliness. Number one on my To Do list: tell everybody how much I love The Odd Years. Number two: Try not to be possessive of Morgan’s genius and wit!
—Andrea Lawlor
About the author
Morgan Bassichis is a comedian and musician living in New York City. Morgan’s performances include “Nibbling the Hand that Feeds Me” (Whitney Museum, New York 2019), “Klezmer for Beginners” (Abrons Arts Center, New York, 2019), “More Protest Songs!” (Danspace Project, New York, 2018), and “The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions: The Musical (New Museum, New York, 2017). Morgan was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the 2015 Greater New York at MoMA PS1, and has presented work at the Brooklyn Museum, Hirshhorn Museum (Washington D.C.), and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. Morgan has released two albums, March is for Marches, a collaboration with Ethan Philbrick, published by Triple Canopy in 2019, and More Protest Songs!, a live album recording at St. Mark’s Church in 2018. Morgan’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Captive Genders, and in Nightboat Books’ 2019 reprint of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. Morgan has received support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Art Matters, and attended Brown University.
Press
Madeline Weisburg, "20 Best Art Books of the Year," The Brooklyn Rail, December 20, 2020-January 21, 2021
"The Intimate Suggests the Epic: A Year in Small Press and Indie Publications," BOMB, December 17, 2020
Gregg Bordowitz, "Best Books 2020," Artforum, December 2020
Ryan Chapman, "13 Rapid Fire Recommendations," Book Marks, November 15, 2020
Ksenia M. Soboleva, "Documenting These Last Two Years in Order to Survive Them," Hyperallergic, October 9, 2020
Harriet Staff, "Jess Barbagallo Finds Pathos to Punctuate Pettiness in Morgan Bassichis's The Odd Years," The Poetry Foundation, October 1, 2020
Jess Barbagallo, "Open Plan," Artforum, September 28, 2020