Artists, book dealers, and publishers travel from all over the world to sell their wares to the thousands of attendees who come to the San Francisco Art Book Fair every summer. The fair, which is free to attend and now in its tenth year, brought in over 30,000 people across four days this weekend, according to its director Gaelan McKeown.
This year, said McKeown, the fair got over 400 applications from would-be booksellers, but could only squeeze in about 130. They got close to 200 applications to host events at the fair — book talks, art talks, and workshops — but could only choose a few dozen.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Art Book Fair turned down a proposal to be haunted — even if the would-be haunt-er, Aaron Wojack, works at the Minnesota Street Project (which hosts and curates the fair’s programming) and, also, really wanted to get in.
“I was upset,” said Wojack, the impresario behind Bat Witch Ghost, a local arts organization that specializes in haunted houses, like last year’s Halloween “Haunt” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. “I was hurt. I felt like I was not appreciated by my own community.” Wojack had proposed a (haunted) installation, with (haunted) smoke machines, where he would make a (haunted) zine, and host a (haunted) prop-making workshop.
Eventually, though, Wojack got over it. His proposal was pretty “haphazard,” he admitted, and it didn’t do much in the way of catering to the “book” element of the Art Book Fair.
In the course of those realizations came another: “Fuck it.” Wojack recalled thinking. “I don’t need permission.” All you need to haunt someplace, he added, is a good outfit. In fact, he’d dabbled in a bit of freelance haunting in the past, handing out Bat Witch Ghost fliers by himself draped in a ghillie suit.
So, Wojack got a small crew of ghosts and monsters to haunt the fair anyway. Each day of the fair, a costumed actor would roam around the tables, perusing risograph prints and walking through the galleries upstairs, which served as overflow rooms for fair attendees to take a break from looking at art books and look at just art.
In preparation for this weekend, Wojack gave his hired actors specific haunting personas.
“The personality that I’m looking for here,” Wojack recalled telling one actor, “is this a friendly ghost. It’s got good manners, but also, it just can’t help scaring people from time to time. It’s mischievous, and funny. It loves to dance.”
“Great,” Wojack recalled the actor saying, “that sounds like me.”
It’s not easy to scare throngs of people walking shoulder-to-shoulder inside cavernous warehouse-turned-gallery buildings with relatively open lines of sight — in fact, a true jumpscare is nearly impossible, and possibly a vibe-killer at this high holy day for all hipsterdom. But a person wearing a Halloween costume in late July on the sunniest weekend in recent memory was, apparently, startling enough.
On Sunday, as one actor, draped in fabric and wearing a green foam mask with drooping yellow eyes, approached two fair attendees, the pair jumped, less out of fear than surprise. The ghost offered them each fliers advertising Bat Witch Ghost’s haunting services.
“We should go to this haunted house,” said one to the other, as the ghost drifted away. Halloween was just a few months away.
As Wojack sees it, the crafts associated with the haunted house — costuming, prop-making, sculpture — are aligned with the art world. And he sees analogues between a good haunting and contemporary fine art in the works of Cameron Jamie and Thomas Hirschhorn. (Wojack was particularly inspired by a 2008 labyrinthian collaborative work by Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, and Alexandre Singh called “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun.”)
The ghost continued to work the mezzanine level, where there was a temporary breakdown in the friendly ghost vibe. A small child yelped at the sight and ran off to clutch the nearest (hopefully familiar) leg.
The fair’s organizers appeared happy with the rogue haunting.
“Bat Witch Ghost is exceptional and so extremely San Francisco,” said McKeown, as people buzzed around the fair’s main building on its final day. Behind, vendors like Special Effects peddled Vaillancourt Fountain posters, and The Last Straw gallery-store sold the last of its supply of shirts that read “Too dumb for NY, too ugly for LA, just right for SF.”
“I took my kid back to their installation at Yerba Buena three times,” McKeown added. “It was her favorite thing.”
The fair’s programming is curated by the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, which schedules artist workshops, and by SFMOMA library director David Senior, who plans lectures and talks.
The official programs listed on Sunday included a billboard-painting workshop with artist and sign-painter Rose D’Amato — and a talk on “Back-to-the-land architecture in Northern California.” Also programmed was a talk with the fair’s founders, who, McKeown said, share Wojack’s do-it-yourself ambition.
“We love the San Francisco ethos of just showing up and making it happen,” McKeown said, “because that’s what this was.”
