meanderings

gamer-face film using errol morris’ interrotron

March 26–July 7, 2008, MOMA

Featuring works that transform books through a variety of mediums, Book/Shelf stresses an expanded notion of the illustrated book. The exhibition begins with a documentation of Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade (1919)—a work created when the artist, while traveling, asked his sister back home to hang a geometry book on his balcony in order to let the wind flip and tear the pages. It continues with works in which artists appropriate books by others, such as a sculpture by Martin Kippenberger made partly of books, and a copy of Duchamp’s catalogue raisonné rebound by David Hammons under the title Holy Bible. Artists who tackle the idea of books in film (William Wegman), sound works (On Kawara), prints (Edward Ruscha), and drawings (Steve Wolfe) are represented as well. Finally, the exhibition surveys a number of artists who have created installations that display books in public contexts, including Brian Belott, Allen Ruppersberg, Josh Smith, and Lawrence Weiner.

“Much of the novel’s alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last. Of course, through print’s long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line’s power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic, not to exclude the form’s father, Cervantes himself. But true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text.”

Dissected book in circular acrylic case.

“You have been searching for us without knowing it, following oblique references in crudely xeroxed marginal “samsidat” publications, crackpot mystical pamphlets, mail order courses … a paper trail and a coded series of rumors spread at street level … and the propagation of certain acts of insurrection against the Planetary Work Machine and the Consensus Reality … or perhaps through various obscure mimeographed technical papers on the edges of “chaos science” … through pirate computer networks … or even through pure synchronicity and the pursuit of dreams. In any case we know something about you, your interests, deeds and desires, works and days … and we know your address. Otherwise…you would not be reading this…”

The Incunabula Papers: Ong’s Hat

“Incunabula” is a generic term coined by English book collectors in the seventeenth century to describe the first printed books of the fifteenth century. It is a more elegant replacement for what had previously been called “fifteeners”, and is formed of two Latin words meaning literally “in the cradle” or “in swaddling clothes”

Granary Books

“observing progressive scholarship and supporting adventurous book making in the context of exploring the relationships between seeing and reading, reading and seeking.”

Kaldron Home Page — Begun in the early 70s, Kaldron is the longest running magazine of visual poetry, or concrete poetry, or book art, the avant-garde intermedium between poetry and painting in the U.S., with an international and multicultural scope