BOOK WORK

ookwork B
Bookwork
MEDIUM TO OBJECT TO CONCEPT TO ART

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London G a rr e t t S t e w a r t

Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

Letters in the Department of English at the University The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

of Iowa. He is the author of numerous books, including © 2011 by The University of Chicago

The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text; Framed Time: All rights reserved. Published 2011.

Toward a Postfilmic Cinema; and Novel Violence: Printed in the United States of America

A Narratography of Victorian Fiction, all published by 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 12345

the University of Chicago Press. He was elected in 2010

to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77391-9 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-77391-4 (cloth)

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Stewart, Garrett.

  Bookwork: medium to object to concept to art / Garrett

Stewart.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77391-9 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77391-4 (cloth: alk. paper)

  1. Artists’ books. 2. Altered books. 3. Books in art. 4.

Conceptual art. I. Title.

  N7433.3.S74 2011

  709.04´082—dc22                                         2010032666
For two Susans—

M. Bielstein and J. Wolfson

—who make bookmaking

an art

C O N TE N T S
 l i s t o f i l l u s t r a t i o n s   viii

frontmatters  xii

Prologue/Catalog: An Exhibit in Mind  1

1 T h e T h i n g o f I t I s   16

2 Readybound  54

3 D e m e d i a t e d M e a n s   94

4 O b j e c t L e s s o n s   128

5 Anarchives  150

6 P o l i t i c s a n d t h e B i b l i o b j e t   184

e n dpa p e r s  218

n o t e s   234
i n d e x   245
I l l us t r a t ions
 0.1. Wolfgang Nieblich, Buchweizen (1983)  xvi
0.2. Wolfgang Nieblich, Der Lügendetektor (1990)  xvii
1.1. Guiseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian (ca. 1566)  18
1.2. Brian Dettmer, Tab aka The Boy Who Knew Too Much (2005, detail)  19
1.3. Wolfgang Nieblich, Still Life, Bookobject (1987)  20
1.4. Doug Beube, The Arena: White over Black, or The Secret Wars of the CIA (2002)  22
1.5. Doug Beube, Paris (1994)  23
1.6. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Torn Notebook (1992; fabricated 1996)  24
1.7. Steve Wolfe, Untitled (This Is Not a Pipe) (1987–88)  27
1.8. Byron Clercx, Purification (1993), 21st Century Edition (2002)  28
1.9. Adam Bateman, Rubbing: The Flesh (2005)  33
1.10. Matej Krén, Gravity Mixer (2000)  37
1.11. Adam Bateman, Untitled (2004)  38
1.12. William Drendel, The Starr Report: Beat Yourself Up, America! (1998)  40
1.13. Ann Hamilton, lineament (1994)  47
1.14. Ann Hamilton, lineament · book/ball (1994)  48
2.1. Robert The, Duchamp (2008, detail)  58
2.2. Robert The, Duchamp (2008, detail)  59
2.3. Robert The, Reader’s Digest (1998)  60
2.4. Robert The, Reader’s Digest (cake book) (1998)  61
2.5. Helmut Löhr, Faucet (1989)  62
2.6. Jonathan Callan, Mass (2003)  71
 2.7. Buzz Spector, A Passage (1994)  87
2.8. Maurizio Nannucci, Universum (1969)  88
2.9. Fiona Banner, Life Drawing Drawings (2007)  92
3.1. Grant Wood, Victorian Survival (1931)  99
3.2. Naftali Rakuzin, The Nature of Still Life (2007)  107
3.3. Naftali Rakuzin, Sims Reed Catalogue (2009)  109
3.4. Naftali Rakuzin, Chuck Close (2002)  115
3.5. Jordan Kantor, Untitled (The Bar) (2009)  117
3.6. Jordan Kantor, Untitled (X-ray) (2009)  118
3.7. John Sparagana, altered magazine page (2008, detail)  121
3.8. John Sparagana, NW 8.5.09 (2009)  125
4.1. Peter Coffin, Untitled (Theory of Colour) (2004)  134
4.2. Damien Roach, Mobil (2007)  139
4.3. Fiona Banner, Sleep (2009)  148
4.4. Fiona Banner, Anatomy of a Book (2009)  149
5.1. Wyn Geleynse, Kit 1A: Collected Books; Some Assembly Required (2006)  157
5.2. Matej Krén, Passage (2004)  161
5.3. Tom Phillips, The Library at Elsinore (2006)  163
5.4. Tom Phillips, The Library at Elsinore (2006, detail)  164
5.5. Marcel Broodthaers, Pense-Bête (1963)  166
5.6. Adam Bateman, Sphere #5 (2005)  170
5.7. Heather Weston, Book of Babel (2001, detail)  172
5.8. Heather Weston, Flip Read (2005)  174
5.9. Doug Beube, Volume (2005, detail)  175
5.10. Buzz Spector, 33 Art Histories (spine) (2003)  176
5.11. Buzz Spector, Malevich: With 8 Red Rectangles (1991)  177
5.12. Clegg & Guttmann, False Perspective—Reflections on Claustrophobia,
Paranoia, and Conspiracy Theory (2001)  182
6.1. Peter Coffin, Untitled (Koko) (2002)  188
6.2. Doug Beube, Border Crossing—In the War Room (2006)  191
6.3. Doug Beube, Fault Lines II (2009)  192
6.4. Doug Beube, Speakers: Italian to English (2007)  193
6.5. Doug Beube, Speakers: Italian to English (2007, detail)  194
6.6. Zhang Xiaogang, Sleeping Boy on the Book (2008)  196
6.7. Anselm Kiefer, Census (1990)  199
6.8. Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia (1514)  200
6.9. Rachel Whiteread, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, also known as
The Nameless Library (2000)  202
6.10. Rachel Whiteread, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (detail)  202
 6.11. Micha Ullman, Memorial to the Nazi Book Burning (1995)  202
6.12. Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Paperbacks) (1997)  203
6.13. Pier Paolo Calzolari, Natura Morta (2005)  204
6.14. Anselm Kiefer, Narrow Are the Vessels (2002)  206
6.15. Anselm Kiefer, Narrow Are the Vessels (2002, detail)  207
6.16. Christine Borland, After a True Story—Giant and Fairy Tales (1997)  210
6.17. Christine Borland, After a True Story—Giant and Fairy Tales (1997, detail)  211
6.18. Robert The, The Medium (2006)  216
E.1. Idris Khan, every . . . page of the Holy Quran (2004, detail)  225
E.2. Idris Khan, Thus Spake Zarathustra . . . after Friedrich Nietzsche (2007)  229

Plates to follow page 122.
Plate 1. Brian Dettmer, Key Monuments (2009)
Plate 2. Steve Wolfe, Untitled (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) (2003)
Plate 3. Adam Bateman, The Flesh, the Spirit, and Father Smith (2005)
Plate 4. John Latham, Painting Is an Open Book (1961)
Plate 5. Hubertus Gojowczyk, The Latest News from the Years 1732 and 1733 (1999)
Plate 6. Jonathan Callan, Rational Snow (2002)
Plate 7. Raphaelle Peale, Catalogue Deception (after 1813)
Plate 8. John Sparagana, NW 8.5.09 (2009, detail)
Plate 9. Naftali Rakuzin, Anselm Kiefer (2008)
Plate 10. Xiaoze Xie, The MoMA Library (46–50) (2005)
Plate 11. Vincent Desiderio, Cockaigne (2003)
Plate 12. Matej Krén, Passage (2004)
F R O N T M ATTE R S
T here they rest, inert, impertinent, in
gallery space—those book forms ei-
ther imitated or mutilated, replicas of read-
ing matter or its vestiges. Strange, after
its long and robust career, for the book to
take early retirement in a museum, not as
rare manuscript but as functionless sculp-
ture. Readymade or constructed, such book
shapes are canceled as text when deposited
as gallery objects, shut off from their nor-
mal reading when not, in some yet more
drastic way, dismembered or reassembled.
Painting, of course, has often put unread-
able books in the hands of a pictured body
or left them open on draped tabletops in
still life, all text inactivated. Real, or at least
three-dimensional, books can instead be ne-
gated by becoming installation objects on a
real table, if not hung on the wall as bas-
relief—even as they remain resident aliens
in the sphere of exhibition.
In question here is not the illustrated art-
ist’s book, the prestige limited edition that
may turn up for sale in a specialty bookshop,
nor the handcrafted artisanal book, often
wordless, that is more likely to be shown
with works in (rather than on) paper. This
study has in view, instead, the orphaned co-
dex form—stolen from normal exchange or
sculpted from the ground up: the codex as
abstract or conceptual book art, increasingly
to be seen on display in galleries worldwide.
Solo or in group bondage, such books are of-
ten abandoned on a display pedestal—if not
drawn and quartered, or perhaps scattered
or banked, on the museum floor. Whether
they are culled from libraries or carved from
foreign matter, these retreads and effigies
are book-works that—in collaboration with
viewer rather than reader—do bookwork.
Whatever we decide that is. In such forms,
the idea of the codex survives its use. The
book-work—as material object—once denied
its mediating purpose as verbal text, can
only be studied for the bookwork—as con-
ceptual labor—it performs.
 But allow me to back into this discussion
as I once backed away from it, via an adja-
cent set of considerations. Bringing almost
any work of scholarship to completion is a
matter of suppression, a sidelining of mate-
rial than can’t be assimilated. This was cer-
tainly the case with the last chapter of my
2006 book, The Look of Reading: Book, Paint-
ing, Text.1 Focused there on what I called
the “lexigraph” in postmodern art (the site
of text without a figured scene of reading),
I was, wherever I turned, finding contem-
porary paintings that appeared more like
manic or hypertrophic or dyslexic pages
than like pictures, oversize and often un-
framed, yet as retinal occasions—and prov-
ocations—more linguistic than textural or
pictorial. But all the while, my peripheral vi-
sion in the same galleries couldn’t help but
take in all those real book pages or shapes
in real space, or their carved and painted
mock-ups (often send-ups), that were them-
selves at times manic, hypertrophic, dys-
lexic—or, more often yet, mangled and de-
faced. That’s a different thing, I kept saying.
Too often, I even stopped taking notes to
prevent distraction. I needed to download
my evidence for postfigural text art, not
overload it with comparison. But now, in
this follow-up—and I hope follow-through—
account, comparison is the very point of de-
parture. That’s a different thing, sure: book
sculpture as opposed to word painting. But
how? I mean how much different? And how
so? And why so much of it lately?
This study is therefore about the book
itself as “study” rather than as functional
object: the book as approximation, heuristic
double, or—when found rather than faked—
piled with (and shut tight by) so many oth-
ers like it that there’s no way in. Appropri-
xiv    | f r o n t m at t e r s
ated but dysfunctional, the used book ap-
pears in this case under conditions of dis-
use. Either way, reclaimed or fabricated, the
demediated book-work, as we will come to
understand it, is a conceptual object: not for
normal reading, but for thinking about. In
the realist tradition of making and match-
ing that raises the cult of expertise to such
heights in painting and sculpture, one of the
thrills of mimetic art is always its recogni-
tion value. Conceptual art replaces that al-
luring visual passivity with the deskilled rig-
ors of cognition value, elevating information
over image—or isolating information as im-
age. And whereas the word-works of concep-
tualism often substitute discursive address
for visual pleasure, book-works, blocking
discourse, substitute for any and all verbal
pleasure a reading of their shape as such—if
only through the back door of form and the
closed door of the illegible page. So from
this halt to all data flow in such castaway
shapes, this denuded use, why the potential
for jolt, hilarity, exhilaration?
As so often, idiom hits home. We ap-
proach the very essence of the experienced
book—our access over time to a referred
world both elsewhere and inward—when
asking, for instance, if you brought “your
reading” with you in the car or suitcase.
This is to say that a book, conceived as text,
is virtually coterminous with its activation.
Not so with book art, conceptualized instead
as sheer physical object rather than released
to linguistic transaction. Reading is divorced
in such book forms from its transmitted ref-
erential matter, suspended by a more plas-
tic apprehension of its material conveyance.
No longer opening within us, museum books
close in emphasis upon themselves. In our
contemplation of such dysfunctional forms,
what we can often only imagine, rather than
actually see, is text itself, isolated under ar-
rest—not what it normally helps visualize for
us. Such book objects—plastered, slashed,
trashed, or otherwise unusable, piled up,
pinned down, or disintegrated, nailed,
scaled, or raked, pummeled or simply dum-
mied—are volumes not awaiting return to a
library’s stacks. They often appear merely
as stacks in the other and everyday sense:
squat towers, faux stairs, textual dumping
grounds. They are taken out of circulation
for sheer pondering as objects, reading mat-
ter reduced to cubic inches or feet of worked
surface, all verbal mediation disappeared
into its physical support. It’s hard to over-
state the frequent blend of low comedy and
high concept in these privations.
We know about bookishness, odd nomen-
clature that it is. It’s what certain readers
bring to an abiding cultural form: a thirst
for the medial immersion in textual experi-
ence, a craving lifted free, however obses-
sional, from the object that backs it. And,
truer to the book as object, we also know
about the collector’s bibliophilia. But what
is bookhood itself? That’s what the artis-
tic distancing of bookwork shows forth
through the work of demediation. Weight-
less text disappears into the now-function-
less revelation of its suddenly overmaterial-
ized support. Sometimes these book-work
shapes are skewered through the middle
and bolted shut. Sometimes they are the
proverbial steel traps to begin with, or more
specifically lead layers inscribing nothing—
nothing legible, that is, as in the funereal
tomes of Anselm Kiefer. Oppositely at times,
in the work of American book sculptor Doug
Beube, for instance, the book returns to its
fibrous origins. As one of several book art-
ists in a line descending from the pioneering
work of Buzz Spector, Beube goes so far into
materialist oddity as to evoke the organic
basis of the book object in a variant whose
stock is actually made of seeds pressed
into rag paper. With pages that therefore,
when dampened, sprout over time, in some
bizarre punning sense exfoliated from the
swollen volume, this deviant book can seem
to spread itself open by itself, without a
reader: a nonmechanical automaton.
Odd, yes, and often motored by unspo-
ken punning, conceptual if not strictly
verbal: an ocular troping. It certainly can’t
hurt, momentarily, to unleash the flood-
gates of suggestion attending the variegated
anomalies of such objects. With something
of the same organicist humor that impels
Beube’s sprouting book, we find in the work
of prolific German book artist Wolfgang Nie-
blich—with over 4,500 artworks devoted to
the book in theatrical set designs as well as
drawings, sculptures, and installations—
the phenomenon of a closed codex used
as the base for the vertical installation of
long-stemmed grain (fig. 0.1): the bound
cover (rather than land cover) offering the
potting soil of fruitions not yet requiring
the mulching of the book itself in the fertil-
izing cycle of reuse. 2 Installed in 1983 under
the punning German title Buchweizen for
“book” rather than “buck” wheat (a far pho-
netic cry from Buchwissen, or “book learn-
ing”), the imaginative outgrowth of Nie-
blich’s book sculpture plants its botanical
wit at one pole of such material figuration.
Alimentary metaphors for textual digestion
find their counterparts elsewhere, for Nie-
blich, in psychoneural ones. For Buchweizen
is soon followed by Der Lügendetektor (fig.
0.2), where two volumes resting on the seat
f r o n t m at t e r s |    xv

Figure 0.1.  Wolfgang
Nieblich, Buchweizen  
(1983). Courtesy of
the artist.
xvi    |
of a wooden chair are strapped to the appa-
ratus of a “lie detector” hung from its back,
plugged in only in a predigital sense. Food
for thought is one thing; truth and con-
sequences, another. It is as if the reputed
inwardness of the book had a moral senso-
rium of its own, but not according to some
stale humanist paradigm. The technology of
the codex form is tested here not against
head and heart but against the forensic ap-
paratus of modern police science. The joke,
of course—whether on ethics or simply on
verisimilitude—is that a book’s only brain-
wave activation, its sole nervous system,
resides in a given reader’s engagement with
the text it contains. Nothing can register
authorial intentionality, its truth quotient,
except on the pulse of reading.
In book-works of this sort, figuration is
everything, the materialized “as if.” Books
seed thought. They also harbor intentions,
f r o n t m at t e r s
disseminating ideas sometimes true, some-
times not. In this they seem to breathe with
a life of their own. Not respirating exactly,
but again opening under their own power,
the “Breathing Books” of another German
sculptor, Edith Kollath, are embedded
with the kind of microprocessors used in
spe­c ialty textiles. This is done in order to
activate in each book, on their separate ped-
estals, what amounts to the pulmonary sys-
tole and diastole of the Living Word—either
that, or to fan and retract several pages as
if they were being thumbed by an invisible
reader at waist height. 3 In any case, these
self-lifted pages never open wide enough for
your or anyone’s actual ingestion as text—
remaining true, even in their not-quite-still
life, to their prototypes in nature morte.
With Kollath’s treated books having inter-
nalized their own antithesis in digital pro-
cessing, their slow throbbing may further
enact not just the shallow breathing but
perhaps the last gasps of the codex form.
Seriously odd, yes. And oddly serious.
But also funny, as in the case of American
ceramic artist Richard Shaw’s double re-
move of the book form from textual use: his
artisanal remolding of an already “altered”
(which usually means defaced) book. His
is, by deadpan restraint, an untitled work
from 1978 identified by the Stedelijk Mu-
seum, Amsterdam, simply as “torn book
with coffee cup and pipe.” But since the
fan of open pages, stood on end, supports
the ripped-away cardboard cover on which
the mentioned objects are resting, the un-
avoidable rebus joke of this construct is to
wrench from idiomatic complacency the cli-
chéd term “coffee table book.”
How do we sort out even these first
examples? The giddy variety of such in-

Figure 0.2.    ventions—whether micro-processed, agro-
Wolfgang Nieblich,
Der Lügendetektor   processed, or molded in ceramic—stretches
(1990). Courtesy
of the artist. to the very edge of categorical coherence. By
turns opened wide and shut tight, appro-
priated or duped, such book-works—when
they offer other than garden plots, bursting
seedbeds, epistemological litmus tests, sur-
reptitious microchip platforms, or flagrant
visual riddles—can further, in their native
materiality, be curled, bisected, haphazardly
compacted, sawed, fused, glued, scissored,
singed, and otherwise erased in their mes-
sage function. Or sometimes they are so in-
cendiary in their break from the cold-press
norms of industrial printing that their com-
bustible matter (no need of matches) ignites
on contact. I’m not making this up. You’ll see.
Whether scooped up from the world of
mass production or duplicated by the handi-
craft of simulation, what underexamined as-
pects of cognitive life does the abandoned
book form—rather than the activated tex-
tual object—bring to view? And in the site-
specific reorientation of just what social
field? If we can determine or at least intuit
the weight and valence of the book shape
in museum space, so often unopenable, in-
operable, defaced, or otherwise abolished
as text, and thus grasp the motives for its
increasing prevalence as well, we have gone
beyond the enumerated features of a con-
temporary aesthetic genre toward, at least
in this one case, something like a cultural
unconscious of spatial form. Or phrased
otherwise: a sculptural iconography of an
emblematic shape and its material substrate.
In all this, and in view of the 1960s im-
petus to book-works in the mode of concep­
tual art, impinging technology should not
be overstated as prime mover. Yet the digi-
tal turn can scarcely be ignored, given an
ever-spreading assault on the pliable, even
friable and flammable book by the ascen-
dancy of the “burned” or fiber-optically
transmitted e-text. From scroll to bound
folio, books have indeed evolved. And like
all things subject to evolution, they can
face extinction. As often happens, outmod-
ing invites remotivation. That’s one of the
things museums are for. Though conveyed
for centuries by the mechanics of the co-
dex, text may now, in the new electronics
of reading, configure itself (and no longer
metaphorically) as engine, with drive and
inertial momentum across layered fields
of cognitive flow. Electronic searching and
scrolling are of course gradually replacing
the manually operated flange of the codex,
the keypad digit superannuating the oppos-
able thumb of page-turning. This is part of
the reason why the limited mechanics of the
book, under exhibit in the space of the arti-
fact, can generate a kind of vestigial poetics
f r o n t m at t e r s |    xvii
 instead—even without recourse to textual
content. Or a poetics of the vestige. Such is
the museumization of the tool. It is in just
this way that an art of the book gives way
to book art—which becomes an art of fig-
uration in the metaphoric rather than the
sculptural sense, not just picturing the co-
dex but finding spatial similes for its opera-
tion. That’s its wit, its flair, its tonic charge,
its edge, say, its conceptualism—certainly
its demediated leverage under current con-
ditions of display. Say, its work.
In normal reading, books are to some de-
gree vaporized by attention. Intermittently
at least, they disappear as mechanical ob-
jects and weighted things. Museum expo-
sure slows or blocks this process, whether
to elegize it or reinvigorate its recognition. In
gallery rather than library, books are thereby
subsumed to the kind of metaphors in which
their pages so often normally traffic. Books
live, breathe, sprout, prevaricate, and engulf.
All these figures, and more, find form, and
their premises demonstration, in book art.
Books bunch and segregate among them-
selves, affiliate and are cross-filed. Book
art brings this intertextual density to view.
Books are manifolds as well as iconic objects,
mechanisms first, then journeys, worlds.
Book art moves to shape, operate, map, and
occupy these assumptions too. So with the
book as tomb. And so on . . . and on . . . until,
perhaps, finally.
As the first searchable database in West-
ern culture, though now dethroned as sover-
eign medium of document storage and mass
communication, the book will certainly lose
further ground to a web-worked field of dis-
cursive exchange. History, made by books
to begin with, both impelled by and then
transcribed in them, sees their prominence
xviii    | f r o n t m at t e r s
tapering out as part of its own long view: a
perspective taken up by a now-electronic ar-
chive, rife with its own book arts and book
history websites. The book in a museum is
what all books may become. Aesthetics yet
again presides over the subsidence of use
value, both locally and historically. The
readymade or the simulacrum is each re-
moved from the normal social space of the
intentional object. And it is exactly when
books are so treated (as a spatial apparatus
of fold and hinge, a material aggregate of pa-
per and ink) that their history comes into a
focus that includes its tacit vanishing point,
with whatever piquancy or sting this may
induce—or absurdist defiance.
This study thus operates at the colli-
sion of two disciplines and the elision of a
third. In it, art history impacts book history
over the absent scene of anything like liter-
ary reading. But without a line of poetry or
prose being necessarily visible, the book ob-
ject, though part of a history of codex pro-
duction (book studies) and a lineage of non-
representational art (conceptualist practice
in the aftermath of abstraction), has also, as
suggested, its own poetics, where inferences
come to formulation—and often specific
phrasing—in the head of the gazing specta-
tor. This is a poetics—or a volumetrics—of
displaced text. The spotty commentary on
these objects, however locally illuminating,
does tend to enfold conceptual book sculp-
ture into the adjacent and more established
field of the limited-edition artist’s book—
with its numbered and often luscious pages,
whereas the unpaginated objects of book art
regularly bear only a catalog number in a
gallery list. Distinctions are carefully made
in several accounts, but the field tends to
seem continuous, the book sculpture being
only an extreme form of the artist’s book.
I’m thinking, for instance, of the influential
work by Johanna Drucker, her commentary
rather than her own book artistry.4
Unlike Drucker, I am scarcely a practitio-
ner of either the artist’s book or of book art.
Instead, I have set out in part to read the
difference between them. Not a maker and
shaper, then—except in what follows next,
where, for a brief heuristic stretch in the
coming prologue as imaginary catalog, I do
make things in the sense of making them
up; and where responses to the de-ciphering
of textuality in repeated book objects—their
suppression of letter forms—can thereby be
seen to have set off a mental chain reaction
in at least one habitual spectator. From there
on out, the going will be more straightfor-
ward, observational rather than hypotheti-
cal. At least up to a point: the point of inbuilt
enigmas, contradictions, and puzzles in the
book-works themselves, where spectatorial
invention becomes actively enlisted. For
a recognition of the book object, in all its
skewing ironies of access, can at times seem
inseparable from a viewer’s instinct to re-
configure in the mind’s own workshop other
latent book properties worthy of similar ab-
straction, other symbolic formations proper
to reading and prey to happy exaggerations.
I can’t be alone in this. Indeed, anecdotally,
I know I’m not. The issue isn’t inspiration so
much as free association, casual, glancing, a
bolt of afterthought subsiding into an idea in
or beyond the reaction time of display. Rodin
can make you want to mold; Proust can make
you want to write. In play here is something
else. Viewers are tweaked with unspoken
possibilities rather than itching to roll up
their sleeves. Conceptual book sculpture,
no matter how impeccably executed, tends
to make its mark on imagination by passing
straight through craft to idea, where book
art finds its true stage of operation.
Bookwork, in short, doesn’t stop with
making you think. You start thinking how
to make it, make it otherwise, pondering
those related aspects of the codex experi-
ence that could be likewise overblown or
flagrantly disengaged, figured or disfigured.
To see the point of a given book-work is to
pass from matter to abstraction so fast that
the mind is limbered up for other spatial ex-
trapolations. If, row by row along its worked
ground, the codex is a tilled and seeded gar-
den, what else is it? For what other topogra-
phies can its surface be made metaphoric? If
the hinged volume is a swinging door, what
other kinds of opening does reading facili-
tate or perform? If the book is a room, what
about . . . ? The posing of tropes for the read-
ing moment may thereby invite of us other
speculations, other specular formations,
on the spot. For book-works, even if only
by negation or erasure, can be stationed
to reveal—and at fresh strata of apprehen-
sion—what happens when the book works.
Or when, by contrast, its options are fore-
closed. Thinking one work through is often
a matter of thinking up others like it. In this
way, bookwork can come to seem as par-
ticipatory as reading itself. And just such
textual participation in the normal course
of literary consumption is one of the things
that the artifact I call the bibliobjet can end
up serving, even in suspension, to read.
f r o n t m at t e r s |    xix
P R O L O G U E / C ATAL O G
AN EXHIBIT IN MIND
L et the browser beware. The books in
this prologue—prologue as imaginary
catalog in the orbit of contemporary mu-
seum display—are not really books as we
know them, but rather conceptual sculp-
ture. Entirely conceptual. No pages to turn,
no paragraphs to read—except the ones de-
scribing them here. As gallerygoers, some
of you may think you’re used to this. But in
this particular case, the book objects, these
nonbooks, are not really there at all. So
there’s no need for the obligatory “Do Not
Touch” sign. My sense is that the theoreti-
cal insistence of all such works, their claim
on a postwar genre of textual demediation,
requires no existence in order to prosecute
the ideas they conjure. They are so fully
conceptual that they need no perceptual ba-
sis except in the mind’s eye. Which means
that they can, if you’re in a cognate frame of
mind, pass directly from fantasy into ironic
force.
It is this available ease of manifestation
that I trust justifies beginning with them
in this real book about others like them in
real museum spaces. And beginning with a
brief definition as well—drawn from them.
For now, suffice it to say that demediation,
as an active function of such works rather
than some a priori condition, names the un-
doing of a given form of transmission, now
blocked or altered, in the medium of its sec-
ondary presentation. Where in Marshall
McLuhan’s well-known sense of the form/
content dyad, the content of a new medium
is always the lingering form of the old, in
the art of de­mediation the absence of the
old medial form becomes the content of the
new work. The actual book objects to come
(sculptures, appropriations, composites) of-
 ten appear, like these first virtual or fictive
ones, as abstract volumetric forms—deme-
diated in just this sense, no longer broad-
cast from within as explicit textual signifi-
cation or legible message. So that their point,
too, is one we must in the best of cases half
make up for ourselves; or, as we say, make
up our minds about. That the display space
we’re about to survey should house an ex-
hibit whose works are held in mind alone
is a testament to that category of bookwork
so thoroughly demediated that it needs no
real matter, only conceptual material, to be
understood. But to have true impact, that’s
a different thing. Soon enough we must turn
to the real executions that bring it about.
To begin with, though, imagine the
world’s largest composite piece of book
sculpture. More than 1 million square feet of
quadratic geometry composed of four identi-
cal open folios, twenty-four stories each in
elevation, facing into each other at separated
right angles: durable limited editions in steel
and glass. Below them: a cavernous system
of “sub-texts” in the form of a vast fantas-
tic warren of a library, accessed separately
from each single megatext. A Borgesian
dream come true—11 mil­lion volumes and
still counting, each the fractalized image of
the whole. To encounter such a conceptual
book sculpture, undergirded in just this in-
frastructural way and not imaginary at all,
see the real thing standing—and burrow-
ing—in no less visible a site than the French
capital. Its proud nameplate: La Bibliothèque
nationale, Site François-Mitterrand.
The structure’s four-towered profile
rises from a sparse urban esplanade even
while hiding within its deep-dug atrium the
symbolized forests (a huge stand of fifty-
foot trees) that have never been, nor ever
2    | prologue / c ata lo g
will be, denuded and milled in the service of
book production. Nature meets culture at a
mutual point of no return beneath this most
abstractly grand of Mitterrand’s Grands
Travaux, each gargantuan codex like a high-
rise work in the bibliographic as well as the
architectural sense. And imagine deep at
the underground glassed-in core of this
work of works, this palace of oeuvres—open
to readers between trips to the stacks—nu-
merous mise en abymes of its overarching
formal vaunt. These conceptual miniatures
of the fourfold superstructure take shape as
handmade, non-industrial microcosms, one
after another: in other words, book sculp-
tures in several media beyond conventional
paper forms. For there in the central gallery
space (ordinarily devoted to rotating tradi-
tional displays in the history of the book)
is a winter exhibition not of artists’ books—
that was last season—but of conceptual
book art, with an international selection
of contributors. Beneath the superbooks of
the building’s four towers, then, the meta-
books of aesthetic reflection. Why not? How
long before such a show does actually get
mounted?
Let’s imagine it’s called La Joie des Livres:
De Codex à Biblio Tech. A half-page press
notice in the English edition of Pariscope
reports that
this bibliomaniac carnival features—and disfig-
ures—the book in all its forms and functions, from
sacred to secular object, impenetrable script sur-
face to plumbed receptacle of culture. The show
is at once funny, fabulous, and frightening. Not
content with the display of artists’ books in the
decorative or artisanal sense, the curators have
arranged instead a multimedia compendium of
that mixed medium known as the book, captur-
ing by sometimes comic sample the whole spec-
trum of its historical force from the ancient illumi-
nated codex to the postmodern PowerBook. By
estranging us from one of our most routine tools,
postconceptual art has found a new springboard
in these familiar planks of culture. We are invited
to think again about the too-familiar book, con-
ceive it anew.
The International Herald Tribune is equally
encouraging, with praise enough to hustle
one onto the Métro for a look:
The show’s designers have found the right place
at the right time. Despite the flamboyance of its
booklike towers, this normally stodgy basement
venue for the display of manuscripts and rare
print editions has this time really given us new
eyes for the book object. Future exhibits should
be all the more vivid for it. Reading has never
seemed more remarkable, more mysterious. See-
ing the book as shaped object is the first step
in gauging the black-on-white magic by which
the graphic surface of a turned page can set the
brain afire with objects and events nowhere to
be seen.
For all the diversity of the displayed
works, including their purposeful disorien-
tation as bound volumes or isolated pages,
a few discernible patterns emerge. In this
respect, these book-works sample the whole
neo-conceptual field of such contemporary
practice, everything from écriture art to
pulp sculpture that has followed from the
text-work of conceptual art since its flour-
ishing first moment in the late 1960s. Some
book shapes are more concerned, even if il-
legibly, with content, some with form. Yet
any one of them is liable to leach from the
blocked, suspended, or effaced textuality
that defines it, or from its materialist exag-
gerations as felt surface, a certain verbal
self-consciousness, after all—and to do so
precisely in order to play (or even bluntly
pun) on its own aberrant mode of legibility,
whether occluded, deflected, or redefined.
This frequent, obliquely verbalized gesture
feels meant, in other words—and some-
times in no actual written words at all—to
give back to us, whether by title or associ-
ated lexical irony, at least some modicum—
and maybe even some strange epitome—of
the “textual” pleasure these negated books
would otherwise deny us in their frequent
sculptural occlusion of reading matter by
material form.
“FROM GUTENBERG
TO GOOGLE”
That’s the historical span identified by the
four-page flyer free on entrance in lieu of
the full illustrated brochure that the library,
one finds when inquiring, regretted having
no funds to publish. (As above, I’ll be giving
text and titles in English unless some play
on words in the imaginary artist’s original
language cannot be retained in translation.)
Gutenberg is one benchmark moment, of
course, even while the flyer acknowledges
that the pre-print codex hails from some-
time between 100 bc and ad 50. Yet the his-
torical scope of the “concept book” goes
back further yet in this exhibit, by Old Tes-
tament evocation, to a bulking stone tablet
in the anachronistic form of a bound codex.
An oversize drab form in poured concrete
by a Berlin conceptual artist, about four
by five feet and six inches deep, is scored
like page edges on three sides, rounded off
like sewn binding on the fourth, and leaned
an exhibit in mind |    3
 against the wall next to the faint pale-gray
label Rock of the Faith—complete with a
red satin bookmark emerging mysteriously
from the impenetrable density of the bot-
tom edge and lolling on the floor like a si-
lenced tongue.
But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves by
looking across the first room of the exhibit
to this far wall. The exhibition confronts
us face on—in this space regularly devoted
to the museology of books—with the most
obvious relation of book culture to the
life of the modern museum: the output of
self-publication—as if in ironic recognition
of the show’s own absent catalog. The un-
abashed wordplay of its title, L’Oeuvre des
livres du Louvre, by an Alsatian installation
artist, greets us on entrance through door
panels covered on each side by enlarged
photostatic replicas of facing pages, head-
ers included, from Roland Barthes’s Le Plai-
sir du texte. This wall of words, transferred
to thin plastic sheeting, is affixed to the
preexisting diptych of the swinging glass
doors—so that you seem to be entering the
evoked zone of Barthes’s own commentary.
The optical irony of scale and penetrabil-
ity, as we traverse this interface of text as
portal, is only compounded by the fact that
it is exactly this “pleasure” of textual ex-
perience that most of the works will pre-
vent—and precisely by their programmatic
effort to return us from reading to the sheer
mechanics of mass-print inscription and its
physical support.
This is certainly the case with that first
and largest of the book-works now there in
our way. For L’Oeuvre des livres du Louvre
spreads before us, at base, over 100 square
feet of Louvre publications, of different vin-
tages, some intermittently duplicated. They
4    | prologue / c ata lo g
are built up on the floor in perfect squares,
one after the other, approximately 10 feet
on each side to begin with, overlaid with
smaller and smaller expanses of the same
foursquare format in hard- and soft-bound
catalog copies. The books are carefully bal-
anced to keep the vertical strata roughly
level, evened out at times with one or more
of the museum’s monthly bulletins—and
with two inches or so of all the texts left
visible, spines outward, around the outer
edges of the terraced pile. Built up in two
dozen incremental layers of this sort, the
stair-stepped pyramidal assemblage rises
to a height of about 4 feet, topped there by
the 2003 edition of Les Sculptures Classique
du Louvre and then surmounted by a gift-
shop model of I. M. Pei’s entrance pyramid.
The architectonic parable is as obvious as
the wordplay of the title. In the prolifera-
tion of bound objects documenting mostly
itself and its own holdings, the museum
adds to its formidable stockpile of images
with these very print artifacts. Yet there
will always be one rising to prominence,
one of immediate note to a given viewer/
reader, maybe something about the history
of sculpture that a work like this perpetu-
ates—offering, like Pei’s transparent struc-
ture, its own specialized ingress to the col-
lection’s archive.
Early in this imagined exhibition, then,
the book form itself, including both its
modular mass (in a pile on the floor) and its
adjacent pages (superimposed on the glass
doors), is enlisted by disuse, alteration, or
other irony into the roster of art history—
which is to say, placed on display as such:
turned from instrument to artifact, in other
words to objet d’art. The theme is set. On
another wall of this first room, by a Belgian
conceptualist this time, is a lectern with at-
tached podium light shining down on an an-
tique diptych frame. Behind its hinged pair
of opened glazed surfaces are the copies
of two apparently facing pages—though in
fact approximately twinned from separate
editions—of Michel Butor’s 1960 collection
of essays called Inventory. Each page is
“masked” by a beige plastic overlay—except
for the rectangular slits through which ap-
pear, in different locations and typefaces on
each page, Butor’s famous remark about the
common material basis of print and paint-
ing: “. . . all books are diptychs.” The whole
point of which is meant to be resumed by
the spatial overexplicitness of just such a
textual assemblage.
BIBLIO TECH:
RE-MEDIAL READING
Granted, all books are diptychs: framed
adjacent fields of marking. They are also
machines, technologies. In this mode of
bibliographic irony, a seasoned California
video artist has branched out into “book
sculpture” with his Books on Tape, hung
on the far wall of the second gallery space.
The work consists of two six-inch-high,
eight-foot-wide translucent plastic bands,
rolled and tucked away at the ends on wall-
mounted spindles, one horizontal scroll
thus stretched above the other. The image
strips are then overlaid with a series of
separate photographic negatives, “life-size”
and discretely taped together, of pages from
published books—their white lettering on a
dark gray translucent field legible against
the backing and brightly lit white wall. This
ironic send-up of magnetic tape marks out
the refused, rather than embraced, media-
tion of a print technology by an audial one,
as accentuated by the fact that these photo
strips are flanked by small shelf speakers.
To complete the joke, the titles of the books
thus purveyed for “easy listening” are none
other than The Sound and the Fury and
The Silence of the Lambs. Or almost com-
plete it. The ultimate historical irony of
this 1987 work, escaping its own direct in-
termedial comedy, only hits home when we
realize that the long genealogy of the scroll
in Western culture, ancestor to the codex,
has finally seen its day, since even the spool
of audiotape has been replaced now by CD
technology in the marketing of recorded
books.
A related audiovisual irony in the sec-
ond gallery, perpetrated by a Catalan art-
ist this time, reflects on the logocentrism
of the divine Word and its demystification.
In History of the Word: Vols. 1–3, the thickly
bound mock-up of an illuminated Book of
Hours has its pair of exposed pages spread
out in (photographically reprinted) color on
parchment-like bond, with hand-painted
gold highlights, all handled with evocative
precision. Defacing the text is an earphone
jack plugged into a dove pictured at a proph-
et’s ear in a vignette illustration on the right
page, connected in turn to a headset waiting
at the side of the book, with a sign alongside
it, scarcely temporary (carved deeply, in
fact, into a granite plaque): “Audio Tempo-
rarily Unavailable.” Next to this, in neutral
modern typeface, two pages from a popular
science journal are encased in a large bell
jar, the magazine opened to an explana-
tion, with diagrams, about sound waves not
traveling without material impedance, and
this under the running head “The Silence
of Vacuums.” The third part of the sculp-
an exhibit in mind |    5
 tural triptych is a copy of Roger Chartier’s
co-edited volume A History of Reading in the
West pressed open and inserted behind the
Plexiglas face of a small computer monitor,
with all the keyboard’s operational alphabet
and numbers blacked out except for “READ”
clustered together in two rows: E R over A D.
And next to it “Alas” (e-texte) by a Zu-
rich artist reworking that maverick British
instance of postmodernism avant la lettre,
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Here
we have another new-media irony carried
back beneath a print surface to its underly-
ing typographic codes. The original novel is
shown open to the black rectangle opposite
the mortuary allusion “Alas, poor Yorick!”
at the end of chapter 12, the three words
themselves outlined at the left, by Sterne’s
own design, in a horizontal frame like a cof-
fin or a blank funeral card. In the equivalent
e-text version alongside it on the display
shelf jutting out from the wall, we find two
unbound pages side by side. Whereas the
first is a dot-matrix printing of “Alas, poor
Yorick!” in full legibility, the facing page of-
fers not the solid black of an unlit grave or
onyx tombstone, as in the novel, but instead
one of those crazed densities of algorithmic
breakdown into computer code, breaching
the articulatory maintenance of the system
as if by elegiac capitulation, seizing it up in
going dead to decipherability.
NEGLIGIBLE PAGES,
LEGIBLE BOOKS
The reflexive or metalinguistic twists of
such an offering can be contrasted, near
it on the wall, with another and less con-
ceptual, strictly material, treatment of the
book form. A principle of inversion dawns
6    | prologue / c ata lo g
on the viewer. Whereas the book is ordinar-
ily made of words, what if words were made
of books? This sculpture bears the deliber-
ately English—and deliberately uppercase—
title BOOK. Protruding from their wooden
backing, by three inches or so, are sawed-off
books spray-painted in matte black, edges
foremost in their thrust from the wall. It
is thus that books seem to be spelling out,
as seen from the front of their narrow sev-
ered ends, the words of the sculpture’s own
title: doing the enunciative lexical work
they would otherwise mutely contain. The
initial B is formed by two thick, curved-
spine tomes whose open edges are angled
leftward, the nearly semicircular arcs of
their bound ends thus facing right—so that
the tandem curves of the closed volumes
shape in solid geometry the signifying cur-
vilinear stack of a broad capital B, its loops
filled solid in this case. This alphabetic form
is followed by two slim soft-back books
scrolled into tube forms for makeshift but
serviceable O’s. The titular word is then
completed by a single codex volume opened
flat, turned vertically, and facing right, its
pages separated into splayed and braced
angles to form the sideways V necessary to
double for the lateral declivity of a capital K.
By this blunt reduction we are reminded, no
doubt, that “book reading” is always mate-
rial at base.
But not once it really gets started. Read-
ing’s immaterial measure is frequent in
such works. Well-known German book il-
lustrator (and book picturer) Michael Sowa
has materialized in sculptural form a vari-
ant of one of his most popular note-card il-
lustrations—and in the process given one
of his cartoonish books, for the first time,
an actual title, associated in fact with the
grandeur of the German philosophic tra-
dition. A wooden plank seems balanced
on a large rock, though it must in fact be
screwed to it invisibly from beneath. To
the left are stacked oversize law and
medical volumes in German, two hundred
pounds worth at least. And on the right,
balancing them out in apparent mass, a pa-
perback German edition of Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason. Just like you can’t tell a
book by its cover, you can’t judge weighti-
ness by volume. And you couldn’t make
this up, at least I couldn’t, if you hadn’t
seen its like, from the same artist or others,
in one medium or another.
TEXTERNALIZED
But back to strictly virtual artists as well as
entirely imaginary book sculptures. Delib-
erately titling his own work in French, an
Italian conceptualist, part of the original
Arte Povera movement—where a poverty of
means releases a flood of unskilled inven-
tion—has gathered hundreds of unidentified
books, each of them jacketed with trimmed
color photocopies of the original hardback
cover for Gérard Genette’s Architext, and
then stacked and glued them in an overlap-
ping fashion to form a self-supporting arch
in the center of the room, entitled L’Arc de
triomphe du structuralisme. As with other
works in the show, and many another in
transatlantic exhibitions lately, the disused
object of material culture is repurposed for
new cultural material, however ironic. Thus
do the words excluded, locked away, or de-
faced by the objectified book-work tend to
return from the repressed as a turn (back
toward us) of phrasing itself.
Reflexive wordplay of this sort, or at
least a terminological overexplicitness
verging on conceptual irony, characterizes
another piece in the Joie des Livres exhibit,
titled Roman épistolaire, an “epistolary
novel” composed of actual and various let-
ters, handwritten and typed, personal and
business, some on newsprint to the editor,
some artificially faded love notes in blue
and brown ink, including among the layers
some large-format postcards. They are all
cut (and thus truncated) to the same mea-
sure and bound as a simulated paperback
novel with glossy romance-style graphics
(and high-centigrade embrace) on the cover,
under the title, in florid print, To Whom It
May Concern.
The common denominator in all such
work amounts to so complete a satura-
tion of form by content, or otherwise of
medium by message, that even when the
words are invisible or eviscerated, or dis-
continuous and pointless, the text object
still speaks to something of its own rep-
resentational assignment. Even when up-
ending it. Chained to a shelf support but
available for lifting and leafing through,
there is the original hardback edition of
Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, the affixed
dust jacket explaining in broad outline
the trick of a plot that moves backward in
chronology toward a buried trauma. But
in the case of this altered book, the pages
have been sheared off about one-third of
an inch from the binding and taped back
to these stubs in reverse order, fanning out
in new bulk from the thickening effect of
the tape—all so that the arrow of destiny
drives forward now, rather than backward,
however jerkily and nonsensically, in this
bulging narrative redaction. Within the
conceptual orbit of the disused or abused
an exhibit in mind |    7
 book, it is a case of mutilation as putative
rectification—presented under the mini-
malist title Revised Edition.
Again and again, the anomalous book ob-
ject borrows its ironies of nomination from
a found and altered text. Don’t miss in this
regard three works in the show by French-
Canadian artists, with their openly comic
turns on the tension between percept and
concept in all reading. The first picks up im-
mediately on the difference between books
in their linguistic versus physical proper-
ties. Untitled (after Foucault’s Les Mots et
les choses: Une archéologie des sciences hu-
maines) offers, behind glass, in a simulated
cross section of an archaeological dig, the
compacted layers (two dozen deep) formed
by mangled covers of Foucault’s paperback
text, with parts of its designation visible
enough for recognition, shards of title and
subtitle here and there in the sedimented
mass. “Dis-entitled” would be closer to the
point in naming this book-work. In a com-
panion piece by the same Montreal artist,
Untitled (found books), each of twelve hard-
bound volumes has its title carefully cut
away both on spine and front cover of the
jacket. By a madcap sliding association, the
fallback formal rubric of museum display
has subtracted the designation of textual
content itself.
And near to this, by a Toronto sculptor,
The Medium Is the Message (Twin Ceno-
taphs for M. McLuhan). Each textualized
object leans on an angled book rest. First, a
perfectly simulated six-by-nine-inch marble
rectangle of corroded Italianate facade, with
an ogive arch beginning its curve at the left,
is painted over in the clean white typog-
raphy of the 1985 Da Capo edition of The
Stones of Venice by John Ruskin. An equally
8    | prologue / c ata lo g
exacting flourish of re-executed publisher’s
typography overlays the rectangular brass
bell shape, complete with pendant tongue,
attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Ask not in
reading for whom the bell tolls. It is always
for you. As is Venice always there before
you in textual tourism.
By the same artist who duplicated the
Butor pages across from the gallery en-
trance, we come near the end of the exhibit
to a text-based mirror work called Tych/dip
Palindrome: a pair of hinged boards at the
scale of a normal hardback book covered on
their inner faces with thin mirrors and held
ajar at forty-five degrees for viewing. The in-
ner surface is stenciled over in black on the
left panel by a single word in lowercase sans
serif letters, t-o-l-d, thus flipped in the fac-
ing mirror to the merely inscribed (scarcely
narrated) marks of the monosyllabic form
b-l-o-t. By this textual as well as lexical
irony, demediation stares itself in the face,
with the work of story no sooner posited
than blotted out. And next to this reflexive
metaform hangs the only image found suit-
able for reproduction, without loss, in the
show’s nonglossy flyer, a line drawing by an
American theorist-practitioner from 2010
called Attempting to Read the M. C. Escher
Catalogue Raisonné:

BOUND TO RECONSIDER
Now you see it; now you don’t. The Biblio-
thèque nationale exists, of course, above‑
and belowground. But not, as we know, the
exhibit just selectively traversed. At least not
there. Nor anywhere else all at once. Or even
piece by piece. Yet its wholly imagined dis-
play remains representative. All its invented
offerings are dug deep in the same contem-
porary aesthetic soil upon which Paris’s ac-
tual book-shaped high-rise library towers are
erected. The iconography of the codex form
is repeatedly memorialized at the moment of
its own passing reign. The computer-design
teams that produced the four looming codex
forms at Site Mitterrand, those superbooks
as well as the cavernous hypostructure be-
neath them, were building a fourfold monu-
ment to a culture of the fold that had long
been undergoing its own replacement with
electronic databanks. This obsolescence was
no doubt the furthest thing from their own
minds, and scarcely the sole explanation for
book sculpture either, in its prolific manifes-
tations elsewhere.
But the explanatory power of the digi-
tal advent is always lurking there, at least
around the edges of effect, and certainly at
the margins of affect, in the dysfunctional
book object. So that whatever interior space
may have been further set aside by the ar-
chitects and designers for a museum of the
book within this grandest of its depositories
couldn’t help but seem like the book’s po-
tential mausoleum as well. Thus do works
of the sort I’ve just made up out of whole
cloth—neither wood pulp nor ragstock—
move to assess and sometimes revitalize,
and precisely as objects, the codex form
they ironize, contort, wreck, remake, and
in many cases elegize. Whether one wishes
to consider book culture vestigial, residual,
or still temporarily central even in pass-
ing, the Book has fully entered history by
having now a conceivable aftermath. At the
very least, another epoch in the technics of
reading overlaps with it at the turn of the
millennium.
Though operating entirely within—and
steadily in view of—this sea change in the
medium of mass information, the goal of
this particular book (one day soon to be out
of print and available only through e-pub-
lishing) is to place the contemporary book
object within a broader historical swath of
conceptualist wall art and installation work
in order to highlight a common effect of re-
fused immediacy in the experience of verbal
or visual textuality. Or to give this its full et-
ymological spin: the refusal of primary me-
diacy in the work of art. Much production in
the lineage of conceptual art concerns the
discourse of aesthetics before the fact of its
objects and instances. This is a supervening
discourse that can only be addressed and
in some cases fended off in its very own
terms—that is, terminologically.
Such works resist the seductiveness of
image—or in the case of book sculptures,
of reading itself as inbuilt ocular function—
and do so by what I am calling demediation.
They turn a primary appeal of visual culture,
graphic and plastic both, back on itself as
an epiphenomenon of its ideational as well
as material support. So that—among many
other manifestations of the presupposed—
paintings evaporate into aesthetic axioms
about their own possibility traced into view,
book pages collapse into strictly graphic
rectangles, reading matter into sculptural
blocks. Two chapters ahead, we will be able
an exhibit in mind |    9
 to locate the deadpan effrontery of such
work, especially in its three-dimensional
forms, within a lineage descended from
the appropriationist “comedy” of Marcel
Du­champ’s readymades. But with a differ-
ence. Altered book art, reversing Wallace
Stevens’s concretizing modernist gesture,
gives us, like all conceptual art, less the
thing itself than ideas about the thing—
even when those ideas take the paper-thin
form of metapictorial stenciling on the mu-
seum wall. In the case of book art, however,
this abstractive process often begins with
the reduction of the functional paginated
form from proverbial tool of literacy to mere
material form, from instrumental object
of cultural transmission to raw geometric
thing. With which, then, there is nothing to
do but have ideas about it.
These preliminary pages have in fact
gone further yet in installing their mental
museum, overriding given materialist re-
ductions of this sort altogether in a fanta-
sized collection of detextualized objects
in every sense unmade. Nonexistent. The
pieces recently described are conceptual
in the narrow sense of finding manifesta-
tion only in the head, or only in words on
paper. With that one exception of the hom-
age to Escher in Microsoft Paint, there is no
draftsmanship in their design, no prelimi-
nary sketches, only a verbal draft or two on
my part. They are strictly a writer’s inven-
tion: thought experiments. But so, in this
last sense, are the works of this same sort
that actually occupy floor and wall space in
contemporary museums. In initiating this
book’s tour of exhibitions with an invented
one, free of all possible copyright burdens
in its illustration, I like to think less that the
nonexistence of these book-works “serves
10    | prologue / c ata lo g
conceptualism right” than that it serves the
movement’s long-standing purposes, even if
doing them scant justice in its brief scope.
Turnabout has seemed fair-enough play.
In any but the institutional sense, “art”
isn’t defined by its exhibition. Such is the
on­going polemic against spectacle and dis-
play in certain strains of postwar practice.
Taking the point, one might think that art’s
not being there at all in any recognized form
may be one way to prove it. In any case, you
shouldn’t come to the museum awaiting its
preselected works under institutional impri-
matur. You should come ready to examine
not objects, first of all, but your own aes-
thetic assumptions—in what a post-Marxist
theory of intellectual productivity (exam-
ined in the second chapter) understands as
the “immaterial labor” of interactive recep-
tion. Conceptualist works are meant to con-
template, and often resist, the intertwined
functions of visuality and discourse typi-
cally gone unexamined under the sign of
Art, and so to initiate new lines of thought
about the aesthetic experience. One result,
albeit exaggerated in the discussion so far,
is that such redirected force of thought—if
it survives some real objects of provoca-
tion in this mode in order to concoct in the
mind others like them—is only extending
the conceptualist experience into a private
museum without walls, the venue of reflec-
tion itself.
To imagine, for instance, an outsize reg-
ular sexahedron perfectly finished off and
sealed tight in sheets of white-painted wall-
board—a giant cube set up for monumental
display as a minimalist sculpture within
the only somewhat larger white interior of a
one-room gallery space—is already to have
“thought beyond the box” by the very par­
ody of it. It is to have moved, in the famous
phrase of conceptual artist Brian O’Doherty,
beyond “the white cube” (if only by reduc-
tive inversion) as supposed neutral territory
“inside” of which the viewing and validation
of modern artifacts takes place. You don’t
have to build this hollow but wholly exterior
form (within, and over against, the gallery’s
interior as cubic-footed chamber) to think
about it. Lots of works operate this way,
both in and on the imagination. If you were
to think further about flattening and recon-
figuring any such voided room-size cube to
an Oldenburg-like oversize book shape, and
then about stenciling ART HISTORY along
a spectator-high spine, you would be work-
ing still within the same conceptual space
of that original architectonic regress in
which the contained format replicates its
own antiseptic “premises” as container. In
all sculptural reductions of this sort, even
when they are entirely absent from any real
space—even when they are just mental fur-
niture in a museumgoer’s afterthoughts—
there is exactly the balance of medial depri-
vation and mental liberation we have come
to expect from real freestanding contempo-
rary artifacts in the bookwork mode.
Yet book art in this conceptual vein is
often “expertly” made as well, its objects,
for instance, finely crafted and precision
cut—or exquisitely exacting even in their
painstaking defacement. And in its mate-
rial form lies a large part of its thinking, not
just of its ocular appeal. What follows in
this study concerns in fact not just concep-
tualist (or, in period terms, neo-conceptual)
book art but the real artistry as well of such
conceivings in execution: not merely imag-
ined works but instead some carefully hand-
crafted ones—as well as the rethinking they
shape within a queried set of cultural pre-
occupations. The book’s method, in other
words, is thus from now on ekphrastic, not
fictional—reporting rather than proposing.
You have to have been there after all, re-
ally—and the objects really there before you.
At least now and then, as often as possible.
Or at the very least be inclined to keep your
eyes peeled next time out. This point should
come through unmistakably enough from
the sheer difficulty of description in certain
complex cases awaiting us. The very strug-
gle at times of the following pages—to bring
structural nuances into view, those that
even a photographic reproduction wouldn’t
easily divulge—should also make clear that
book sculpture has in fact an often close-
grained artifactual dimension that can-
not be subtracted without diminishing its
thinking. Again, its thinking: the thinking
done in and through its own formal disposi-
tion, as well as with it in uptake. It is in this
sense that the demediation linking altered
books—often in the form of what we might
call for now biblioclastic sculpture—to the
preceding and wider field of visual and let-
trist conceptualism is an effect that must
ultimately be seen in order to be, if not so
much believed, then fully and appreciatively
conceived. In the meanwhile, just discourse.
But though you have to be there, at least
whenever convenient, you can’t go right
now—at any rate not while you’re still read-
ing this unaltered book. From this point on,
though, its author can at least promise to
revisit in description the real rather than
imagined objects that have shaped the di-
rection of its chapters—and have triggered
the foregoing exercise (your indulgence
appreciated) in speculative curatorial la-
bor and parallel-world spectatorship. The
an exhibit in mind |    11
 attempt has been, of course, to secure ad-
mission on a certain firmer footing to the
prominent museums and galleries whose
floor space, and sometimes whose walls,
are punctuated with actual and signed in-
stances of such bookwork by an unusually
diverse range of contemporary artists. And
to prepare us for asking in clearer terms
than otherwise, in each case and then all
told, why.
FANTASMETRICS
Conjuring nonexistent works of this kind out
of thin air so far—though in an aesthetic at-
mosphere thick with precedent—is the sort
of thing the initiate to such art (I speak for
myself at least) is likely to do in certain
moods of mind, and in the unlit studio of a
spurred brain, after encountering the real
thing, the object reduced to thing, in vari-
ous book forms. Such almost collaborative
aftereffects from an encounter with these
conceptual works make for their most force-
ful aesthetic “take-away.” Compelling in an
altogether transitive sense, activating the
spatial imagination, this is the true econ­
omy of such bookwork practice. One can in
fact practice it, experiment in its wild vari-
ety, exercise its implications, without pur-
chasing or building it. You don’t have to own
or physically reconstruct the works in order
to buy into—or cash out—their ironies, their
ludic verve or goofiness, their indefatigable
capacity for surprise and recognition at one
and the same time.
Putting concocted examples before real
ones, however, does more than suggest how
invention comes before execution in such
practice, conception before material pres-
ence. It is a categorical issue as well. Every
12    | prologue / c ata lo g
book-work is better for (not better than) the
most recently seen one a viewer thinks to
associate with it. The mode is cumulative in
its purpose, an implied cultural argument
as much as a chronology of experiment.
With our opening mental museum fresh in
mind, exemplary and quite real book-works
will from here out be lifted to view by meet-
ing the gaze of a (now) generically attuned
and practiced eye. Even the unpictured,
merely described (though actually produced
and previously displayed) book objects
stationed in wait for consideration should
therefore, true to their generalizing power
and sometimes daft panache, begin doing
their work upon you—wherever you’ve been
until now—through a preconditioned set of
cultural figurations in the iconography of
textual conveyance. And in the material un-
conscious of literacy itself.
Two things above all, then, in prospect.
Operating, one way or another, upon a famil-
iar material support in the codex form, the
objects we are to encounter are works com-
mitted to the working over of book shapes, in
alteration and combination, or their working
up in simulation. Results take their bearings
from a formal defiance, here called demedia-
tion, that is by no means new to contempo-
rary museum experience. The book irremedi-
ably closed to reading is the open secret of
this whole regnant aesthetic. And the other
thing, trickier to articulate yet justifying our
underground Parisian interlude at perhaps
a deeper stratum of aesthetic resonance: In
extracting the form from the function of a
book shape, fantasy does in a crucial sense
precede fact. Book-works, as suggested, are
mounted in their divergent ways to explore
exactly the unconscious of mediation, re-
turned with material force for each viewer
from the standard suppression entailed by
abstract text.
By this logic, hallucinating specific
book-works—as this Prologue/Catalog has
given itself leave to do—only returns them
to origin, where they are forged as if from
the collective cultural imaginary of literate
life before getting fashioned by a signature
hand. In this light, there is indeed often
something fantasmatic about the meta-
phoric overtones mobilized and probed by
such works. Despite their taciturnity or
extravagance, these wordless vessels of
effaced mediation do for this reason regu-
larly induce, at least for this viewer, and in
this I certainly can’t be alone, an uncanny
sense of déjà vu. We see before us in such
executed bookwork, whether insinuated or
blatantly travestied, what we always half
knew, half felt, about the architecture of
reading, its wonders, ruses, and vulnera-
bilities. Denied any medium of communica-
tion or translation, the resistant book-work,
the anti-book, offers the very scaffold of
latent textual intimacy, summoning—even
under physical duress and erasure—the
tacit space of reading’s inner rather than
outer bounds. These are the routes, re-
cesses, and tunnelings of normal response
in a book’s confounding of spatiotempo-
ral “extent,” the whole mystified world-
building of its own material enclosure and
its intangible space-making duration.
Then, too, part of the reason for roam-
ing that secret underside and inner sanctum
of the renowned bibliothèque just visited is
to stress a tendency in book sculpture that
plays out in almost diametrical opposition
to the conventional artist’s book: namely,
conceptual book art’s overt jokiness. And,
in particular, the way expectations can sur-
face from the unsaid in such work across
the inference of spatial and optical double
entendres, a sense never far from Freud’s
claims for wit’s relation to the unconscious.
Where the limited-edition fine press text
known as a livre d’artiste maximizes the
fascination of the codex form by layers of
artisanal mediation, the anti-book often in-
verts and deforms what we unconsciously
wish for or assume from reading—even
while retaining the lure of a now-unlettered
decipherment in the coils of response. Seen
in this way, book-works work by negating
one kind of reading by another. As if in a
direct reversal of the poststructuralist
translation of literary work into text, book-
works submerge text to artwork in order to
figure the contours of a page’s normative
but now-aborted function. Canceled as writ-
ing, the work becomes a metatext by default.
Which is why, in the violence of this con-
version, the objects in question are so often
abruptly funny, a silent slapstick manifes-
tation of the slammed-shut or mussed-up
book. Or punning even if not funny. When
the familiar verbal transmitter, the book as
paper manifold, is either dismembered and
rebound or closed upon itself to become a
virtual black box not only empty but un-
plugged, it is only so as to mark out—in the
abstract—the never strictly spatial shape
of our reading machines to begin with. The
expunged text, as book-work, can grow pun-
gent with the idioms of verbal immersion it-
self, familiar even in their exaggeration and
parody. Always in “mute” mode anyway, the
book shape that goes so far as to boast no
words at all may still, in its own right, float
its claim to meaning on a punning “volume”
reduced to one sense only, a spatial dis-
placement entirely its own.
an exhibit in mind |    13
 Yes, you have to see such book-works for
yourself now and then, whenever possible;
probably already have seen some, even if not
lingering to let them engage you. At its full-
est, however, that engagement is returned
by the viewer in acknowledging the restless,
fertile, and sometimes loony materiality by
which bookwork can tap one’s unformu­lated
sense, half tangible, half disembodied, of
reading’s physically backed but ultimately
ungrounded terrain—and this in varying
degrees of mock aggrandizement or ironic
negation. Do look for them, by all means. But
know that their strange force, including their
frequent double-take comedy, in all its spec-
trality and frolic, derives in no small part
from the fact that you’ve been there already,
alone rather than in public exhibition spaces,
been there in your most intimate and tac-
tile and always partly unconscious relations
with the read word.
Looking ahead from the strictly men-
tal display these opening pages have cata-
loged to the harder evidence coming, we
can sum up the assumptions so far. Despite
their often wholly effaced verbal dimension,
there is a kind of ocular grammar to such
detexted book forms. Subjective genitive
has turned objective; the evacuation that is
reading becomes the evacuation of it. That’s
why various contorted objectifications of
the book form, of reading’s materiality
rather than its matter, amount in their own
way to a museum of the mind, exhibiting
the mind’s own ineffable—but nonetheless
figurable—relation to the present elsewhere
of textual immersion, haptic and impalpable
at once. This is what book-works wordlessly
spell out for recognition, if only by our read-
ing it in. Halfway between text-exempt ma-
terializations of the bifold codex structure
14    | prologue / c ata lo g
and metaphors of its activation in uptake,
each new book-work, however distorted
or not, intercedes in our textual precon-
ceptions like the return of the readerly re-
pressed. Whose multiple recurrences—and
whose broader conceptual patterns—we
now, across the following chapters, set out
to assess in two main stages.
TABLED CONTENTS
Axioms yield cases—and cases (even imag-
ined ones) new axioms. But you have to
start somewhere. And the contents regu-
larly tabled by the formalist reduction of
wordless bookwork invite here a considered
discursive sequence in response. Three ini-
tial chapters will situate such bookwork in
the materialist philosophy, the conceptual-
ist art history, and the medial valences of
its deviance: the object becoming thing;
the deskilled or actively defaced commod-
ity, as readymade, getting revalued as aes-
thetic objet; and the book shape emerging
as sculptural substitute for itself within a
broader context of aesthetic forms involv-
ing the canceled mediation of message in its
abeyance as sheer image. From there, three
answering chapters turn to the contempo-
rary spread—in both senses—of such anti-
books, their variant array and their prolif-
eration alike: one chapter on their place in
a single representative exhibit; one on their
figuring and disfiguring of textual collectiv-
ity as a cultural archive; one on the overt
political animus of certain book-works in
this and other modes.
But the half dozen zones of approach
thus portioned out cannot themselves
be neatly halved. Hence no part I, part II.
The division of analytic labor across these
paired phases of attention marks no divide
in the topic. Just as the closing chapter
should show more clearly than before how
there is a tacit politics inherent in the rest
as well, the last three chapters all told, de-
voted to canvassing the actual field of such
artifacts, serve at every turn to insist upon
or revisit the materialist, art-historical, and
medial orientations of the first theoretical
triad, usually with a certain adjusting twist
delivered by a given object. For in bookwork,
as in other exploratory art, practice is not
so much the confirmation of theory as its
further venturing.
an exhibit in mind |    15
C H A P TE R O N E
THE THING OF IT IS
B ook-works are objects that don’t make
for usable works in any textual oeuvre.
Rendered unreadable, the book form works
against itself when isolated for display. It
subtracts meaning from its own vehicle.
In so doing, it sacrifices text on the self-
imposed rectangular altar—the reductive
material slab—of geometric form. In this
utter occlusion of belles lettres among
other textual modes, the sculpted book
may further deflect the tradition of beaux
livres to that of faux livres. For what kind
of aesthetic thinking does the neutered
textual shape that results offer a concep-
tual platform? In answering this kind of
question, we look to a proliferating but
so far only vaguely categorized mode of
museum object, whether solo or lodged in
installations or tableaux. This is an objet
d’art for which there is as yet no good, or
at least no going, term. That may in itself
be good trouble, though. For in search of
designations, one might get closer to the
conceptual instigation at hand. Or not at
hand: that’s more like—held off like no
book typically is, often permanently shut
tight, its language in every sense shut up.
DETERMINATIONS
Book art, book sculpture, book objects, not-
books, dummy books, book-works; books
found, appropriated, altered, distressed:
their name is legion. In the nomenclature
of one contemporary book “surgeon,” these
book “adaptations” become “autopsies”—
their contents operated upon under the
knife in Brian Dettmer’s work, hence no
longer operable as text. In a piece from
2009, for instance (plate 1), black-and-white

Figure 1.1.  Guiseppe
Arcimboldo, The Librarian
(ca. 1566), oil on canvas.
Skokloster Castle, Sweden.
18    |
illustrated sculptures from H. W. Janson’s
1959 Key Monuments of the History of Art,
as originally printed both horizontally and
vertically, have had their figures “carved”
out in turn by Dettmer. With enough pages
entirely removed in between these iso­lated,
photo-duplicated forms, their recessed
stacking produces a new sculptural “monu-
ment” in a crowded bas-relief all its own.
In work of this sort, the found book, once
adopted from the archive of print circula-
tion, is then “adapted” to some new proto-
col of museum display. This happens as well
chapter one
when the found cover in Dettmer’s work is
retained intact around the edges, providing
its own frame to a sculptural excavation in
regress, as in his selective highlighting of
line-drawn illustrations from the several
inches thick Webster’s New International
Dictionary, Second Edition, a mining of the
sporadic graphic image from within a depth
of sheer typography.
In another “altered book” by Dettmer, a
volume on the history of set design called
The Theater, enough textual phrases remain
nested at random within the 3-D palimpsest
framed by the binding’s own carved-out
proscenium—like the receding perspec-
tive of stage flats—that the surviving tex-
tual snippets seem to anticipate and even
perform the book’s own fate in dismember-
ment: “adaptation in . . . found drama . . .
here again bound up . . . representation of
space between.” For a further sense that
such “book autopsies”—or perhaps vivi-
sections is more like it—achieve something
beyond just a “sampling” of graphic mate-
rial, more like a spatialized skimming of
the illustrated text all told (a cross section
temporal as well as spatial), see another
of Dettmer’s works, in installation form,
that returns temporality to his typical
process. This happens in three time-lapse
digital videos that “read” every page in its
partial or total disappearance, over 3,000
shots each, of a three-volume world history.
Thus “cutting” not only into but between
pages, and with the adapted books them-
selves mounted on the wall across from the
three rapid-fire projections, Dettmer’s race
through The Chronicle of the 20th Century
is summed up in its speed and deletions, at
the lexical as well as paginal level, under
the pared-away titles on its three adjacent

Figure 1.2.  Brian Dettmer, Tab aka The Boy Who Knew Too Much (2005), detail. Altered set of
encyclopedias, 51 x 101/4 x 71/2 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Packer Schopf Gallery.
spines: Chronicle, Chronic, Con. The result,
in Dettmer’s sculptural as well as moving-
image précis, is three “conned” books sur-
veyed with a care no less than incisive even
as they are committed to selective and com-
pressed memory traces.
Not just old dictionaries and old histo-
ries, even old technical storage systems
in phonographic rather than typographic
form come into play when Dettmer turns
from the sculpting of out-of-print volumes
to the melting down and remolding of de-
funct white audiocassettes into the weirdly
convincing shape and texture of a bleached
skull: the memento mori of storage and
mediation at once. And when not a plas-
tic skull, a cellulose mask, for the style of
Dettmer’s usual interior book carving is
adjusted when a stack of found volumes is
shaved away one by one so that their only
intact remains—their cantilevered cov-
ers—serve to subdivide, like surgical cross
sections, a sculptural update of Arcim-
boldo’s famous Librarian (fig. 1.1), the man
made of books. You are what you read; but
seen from the outside, this is sheer opacity.
In Dettmer’s version (fig. 1.2), fashioned
from the interior of such books rather than
their stacked binding, and with a personi-
fying title that plays on the thumb indi-
ces common to such reference works, we
see—shown here in detail from the vir-
tual mummification of a full-length white
body—the shape a young life fashioned
only from collective data, Tab, aka The Boy
Who Knew Too Much.
In a comparable book sculpture, or call
it sculpture with book, the same German
artist who offered us at the start that quin­
tessential trope for the organic text in Book
Wheat (fig. 0.1), Wolfgang Nieblich, re ­verses
Dettmer’s composite procedure with his
own version of the book-constituted human
subject. In his ironically titled 1987 Still Life,
Bookobject (fig. 1.3), in fact a kind of “por-
trait with book,” Nieblich arranges various
laminated abstract profiles in wood of a hu-
man head and then inserts an untitled book
deep into the layered cranium, its outer
edge emerging where the eyes should be.
The inextricable book is bisected there by a
bronze band that offers the hint of binocu-
lar optics as the outward manifestation of a
the thing of it is |    19
Figure 1.3.  Wolfgang
Nieblich, Still Life,
Bookobject (1987).
Courtesy of the artist.
brain that is all internalized text. Not only
do books make the man, as in Arcimboldo
and Dettmer, but they constitute the men-
tal scope—and the very oculus—of human
culture.
Pursued closely in the case of such varied
evidence, terminology may unfold a certain
logic. As a museum rubric, “book sculpture”
can’t quite suffice, though it’s a fair-enough
starting point if broadly understood. As such,
the phenomenon would include three chief
manifestations in the works I keep seeing.
Bookwork is something done to a book, done
with it and others like it, or done in place of
it: alteration, assemblage, or simulation. To
have missed noticing at least some of these
museum objects is as unlikely as it would be
to miss in any one of them its typifying mix
of the comedic and the demonic, a levity in
their materialist levelings.
All three reworkings of the book are rep-
resented in a single show at London’s Tate
Modern, from the summer of 2007, to which
this book’s fourth chapter will take us once
we are better positioned to honor the ex-
hibit’s own imperative title, Learn to Read—
and to do so even in the absence of legible
text. Attached to some works of this sort,
the term “altered book” is common enough,
or “treated book,” often designating in
fact a kind of appropriated and distressed
shape. But this doesn’t get at the funda-
mental transformation involved in bringing
the text object into museum space, where it
may in fact, though unchanged in itself, be
reconceived in some composite installation
as part-object in a configuration not its own.
And even there one wants a term that would
capture more directly—better at least than
“sculpture” does, or even “assemblage”—
the latent affront to even a capacious mu­
seum practice posed by such interlopers
from verbal culture.
The book: a text on offer. Singular or com-
posite, the book-work: an object or objects
on exhibit, reduced in the usual case to a
format of canceled text—at least mostly can-
celed, whatever words may lie open on the
sampled surface. Bookwork, then: the mode
of materialization for such reduced textual
circumstances. An apt formulation of the
basic distinction between text and its sus-
pended operations comes from one of the
altered book’s most active current practitio-
ners, New York artist Doug Beube, who in
a 2003 interview—under the punning title
(given his frequent severing and scoring-out
of found pages) “A Cut-Up and a Book Art-
ist”—stresses the difference between the
“paginated artist’s book” and its sculptural
counterpart.1 Not just unnumbered but often
entirely depaged, book-works are what is left
of bibliographic culture without the cultural
transmission itself. Though not identifying
themselves as such, “bookworkers” often
set about reworking a found volume rather
than fashioning a new one for publication or
display. The vast spectrum of book arts is
thus roughly split between two abiding and
rather different fascinations: the ramifica-
tions of design and graphic layout, on the
one hand, and the heft and texture of raw
materiality, on the other—a materiality ei-
ther appropriated or at times recomposed
from another medium. Across the resulting
divide between publication and installation,
the difference emerges most vehemently
when comparing the high-concept print vol-
ume—all design flair, no prevented textual
pleasure—with the reworked conceptualist
object, which displaces reading entirely onto
material reconsideration.
the thing of it is |    21
 ABERRATIONS OF SURFACE AND SCALE
In Beube’s bookwork practice, there is an
appropriated book on the CIA whose own
textual disclosures are returned to secrecy
and oblivion through a word-by-word goug-
ing out of the text by hand-drilled efface-
ment on the visible recto as well as through
terraced excavations of the full text block to
the right (fig. 1.4)—like the Arena of its title
as cramped amphitheater. Seen otherwise,
Figure 1.4.  Doug Beube, the appropriated bureaucratic exposé be-
The Arena: White over  
Black, or The Secret   comes merely the empty crypt of its own co-
Wars of the CIA (2002).
Altered book, collage, vert operations, its secrets buried again in
1
/2 x 61/2 x 21/4 in. Courtesy
of the artist. illegibility. And in an earlier work of Beube’s,
22    | chapter one
a black-and-white picture book on Paris is
pulverized by a belt sander—in diminishing
elliptical holes—in a way that calls out the
very rings of the tree from which the book
itself was pulped in the first place. Then,
too, on one of the recto pages (fig. 1.5), by
sheer accident, the footprints of two figures
walking close together in the snow are seen
to disappear in their own receding distance,
and perhaps the invisible couple with them,
into the different recessional layers of de-
facement burrowing into the deep space of
the book itself.

Figure 1.5.  Doug Beube, Bookwork of this sort regularly seems
Paris (1994). Altered
book, 9 x 6 in. Courtesy to be distinguishing itself, by allusion and
of the artist.
refusal at once, from the livre d’artiste tra-
dition (associated, for instance, with works
for left or right hand by such high mod-
ernists as Picasso and Matisse). With the
interplay of their lineages explored more
fully in chapter 2, along with the rise of ar-
tisanal or craft books, all three traditions
still cohabit in museum displays, of course,
yet distinctions remain. Rather than be-
ing elaborately worked, or in other words
beautifully wrought, the book-work is of-
ten ironically worked over, battered or de-
faced, if not composed of indifferent mul-
tiples. In 2008 at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, a small show representing mostly
the output of a single commissioning “pub-
lisher” (Lady Elena Foster’s Ivory Press)
was called Blood on Paper for its included
display of the 1969 Ed Ruscha twist on the
livre d’artiste. This is his 70-page Stains
portfolio, where the volume’s leaves are
treated not with fine craftwork but with
everyday discolorations like Hershey’s
Syrup, including further—in a parody of
aesthetic self-laceration—the artist’s own
blood. And in a send-up of another DNA
signature effect, his authorial semen. Even
the subtitle of the Blood on Paper show
suggests its departure from the canoni-
cal artist’s book, for it is given as The Art
of the Book—and includes, for instance,
among the new work, a huge open volume
by Anselm Kiefer in “lead and cardboard.”
Also presented there are four elegantly
curved futuristic-looking book forms in
various metals by sculptor Anthony Caro,
models in fact for potential public works
at a Claes Oldenburg–like scale. Grouped
together under the title Open Secret, their
apparent “covers” are molded in softly
contoured waves like the bending of self-
turned pages into whose secrets we are al-
ready in the process of being initiated.
Another overscale example elsewhere, al-
ready built and installed: Oldenburg’s own
21-foot-high sculptural assemblage called
Torn Notebook (1996), done with his wife,
Coosje van Bruggen, implanted outdoors
at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon
Memorial Art Gallery (fig. 1.6). Cursory
the thing of it is |    23
Figure 1.6.  Claes Oldenburg
and Coosje van Bruggen,
Torn Notebook (1992; fabri-
cated 1996). Stainless steel,
steel, and aluminum; painted
with polyurethane enamel;
footprint at base, 262 x 276
x 313 cm, Sheldon Museum
of Art, University of
Nebraska–Lincoln. Photo ©
Sheldon Museum of Art.
24    |
incisions are etched into and through its
white-painted metal surface, while its spiral
binding is bent and stretched out of shape
in a fateful dismemberment. With two of
its metal pages torn loose and discarded at
some distance on the museum ground, as if
swept away by the very currents of history,
the demolished bound form serves as relic
for a passing era of nonelectronic jotting.
Implications accumulate. Change seems in
chapter one
the very air itself, where the opposable hu-
man thumb can now execute, rather than
merely facilitate, the work of annotation as
well as of text-messaging. Notepad has been
eclipsed by touchpad. Before our eyes in
the gross magnification of this valedictory
book sculpture, the most rudimentary co-
dex shape has become terminally unwieldy.
As with Oldenburg’s antiquated gargantuan
typewriter eraser, dispensable technolo-
gies—like the typewriter itself, like the book,
like in fact handwriting even—are concret-
ized as pure dysfunctional image when no
longer determined by the efficacies of hu-
man scale, inflated to monuments rather
than instruments. Or at least deactivated,
elegiac.
Caro’s models for similarly scaled monu-
ments in that London show are sculptures
of the book that take its own form in repre-
sentation. So with the overscale Kiefer tome.
They are displayed alongside a sculpting of
the book in the other sense, a slicing into
it, called Wound, by Anish Kapoor, which
involves a laser cutout, hundreds of blank
pages deep, in the shape of a jagged, gaping
scar. More than just “stained” in this case,
as with Ruscha’s blood or semen, the im-
pressed page opens us to its depths only in
the form of a bloodless textual injury—and
in the shape either of a twisted vagina or
a grimly wincing mouth forever swallowing
its own textual pain in the mute vacuum
of the unwritten, ungestated page. Either
way, whether modeling and molding books
or disfiguring their paper manifestations,
there is no reading to be done.
So a first axiom. Unlike the facilitating
art of the book (as with rubrication and il-
lumination in the decorated medieval co-
dex, or the manifold graphic and pictorial
devices in the artist’s books that flourished
over the whole last century), book art, in the
sense of book sculpture, begins in disuse.
This is its primal wound, the injury done to
transmission. Such suspended reading can,
in the more experimental cases, be extreme
and immutable: a total voidance of legibil-
ity, a purge of mediation. Hence the linked
emphases of this study: bookwork as an
assault on mediation. The goal is to define,
and in part by naming, a general process of
medial negation by selecting out, and again
by naming, a specialized but widespread
instance of it: the codex form discarded or
tampered with, submitted to materialist re-
duction, undone as reading, disused and de-
texted—in a word, and en route to a general
principle, demediated.2
TURNING, TROPING,
DETOUR, AND RETURN
In the field of book studies, the altered
rather than enhanced book is often mar-
ginalized. It seems cordoned off as tacit an-
tithesis to a history and aesthetics of use
value concentrating by turns on typogra-
phy, illustration, and binding. No accident,
then, that a “textual” or literary scholar in-
stead should have offered, some years ago
now, the most compelling brief treatment
of the bookwork phenomenon. And not only
because such a professional reader would
perhaps sense most urgently what is miss-
ing from the abrogated textual form, but
because he would find in the arsenal of rhe-
torical analysis the terms for what is per-
suasively there instead. Reprinted from his
1993 catalog essay for a show called Books
as Object (at the Comus Gallery in Portland,
Oregon), Thomas A. Vogler delivers in this
way a sharply articulated effort to register
the inferences of book art in its mode of can-
celed literary use. 3
Vogler’s purpose is to distinguish the
“somewhat cumbersome term ‘book-object’ ”
not only from text art on walls and framed
surfaces and from words included in a va-
riety of sculptural forms, but also from the
broader “world of the book” in its normal
circulation and consumption. This is ex­
the thing of it is |    25
 actly the norm Vogler sees negated under
his alternate and more telling hyphenate of
the “not-book.” In addition to his examples
of altered or alternative book forms, he
might have cited the overt similitudes by
Steve Wolfe, who paints true-scale wood
sculptures of used paperbacks—photo­
realism in 3-D—with even the “yellowing”
depth of pages perfectly captured by the
striations of thickly applied tan pigment
along their edges. At a recent Whitney ret-
rospective, for instance, in a gallery hung
with earlier modes of conceptualist text art
in everything from stenciled lettering to
neon lexemes, these dummy books by Wolfe,
affixed to the walls as trompe l’oeil images,
included, from 2003, Joyce’s A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man with the en-
larged benday-dot array of its photo (plate
2)—as if its painted wood-block simulation,
though technically untitled, were actually to
be named in regress A Portrait of A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man. Among other
such simulacra, there was, more involuted
yet in its referential irony and from a de-
cade and a half earlier, the exact duplicate
from 1987–88 not of the Magritte painting
and surrounding cover for Foucault’s 1968
This Is Not a Pipe—as if to say “this is not
Foucault’s This Is Not a Pipe”—but, more
denuded yet, just the defaced, coverless pa-
perback of the University of California Press
1983 English edition, its dog-eared half-title
page reducing Magritte’s irony to a more
strictly linguistic one with the mere five
words in block capitals (fig. 1.7). Not a pipe,
nor a book either, of any sort. In what we
might call the bas-relief of Wolfe’s nonbook
friezes, his anti-books, any possible reading
of the actual volume is negated in the recog-
nition of its own blocked basis. 4
26    | chapter one
Without Vogler’s mentioning this work, it
is still perfectly fitting that the original title
for his catalog essay was in fact “Ceci n’est
pas un pipe.” Retitled “When a Book Is Not
a Book” for its anthologized version, the ef-
fort is all the more explicitly to foreground
the criteria for noncompliance. What is it
precisely about the codex that a book sculp-
ture isn’t? Beginning with a three-way dis-
tinction that sets off books as “texts” from
a book as material object and in turn from
the book as “institutionalized mode of a
composite technology” (448), Vogler sees
the “book-object” defined simply by perti-
nent negation as none of these. He rightly
detects one of the important precedents for
this swerve from the bibliographic norm
in the situationist notion of détournement,
the revealing deviation: a term persisting,
we’ve seen, into the current French des-
ignation of the appropriated and “treated”
(or “altered”) book as “livre détourné”—or
“deviant book” (456). One of his essay’s im-
portant contributions is then to subdivide
exactly those aspects of “the book” that
are deviated from by the not-book of a book
object.
The norm is multifaceted. Fivefold at
least. A book, as anatomized by Vogler, is
a “structural mechanism” with “turnable
pages” (458) even as it is also a “sequence
of moments” (whose temporal seriality, Vo-
gler adds, “pre-enacts the structure of sub-
jectivity of which the book has long been a
primary cultural agency” [459]); it is also
an object premised on functional assump-
tions about “scale,” “contents” and their
Figure 1.7.  Steve Wolfe, Untitled (This Is Not a Pipe) (1987–88).
Oil, enamel, ink transfer, modeling paste, Masonite, and wood,
7 5/8 x 5 x 3/4 in. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine,
New York.

Figure 1.8.  Byron Clercx,
Purification (1993), 21st
Century Edition (2002).
Courtesy of the artist.
28    |
physical containment, and “reproducibil-
ity” (459–60). In sum: a manifold mecha-
nism, time-determined in its successive op-
eration, human-scaled, content-dispensing,
chapter one
and duplicable. Though Vogler doesn’t put
it this way, a jamming of all these functions
at once is a common feature of the book-
object in its manifestation as a nonsucces-
sive, perversely spatial rather than tempo-
ral, often overscale, and verbally evacuated
one-off: denied, that is, the time, the means,
the matter, and hence the very medium of
reading, including its multiplication and
dissemination.
Further, in a suggestive aside amid the
major distinctions he lays out, Vogler has
it (in the flagged terms of tropological liter-
ary study) that “unlike alternation or treat-
ment, which operates on an individual book
as physical object, book-objects can be
‘troped’ books, figurative constructs where
the book as general cultural artifact is the
subject for representation, imitation, or vio-
lation” (459). Part of his purpose is to dis-
tinguish the root-associated “turning” of
the trope, the swerve from object into fig-
ure, from the “détourning” of material re-
use: singling out, that is, three-dimensional
analogues or metaphors for codex forms
as distinct from the found or refashioned
things themselves. These are exactly the
kinds of tropes, already imagined multiply-
ing underground in Paris in the preceding
section, that will rise to evidence in the
ensuing chapters, where the book, whether
as object or event, is not just worked over
but played upon, refigured, sometimes pun-
ningly doubled, by the graphic form of some
analogous shape or material.
Though this posited aspect of book art
is not attached directly to Vogler’s later
example, one presumes that he has it in
mind in adducing Byron Clercx’s 1993 Pu-
rification, redone in a new edition for the
“twenty-first century” (fig. 1.8). In that
bizarre assemblage, a text from Fran-
cis Ponge’s prose-poem Le Savon (“The
Soap”), printed on a towel hanging from a
rack (as if rubbed off there in the normal
course of ablution), is installed beneath
an open blank codex carved from an ink-
stained and gradually self-disposable
block of soap. This seems just the kind
of gesture Vogler thinks of as a “figuring”
of the book (same with Clercx’s word-
embossed salt lick books rubbed down by
the tongues of passing cattle). For these
are, let’s say, perishable objects in which
the paced consumption of an actual text is
made metaphoric. In Clercx’s soap variant,
the figure seems almost to reverse a norm.
Reading can use up a book even when not
taking it in. Though this is a supplemental
figuration not emphasized by Vogler, it re-
mains the most compelling “deviance” of
many nonbooks, the turn that refigures
some aspect of reading itself under ar-
rest, or say sculpts it into formal view: a
concretizing gesture that goes beyond the
codex shape to its rhetorical force.
This is the formal inflection that gener-
ates—even in reverse—particular tropes
(or call them subtypes) of legibility per se,
its durations, its impetus in transmission,
rather than merely of its bound form. And
in other detexted composites not mentioned
by Vogler, when Clercx pieces sawed-up
and laminated books together in the form
of a chair and calls it Reading Context, he
reminds us that all textual experience—in
one context at least, if no longer its exclu-
sive one—rests on the materiality of the
bound volume. It does so even while provid-
ing—when scores of texts in another piece
are carved into the shape of a canoe under
the name Passage—the launched craft of
an imaginative foray. In Power Tool, from
1992, when the same book artist sculpts a
hammer out of cross-sectional fragments
of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and
Aids and Its Metaphors and rests it on two
bed pillows, the effect is a further displaced
“metaphor” of rhetorical force: the trope of
impact itself. 5 So, too, with those strategic
deletions in Dettmer’s found volume of Jan-
son (plate 1), which would appear to trope a
touchstone text of popularizing art history
as a “key monument” in its own illustrative
and resculpted compendium. And so it is
that the détourned aspects of both simu-
lated and treated books, which is to say of
strictly figural volumes along with blatantly
disfigured ones, can operate to rethink by
categorical abstraction the spatiotemporal
phenomenon of the text form—the acti­
vated machine of literacy—from which they
deviate and devolve. The nonbook is in its
own right, that is, a “translation” or “decod-
ing” of the book. And of the “power” it is
tooled to implement.
READING IN, FIGURING OUT
To this end, anti-books are caught in the
act of obstructed decipherment. As form
rather than content, in its manifestation as
the hollowed or occluded shell of text, such
objects, no longer intentional as so-called
reading matter, must therefore, by default,
rework our idea of the book form itself. In
the process, book-works tend to literalize as
objects—which is only to say refigure—the
guiding paradigms of culture and commu-
nication by shrinking them to the bald facts
of their material support—and in implied
regard once again, following Vogler, to such
bibliographic aspects as mechanism and
the thing of it is |    29
 succession, scale, containment, and repro-
ducibility. Books hold in both senses: they
are the vessels of culture and its tethers.
Books in this sense bind: rewarding only
by the ties of cognitive investment itself.
Books carry conviction: they are vehicles.
As linguistic terrain, they are for marking
off and mapping. But if wordless, they bury
their losses like tight-lidded coffins. So goes
the “troping” in a mode often more nuanced
than wholesale formal similitude, refigur-
ing certain specified textual aspects of the
reading moment. In this way does the de-
mediated object perform its own variable
facets even under negation. In our concern
with the equivocal bookhood of the formal
construct thus exhibited before us, book-
work is what the thing is, or at least once
was. Bookwork is what it does.
What tasks, then, does bookwork regu-
larly set itself? Or what, one by one, are its
works there to display? In their manifesta-
tion as the hollowed or occluded shell of
text, how might such “sculptural” objects
rework our idea of the book form itself? And
how, in doing so, could they fail to take up
a place in that intersecting subfield of gen-
eral semiotics and material culture known
as book studies? “Of all the ways to use
books,” opens a recent monograph in this
disciplinary mode, “exhibiting them may be
the oddest.”6 That’s a relatively mild irony
in context. What, though, if the things on
display, in galleries rather than rare-book li-
braries, were not real books at all, but mere
things—or volumes so reshaped as to bear
no relation to shelved codices? What way
is that to “use books”—or to dupe (rather
than duplicate) them, for that matter? The
answer: it is one way of studying their ma-
terial preconditions, and this in the absence
30    | chapter one
of their function as conduits—a function
absent and gone but not forgotten. For
nonbooks serve to itemize the features of
book-based textuality that may otherwise
be subsumed and elided by the channels of
normal transmission. What stands denied
by the unapproachable book shape of gal-
lery rather than conservationist display,
and thus gets all the more forcefully iden-
tified by suppression, are the instrumental
and informational processes alike of liter-
acy’s social function. Two levels of praxis
are thus overruled, while also reasserted,
by such disuse, such dysfunction: physi-
cal uptake as well as discursive intake. It is
only because such demediation has its place
within media theory that I was able to sug-
gest at the very start that the demediated
objects to be contemplated in these pages
are—and in the venerable aesthetic as well
as historical and disciplinary sense of the
term—each in themselves book studies.
But if this auto-investigation serves,
from one point of view, to expose the book
as sheer object, a sculptural icon of itself
as vessel, from another perspective it only
reminds us by contrast of the book as a dis-
penser of symbolic language, not an objecti-
fied cultural symbol at all but a set of ideas
in transmission. We are helped to see the
inferences of this in terms adapted from Gé-
rard Genette. After Gutenberg, the “imma-
nence” of text is no longer predomi­n antly
autographic but allographic, duplicated
without loss of essence or effect.7 In what
Genette calls, following Nelson Goodman,
the “allographic regime” of print, when I
speak of my favorite book, and mean my fa-
vorite novel, I don’t as a rule have a particu-
lar volume or edition in mind. When sculp-
tural bookwork takes any such volume or
edition, single or multiple, out of reading’s
line of sight, retiring or actually defacing it,
this action may leave the textual system of
that book, even if presently uninstanced, in
every sense untouched—neither held nor
eradicated. And not just because we may
solace ourselves lately that the work exists
in another (electronic) medium elsewhere.
The point is conceptual, not technological.
It isn’t that you can slice down the middle
of its grammatical conjunction all the paper-
back copies you want of War and Peace and
array them combatively against each other
in dissevered fragments on the museum
floor—while resting easy that the narrative
prose, if not the exact typeface of any partic-
ular edition, has been safely digitized some-
where. The bookwork effect is more immedi-
ate than that. The aesthetic charge of such
demediated print forms, rent or otherwise
unreadable, is their own manifest contrast
with the reading they disallow: the felt ab-
sence of usable text right here and now. Felt
absence, yes, but only in the service of con-
firmed existence as idea—in an elsewhere
that is also now too. Again, de­mediating a
text by suspending our access to its form
as legible object only isolates it as mental
entity. Moreover, if we shift the focus from
regimes of inscription in Genette to their
underlying material support, including the
figurative rhetoric often generated to char-
acterize it, we find that the suspended imma-
nence of any text in the materially reduced
book object, the gallery rather than library
form, leads (beyond Genette’s vocabulary)
to something like an allotropic mode of book-
work or book sculpture, with the valences of
an immanent reading troped in absentia by
plastic form. It is in this way, well within the
aegis of book history, that such nonbooks,
even with no typeface visible, study their
own prototypes in the actual book. 8
This is the thing about the book-work
as a nontextual thing. When the “tropic”
replaces the strictly “graphic” in this way
(auto- or allo-), the bibliobjet stands defined
as the book form without textual immanence.
In many of its most enticing examples, there-
fore, bookwork is the art of illiteracy. In this,
it has an anomalous modern progenitor in
the “outsider” artist James Castle, born deaf
to a poor Idaho farm family in 1900. Never
learning to utter language or even read to
himself, Castle nevertheless made book
replicas of his own for years out of found
or handmade images and cut-up or copied
verbal outlines: “picture books” full of lexi-
cal shapes only, not functional word forms,
pasted or strapped together with ready-
made materials like string or yarn. Exhibited
in a full retrospective at the Art Institute of
Chicago in 2009, these sewn folios are not for
reading; they are parabooks as mute as their
maker, all language in them demediated. And
within these volumes, in a contingent but
extreme materialist appropriation of its own,
Castle’s masterful line drawings, mostly of
farmhouse interiors, are eked out with the
rawest of materials found there. Instead of
legible transcriptions of phonetic language
on pulped and processed wood-based pa-
per, Castle made his mark on his cloth and
cardboard pages by a quite different collabo-
ration of mouth and burnt trees: his ink a
mix of saliva and hearth ash. Yet his role as
forerunner of the conceptual bookwork that
emerged in the second half of his century
lies not in the means of his craft, but the
ends. Not being able to use books, he saw in
them only objects for making—for him com-
pensatory, for us increasingly dispensable.
the thing of it is |    31

BOOKS@RISK
The “found book” as well as the fabricated
one is regularly delinked from all reading
in museum confines. Why? What modes of
overruled or outmoded reading are really at
play in these works? In their recent mani-
festations, can the ascendency of electron-
ics ever be far from mind, even when not in
view? Recall the Sony ads for e-books—ironi-
cally enough, print ads—often mounted at
airports as indoor billboards: the emancipa-
tory “paging” of an on-screen novel pictured
alongside a bulky pile of old-fashioned actual
books too unwieldy to take on the plane with
you. These marketing images, despite their
vestigial material form as photomurals, are
nonetheless symptomatic of the current ero-
sion of print hegemony. In this, they may well
register the same cultural forces that have
lent the dated piles of books they patheti-
cally conjure an unusual new prominence
in the isolation wards—and obsolescence
chambers—of gallery space. Where volu-
metric conglomerations of this sort are de-
cidedly not for reading. Where the unwieldy
becomes precisely the sculptural. And where,
no matter what its immediate “theme,” such
an assemblage bears witness to the residual
nature, the historical redundancy, of its for-
merly instrumental components. In this
9
respect, there is a remarkable piece of pre-
cision paper-work by M. L. Van Nice from
2008, the retractable Swiss Army Book, in
the form of an open printed codex whose
right stack of pages has been carved out to
make room for a drawer containing the paper
model of an old-fashioned typewriter: the
sort of tool that had once gone into the mak-
ing of books. From an equivalent if narrower
slot in the left stack, a simulated CD tray
32    | chapter one
obtrudes in open position with some burnt
page fragments at the center of its disk. A
match as well as a pen are abandoned on the
open volume: metonymy for the handwriting
that used to produce texts along with a pun
on the new mode of their direct electronic
burning.
The architectural magazine Volume,
building on the play of its own name, put
out a 2008 call to artists for works under the
rubric “The Last Book.” Responses include
a massive stacking by book sculptor Adam
Bateman (plate 3), where several hundred
books—in striated, sagging rows, all spines
inward, averted and illegible, and warped
under uneven vertical pressure—are none-
theless squared off at the top and corners in
the mode of a huge minimalist shape: mod-
ernist museum object par excellence, with
its fitting of form to the rectilinear space
that contains it.10 There is no one-and-only
“last book” here, just the collective fact of
outlasted utility. Like all of Bateman’s book
moundings, the piece is named by allusion
to one of the found volumes collected to as-
semble it, in this case a couple dozens cop-
ies—an embedded pillar helping to form one
of its corners—of a 1945 novel called The
World, the Flesh and Father Smith by Bruce
Marshall: a novel alternately known—and
here ironically, given its multiple closedness
within this closed cubic structure—as All
Glorious Within. Deriving a collateral graphic
piece from the sheer externality of this book-
work, under its revised title The Flesh, the
Spirit, and Father Smith, Bateman returns
the very idea of the unseen page to its origin
in two-dimensional imprint for Rubbing: The
Flesh (fig. 1.9). An indexical trace that has,
as it were, pressed the flesh of books whose
spirit is vacated by illegibility, this is like
Figure 1.9.  Adam Bateman,
Rubbing: The Flesh (2005).
Graphite on paper, 40 x 30
in. Courtesy of the artist.
 a tombstone rubbing taken from the mass
grave of reading.
Another contemporary book artist, Jac-
queline Rush Lee, has, by turns, both a
lighthearted and an elegiac side to her work.
There are the smashed-together volumes of
narrative fiction whose retained spines face
outward in a circular band but are sawed in
half to produce a squat wheel of compressed
pages called Short Stories (2005). But in
another mood, her works of the ruined or
superseded codex form have been shown
recently under the exhibition title Ex Libris,
departing from a strict Latin to stress the idi-
omatic English “ex” of “former” rather than
“from,” including not only water-damaged fo-
lios but a wall of “book fossils” that are only
the plaster traces of absent books, some-
times with their embossed titles visible in
depression, sometimes with the shallow
ridged traces of the tape that held them to-
gether in their former fragility. These might
of course be the same “lost” books she else-
where soaks and crushes.
In any such recycling of book forms, with
its aesthetic capitalization on the cast-off,
one comes to suspect that the increasing
prevalence of multivolume book sculpture
stands in inverse proportion to the pre­
mium placed on stored volumes themselves.
In all likelihood in any given case, though
you can’t tell just by looking, these works
are built up with library discards: now
microfilmed or digitized volumes whose
original formats make ever more frequent
appearances in used-book stalls, if not re-
cycling bins, across the Western world. The
waning empire of the book often seems
part of the point in this remodeling of an
extraneous backlog. And that’s what helps
minimize one’s recoil from the disused and
34    | chapter one
sometimes abused books in such sculptural
composites: the sense that the damage
would otherwise have been worse, the su-
perannuated objects assigned to scrap heap
or dumpster rather than gallery floor.
In what comes to seem a homeostatic
system of institutional economies, the mu-
seum space is found remobilizing a library’s
expendable matter in the age of data pro-
cessing, with textual surplus rescued from
pulping for sculptural irony. In general, of
course, any such technological eclipse, of
one medium by a successor, finds refuge in
two prominent venues: either in the mu­seum
or the academy. In literary and historical
scholarship alike, book studies is a growth
industry that often seems fueled by threats
of the book’s own passing—as if the loam of
the discipline’s recent intellectual ferment
were the compost heap of cardboard and
cellulose itself. Certainly that’s how book
artists often treat the rumored superses-
sion of the codex: the former paperwork of
signage done in by the warping of form it-
self in books found and mounded, dumped,
compacted, or axed through, where a more
concrete idea of the book form arises by de-
mediation from an abasement of the material
base itself. The “deaccessioned” library vol-
ume is often isolated by bookwork at another
level of canceled access. In this sense, again,
book-works are a subfield of book history,
where wreckage aspires to new recognition.
And they know a curious recent allegiance
in this regard with commercial publication.
COVER STORIES
One suspects that a good deal of biblio-
graphic anxiety is being masked or subli-
mated of late by the satisfactions of cover
design. At least there are strange compen-
sations seemingly at work in the book trade,
especially with bound texts that diagnose or
bewail their own vanishing breed. Hardback
jackets and paperback covers alike are going
rapidly (if lightly) conceptual. The revised
edition of Sven Birkerts’s unequivocal la-
ment for the electronic age, The Gutenberg
Elegies of 1994—advertised now by Ama-
zon with the unwittingly ironic injunction
to “Tell the publisher you’d like to read this
book on Kindle”—arrives with a new cover
whose eight-word subtitle appears in turn, in
page-scale type, on the verso of an embed-
ded open book, spread wide in photographic
as well as historical regress. It’s as if, with
that prognostic phrase “The Fate of Reading
in an Electronic Age,” we’ve already turned
some final page on the reign of the codex. 11
And, from a different press, a more recent
collection of essays by Birkerts has come
out in the form, at first glance, of a perhaps
mutilated if minimalist book object in some
text-art display. For its front cover offers,
in the photographic form of an open book
with only a back cover visible around the
outside edges, a slightly reformatted version
of its own nondescript copyright page, here
on recto rather than verso—as if in a self-
mortified act of advance mourning for the
very idea of the hard copy.12
THE CONCEPT BOOK
Leaving aside such ingenuities of market-
ing design, we note how the rapid atrophy
of unplugged reading—thorn in the side of
the bibliophile—seems a frequent spur to
conceptual book-works in museumizing the
codex as paper-based (and culturally hard-
pressed) textual objet. Certainly the effect
is more often nostalgic than gloating, far re-
moved from what Nicholson Baker laments in
the “e-futurist” dismissal of books as “tree-
corpses.”13 But it can’t be forgotten that the
book-work, though visibly multiplying under
digital anxieties, arose to new prominence
from its intermittent use by surrealism (Mar-
cel Broodthaers especially, and more than
once, as we’ll see, even Marcel Duchamp)
with the first wave of telecommunications
and its widespread media consciousness.14
For with the “discursive turn” in museum
culture of the late 1960s, and well before the
digital turn two decades later, visual art at
large is often reduced by medial leveling to
an immobilized public “texting.”15 The devel-
oping place of book objects within this del-
uge of ciphering gets separate treatment in
the next chapter, but their prevalence needs
acknowledgment from the start. Amid the
conceptualist vanguard represented by late
1960s text art, the book-work, as well as the
wall-work, has its decided if shifting place,
from Joseph Kosuth to On Kawara, John
Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and beyond. Such
books are to be read instead of reading the
wall—or sometimes in their very position on
that wall. In any case, bookhood was part of
their “text.” In them, and beyond their inter-
nal play with graphic data, you were to read
the very concept of the book in the oblique
track light of gallery display.
Within the delimited gallery space of the
“white cube,” as Brian O’Doherty famously
characterized art’s typical postwar holding
chamber, the revolutionary “paradox” of Ko-
suth’s “installation” at the Castelli Gallery in
1972 offered, for O’Doherty, a “remarkable
image”—and a watershed moment: tables,
chairs, and open book binders facing ex-
cerpts from those text objects stenciled onto
the thing of it is |    35
 the wall, so that the “cloister of esthetics”
is no longer “a looking room, it is a reading
room.” If one were to close those binders,
16
remove the chairs, and stack the same vol-
umes—passive and (in both senses) imper-
tinent—on one of the tables in the middle of
the gallery, turning cloister into reliquary,
the metatextual installation in the verbal
“looking room” would have become the neo-
conceptualist book-work. Of which there are
no few examples, in fact, in something close
to this piled-binder format. It is with this
second or nonlexical phase of volumetric
irony—or, in other words, the self-immur-
ing of the linguistic object in its deactivated
conveyance—that we are most broadly con-
cerned. With its own imprint buried, verbal
mediation is at once beneath and beyond all
use in the book-work—except for its contem-
plated absence, throwing the viewer back on
an entirely associational sense of reading the
nonsequential sign function of a disused cul-
tural instrument as epitome and icon.
CLOSED READING
When instances turn up everywhere you
look, you know something else is up as
well—a tendency if not a trend. When so
much new artwork in the same vein is being
made, there must be a given behind it: more
than a pattern even if less than a collabora-
tive plan. And something to be made of it in
art-historical terms. When a Paris collective
formed in 2004 known as Claire Fontaine
(its name borrowed, in fact, from a popular
brand of French notebooks) produces a kind
of twofold readymade, wrapping the “found”
cover of Guy Debord’s La Société du specta-
cle around a large red brick so as to suggest,
perhaps, heavy going as well as the radical
36    | chapter one
de-spectacularization of the objet (and with
an obvious though unspoken allusion to
Debord’s own situationist film Can Dialec-
tics Break Bricks?)—and when this gesture
needn’t be just tossed off, but is filed away
in the imagination with others like it—such
a work becomes less a lone claim staked
than an ongoing stake raised.17 Especially
when it operates in a close echo, no doubt
unconscious, of an ironic work by Hungar-
ian artist Lázsló Lakner from over two de-
cades earlier, on display in the superb 1989
exhibit at the Kunsthalle in Bremen, cata-
loged as Das Buch: Künstlerobjekte, in which
a stained copy of Marx’s Das Kapital was
strapped and glued to a long wooden handle,
the whole slathered with soiling pigment as
if it were an unearthed Paleolithic tool—ax,
hammer, or bludgeon—under the title, given
in English, Tribal Object 12 (1980). It took its
place there in an array of objects that the
curators intended to reflect the “blackout”
of language, part of a millennial extrication
of art from the theological Word—in this
case even from a potent secular discourse
and its revolutionary manifestos.18
Also from within the former Soviet bloc,
though unrepresented at Bremen, is the Slo-
vak installation artist Matej Krén. When his
shredded and compressed books are molded
into marbleized rocks in memory of the end-
papers of a previous century’s publication
protocols and then piled together in gallery
space as a Virtual Rock Garden—and when
the idea of such violated books seems famil-
iar enough on the current museum scene—
one is beginning to see the forest for the
pulped trees of bookwork.19 Wherever this
happens, it bears repeating, the object of lit-
eracy has become the blunt material thing—
in its passage, of course, to aesthetic trans-
Figure 1.10.  Matej Krén, Gravity Mixer (2000). Courtesy of the artist.
valuation. When, by the same artist and
many others worldwide, books are stacked
and cantilevered into shapes not their own,
archways, cabins, towers of books by the
thousands that from the inside become wells
of flowless words—or in one case, again by
Krén, build up a wavelike wall (scores of
closed volumes high, and hundreds long)
of cultural layering called Sediment, imply-
ing the silt or slag of ideas in the backwash
of historical circulation—and when all this
takes place in international museums as well
as local galleries, a genre seems very much
in place (and in play). Krén even gives the
architectonics of this genre a mixed-media
spin in Gravity Mixer (fig. 1.10) by rotating
within one of his giant bibliographic ro-
tundas a platform of mounted mirrors and
equivalent empty frames that bring real
books in and out of view in an alternating
rhythm with their endless doubles, holding
the mirror up only to the nature of textual
culture itself—an effect further explored in
its anarchival dimensions in chapter 5.
When a punning configuration called
Story Line snakes together linked volumes
in a sinuous hedgerow of upright texts, fig-
uring thereby the very through-line of nar-
rative. . . . Or when another piece by the
same book sculptor, Adam Bateman again,
a book-work announced with a quiet irony
of demediation as Untitled, piles beneath
the blank sheets of a loosely opened volume
a heap of black-painted alphabet pasta like
the thing of it is |    37
Figure 1.11.  Adam Bateman,
Untitled (2004). Book,
pasta letters, 8 x 12 x 12 in.
Courtesy of the artist.
38    |
raked-away typeface (fig. 1.11). . . . Whenever
assemblages or installations of this sort ap-
pear, common generic cause is joined with
such canonized masters of the monumental
book-work, sculpting textual absence in dia-
metrically obverse ways, as Anselm Kiefer
and Rachel Whiteread. Kiefer’s shelved
leaden tomes include a piece from 2006 in
homage to Paul Celan where lead books rest
atop a punning “table” of stone supported
from beneath by smaller rocks. Opposite
chapter one
in spatial conception to such dead weights
are the absented, phantom books of Rachel
Whiteread, with the plaster caverns of her
negative molds—where texts once were—
hollowing out the now-empty “book corri-
dors” (her title in one case) of irregularly
grooved library shelves. 20
When London installation artist Rich-
ard Wentworth lines metal shelving with
dictionaries facing forward under glass
and tilts them toward us precariously in a
Mirror, Mirror of language no longer quite
“on the wall”—so that one is looking under
pressure at the very precondition of book
reading, its a priori lexicon, rather than
its normal storage and access space—we
recognize, in any formulation of its impact,
how our own vocabulary of response has
been trained by years of such appropriation
and installation work. Or when that same
site artist elsewhere, as readymade sculp-
tor, uses two wristwatches as arbitrary
bookmarks in a dauntingly thick untitled
volume, we must consult our own concep-
tualist lexicon for the equivocation of the
Kantian keywords. We readily and willingly
can’t tell, that is, from the “scuptural” title
Time and Place, whether the temporality of
reading is meant to subordinate the mere
material placement of so-called timepieces
as spatial markers—or perhaps the other
way around, with reading itself a place and
a space even before it is a pace. With such
21
uninhabitable books taking up occupancy in
a museum venue, the legacy of conceptual
art has found one of its most fertile objects
at everyday arm’s length—and then held
it off there by strategic disuse, avoiding
for the most part all sight, but scarcely all
sense, of the former discourse it now wards
off between closed covers. But whose pres-
sure is felt nonetheless.
VOIDED TEXT
Conceptual artist John Baldessari paints
over—and out—in white vinyl pigment (as
if it were correcting fluid) the paired pho-
tographs of separate untitled volumes in
1994 and calls them, sardonically, Two
Voided Books—as if they were ever there
as books, rather than just as photographic
shapes and shadows, in the so-called first
place; as if any photograph were ever oth-
erwise than the voiding of its object. Else-
where, in postconceptual practice, printed
books are carved out like empty grave sites
where the print rectangle should be, coun-
terset with defacing geometries of all sorts,
bored into or tunneled through, all bearing
metaphoric overtones associated with the
spatialization of reading time and its phe-
nomenologies of access. On it goes, this
praxis, invasive and abrasive by turns, cut-
ting in and across the distressed surface
(and restressed mysteries) of the textual
object as material thing. Though book art
(vs. the artist’s book) is one stab at an ini-
tial distinction, the former can still sound
like something in a book—rather than the
recrafting or demolition of it, its reduction
to (or toward) pure shape. So bookwork
has seemed the better term in the more
strident case, evoking the work done upon
the object as well as with it in contempla-
tion and interpretation. Identified thereby,
to begin with, is the variable disuse or mu-
tilation as text through which its form and
matter may get recycled as that manner of
aesthetic object I’m calling a bibliobjet. 22
The question is how to think about the
unreadability of these 3-D rather than 2-D
books, no longer mostly representations
(as on canvas) but the things themselves. 23
Yet what sort of things (one keeps wonder-
ing)? And given that they are mostly closed
to access by hand or eye, what cultural
work is being thus cut off—and in that way
marked out—for reflection?
The book-work is in this respect very
different from the viewer’s neutralizing re-
move from portrayed textuality within the
painted scene of reading. The book that is
the thing of it is |    39
Figure 1.12.  William no longer for reading is absolutely distinct,
Drendel, The Starr  
Report: Beat Yourself   even in a wholly simulacral form, from the
Up, America! (1998).
Paper, dyed oak; picture of one that never was: never was for
laser printed, 8 x 27
x 11 in. Courtesy reading, that is—whether or not it existed
of the artist.
in that first and other place, held in a staged
reading on the model’s lap or let rest on her
desk. Painted pages exist, instead, at the in-
terface between writing and drawing as a
mode—and common denominator—of gen-
eral inscription. Their reading may be rep-
resented, yet it is never genuinely potential.
Never latent to begin with, it cannot there-
fore be forestalled. In contrast, the actual
40    | chapter one
book—virtualized by sculptural treatment,
turned from functional object to thing—is
a more wholly demediated form. Yet con-
ceiving the force of such book-works means
“reading” them after all, even in their fre-
quent illegibility. That’s what selected in-
stances will continue to unfold.
Examples, however, can be so extreme
that they work away, and finally do away,
with the book form altogether, whether
from without or within. That mad papier-
mâché rock garden of petrified text (by
Matej Krén) is only one kind of reduction:
by compression rather than dismember-
ment. In William Drendel’s 1988 Laborem
Exercens: The Encyclical of Pope John Paul
II on the Dignity of Labor, the high-flown
recuperative rhetoric seems swept away by
a mop formed by sliced strands of the Vati-
can text, the papal vision tested as it were
in the workplace itself. In another piece by
Drendel, The Starr Report: Beat Yourself
Up, America! (fig. 1.12), the transcript of the
Clinton sex scandal (complete with its own
seven-volume appendix) is a text sampled
and drastically altered—though hardly
“shredded” as a destruction of evidence—
so that some indeterminate number of its
pages are sliced into single-line though still
readable filaments. As with the encyclical
recycled, a thick swatch of these incised
transcriptions is then tightly rebound
at one end, not in this case by the two-
handled wooden rod of a library’s news-
print rack (which the treatment evokes)
but, instead, with the single red-painted
oak grip of a flagellant’s more than nine-
tailed cat. Lash and backlash at once, the
piecemeal de­mediation of the text becomes
the retrospective emblem of a mass-media
bondage and humiliation. 24
Pushing even beyond the closed-circuit
ironies of textual laceration in the Dren-
del piece, a uniquely fragile book-work—or
unstable is more like it—is taken to an un-
precedented point of no return: the text
form’s own auto-incineration. From the
height of the digital moment, book read-
ing seems put at risk instead by some-
thing more extrinsic and incendiary about
the wager of textual involvement. Danger
Book: Suicide Fireworks is a 2006 work by
Cai Guo-Giang in which flammable adhe-
sive material and inset gunpowder charges
threaten us with the realization that each
page of its handmade drawings might
burst into flame on contact. Indeed, the
prototype for this limited edition of nine
books, having been ignited by the artist,
can be seen on sculptural display only in
the form of its own embers.
That’s one kind of “danger” not usu-
ally associated with the fate of the book in
willing hands. Indeed, the voiding of text
can be a defense mechanism against the
very threats that elsewhere lean toward
totalitarian book-burning rather than auto-
incineration. In the longer historical view,
the “voidance” of reading matter, as an alle-
gory of cultural risk, is essentially twofold:
on the one hand, destruction in the name
of censored utterance; on the other, the un-
toward freedom of speech from all need for
material backing: in short, proscription vs.
computerization. Some of the most inge-
nious book-works addressed to the earlier
hazard come, it turns out, from behind the
former Iron Curtain. We’ve noted already
the massive book sculptures of Slovak in-
novator Matej Krén, as predecessor (along
with Buzz Spector) of Adam Batemen’s or
Tom Bendsten’s recent work in this mode,
all with its inevitable aura of texts excluded
from circulation and thus available for
construct.
When the single codex form is opened to
its own internal tropes rather than massed
in a secondary metaphoric configuration,
however, the emphasis falls more on en-
cryption than on bulk prohibition. Given
how many legible texts were banned under
Soviet control, book artists of the more arti-
sanal sort found that the unpaginated, illeg-
ible text was the safer vent for bibliographic
creativity, not menaced by any policing of
the thing of it is |    41
 verbal content: the radically demediated co-
dex rather than a typical artist’s book. This
counterculture of abstract bookwork was
especially viable and widespread in Poland.
On view in a series of ambitious traveling
shows and collective publications across
the Continent in the years since, the results
can seem as abstractly philosophical as
they are political. In one traveling exhibit
from the last decade, a work by Joanna Sto-
kowska called The Library of Thoughts ap-
pears as a fanned-out bouquet of densely
woven fabric pages thickly unfurled, their
wildly porous surfaces seeming to condi-
tion only the tentative weave of imagination
before it flattens into print stock or type-
face—and hence before it puts itself at risk
of penalty from the censor. Only Orwell’s
Thought Police could read their way into
those pages. The tacit work of troping again
advances the unspoken on more than one
level at once. As suggested by Stokowska’s
format, books can be fuller, can be spread
wider, with ideas than with the words they
imprint; may seem bursting with more than
they could ever inscribe. Or, alternately, the
only book whose content is free from prying
eyes, and thus permitted to be sufficiently
replete, is a codex of thoughts never writ-
ten down, never in that way limited or in-
criminating: the invisible compendium of
an entire library or archive closed to all but
self-searching.
BRINGING MEDIUM
SPECIFICITY TO BOOK
As it happens, though not mentioning book-
work specifically, recent issues in—and
even dedicated issues of—the journal Criti-
cal Inquiry converge on this recurrent phe-
42    | chapter one
nomenon of international art practice in
regard to (1) the very question of the mate-
rial instance (or aesthetic “case” in point),
as manifested in the altered texts or 3-D
replicas of book sculpture; (2) the “thing-
ness” of their materialization; and (3) their
equivocated, compromised, or erased “me-
dialilty” as text objects.25 Such intersecting
terms make possible a new triangulation of
the rectangular solid I’ve been designating
the bibliobjet. The found or false book, the
readymade or the simulacrum, the poached
text or the one-off—by suspending me-
diation within an often abstracted case of
book as formal shape—stands, even in the
shelved company of others, estranged by its
own isolation as idea. Assembled from pre-
vious circulation or entirely dissembled, it
delivers the sample (authentic or otherwise)
of mass production and its disablement at
once, the self-decimated specimen. Under
erasure as text, book-works are thus the
received instrument of culture and a case
of its cancellation, the cited “object” of im-
material desire and the depurposed physi-
cal “thing” of its prevented activation. In
this sense, the material “conventions” of
the bound volume—no longer opening onto
inscribed text—are revised from within, by
cultural displacement, into a case of sculp-
ture as incised but demediated bulk.
This is where Diarmuid Costello’s essay
on medium specificity helps round out the
journal’s recent consideration of both in-
stance and its material presence, case and
thing. 26 Art innovates on its own tangible
conditions; it has nothing else to work with.
It tests limits, calls its material bases to ac-
count. Teased out in its full implications by
Costello is Stanley Cavell’s view of modern-
ist innovation (coterminous with the early
writing of Michael Fried in the same vein).
The idea is that modern art, working in any
medium, may well defy our predictions as
to what would constitute genuine new art
by that given means. The aesthetic instance
becomes a case in point that installs its own
revised principles. An important new paint-
ing, say, doesn’t just show us something or,
if nonrepresentational, show something
forth about its assumed visual mode (that
second something being—or instancing—its
thingness itself, the stuff of its manifesta-
tion). Such new work shows too, at the far
edge of expectation, how it is to be under-
stood still as painting. Here the question of
the “case” is vexed, suspended, redefined by
the effort at origination. Aesthetic innova-
tion offers, we may say, a singular instance
of something otherwise unexampled.27
Which may involve, though Costello
doesn’t put it this way, a certain degree of
demediation to begin with—well before a
fresh acknowledgment of rearranged mate-
rial means and their new ends. In Costello’s
complementary examples, Jeff Wall stages
his photographs as if he were painting and,
with his studied optic blurs, Gerhard Rich-
ter is, as the artist himself puts it, “prac-
ticing photography by other means” (301),
making snapshots rather than just taking
them. One is encouraged to extrapolate.
Book-works, this book needs to show, are
texts by other means, not to be read in as
discourse but rather—as denatured things,
estranged, dysfunctional—to be read whole.
Put as simply as possible, the foregone text
of a readerless book can bring thing theory
together with case theory around the very
object generally unexplored so far by ei-
ther: the art object (or visual artifact). And
this in a double further connection: first to
medium specificity and its states of excep-
tion (departures from the received case of a
given aesthetic means); then to the unset-
tling of medial determinations in the case
of the industrial duplicate as found object.
Found, foresworn, fabricated, or de-
faced. As alien shape from both another
mode and another medial realm, from
mass production and linguistic expression
alike, the book-work suspends and neutral-
izes its unseen pages in the recognized (or
doctored) shape of the already-replicated
item—imported into museum space only
under citation as discard or simulacrum.
With all text sequestered if not effaced,
the bibliobjet is therefore a null case of the
printed codex, an encasement vacated of
reference, its material presence entirely
self-designating. What I’m suggesting is
that the book-work isn’t a kind of book af-
ter all, isn’t singled out as one of the book
kind, a case on hand. In respect to every-
thing its shape evokes, it amounts instead
to a negative imprint of the book. But only
in this way is the book as “thing” opened
to concept over the lost body of its func-
tion as textual object. What that object can
then do to retextualize the illegible is the
second phase of the process, whose work
only the examples of given book-works can
demonstrate.
To be more specific about the body of
a text gone missing in this way, a sense
of book art as involving a demediation of
textual surface calls to mind, in reverse,
the use of Heidegger and Blanchot by Pe-
ter Schwenger in the “Things” volume of
Critical Inquiry. Only mediation, though not
Schwenger’s term, allows the realization of
the communicable object in the erasure of
the material thing. “Words and the Murder
the thing of it is |    43
 of the Thing” has it, in a familiar vein, that
reference lays low the entity it calls to no-
tice, levels it to semiosis rather than main-
taining it as somatic or material presence,
flattens it to mere words on a surface where
the thing isn’t. Language alone brings the
being of things into recognition as such, as
being—but no longer as empirical things.
Once conceptualized, these same things
vanish in respect to their thinghood. Nam-
ing is the corpse of the existence it elicits.
Things are no sooner spied and identified by
name, that is, and thus deconcealed in their
being, than lifted to the plane of objectifi-
cation as idea, in all its communicable use.
Transferring these distinctions into the
realm of the book as adopted (appropriated)
or more drastically adapted (altered) mu­
seum piece, a sculptural form either found
or refashioned, one sees that the elevation
of quotidian factory product to objet is likely
to involve at the same time a reduction of
temporal vehicle to immobile thing. This
is because the textual foreclosure of such
bookwork abrogates the phenomenological
access of conventional reading. If, following
Schwenger, one would say that the imma-
nence of reference within a thus invisible
succession of the signifier ordinarily effects
the murder of the book thing in its transfig-
uration to worded object of communication,
an opposite set of questions would follow
in reverse. What if the material thinghood
of the book form could be revived within a
suspension of the text object, whose force
as lettered engine of a disembodied mean-
ing that thingness would quite literally
obliterate? What reductive level of medium
as sheer material support would then be re-
vealed, what vehicle, what sense of convey-
ance? In its exile of text, bookwork shapes
44    | chapter one
certain answers precisely by not being able
to spell them out.
EXCOMMUNICATION
This is where the book-work functions as
something like the symmetrical obverse
and complement of the text-work. One
main thrust of the postrepresentational
aesthetic within which book-works find
their noncirculating currency—a principle
inscribed in so many words at times, of-
ten so many block capitals, by conceptual
art—can be understood as a conflation of
Schwenger’s linguistic stress and Costel-
lo’s materialist one: we cannot know in ad-
vance the terms by which innovation will
lay claim to the habits of a medium even
as it contests and revises them. Mimesis
is no longer a standard. Art must invent
the discursive frames, as well as the opti-
cal conditions, by which to bring out the
revised conventions of its own instance.
So that the canonical prop of museum cul-
ture, whether canvas surface or 3-D mass,
tends at times, from the late 1960s on, to
be vaporized into sheer proposition in its
function as authentic new gesture. Experi-
mental art of this linguistic stamp some-
times gives us only the terms in which art
might appear, not the aesthetic object itself
in its instance, its being. It is more like art
conceptualized than like conceptualized
instances of art. Such is the postmodern-
ism—and quite often the undisguised on-
tological comedy—of its text-works, where
the graphic image is regularly reduced
to sheer and literal prose. As Schwenger
might have it, what results is the killing of
image by word.
In reversing this, bookwork disappears
the word into its abandoned material for-
mat. Beyond Schwenger’s metalinguistic
contribution to the “Things” volume, a
sense of the submergence of the purpose-
ful object (reading matter) in the book thing
(rectangular solid) builds on the editor’s
own later elaboration of “thing theory” in
his separate publication A Sense of Things.
There Bill Brown cites William James’s
distinction between the thing and the in-
tentional object—as, for instance, between
the shiny silver-gray metal oblong and its
immediate recognition as a table knife. This
is James’s example of the way habitual use
“ploughs deep grooves”—his very phrase
operating as if by association with the blade
itself—“ploughs deep grooves in the ner-
vous system.”28 The observation could just
as well be made about the routinization of
books as objects of consciousness, where
the grooves of recognition—and in part line
by line along the depthless runnels of the
imprinted page—tend to inoculate against
response to their own physical format:
their material instrumentality for coded
transmission. Book sculpture lifts this con-
ditioning format back to view, isolating the
physical support of portable reading as a
now-objectless (or purposeless) thing: the
sculptural objet as the demediated double
of its former and industrially cloned use as
cultural tool. The question still: with such a
thing no longer a textual object in the stan-
dard sense, what kind of cognitive and aes-
thetic form has it become?
In thinking this out in continued com-
parison with the text-work or lexigraph
of conceptual art, we can turn to another
case of the 2-D “voided book” from John
Baldessari, who in the late 1970s trans-
ferred a black-and-white photograph of
an Art­forum cover, featuring one of Frank
Stella’s boldly chromatic abstractions, to
a canvas backing overpainted in mottled
gray acrylic, so that the cover looks in-
stead like an obsessive but affectless pen-
cil sketch. In a canvas entitled This Is Not
to Be Looked At, Baldessari too—recall-
ing Costello’s citation of Richter—might
here be said to be doing painting by other
means. If not undoing it entirely. But why?
What does this resistance to mediation
mean—or want of us? For one thing, it
doesn’t just insinuate; it says outright and
up front, flatly enough, that such an in-
stance of art—or at the very least the arti-
fact it repictures, painting or magazine—is
not to be gazed upon (but rather, implicitly,
thought about). Equivocating the demon-
strative, Baldessari’s title suggests further
that, within the image, “this” is one book,
one art volume in fact, that cannot be
looked into. Because it is only the picture
of itself. And the title also hints, recipro-
cally, that art is never merely to be looked
at anyway—but rather, in the very capacity
of its picturing, to be read, decoded.
It is just this aspect of painting, dena-
tured and discursified, that book sculpture
itself, when reducing text to thing—even
when crushing the broken-backed codex
as near to flat as possible—can still shape
into view. According to the loosened tenets
of medium specificity we’re allowing, one
question would be whether painting is still
painting when it uses as its medium not pig-
ment but plaster and books? And the answer,
whatever it is, would find its best, because
earliest, evidence in what this first chapter
is now ready to propose as a founding con-
ceptual bookwork: a fractious and irrever-
ent materialist jumble from 1961 by the ren-
the thing of it is |    45
 egade British provocateur (later actual book
burner) John Latham. In a clutter of pillage
and pileage, Latham literalizes the idiom of
“an open book” by mashing random slashed
volumes onto an adhesive canvas under the
title Painting Is an Open Book (plate 4). 29
This titular notion that what you see is what
you get is exactly the idea that conceptual
art, in its more solemn moods, takes the
trouble explicitly to refute: not simply by re-
placing pictures with the forms of discourse,
but by insisting on the tacitly verbalized and
intertextual nature of painting all told. De-
mediated volumes like Latham’s become the
medium of a nonrepresentational canvas in
which the very idea of the book lies embed-
ded as a deep cultural metaphor for cogni-
tion itself. Descended from biblical scenes
punctuated by the foreshortened Book of
Books (and elsewhere sardonically remod-
eled by Latham), here instead is a work of
“books on canvas” (or say of painting-with-
books) that is, in Baldessari’s sense, not to
be looked at either—but merely “decoded”
from the ironic key of its title. 30
If, riffing on Baldessari’s later piece, a
subsequent artist were to replace the large
mixed-media canvas called This Is Not to Be
Looked At, operating as it does within and
against the tradition of the “still life with
book,” by a real and “treated” Artforum
issue—one, for instance, in which the ge-
ometry of the same Stella cover would be
carved out of the volume and set aside in
a stack of glossy pages answering to the
gaping angular hole—the gesture would
rehearse quite directly the transit from the
lexigraph of conceptual art to its progeny in
altered bookwork. It is a route increasingly
traveled of late, even when no excavation
or mangling is involved but, rather, just a
46    | chapter one
deactivated reading under the sign of found
sculpture. And then there’s the case of the
unillustrated book, or the non-art magazine,
which is even more often recruited for post-
conceptualist book sculpture. Words may
murder the thing. But often in bookwork,
vice versa: geometric form effaces textual
content.
DE-LINEATION
Here again, one no sooner makes up an ex-
ample in the head than one is likely to find it
sculpted somewhere in tangible if adjusted
form. Or its revealing opposite. I spoke
above about the vacated book as a tight-
lidded coffin. I might have said closed tomb.
In Ann Hamilton’s lineament, however, as
we saw earlier with Beube’s The Arena, the
nonbook may also appear like an exhumed
rather than secured grave, its very typog-
raphy dug from the pages in which it is set.
Whereas in chapter 6 we will find the far
poles of book sculpture established by An-
selm Kiefer’s rectangular solids versus Ra-
chel Whiteread’s gaping molds, leaden im-
penetrability versus sheer emptiness, there
is, in between these extremes, a frequent
third term that helps reconstellate thing,
case, and medium around the question of
figuration. For between the totally closed
and the totally open codex form, obvious
void and visible vacuum, is the far more
common bookwork format of the present
yet visibly excavated volume: sliced open,
carved up, gouged into, dug out, or burnt
through. But the invasive gesture may
feel as if it’s coming from the inside out. If
Wolfe’s simulated Joyce (plate 2) stares us
straight in the eye with a text we can never
open, a more bizarre, almost macabre form
Figure 1.13.  Ann
Hamilton, lineament
(1994). Installation,
plywood, steel cables,
figure, books, steel frame,
silk organza, wood box,
movie projector; overall
dimensions: 23 x 27 x
48 ft. Ruth Bloom
Gallery, Santa Monica,
CA, June 4–July 17, 1994.
Photos courtesy of
Ann Hamilton Studio.
of simulation—as in Hubertus Gojowczyk’s
image of a history that actually reads the
present—goes so far as to embed glass eyes
in the diptych sockets of a defaced antique
volume (plate 5).
In the mode of surgical excision rather
than implant, the demediating work of Ham-
ilton’s 1994 lineament is a complex example
of such site-specific negation, a case of the
experienced book reconceived by its own
dismemberment. Hers is a performance
piece whose only legibility as such derives
not from the untitled and desecrated book
on a suspended platform or table but from
the intertext in Wallace Stevens, where the
word “lineament” functions as a pun on
textual lineation. All that “mattered,” in
Stevens’s phrase, is that poems “should
bear / Some lineament or character . . . /
Of the planet of which they were part”—
with “character,” too, having a typographic
or alphabetic biplay in this context. For
the planet is entirely a textual one, as the
loosely anagrammatic title, “The Planet on
the Tabletop,” makes clear. To trope this,
Hamilton (who in another installation of the
same period, called in fact tropos, burns out
the lines of a novel with an electric burin to
figure their “consumption” in the reading
act) here slices through the print rectangle
of an unidentified found book. Silhouetted
by the shadows cast from a movie projec-
the thing of it is |    47
Figure 1.14.  Ann Hamilton,
lineament · book/ball
(1994). Photo credit: Steven
Harris. Photos courtesy of
Ann Hamilton Studio.
48    |
tor with no signifying photo strip of its own,
the artist (or her assistant) then spools the
shredded ribbons of text, hyper-tactile now
in their linear sequence, into a growing ball
of fragile paper strands (figs. 1.13, 1.14). With
the human figure “projected” in profile as
a shadow portrait of the reading agent, a
radically demediated planar text has be-
come instead a whole planetary system, a
world of its own, no longer flat but englob-
ing—even (one must say especially) in the
double remove of defacement and silhouette
chapter one
alike, blanking out both the language and its
point of reception.
Even such severe demediations—image-
less film, wordless pages—can bring this
fantasy of verbal englobement to light. Can
in the full paradoxical sense materialize
its phenomenological premise. Can figure
its encompassing figment of a deciphered
world. And so we continue to probe, even
without the transmedial context of works
like Hamilton’s, the underlying logic of any
such demediation of text by reduced codex
form. Such investigation returns us in the
next chapter to the counter-modernist ori-
gins of sculptural negation in the industrial
readymade, where deactivated toilets and
decommissioned texts can be understood
to keep proper and deliberated company
on the museum floor. For the thing about
book-works, as this opening chapter has
recognized, is their refiguration of the book.
And if the detached urinal of Duchamp is
famously a fountain, then so, too, can the
found or refashioned codex as recognized
industrial shape be many other things at
once—including many isolated aspects, per-
haps less recognized, of the reading experi-
ence turned back on itself in blocked pos-
sibility but troped force.
VIEWING IN OVERVIEW:
MEDIATION’S BIG PICTURE
On the threshold, then, of a more specific
twentieth-century lineage for the found
book and its associated simulacra in gal-
lery space, to be developed under the rubric
of the “readybound,” there is another and
vaster paradigm that can serve, beforehand,
to locate the book object in its most capa-
cious possible frame. This is the epochal
template of mediation sketched by Régis
Debray and brought into glancing alignment
here with the vestigial metaphysical ring of
Genette’s vocabulary. Debray’s framework
31
should assist in reckoning bookwork’s de-
feat of textual “immanence”—epiphenom-
enon of print culture for more than half a
millennium—by the spatial form of post-
modern objecthood. Without such typical
and immanent release of meaning from the
page either by reading or by recitation (in
Genette’s terms), the book as work reverts
to its own solid mass as spatial construct:
“released” from writing in the other sense.
Its exile to the museum, even if elevated
to pedestal there, only rubs in this demo-
tion. Or isolates it as the strategic cultural
regression it constitutes. Given the deliber-
ately lowercase and post-theological cast of
Genette’s secular terms for the indwelling
mystique of literary phenomenology, where
the word is “immanent” to its vessel or ve-
hicle even while interpretation is “transcen-
dent” to it, we can usefully reinscribe this
vocabulary within Debray’s longer history
of theological default and its aftermath lead-
ing on to modern mediation.
In the sweeping “mediology” proposed
by Debray, the “three ages of looking,”
though overlapping in the strata of their
implied archaeology (rather than straight-
forward genealogy), unfold nonetheless in
roughly chronological order. The first para-
digmatic transition (532; charted, 537–38)
is the metaphysical devolution of the idol
(of the “logosphere”) into the icon (of the
“graphosphere,” including the “era of art”
consolidated at approximately the same
secular moment as Gutenberg—and thus
fully caught up in book history and the re-
production of images). The third phase is a
regime of sheer ubiquitous visuality with-
out subjective seeing (in the postmodern
image culture of the “videosphere”). These
are indeed spheres of influence rather than
strict periodizations, for Debray’s medi-
ology is concerned not with the medium-
specificity of the image (charcoal and stone,
mosaic, paint, photo emulsion, electronics)
but with its “efficacy,” its cultural force in
transmission. Idols (the epoch of theology)
are received as indexical apparitions of the
supernatural; icons (the epoch of art) are
the thing of it is |    49
 understood as appearances in analogical
equivalence with the natural world; images
(the postmodern epoch of the visual) are in
themselves, and by consensus, manifesta-
tions, events, virtualities. Presence, giving
way to representation, gives way to simula-
tion. Whatever the specificities of their me-
dium, images in their role as mediation—in
their efficacy, that is, not as “communica-
tion” but as pure “transmission”—answer
first, as Debray summarizes it, to the di-
vine “archetype,” later to the mundane or
mimetic “prototype” (in its full coincidence
with print culture), and finally to the capi-
talist visual “stereotype” (538). These are
phases that map approximately for him
onto the semiotic categories of index, icon,
and symbol (539), or in other words met-
onymic trace, secondary depiction, and
arbitrary convention. Their respective de-
terminations are, for Debray, theological,
aesthetic, and sociological (539), in that his-
torical order.
In such tripartite terms, the three “ages”
can overlap even in the latest postmodern
phase of visual dialectics. Here one finds
innovation sending image production back
to its own lost origins. On behalf of a mod-
ern looking that has exhausted, in Western
cultural sequence, the idolatrous, the sce-
nic, and the discursive—or, in other words,
the incarnational, the iconic, and the sym-
bolic—there is the returning urge for a (now-
desacralized) index, by which one recognizes
(in Debray’s italics) the “retrograde charac-
ter of progress”—“no less flagrant in the
life of forms than in that of societies” (540).
What he means to spotlight is “a compensa-
tory return of the primitive repressed, as we
have recently seen in painting with collage,
frottage, and grattage; in automatism, drip
50    | chapter one
painting, body art; in graffiti art, doodling,
ejaculations” (540). In the late twentieth-
century phase of looking’s third “age,” op-
erating under the aegis of arbitrary visual
conventions after the reigns in turn of sacral
index and secular icon, now “the loop of con-
temporary art reverses itself and turns away
from everything symbolic”—which would
mean even from the critique of the visual
regime itself in conceptual word art—“in a
desperate quest for the index: muddy mat-
ter, tar, sand, chalk, and charcoal. . . . [A]fter
Calder, Ségal [sic] and his nudes in almost
perfect facsimile” (540). Debray might bet-
ter have mentioned Duane Hanson (rather
than George Segal) in comparing these so-
matic forms to “the wax models of Roman
magistrates and Renaissance kings.” In
short: “Flesh rediscovered” (540)—and, as
in Hanson’s case, often with actual matter
in simulacral hand, real (appropriated) read-
ing matter. 32 Incarnational presence under
the Logos, exiled from the picture plane by
re-presentation, and negated by simulation,
returns at the tail end of this third regime,
this era of increasingly “virtual presences,”
to raw “traces” in the material sense, depos-
its of the actual, whether organic or radically
fabricated. The fecal art of Andres Serrano,
especially in conjunction with his profane
incarnational crucifixes, would only extend
Debray’s examples, rendering the retrograde
somatization of contemporary visual signs
complete, a reversion to index entirely di-
vorced from any “logosphere.”
Complete at least on the wall. On the gal-
lery tabletop, of course, we might also see
a similar dialectical return at work, and
not just in the nonexpressive “ejaculation”
of that semen-streaked page from Ed Rus-
cha’s artist’s book: the disseminated Logos
in parody. Neo-conceptual bookwork, more
broadly yet, indulges its own recursive loop
within a metahistorical pattern of advance
and reversion in the imaged Word itself.
Imprint text, ushered onto the Renaissance
cultural stage along with secular painting,
accompanies the latter down through its
eclipse by the domain of the absolute visual,
or in other words the virtual. In resistance
to the burgeoning of this third regime in a
postreal(ist) period, the text art of the Con-
cept (often symbolized in words or related
ciphers) breaks with the strictly visual (as
well as the pictorial) order, not just putting
simple appearance in its dated place, as ap-
pearance had long ago overthrown divine
apparition, but intervening in the capital-
ist flood of instantaneous and impersonal
imaging. And in a further reach back to
indexical grounding, the raw materiality of
the demediated book form in subsequent
decades surrenders its efficacy as text in
a return to nonsignifying form or mass. It
thereby enacts its own brand of primitivist
reversion: from found symbolic instrument
to displayed material presence, entirely
short-circuited in—and detached from—its
symbolic function, which had already been
usurped to some degree by the word-works
of wall text, to say nothing of conceptual-
ism’s serial binders and Xeroxed folios. In
the neo-conceptualism of the bibliobjet,
book minus text is mere spatial volume: in-
dex of nature plus manufacture (from cel-
lulose to assembly line) but without symbol,
closed on itself in sheer physical sufficiency.
The illegible displayed book isn’t some
final capitulation of “graphosphere” to the
“videosphere” of mere image. It is instead
the return of an indexed materiality from
within a profanated (nonlogocentric)—and
now hypermediated—trade in discourse,
the palpable codex base won back from its
own suspended “efficacy” as message ma-
chine. This drastic recovery action can’t
help but intersect, in turn, with another
contemporary dialectical tension, already
discussed under the heading “books@risk,”
that can in fact be located precisely within
the precincts of Debray’s “videosphere” at
its most narrowly defined: namely, the elec-
tronic virtualization of text itself as the
supersession of the book, as if the prefix
e in e-text were what it was for centuries
without the now-antiseptic hyphen: the
sign of a drawing out or away, of removal.
From Johannes Gutenberg until Yahoo!’s
Project Gutenberg, print culture dominated
the flow of verbal data. In an ironic gesture
compounded of both mourning and resus-
citation at once, then, it is partly as if the
endangered book under museum scrutiny,
refigured as the illegible book-work, forfeits
text altogether to the competitor realm of
electronic streaming—to a pure visuality
without inscription or imprint—in order
to embody in isolation the palpability thus
subtracted from our current culture of
transmission. More clearly than ever under
the auspices of “mediology”—which, in di-
agnosing the ideology of exchange, studies
the social assumption rather than constitu-
tion of separate message systems—the art
of demediation is seen to draw its aesthetic
force from the realm of inefficacy.
In a variant of Genette’s rather than Deb-
ray’s terms, the bibliobjet asserts in this way,
as noted, a perverse immanence apart from
that of either text or its vehicle. And does so
in the resourceful form of countless spatial
tropes for those absences. This is the case
even when the apparent book is a mock-up
the thing of it is |    51
 rather than an appropriation, as with Deb-
ray’s instancing of even bodily simulacra as
a yearned-for return to the index (as much
as an actual embalmed sheep, say, in the
formaldehyde art of Damien Hirst). In sum,
book minus writing, book minus symbol,
manifests (or at least evokes) the index as
much as the icon—present indication as
much as secondary depiction—of its own
materiality and disuse. For which, in the
role of objet, its new conceptual utility—as
six-sided gearbox of thought and figura-
tion—seems endless.
MEDIUM UNMIXED
None of this goes to privilege wording over
the hands-on thing in textual transmis-
sion. Instead, the functionless material of a
rectangular solid as remnant or replica of a
book (in my earlier distinction, as “retread”
or “effigy”) enforces by its very dysfunction
the abiding rule of material use in codex
communication. That’s why, before the next
chapter enters upon a history and theory of
these works in their conceptualist valence,
I pick up again the preliminary definition of
demediation as “the undoing of a given form
of transmission, now blocked or altered, in
the medium of its secondary presentation.”
For “a given form” one may substitute “a
given facet” if it helps hold in view, or keep
us in touch with, what book studies would
insist on in the physical as well as linguis-
tic features of the communicative object.
These would include the book’s material
dimensions in the mass and density of its
sequential format, its layered surfaces as
well as its textured layout, its typographic
rather than literary patterning, impress be-
fore impression, and so forth.
52    | chapter one
What demediation in the book-work sin-
gles out, precisely by dropping it out, is in
general only the legibly enciphered surface
of the verbal message, if often all support-
ing pages with it. Obviated or obliterated let-
tering thus results in the premature “end of
the book as we know it”—and as we have
come to know through it. Call it the burial of
the book form within the foregrounded re-
mains of its material infrastructure. That’s
all I meant by the title of a seed essay for
the present study, “Bookwork as Demedia-
tion,” an article that came under fire (use-
ful even in its ricochets) from the adjacent
terrain of book studies and media theory.
For my respondent insisted in his critique,
fitly enough, on the codex not as verbal se-
quence mounted for sheer convenience upon
a physical prop but as in effect a “mixed me-
dium” to begin with. 33 No debate from me
on that. In my sense of “demediation,” the
particular feature of the verbal codex iso-
lated by negation is writing: words typically
eased from paper into meaning, though here
erased instead, in their (only partial) con-
tribution to the experienced instrument of
literacy. Necessary but not sufficient to the
condition of bookhood, these are the words
that must in fact be called out specifically
by the subtitle of the anthology cited earlier
(n. 3) in which Vogler’s essay is reprinted:
“Some Work and Projections on the Book as
Writing” (emphasis added).
Projected into the future or just reflected
upon, the book is other things too, of course,
besides writing, including a thing. But with-
out writing, that thing is no longer a read-
able book. This way, then: Exactly because
the book is intrinsically a mixed medium,
physical and graphic and linguistic as well,
its canceling embodiment in the volumet-
ric object—with all language siphoned off
or closed to view—can be understood as
a work of demediation. Alternately, we
might identify such aesthetic work as the
unmixing of its medium. This happens not
only through the refusal of wording, as one
among other ingredients of textual encoun-
ter, but through the inhibition of material-
ity’s ordinary role (both supportive and in-
corporated) in the transmissive operation.
The functional object is denuded to fixed
thing. In whatever gallery medium of its
own (from glass blocks to molded lead; or,
as if in variant emdodiments of the chil-
dren’s game, from rock to scissored paper),
so it is that the book-work artifact keeps
open—by its specifically verbal demedia-
tion—a question that in itself links the post-
modern conceptualism of these objects with
the book history that might choose to frame
them otherwise. This is a question, the
question, about whether reading a printed
work of writing is first of all the reading,
say, of literature, philosophy, history, art
criticism, your choice, or instead, and more
tangibly yet, the reading of a book—or of
course (though by what interchange and
equilibration?) both. As a second chapter is
scheduled to explore, the question is, in ev-
ery sense of the word, conceptual.
the thing of it is |    53
C H A P TE R T W O
R EA D Y B O U N D
B ooks usually look to be opened by those
who approach them; look at least like
they might be—be in fact books for use. But
they are sometimes just look-alikes. As book-
works rather than working books, what they
do is to put prevented reading on display.
Nothing reminds us sooner of the book as
factory product, in fact as the first factory
product (originally on the guild master’s as-
sembly line, later on the industrial conveyor
belt), than a gallery-mounted inability to en-
gage or transfigure such a duplicated form:
to turn it from inorganic thing into textual
object through the intimate processing of its
verbal content. Books are singularized only
in reading. Otherwise, and as the very pre-
supposition of that reading, they are mass
multiples. Which is another way of saying
that nothing isolates the book for its strictly
formal or material consideration sooner than
its verbal demediation. Whether the gallery
shape before us was once published as text
and now recycled as strictly geometric vol-
ume, or carved in the first place from Styro-
foam or pine, soap or salt block, this chapter
is about its museum life as an evoked indus-
trial duplicate under new conditions of dis-
use. Put it that what I call the bibliobjet puts
quotes around “book” so as to insure a veri-
table thesaurus of paraphrase for its shape
and feel and use, the latter including (but
of course not exhausted by) its invitation to
verbal immersion.
Even when the given shape of mass-print
publication in gallery space is an entirely
fake one, it summons a venerable history.
Preeminent among the objets trouvés of a
post-subjective and counter-expressionist
aesthetics are the “unassisted readymades”
of Marcel Duchamp, his mocking response in
 part to synthetic cubism (with its incorpo-
rated social debris) in the same first and sec-
ond decades of the last century. From there
on in the resistance to high modernism, the
deskilling of art persists down through and
beyond conceptualist postmodernism. In an
extreme form of demediation like Duchamp’s
mute industrial urinal or bicycle wheel, such
art insists on reducing the appropriated or
self-“cited” object to the material but non-
communicative condition of the found and
dysfunctional thing. But not without asking
how nonmaking of this sort could conceiv-
ably make such a thing art—and about what
kind of disuse is thereby repurposed. Not,
in other words, without probing its self-
enunciation as art: a nomination as far as
possible from the expressive. Here we en-
counter John Roberts’s sustained line of
Marxist consideration in The Intangibilities
of Form—as it will ultimately help elucidate,
even against the grain of this own polemic,
the place of the book object in a postwar
conceptualist legacy. Concentrating on Du-
1
champ’s urinal as foundational exhibit, a ru-
dimentary appliance linguistically retooled
as art, the deep question is this: By what
immaterial process is the mechanically cast
and then cast-off object magically (read: iron-
ically) transfigured to an aesthetic one-off?
ART WITHOUT ARTISTRY:
THE LABOR OF DESKILLING
The philistine’s limp rhetorical question has
come home to roost: “You call that art?” Yes,
exactly: art being an act of naming and fram-
ing alone, not shaping, immaterial rather
than material labor, a creative intentional-
ity rather than a “mastered” skill. Gone, for
Roberts, are the early modernist tortures
56    | chapter two
of subjectivity and neurosis (think Picasso)
finding compensatory form in the painstak-
ing labors of expressive art, high-handed
in their own manual dexterity, brandishing
their inalienable finesse of execution. Gone
even is the half measure of cubist appropria-
tion, where pieces of the world are collaged
and alchemized within the picture plane by
the assimilative if depersonalized genius of
recombinatory aesthetics. Still too bourgeois.
Here to stay with Duchamp: a differently
committed making in the age of mechani-
cal reproduction, the thought experiments
of “immaterial labor.” Or in previous terms:
no more aesthetic things at all, just aesthetic
objects as conceptual trajectories—inten-
tions, projects, situations, gesturings. The
Duchampian legacy persists in this way on
past abstract expressionism into what Rob-
erts sees as the too intellectualized and still
too auteurist “discursive turn” in conceptual
art. Truer to the revolutionary power not just
of the found object but of the mass-replicated
product is, he insists, a second and more
robust line of influence. This leads not just
into the ironies of commodification and mass
replication in pop art but into the collective
demystification of subjectivity in group proj-
ects like that of the Warhol Factory or the
Art & Language collective.2 Despite Roberts’s
value judgments on the studio practices (vs.
consortium research) of conceptual art, it is
indeed that first genealogy out of Duchamp
that delimits our topic: the discursive over
and above the industrial turn of the avant-
garde swerve from pictorialism—where it is
crucial to note that Duchamp’s detached toi-
let fixture has attached to it a title, Fountain,
and thus, sarcastically of course, a whole
intertextual field of valorizing aesthetic dis-
course.
 With or without Duchamp’s verbal inter-
vention as prototype, however, the later dis-
cursive turn is one that, when conceptualist
text art folds back inward to bookwork, con-
nects in fact with that other Duchampian
vaunt closer to Roberts’s art-historical tra-
jectory. It does so precisely by foreground-
ing, for materialist isolation or dismantling,
one of culture’s earliest mass-produced
objects, and thus latent readymades, in the
appropriated print codex. Downplaying no-
menclature and its wordplay, Roberts would
trace what he finds a more politically viable
derivation from the industrial ironies of
the readymade down through the deskilled
work of installation art, interactive video,
networked collaborations, and the rest,
where the artist disappears into a kind of
“programmer” of a broad social response—
or elsewhere, in the bureaucratic ironies of
Hans Haacke’s museum correspondence,
puts on display a private battle of institu-
tional resistance. Art for Roberts, aspiring
to situational models, becomes immaterial,
telematic, nonmanually recombinant, quin­
tessentially “intangible.” Rather than clos-
ing in on itself in medial reflexivity, its pur-
pose is to induce a social reflex.
In the spirit of Roberts’s implacable Marx-
ist reading, one could agree that art’s most
urgent and viable role as social praxis is the
disalienation of intellectual labor on the
public’s part rather than the author’s. Art
3
isn’t just offered up to the masses. It is most
authentically avant-garde as a group move-
ment in itself, both in delivery and reception,
collective, distributed, potentially collusive.
What the everyday viewer might have seen
in Duchamp’s urinal would be a sponsoring
glimpse of this. For Duchamp is understood
as bringing the tedious residue of collective
labor into the museum for the collective rec-
ognition of its impertinence and provocation.
Once deposited there, as one might summa-
rize this demotic snub, industrial product is
transfigured to idea without passing through
a plausible form of high-art fetish.
But not without wording. Or not always.
And this is what Roberts symptomatically
minimizes, even in the moment of origina-
tion with Duchamp. Stressing the material
force of the readymade as factory object
further deskilled to displaced thing, Roberts
undervalues the linguistic ironies that trans-
form it into a resistant objet. In this sense,
he slights—deliberately and polemically—the
other side of the Duchampian lineage: con-
ceptualism rather than participatory inter-
action. One notes this bias, for instance, by
comparison with the way a founding father of
conceptual art, Joseph Kosuth, has explicitly
paid homage to his Duchampian patrimony.
Asked in an interview about his defining in-
fluence from Duchamp, Kosuth stressed the
“shift in our conception of art from ‘What
does it look like?’ to a question of function,
or in other words ‘how does an object work
as art?’ ”4 Not just how in particular—but
sometimes, as with an unaltered bathroom
fixture, how in the world? Duchamp’s pre-
ternaturally direct transfer from the site of
production to that of exhibition, his transla-
tion of industrial entity to aesthetic object—
one may say of mere work into art—quizzes
the spectator about exactly the shared in-
tellectual labor needed to rescue unskilled
drudgery for the deskilled circuit not of mass
consumption but of social productivity (and
public discourse) in response. Cultural work
is called forth, that is, via the immaterial la-
bor of a social discourse sprung in part from
the shared ironies of linguistic nomination.
readybound |    57

Figure 2.1.  Robert The,
Duchamp (2008), detail.
Courtesy of the artist.
58    |
INDUSTRIAL DUPING, VERBAL DUBBING
In its impatience with all other aesthetic
standards and criteria, the stringency of
Roberts’s approach helps in seeing how
bookwork might actually resist his animus
against the supposed dead end of conceptu-
alist wordwork. So we need to be clear about
the starting point. Duchamp’s “unassisted
readymade,” though transported into the
museum without being materially tampered
with, is nonetheless written upon: signed,
that is, with the made-up rather than found
name “R. Mutt” and then notoriously titled
Fountain. This particular urinal is thus
manifestly a work in verbal as well as for-
mal estrangement. But the nomenclature
chapter two
marks a relatively easy victory over mod-
ernist pomposity. More long lasting, Roberts
insists, is the crossover between industrial
output and cultural uptake, which leads him
to downplay the influential “nominalism”
of Thierry de Duve’s work and the other
“new Duchamp scholarship” following in
its wake. 5 For Roberts, instead, the force of
Duchamp’s intervention turns instead on its
lampoon of execution by manufacture, of
subjectivity by mechanization, of valorized
aesthetic use by instantaneous (if imposed)
obsolescence.
But verbal, in part, the joke remains. The
toilet fixture as a “fountain”—as porcelain
Figure 2.2.  Robert The, sculpture—as pseudonymous aesthetic
Duchamp (2008), detail.
Courtesy of the artist. construct: an inescapable irony of naming
as well as a satire of automatic copying. It
shouldn’t be surprising that a more preva-
lent item of mass production yet, the book
form, should help us to another way of plot-
ting out this history of an influence. Nor is it
hard to imagine that somewhere lying open
and flat on a gallery plinth—in Chicago, Ber-
lin, or Tel Aviv—is an art monograph on Du-
champ spread wide with “Fountain: What’s
in a Name?” as the repeatedly visible run-
ning head of a chapter title—the study’s
pages splayed out into a lacquer-stiffened
fan shape or frozen spray, while a pipe,
capped at the outer end, is rammed through
the gapped spine and plugged straight into
the wall next to a label reading Fountain-
head (after Duchamp).
I wrote that last sentence long before
discovering a 2008 work by American book
artist Robert The (surname pronounced
with a soft e) in which the kind of everyday
wooden stool on which Duchamp mounted
his found bicycle wheel now supports in-
stead another appropriated object: a hard-
bound monograph on the Dada master. 6
That volume’s only alteration as book object
is that, in a neo-Kafkaesque metamorphosis,
an oversize roach carved from its spine (fig.
2.1), and thus seemingly spawned by it, has
become (once nailed in place) an instance
of adjacent wall art—as if the found Du­
champian object is only the latest specimen
of a veritable species (fig. 2.2). Or is it that
the conceptual artist working in Duchamp’s
long shadow is always “bugged” by that
legacy? To be sure, such is the discourse of
readybound |    59
Figure 2.3.  Robert The,
Reader’s Digest (1998).
Courtesy of the artist.
60    |
art history that a major innovation, or even
a text about it, can multiply the afterlife of
its gesture.
Robert The’s other work is just as ex-
treme in its book alternations—and often
just as allusive. In his carving of pistol
shapes out of such found books as Bon-
nie Burnham’s The Art Crisis (see his Mc­
Luhan revolver, fig. 6.17, below), trigger and
cocking mechanisms make new use of the
thumb and index finger ordinarily used for
chapter two
reading. In what he stresses on his website
at bookdust.com as a “fusion of word and
form,” the signaled art crisis of the 2003
work is made apparent in its own medium.
Not nominally a weapon, but still a destruc-
tive tool, The’s 1998 “booksaw”—part of the
sculptural composite titled Reader’s Digest
(fig. 2.3)—has been cut from a high-design
trade book, its format iconically tall and
narrow, called Skyscrapers. Itself thus ex-
cerpted by angular damage, the jagged new
Figure 2.4.  Robert The, shape taken by this book now attacks in
Reader’s Digest (cake
book) (1998). Courtesy turn a set of six already “digested” books
of the artist.
in a further play on the violence of excision,
with telltale sawdust heaped at the scene
of the crime. A different “fusion of word
and form” makes for a related visual pun
in another of his works from the same year,
Reader’s Digest (cake book) (fig. 2.4)—one
that looks, from any reasonable distance,
like a hearty slice of white-frosted layer cake
(in some variants shown under a clear glass
cake-stand lid), and which turns out to be
instead a sawed-out triangular wedge sliced
from a two-volume hardback compendium
of, again, Reader’s Digest, the darker bind-
ings, highlighted against the shaved pages,
resembling thinner layers of equally indi-
gestible icing.
With an art-historical nod every bit as
explicit as The’s Duchamp installation, the
Dada innovator’s place as founder not just
of conceptualism but, indirectly, of concep-
tual book art (in the found-object mode) is
further canonized when David Hammons
appropriates Arturo Schwarz’s The Com-
plete Works of Marcel Duchamp and rebinds
it in leather to resemble a Bible, complete
with gilt edging, gold tooling, a ribbon place-
holder, and a slipcase. The only distance
taken from the master in this mock homage
is there in the datedness of the subtitle The
Holy Bible: Old Testament (Hand/Eye Proj-
ects, 2002). Yet these and other newer tes-
taments to Duchamp’s enduring influence
can often seem more supplements than re-
visions, their most baroque innovations al-
ready prefigured in a story gone before.
And beyond such installations and re-
“editions,” criticism other than Roberts’s
monolithic Marxist account helps fill in a
readybound |    61
picture that would situate the installed mu-
seum book in a line of conceptualist descent
from the found object. In Brian O’Doherty’s
sardonic commentary on the disembodied
blanched limbo of the high-modernist gal-
lery space as antiseptic “white cube,” he
quips that amid the minimal furnishings of
such rooms, “a standing ashtray becomes
almost a sacred object, just as the firehose
in a modern museum looks not like a fire-
hose but an aesthetic conundrum” (15).
Think of the Duchampian urinal itself if it
were rehung and tucked incognito around
a corner at the back of some cutting-edge
SoHo or Chelsea gallery, in New York or Lon-
don. There it might well be made to bear a
“Please Do Not Touch” sign (as it does now,
in fact, at the Tate Modern—or more to the
point, and all the more ironically, as does
a later copy by Duchamp of the lost “origi-
nal”). Better yet, one might affix to it a “Do
Not Flush” caveat. Or more apt yet, given
the meta-sculptural irony of gallery display,
“For Employee Use Only.” A routine plumb-
ing fixture takes a different form in another
book-work, by German-American sculp-
tor Helmut Löhr, in his 1989 installation
Faucet (fig. 2.5), where an everyday spigot
protrudes from a five-volume set of books
on science mounted on a tall pedestal. Out
of this unlikely tap drains a dangling book
spine as if it were the first flow of ideas, sev-
eral feet below which waits a pottery bowl
full of ashen paper debris. Water and fire
thus bracket (by material association) the
elemental givens upon which scientific in-
vestigations—as well as the ironies of plas-
tic art—go to work.
Figure 2.5.  Helmut Löhr, Faucet (1989). Courtesy of the artist.
But Duchamp’s original joke, it must cer-
tainly be said, is on its own terms decisive.
Much of its whimsy, as well as the comedy
of renaming, goes down the drain in the em-
phasis of Roberts’s account, where one is to
think not so much of the specific figurative
gap between urinal and fountain as of the
lag between the anonymous industrial labor
of the unnumbered copy and its manifesta-
tion as artifact (its pseudonymous signing
mostly incidental). It is thus the deep influ-
ence of Duchamp as verbal tactician—the
impact of his inscriptive supplements to the
readymade on the wide spectrum of concep-
tualist textwork and bookwork—that Rob-
erts’s brief for the materialist rather than
the nominalist Duchamp is bound to mini-
mize (and that our recourse to Bergson later
in this chapter should help not just to re­
instate but to link more tightly to the matrix
of industrial repetition itself).
AESTHETIC DETACHMENT:
THE URINAL UNPLUGGED
Roberts’s indifference to the semiotic water-
shed between urinal and its metaphoriza-
tion—and parody—as fountain may also ex-
plain a missed opportunity in his otherwise
exacting deployment of Marx. For Roberts
simply quotes as epigraph—without mak-
ing anything of its “excremental” vision in
connection with the avant-garde’s ultimate
canonical fixture of sewage removal—the
following generalization from Theories of
Surplus-Value: “Almost all articles of con-
sumption can re-enter the production pro-
cess as excrements of consumption, as for
example worn-out and half-rotten rags of
linen in the manufacture of paper” (21)—or,
for further example, the “pressing” of such
readybound |    63
 rag-stock paper into books. That we’ll return
to. For now, art at large can be imagined as
an excrescence of utility, the return of the
functional object as aestheticized thing, lay-
ing waste to use in its nonproductive isola-
tion rather than integrated autonomy. 7
Beyond the emphasis on deskilling, Rob-
erts’s strenuous case for Fountain is more
specific yet in its critique not just of mod-
ernism but of industrial modernity, having
to do in fact with the place of what one can
borrow from the discourse of conceptual art
to call “dematerialization” in Marx: the dis-
appearance of matter into the abstractions
of value. Duchamp’s lasting gesture, accord-
ing to Roberts, is to rehearse the Marxist
view of fetishizing in full public view. The
magical thinking that turns the industrial
product (as thing) into fetish object under
standard-issue commodification in the as-
sembly line of commercial wants and satis-
faction, that all but uncanny “metamorpho-
sis” stressed by Marx, is bluntly redoubled
in this case when the museum thing is unac-
countably and all but invisibly—though im-
manently—refetishized as art object. And in
turn implicitly recommodified in the mar-
ketplace of aesthetic ideas. Though Foun-
tain breaks the normal cycle of aesthetic
seduction, it does so only to explain its
fantasy more fully. Duchamp accomplishes
this by obtruding the commercially diverted
thing itself into gallery space, not as a can-
didate for admiration but as a goad to the
complacent norms of bourgeois subjectivity
and its aesthetic responses.
To intercept and sign the assembly-line
item, the endlessly duped copy, as if it were
a precision artifact, whose parody it thereby
becomes, certainly exposes the pretense
of aesthetic branding. But the irony goes
64    | chapter two
deeper. The “unassisted readymade” can
only be given as art, taken as art, by a mys-
tification that exposes—and visibly so, right
there before our eyes in its white magic—
the very nature of the commercial fetish at
large, exposes it all the way down and back
to commodity production itself. Rather than
pretending to transcend (or at least bracket)
the process of commodification to secure a
vision of the unalienated, art now for once
intervenes in the labor cycle from the bot-
tom up. The attempt to disappear the thing
itself under its entitlement as Fountain, so
comically absurd here, is, in short, the egre-
gious exception that proves the rule of mys-
tification in the ordinary transformation of
constructed thing into objet d’art.
This exposed fetishizing by the joint
process of minimalist negation plus in-
scription—yielding up the signed noncopy
of an infinite copy—is curiously reversed
by Duchamp himself, and with an altered
book at that, almost four decades after this
labeled but otherwise “unassisted” 1911
readymade—and only two decades away
from the upsurge of conceptualist textual-
ity and its bookwork derivatives. Displayed
most recently at MoMA in a gallery called
“Erotic Objects” (2009), this is an “altered”
book in which foam-rubber breasts, made
from a mold on display at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, were affixed, one each, by
Duchamp and his collaborator, Enrico Do-
nati, to 999 collector’s editions of the Surré-
alisme en 1947 catalog for the Galerie Maeght
in Paris. Along with the title on the spine,
these catalog copies bear a lone inscrip-
tion on the back cover: “Prière de Toucher”
(Please Touch). Extending in bookwork form
the bathroom humor of Duchamp’s original
toilet, here, protruding from each of those
haptic catalogs, is another and more primal
font—and again a fetish, this time to be fon-
dled with a bare minimum of displacement.
ART TASKS
As concerns the early and strictly indus-
trial readymade, Roberts’s Marxist reading
couldn’t be clearer. Impervious to the elit-
isms of skill, even of verbal ingenuity, Rob-
erts has no use for technique or its genius in
art, especially in the “dabbing, pushing and
smoothing of paint across a surface” (23).
This is because such craft—subjective, ex-
pressive, private—has only exchange value
in the art market, no use value, he thinks,
in social transformation. For this, it would
not be enough merely to spoil the fun of
looking, as conceptual art descended but
diverged from Duchamp in assuming; more
than that, for Roberts a genuinely political
art would have to turn consumers into mak-
ers, or at least a new kind of worker; more
too, it would have to disalienate the output
of social production by widening the space
for origination, revision, participation. This
is deskilling as a cleared space for collective
cognition and intellectual enterprise, lev-
eling the playing field—as renovated con-
ceptual workplace—between the unskilled
laborer and the latent aesthetic technician.
To do art, rather than to make it, is mainly
to think of things differently—not just (or
necessarily) to say so in one text-work after
another.
It is for this reason that Roberts sees
conceptual art carrying forward the Du-
champian challenge only up to a point. It
misses, he thinks, the socially empowering
drift of Duchamp’s founding animus against
the auratic in modernism. This was his re-
jection of genius and craft in the service of
turning the art viewer into the art user. 8 So
it is that Roberts’s title, The Intangibilities
of Form, can suggest, even in Duchamp’s
inaugural moment, a mass flight from the
manual. Art apotheosized at a far pole from
the factory in the aesthetic valuation of ex-
pertise and “touch”: this is the perennial
standard rejected in a new reach not just for
the conceptual but also, and more immedi-
ately, for the found and unmanipulated. The
decommodified object of exhibition, kept
from recommodification as labor-intensive
studio product, in turn keeps alienation not
exactly at bay but in continuous view as an
issue. Artwork need not be hard work: that
might be the motto. Not hard because nei-
ther enculted by intellectual nor elevated
to manual expertise. Nor, of course, hard
in the way industrial labor is. Just social
exercise.
The work of art after Duchamp, then, the
obligation that tasks it, is only to ask about
its own present possibility. In moving on to
the book-work as frequent instance, single or
composite, of the industrial readymade (or
its mock-up), a last return to Fountain can
help situate these much later derivations.
Put negatively, in response to Duchamp’s
original flouting of convention: “What’s the
matter with this as art?” The answer, by tra-
ditional standards of shaping and expertise:
“Nothing is the matter of its achievement.”
Its aesthetic objecthood floats free of its own
thingness. In that lies its “metamorphosis”
if not its dissimulation. (In that, too, is the
seed of its virtuality—and hence of its ulti-
mately electronic and web-worked progeny
for Roberts.) Though pushed to the point of
travesty, where alone its intervention would
have force, Duchamp’s  unassisted sculp-
readybound |    65
 ture is certainly the extreme case of an art
gesture wholly unhitched from questions
of medium or its specificities. So far from
merely falling between the cracks of one or
another material base, as Costello wants to
claim for a revisionist “conventionality” in
modernist and postmodernist practice, Du­
champ’s mass-produced mass drops off the
charts altogether. Nothing in the essence of
poured steel and cast ceramic—nothing in
this material substrate and surface treat-
ment—could constitute, delimit, or manifest
the art of this anointed urinal. None of this,
this stuff, could make it the world-historical
and ferociously unskilled masterpiece—or
at least innovative masterstroke—that it is.
Nor anything in its suspended flow of liq-
uids under the title Fountain. If this is art,
it must be entirely despite its medium (its
noncommunicative materiality) as indus-
trial fashioning—let alone the liquid me-
dium of its flow if reinstalled as conduit.
Demediated twice over, then, its vaunt is
nothing less—as Roberts might have put it,
but doesn’t—than to exile medium-specificity
altogether in favor of, as his title does have
it, the “intangibility” of its aesthetic claims.
And precisely as an assault on formal cri-
teria. Intangible, but still—as idea—well
within the grasp of an engaged and irrev-
erent public mind.9 If this is an artwork,
the collective spectator has ultimately to
ask, Where’s the work? Right there in your
question: generated not in the studio but
on-site—even when, in the long pedigree
of deskilling, that site has lately become
hypermediated, networked, and more fully
communal. In Duchamp’s instance—with a
product of unskilled labor further deskilled
as aesthetic artifact by unabashed borrow-
ing rather than so-called “assistance,” let
66    | chapter two
alone craft—where, one asks again, is the
effort? With art like this, the viewer, as co-
worker, must in every sense make it.10
Energizing as this may sound, the im-
material labor of conceptualism can also
be demediated to the point of deliberate
send-up—so “intangible” as to be invisible.
In a delicious limit case for the nonmanual
and the deskilled (as well as a raw provo-
cation to any sense of art’s completion by
the spectator; and furthermore as the found
object par excellence), the very premise of a
Rezeptionsästhetik meets its ultimate trav-
esty in the user-based immaterial value of
Tom Friedman’s epic nonentity One Thou-
sand Hours of Staring (1992–97). This is just
a blank piece of paper—writing paper or
drawing paper, it couldn’t matter which—
to whose surface the artist claims to have
given over such a huge measure of his blank
and traceless attention; and to whose ex-
panse we now, however briefly, can only
respond in kind; and which, short of this
further investment, we can only value for
the artist’s conceptual input apart from its
nonexistent graphic output: sheer immate-
rial labor value.
THE DESISTED BOOK
Idiom carries, as usual, an open secret—and
in this case the trace of historical priority.
For the modern book or newspaper is, in
the main, the only assembly-line product
we ask for “a copy of.” I’ve gone over the
ground so rigorously tilled by Roberts in or-
der to unearth there the unspoken (or, as
we’ll see, almost unspoken) role of the book,
along with other industrial duplicates, in the
distancing of aesthetic mediation from the
individuations of skill: not only the book as
multisite conduit of privately disseminated
knowledge but the book as infinitely dupli-
cable icon of bourgeois subjectivity. This is
the mass-made thing (en masse and by the
working masses) regularly buried under its
exchange value as product and its use value
as object. But exhumed as thing—through
its sudden illegibility—by artistic disuse. It
is there that the dead letter can, if only by
negation, be read in its cultural message as
an encased and prototypical, but now in-
creasingly dated, humanist repository. In
drawing this out via Duchamp’s 1917 chef
d’oeuvre, our evidence in this chapter has
so far been complementary rather than
analogous. Whether the book-work retains
a title on its spine or not, the urinal as “floor
model” needs one on the wall into which its
valves are no longer functionally inserted.
Our contrast of pre- and post-conceptualist
readymades highlights in this way their op-
posite as much as their comparable creden-
tials for museum display: the urinal must
be texted to become objet; the book must be
detexted. But in neither case is the status of
its objecthood easy to plumb.
In contrast with a urinal otherwise an-
nounced (and anointed) by title as a non­
articulated (because found and “unas-
sisted”) sculptural mass, the readymade
book-work is a disarticulated one, even if
it is not sawed or bent or reassembled. In
becoming thing, it desists as textual object.
Its pages can’t be turned nor its words mobi-
lized. As early modern culture’s first multiple
copy, partly mechanical at base, the gallery-
shown codex lifted from real-world circula-
tion (or fabricated in resemblance to a cred-
ible volume) thus locates itself within that
double lineage from Duchamp we have tried
keeping in view. This inheritance lies both
in the evoked production line that deposits
the book as residue within gallery space, the
mass object as either debris or gilded lily,
and in the associated “bookish” discourse
implicitly drawn on to reframe it as aesthetic
object. The book thing must enter, in short,
the Text of aesthetics and of social praxis
alike.
But not without irony or resistance in
respect to any canonization there. Kosuth,
in a Duchampian spirit, quotes fellow early
conceptualist Carl Andre to the following
and implicitly resistant effect: “Art is what
we do. Culture is what is done to us” (70).
Certainly the object that most pervasively
does culture to us, imposes or instills it,
or at least did for most of modernity, is the
bound print text.11 In the book-work, art is
what we do back to culture, demediating
the very apparatuses of social transmission
and thus laying bare its instrumental as-
sumptions, all so as to make those assump-
tions—rather than any specific case of re-
ceived knowledge—newly legible. What the
unassisted readymade first did to puncture
and deflate the premises of high culture, the
book-work does to concentrate and entomb
them. Jean-François Lyotard’s foreword to
Kosuth’s collected essays offers in this re-
spect a tempting analogue when he stresses
the way Kosuth exposes “medium” as a un-
stable difference between “text” and “paint-
ing.” So that if Kosuth “gives” to the fact of
words, gives back to them, “the thickness
that is theirs,” however “immaterial,” and
however much “forgotten in the reading of
the printed word,” a comparable motivation
explains many subsequent book-works: to
demediate usage in a return to the native
“thickness” of its (this time quite material)
conveyance.12
readybound |    67
 Nothing could be more material than the
case of a fifty-pound urinal. As appliance
reapplied in a new context, it cannot be
called in any sense “dematerialized” (Lucy
R. Lippard’s influential term for conceptual
art). But the discussion doesn’t end there.
13
Duchamp’s venture, so we’ve seen, is to put
forward a mere thing as the working—with-
out the work—of art. His is the Benjamin-
ian mechanical copy with no aura to begin
with, the industrial replicant offered up as
the contradictory stuff of automatic sculp-
ture. In this elevation of thing to deskilled
object, found as copy rather than fashioned
as artifact, there is a cleansing (almost hy-
gienic scouring) of aesthetic semiosis, of
message and of representation both, so that
the only signifiers left are those of the fake
moniker and the mock-aggrandizing title. It
is in this respect especially that Duchamp’s
copy, as new model for the “intangibility” of
art as immaterial practice, has helped us so
far in orienting the later readymade book-
work—copy of a copy, material instance per
se—within the formulations, from the last
chapter, of (1) case study together with (2)
thing theory under the sign of (3) a mostly
elided mediation. In more art-historical de-
tail, it is now time to see the book-work’s
conceptualist gesture in the round.
TEXTUALITY BY OTHER MEANS
What bookwork does, we may say, is to
rematerialize the textwork of conceptual
art—grossly remanifest, that is, its struc-
tural support—in the bulk prevention of the
linguistic medium itself. Would it be fair to
add, therefore, that the unreadable book-
work, as abandoned tabernacle of literacy,
offers an extreme “case” of textual format-
68    | chapter two
ting (in other words, a strategic instance
of codex culture)—or just its negation? Or
both? If Jeff Wall, for all the technical care
of his canvas-scale pictorialism, may be
imagined (combining Roberts’s terms with
those of Costello in the previous chapter) to
instance the deskilling of painting, or Ger-
hard Richter the complementary reskilling
of photographic documentation—in each
case picturing by new hybrid means—then
book-works, deskilled in any literary and
often any sculptural sense, detached from
all informational or fictive use, may again
be said, paraphrasing Richter’s formulation,
to offer textuality by other means. In them,
that is, the canonical vessel of cultural
transfer, building block of all mediation, has
instead turned simply blockish, foursquare,
and mute—though no less decipherable for
that, at least at the level of concept. As to
what makes this “sort of thing” anything
approaching to a case of art, the obvious
question is this: What is such a thing put
there to say in its overt discursive silence?
The unreadable and thus generalized
book, almost the citational or Platonic copy
of a primal industrial copy, is not just the
site of a frequent metonymy for some spe-
cific content—as when a Debord-wrapped
construction brick seems poised as a pun
not only on weightiness but, cross-lingually,
on the assisted readymade of nonspectacu-
lar bricolage. Beyond such overdetermined
cases, the desisted readymade of a dis-
tressed or disused volume is the site where
one finds sampled—under material duress
or at least linguistic arrest—art’s doing unto
culture as culture does unto us. Or at least
speaking silently back. Whether a voided
text or a faux one—mangled or mocked,
disassembled or merely dissembled, once
legible or never—the book-work enrolls its
aesthetic anomaly as sculptural surrogate
in the very Book of Art. (Indeed, an inspired
art book—parodic and simulacral, and
this from an art critic himself, O’Doherty
again—awaits us shortly to prove this point,
once the canonical and evolutionary post-
war art history to which it alludes has been
more fully laid out.) In the closed circuit
of disuse if not outright abuse, the vitiated
circle is hard to miss. Put another way, the
hacked-up or trumped-up book-work, as
well as the merely found and deposited one,
wins its unique privilege among readymades
because its nomination as art per se, as the
ironic transfiguration of the industrial copy,
is continuous with that same archive of cul-
ture its own form brings to denatured view
as thing rather than a discursive object.
From which perspective it begins to seem
just as odd to throw a book-signing party as
it does to sign off on a toilet bowl. Neither
object is an original.
THE FACT OF THE MATTER
Again nomination—reminding us of an im-
portant fork in the long Duchampian road
between the found object and its lettered
and titled incarnation, the readymade textu-
ally assisted after all. As in Lippard’s earlier
account of conceptualism, Liz Kotz’s recent
emphasis in her survey of the movement
falls on art’s detachment “from any con-
crete, material condition.”14 Just this is what
was promulgated by Kosuth and others in
moving beyond the “contingency” of form
(rather than its inherence or “autonomy,”
in Johanna Drucker’s coming terms) to a
privileging of the ideas behind such form,
the aesthetic “information” instead (186).
But in allusion to Mel Bochner’s Language
Is Not Transparent from 1970 (his blurred
overprinting of just those words as case in
point)—taking it, as Kotz does, for a prob-
able riposte to Kosuth—she glances in pass-
ing at a tendency, and a tension, there from
the beginning in conceptualist textwork
(186). We need to bear down on this until it
releases its further tacit distinctions.
On the one side, conceptual art arose to
break the untheorized stranglehold of mate-
rial specificity in the arts. It is said, often
literally said, that making and representa-
tion each begin in concepts that don’t in ef-
fect, and that won’t now in fact, disappear in
the frisson of spectatorship as we stand im-
mersed in the realization of a given medium.
These concepts need repeatedly to be enun-
ciated. But as soon as words hit the wall, in
photostat or stenciling, and as early as the
work of Lawrence Weiner, Kosuth, and oth-
ers, their own forms become newly visible
as graphic shapes, geometric and enjambed.
Materialization aside, art at base is idea, but
then again ideas come to us under the rep-
resentational sway of words, which, when
written, involve their own “contingencies”
of scale, lineation, spacing, morphology, syl-
labification, and the rest, to say nothing of
font, pitch, color.
Even before locating the book-work
firmly if obliquely within this field of con-
ceptualist texting, a tripartite distinction
therefore needs raising and keeping. In the
usual case there is, first of all, a medium,
pictorial or sculptural, as in oil or granite
or bronze. Over art-historical time, such a
medium may well undergo its postmodern
“dematerialization” into whatever might be
left—say, its executive idea: usually in the
form of mere language, sometimes real-
readybound |    69
 ized on a mostly blank sheet. But in other
cases, beyond the bracketing of the material
base, there is also a partial or occasionally
total “demediation” of some original semio-
sis. This is the case, for instance, when the
symbolic and hence functionally abstract
conveyance of wording in a given text form
is re-rematerialized and enlarged as sheer
graphic marking so as to impede its own au-
tomatic delivery system as inscribed verbal
object. Conceptual art plays between these
two mutually entailed extremes around the
double axis of the medial and the material.
And in that special case of neo-conceptual
practice isolated in the book-work, deme-
diation is the method (not the precondition,
but rather the action) by which work in one
medium (sculpture mostly, if you can call it
that) negates the inherent medial function
of the object it cites or represents, finds or
refashions—leaving behind only the fact
of its matter, no longer its means. It’s this
sketchy paraphrase of demediation that the
next chapter is aimed at rounding out.
Though stressed as such in the title of
Robert C. Morgan’s Art into Ideas, concep-
tualist textwork doesn’t amount simply to
the abstraction of material form into trans-
missible concept. Such practice can also,
15
in staging a confrontation of these two cog-
nitive fields, plastic and grammatical, con-
vert the latter into the former as a graphic
rhythm all its own. Or, in bookwork, a con-
centrated graphic form. In such experi-
ments—perhaps the most fully sculptural
mode of neo-conceptual text art, even in-
cluding neon writing—what gets canceled
in three rather than just two dimensions is
not so much materiality as subject matter.
In the case of such mute books, the layered
information interleaved by text is subor-
70    | chapter two
dinated one level up to a mass-produced
and strictly geometric “volume” and its
machine-cut commercial formats.
In view of this, there is a further art-
historical turn to the book-work’s place
in contemporary gallery culture. One re-
calls Michael Fried’s famous brief, in “Art
and Objecthood,” for the integrated com-
plexity of the single sculptural form over
against the distributive spatial composites
of a staged scene of shapes, minimalist
and literal—and recalls in turn Diarmuid
Costello’s resistance, in the last chapter,
to identifying this as a medium-specific
preference.16 For Costello, Fried’s requisite
integration of elements into compositional
harmony might well, in another manifesta-
tion, involve a hybridization of and between
media within the evolving conditions of
this same formalist dictate—as long as this
mixed mode carries renewed conviction as
advancing the case of (and for) the intrinsic
synchronic complexity and “presentness”
of modernist sculpture. In museum space,
that is, the manifold book form—reduced
by enforced closure and illegibility to a kind
of minimalist, atemporal thing without the
programmed durational rhythm of “reading
time”—has reached a lower limit of visual
efficacy. From out of this reduction, it can
operate with conviction as conceptualist
sculpture only by evoking under wraps the
differential infrastructure and instrumental
complexity (the internal moving parts, as it
were) that lie latent within its demediation
as textual object.
As to the wraps that such reading is un-
der, they can be oppressive, crushing, even
monumentally nugatory. A mixed-media art-
ist devoted repeatedly to stressing the ma-
teriality rather than the linguistic texture
Figure 2.6.  Jonathan of the experienced book, British conceptual
Callan, Mass (2003).
Silicone rubber and sculptor Jonathan Callan has a number of
paper. Courtesy of
the artist. eponymous book pieces that involve illeg-
ible pages swollen with inflated silicone im-
plants meant to denaturalize entirely the
disembodied textual experience—includ-
ing one from 2003 in alteration of a book
called Britain by Mass Observation (fig. 2.6).
Or there is his 2007 work Library of Past
Choices, in which damaged books squashed
in tubular bales are mounded on the floor
like the aftermath of a textual harvest. In
2002, in a somewhat different vein, he gives
us a book—we can only trust him on this,
since as a found object it’s entirely lost to
textual view—titled Rational Snow (plate 6).
Its constrained pages are spread wide—not
really spread open in any other sense—and
surmounted, literally blocked off from read-
ing, by a large solid rectangle of the kind
of “aerated” concrete used as construc-
tion material. If this solidified downfall of
flecked matter, this stone-gray denatured
snow, has gone geometric and rock solid,
readybound |    71
 that seems precisely its way of rationalizing
the floor plan of the book itself—even while
evacuating it of access and affect, turning
its linguistic abstractions mockingly con-
crete. Far from the granite or marble of tra-
ditional sculpture, from which the codex
form might be chiseled into release, instead
we find the airspace of reading occluded
by a cement prevention. It’s as if, depart-
ing from the manner of Rachel Whiteread’s
negative sculpture discussed in chapter 5,
her anarchives of absence, we get (at one
and the same time) the blank mold and the
trapped wings of the open book itself, in a
claustrophobic pun on sheer volume. The
breathing space of reading is at once delim-
ited and obliterated.
Here is a minimalist case of the assisted
readybound: the book left intact but, like the
urinal as fountain, stopped from all inher-
ent motion. Anomalous as object, the case
is not atypical. Just as Fried’s 1960s critique
develops out of a periodized view, over art-
historical time, of the interplay between
absorptive versus histrionic formats in
painting, so does the book-work as postmin-
imalist sculpture know its true place within
a far longer history of three-dimensional
imaging, readymade or otherwise (and this
well before one attempts inserting it into
Régis Debray’s vaster “mediology” yet of
vision per se). We have considered in some
detail the Marxist address by John Roberts
to the “new Duchamp scholarship.” The
purpose has been to take the full measure
of his study’s departure from the “nomi-
nalism” (urinal simply renamed sculptural
art) valorized most notably by Thierry de
Duve—and degenerated, as Roberts sees
it, into the too exclusively linguistic turn
of conceptual practice.17 In view of his cri-
72    | chapter two
tique, conceptual art might be seen as a re-
newed nominalism gone rampant in sheer
statements, labels, and verbal extracts.18
In the movement’s own terms, if art exists
in idea, then it can reach articulation in
thought’s natural medium of language—but
a language itself estranged in the process,
made as much visual as propositional. What
ordinarily goes unspoken can be inscribed
as cause to its own new optical effect. Such
art is in fact often found naming as much as
instancing its appeal to the eye by passing
directly into its claims on aesthetic assump-
tions and judgments. But conceptual work
in this vein—and bookwork’s later place in
its cultural intervention, as I hope has al-
ready grown clear—can be understood at
the same time, pace Roberts, as descending,
within the general temper of deskilling (or
even defacing), from the materialist (rather
than the strictly nominalist) valence of
Duchamp’s Fountain. This is because one
way of tracing the genealogy of conceptual
art from the Duchampian readymade is to
grasp language itself in its recognized pub-
lic shapes—whether in photostatic diction-
ary negatives (Kosuth) or stenciled acrylic
capitals (Weiner)—as in its own way a found
object. Given Roberts’s dismissive sense of
the cerebral and gradually less collectivist
energies of the conceptual art movement, it
is all the more crucial to note how the cited
“findings” of text art and the appropriated
objects of the bookwork assemblage can
together be tracked as sometimes parallel,
sometimes convergent, paths across the ter-
rain of post-1960s experiment.
To this end, too, a point under consider-
ation in the previous chapter also returns
here in its further pertinence to the book-
work. On the score of immanence versus
materiality, idea versus its physical sup-
port, we’ve put into play Genette’s distinc-
tion, for literary experience, between reci-
tation and/or its inscriptive base and, one
level up, the resulting immanence of the
text as such. The latter is that condition
of textuality present to us above and be-
yond—if not apart from—its paper support
or its vocal conveyance, either one. In the
blocked verbal communication of the anti-
book, however, the only immanence is coin-
cident with the book shape’s own material
form. Its neo-conceptual gambit is thus to
foreground by negation all that illegibility
itself leaches from a book, the textual im-
manence it denies manifestation. Just as
with conceptual painting, demediation is a
rudimentary spoiler. Any immanent picture
or image (sine qua non of a painterly me-
dium) may find itself surrendered to its in-
scribed presuppositions, which limn in turn,
and in absentia, the picturehood of painting
in the straitened visibilities of its mere an-
notation. And even with the most obviously
graphic and visually complex of conceptual-
ist wall-work, like the geometric “murals”
of Sol LeWitt in their iterative diagrammatic
templates, the concept is manifest in, rather
than transmuted by, the percept. As early
as 1967, LeWitt theorized the conceptualist
movement as involved in a direct reversal
of normal procedures, whereby an aesthetic
premise can readily find itself altered in and
by execution.19 With art of the Concept, in-
stead, execution is a “perfunctory affair”
in which the procedures, once schematized
and carried out, even though visual in the
result, operate “blindly.”. Leaving the priori-
ties of skill behind, “the idea becomes the
machine that makes the art” (32). The ate-
lier is retooled as a conceptual lab.
FROM STUDIO TO STUDY:
CONCEPTUALISM’S
BIBLIOGRAPHIC TURN
From her vantage a full decade further on
into the 1970s, Lucy Lippard glances back
on the ascendency of the book in conceptual
art, volumes by LeWitt included, with an
idiomatic metaphor of semiotic processing:
“By 1966, if you were reading the signs, you
noticed that the book was a coming thing.”20
In the uncited spirit of Brian O’Doherty’s
comment about transforming the looking
space of the museum into a “reading room,”
Lippard notes how the book object had be-
come the natural extension of an ideational
aesthetic that subordinates execution to
conception. In this way, it joins in the proj-
ect of transforming the artist’s studio into
a site of more deliberative “study”21: a place
of speculation, research, commentary, or in
other words of theory and its prosecuted
reflections. Far from the skilled and prac-
ticed étude of representational painting,
what elicits conceptualist depiction, under
such study, are the motives and results of
aesthetic thinking in the abstract. These are
anything but expressive and subjective, let
alone necessarily pictorial. Rather, the re-
sults of such thinking—in book-works as
well as text-works—are manifest in gallery
space as an engagement (for the challenged
viewer as well) with the social impulses and
ends of transmission, of image and word
alike, or again with “mediology.”
Much depends, in the intervening years
to follow, on what kind of object the unread-
able book would purport to be: optical data
transcript, contingent readymade, or, most
often, reductive sculptural form. Here Rosa-
lind Krauss’s much-cited essay on the “ex-
readybound |    73
 panded field” of postmodern sculpture can
be of indirect use in an arena of contempo-
raneous objects quite different from those
with which she is concerned.22 Applying the
logical methodology of the semiotic square
to her aesthetic limit cases, Krauss locates
the founding binary contrast of “landscape”
vs. “architecture” over against its received
neuter term in the neither/nor of “sculp-
ture.” This offers a further logical spur to
the unfolding set of dichotomies that gen-
erates the “complex” (both/and) term—
pitched positively rather than negatively,
and thus a postmodern breakthrough—
between the founding dichotomy: namely,
the paradoxically built landscape of “site-
construction” (in works like those of Robert
Smithson or Gordon Matta-Clark).
But in attempting to orient book sculp-
ture within the “expanded field” of the
linguistic turn during this same postmod-
ern moment, one finds that its place in the
“given” category of sculpture is hardly axi-
omatic. If the traditional shaped labor of
sculpture is defined negatively against the
natural and the architectonic alike, then
book sculpture installs a further negation:
the obviating of text’s essential legibility.
Both the “double negative” as well as the
“complex” term in the fourfold logical sys-
tem must be freshly generated rather than
taken as given when such work is to be situ-
ated, as it were, squarely within the bear-
ings of conceptual practice. A distinction
formerly dear to aesthetic taxonomy, that
between verbal and visual art, would in this
sense (in another quadratic formulation)
offer the conventional binary of plastic vs.
poetic form within a grid of its fuller logi-
cal determinations. The plastic object that is
not linguistic: painting, sculpture. The lin-
74    | chapter two
guistic incident that is not a plastic artifact:
text. But the “complex” term (both/and)
linking the two would be the unexpected
new thing that is both plastic and linguis-
tic at the same time, visual and verbal: the
conceptual text-work or lexigraph, at once a
unit of discursivity and “an art piece.” Such
is a specialized version of the conjoined
“imagetext” (in W. J. T. Mitchell’s general
portmanteau term) whose conceptual work,
we might say, is precisely not to achieve vi-
sual mediation but, rather, to make media-
tion visible, to intercede in it rather than to
succeed at it. By contrast, in the bottom sec-
tor of this logical squaring off, the fourth or
neuter term, derived by double negation,
would be a mode of production neither clas-
sically plastic nor verbal, neither sculptural
exactly not textual either. Here we find the
denatured book-work: textual instrument
stripped of linguistic function but haunted
by it like a phantom limb of verbal purpose.
Once having resolved a polarity between
the verbal and the visual, the complex term
(mediality made manifest) thereby points
to its neutral counterpart in the conceptual
space of demediation.
Works of canceled textuality like this
persist, of course, alongside the subsequent
“digital turn” of interactive video art. And it
is this other and later work that is theorized
most powerfully as a return of the body to
art’s experience: not the immaterial labor of
analytic engagement but the somatic entail-
ments of wired response. 23 It is precisely in
light of this, or say in the shadow of such
electronic involvement, that a certain his-
torical irony dawns. At times cohabiting in
display space with these new media proj-
ects—in their aesthetic detachment from
the everyday commerce of global commu-
nications—the neither/nor of the illegible
text object frustrates its own natural (un-
plugged) use, its centuries-old implemen-
tation. Well over half a millennium before
hypertext, that is, writing in book form was
the first interactive medium. The bodily
investment and intimacy of paged-turned
reading is thus deliberately sold short, only
to be recouped at a level of conceptual ab-
straction, by the disuse or simulation of the
book form under the protocols of museum
display. This “neutered” zone of sculptoid
bookwork executes not just a repression
of text but an arrest of the reading body.
Standing before the unpaginated codex
evocation conveyed by installed objects in
this mode, readers reduced to spectators
are wholly curtailed in their access to the
heft and grain of pages, their hands all but
literally tied—as if with the docent’s former
cordon in the exhibition of traditional sculp-
ture. So that the blocked tactility of textual
activation is deflected onto the merely her-
meneutic rather than haptic interactivity of
reaction itself.
TOWARD A POETICS OF THE
“REMAINDERED BOOK”
Often far more reductive (or damaged) in
their materiality than Lippard’s late 1960s
“artist’s books,” still the contemporary book-
work needs to be seen against the backdrop
of this early postmodernist enterprise, es-
pecially once we have filled in the history of
what can more broadly be called the fine art
of the book. In distinguishing the primary
kinds of art(ist) books that precede both the
flagrantly altered and the blandly appropri-
ated volumes of current practice, one can
designate them, in historical order of their
emergence, approximately as follows: first,
the canonical livre d’artiste, where—as the
genitive suggests—a painter takes posses-
sion of the page, whether, like Blake, in self-
collaboration, or elsewhere in “illustration”
of another’s words (and however limited the
print run might be of such editions de luxe).
Second, gathering momentum in the mid-
1960s in ways that Lippard later looks back
on, there are the bound forms—sometimes
in anonymous and nondescript binders—of
conceptualist seriality (graphic, linguistic,
and numerical by turns) under the aegis of
impersonal duplication rather than expres-
sive gesture. And third, flourishing since
then along with the rise of the more inherent
and implacable materialism asserted by the
found or altered volume of recent decades, is
the artisanal book of mostly “foreign” rather
than print matter, with its deft interleaving
of twine and twigs and fabric and metal,
everything from grass to Plexiglas—all of it
sheaved and collaged together into expansive
codex formats of unnumbered page shapes,
some worded, most not. In their insistent
bibliographic tactility, such works are all
sensuous texture rather than text, let alone
conceptual metatext.
In the transition from the mixed medium
of the painter’s book to the hybrid materi-
ality of these more craft-like forms, from
the brushwork of lettering and marginalia
to the stitched mesh of discrepant matter
that unfolds from the often-strained spines
of certain tactile assemblages, a familiar
historical anxiety lurks unannounced. For
many of these latter-day, lavishly handmade
works can well seem to exaggerate, at times
almost nostalgically, the cellulose basis of
the traditional codex, including even its
dated mystique of pressed petals. What we
readybound |    75
 get is a new vegetal composite of aberrant
fibers, tendrils, and bark-like binding. As
the hypertrophic antithesis of disembodied
e-books, these crafted volumes appear in
their own right—along with the theoretical
but equally wordless book-works fashioned
during the same years by neo-conceptual
rather than artisanal practice—to be invit-
ing a tacit dialogue, as “sculptural” one-offs
in a sometimes organic mode, with the nor-
mal book’s mass processing of industrial
lumber. And its potentially numbered days.
A clarifying side note. Beyond the novel
titles carved in logs I once saw by Allen Rup-
persberg in an installation at MCA Chicago,
with their unspoken joke on “pulp fiction,”
another kind of arboreal contrast can throw
into relief the wood-based fabrications of
so many textured artisanal volumes, with
their hempen densities of page and jack-
eting, their fully haptic immanence. Ann
Christopher—curating one of the largest
rooms in London’s Royal Academy of Arts
Summer Exhibition, whose 2009 theme was
“Making Space”—writes in a gallery card
that a sculpture of “book and wood” by Bill
Woodrow “invades the space with branch-
like forms that impale a book and make its
pages bleed.” Since the stains are brown
rather than red, the appropriated book can
just as easily be seen as having sprouted,
tightly leaved, from the outcropping boughs
of an unseen trunk, whose still-fresh sap
streaks the cover as it waits—thrust on frail
branches into alien space—to open litera-
cy’s other space. Waits forever—always, as
book-work, to remain untested, its pages un-
cut, unturned, its so-called fruit untasted.
Free association, of course—which is what
the troping of such bookwork, as we know,
regularly solicits.
76    | chapter two
But I return from instance to history.
Apart from any backstory of deforestation
and milling that lends a nervous ecological
edge, if not an outright irony, to certain ar-
tisanal volumes and figurative book-works
alike, a longer genealogy of the mixed-media
limited edition helps sharpen our focus on
the more recent phenomenon of demediated
rather than simply wordless books. Picasso
and Matisse each saw the force of draw-
ing behind all writing, stroke before code,
and—with their alphabetic fillips as well
as their colonization of the textual plane
by painterly image—helped raise the livre
d’artiste to international prominence. But
when postwar painting turned away from
technique into an aesthetic of deskilling,
the artist’s book could only follow suit into
more abstract and unpredictable configura-
tions of the page. Books were increasingly
enlisted in league with the anti-subjectivist
reductions of conceptual textwork in its
wall-hung or wall-sprayed forms: inscrip-
tive patterns at their least imagistic in the
numerical permutations, for instance, of
Hanne Darboven or On Kawara. Indeed art-
ists of the late 1960s, as Lippard reminds us,
were known to “open” their shows in the
“no-space” of mere publication.24 This bibli-
ographic turn, if you will, in the early stages
of conceptualism took the form of stacking
together page-size versions of nonpictorial
coverage, even mere ciphering, into the pro-
totypical sequencing of a codex form—and
often in the further form of photocopied
multiples, thus confronting head-on, rather
than attempting to transcend, what Baudril-
lard would come to reiterate so often as the
“xerox degree” of culture. The serial rather
than originary aesthetic of conceptualism
had found a cognate armature in the pagi-
nated book. And since these volumes were
at least as anomalous in gallery space, when
on temporary deposit there, as any other
strictly textualist visualization, any other
such retinal stringency, they amounted
to an almost punning reduction of artist’s
hand to aesthetic production manual.
The anti-pictorial backlash is clear on
both axes at once, vertical as well as hori-
zontal, walls and tabletops alike. Just as
text­work canvases, enlarged photostats, and
sans-serif wall stenciling suddenly seemed
all that remained after traditional easel
painting and murals had been extradited
from many a gallery, so were those black-
bound dossiers of mechanical or even scrip-
tive performance stationed as the deliber-
ate antithesis to the privileged technique of
the livre d’artiste, with its former painterly
lettering and interpolated drawing. In offer-
ing up the notations, doodles, graphs, nu-
meric print rows, or recursive script of such
pages—their columns and grids and sche-
mata—as a graphic as much as a textual
phenomenon, these loose-leaf or sometimes
sewn volumes become museum “pieces” in
their own right (as, early on, in the pedestal-
displayed notebooks of Mel Bochner). In ef-
fect, they declare themselves as the portable
research archive of the surrounding display
of framed or sprayed inscriptions. 25
Such
conceptualized “artist’s books” may well
seem to repeat in their three-dimensional
stacking the enforced confluence of see-
ing and reading as linked ocular functions.
Or they may appear to reduce each to the
abyss of sheer repetition without informa-
tion, epistemologically as well as aestheti-
cally bereft, as in Robert Barry’s twenty-
five anti-encyclopedic bound volumes of
closely printed periods, no grammar to go
with them—all staccato punctuation with-
out data—under the deadpan title One Bil-
lion Colored Dots. 26 In conceptual practice,
that is, books are produced as the inevitable
extension and compaction, as serial objects,
of the modularity and structural repetition
that characterizes the mode’s overall regi-
men. Studio turned study, yes, but also now
and then gallery as bureau—with its own
informational filing system, all drawers at
times rather than drawings (as in Index 01,
displayed at the Documenta show in 1972 by
Art & Language). Even with such documen-
tation often revolving in turn around the
commercial bureaucracies of institutional
art display, installations of this sort com-
pel an experience no less visual than ver-
bal, whatever their new ocular constraints.
And no less embedded in a longer art his-
tory of the resisted image in its merely facile
appeals.
PAINTING’S RETINAL
DIALECTIC AND THE
BOOK FORM
Only more recently does the galleried book
object, where no leafing through is possible,
take on sculptural pretensions of its own in
the altered or composite book-work. In iso-
lating this genre, we therefore still want to
know how previous modal shifts (as well as
cultural mood swings) in the development
of the museum book—or its retail equiva-
lent in the deluxe edition, however ironized
in turn by the conceptualist art book—can
be more broadly related to the evolving
retinal dispensations of art’s modern, then
modernist, then postmodern transforma-
tions. Thomas Crow reminds us that the
conceptual movement’s departure from the
readybound |    77
 painterly tradition—not from pictorialism
directly, of course, which had already been
decimated by abstract expressionism, but
from the whole “idea” of a medium-specific
visuality and its expressive charge—was
not in its broadest outlines at all new. For
27
Crow, conceptual art emerges out of a fa-
miliar and reversible counterswing in art
history, and specifically in canvas art, be-
tween the intellectual and the sensual, the
thematic and the ocular, ideation and vision,
or, in one of its more canonical variants, ac-
ademicism and optical indulgence.
The seesaw of cultural authority is sel-
dom found resting at its balance point for
long, even within more sustained general
trends. In recoil from all that painterly
paint in Greenbergian modernism, concep-
tual art simply pushes a recognized dialec-
tical swerve to a new level of abstraction.
After the stranglehold of the programmatic
picture under the rule of academic painting
down through the middle of the nineteenth
century, with its emphasis on scriptural,
philosophic, or historical determinations
rather than mere visual allure, representa-
tional art tried breaking loose into an aes-
thetic of the visual “impression” (rather
than the historical or genre pre-text). This
is a reaction formation countered again, one
might note, within a narrower historical arc
(a briefer loop of foil and counterfoil), by the
yet more rationalized optics of cubism—and
then overthrown in turn by the abstract
color fields and all-over gestures of postwar
expressionism, where nonrepresentational
surfaces had defeated figure altogether
(and hence all previous intellectualizing
of figuration’s iconographic tableaux, let
alone of their technique). From there, and
under a delayed influence from Duchamp’s
78    | chapter two
counter-cubist deskilling, painting incurred
the return, one level up, to a new brand of
academicism—anti-scenic now but no less
philosophical and theoretical—in the coun-
tersubjective bias of conceptual art, with its
promotion not just of idea over treatment
but of medial premise over scopic pleasure.
Concept and percept are now imploded
upon each other rather than just fused in an
alert and intellectually inflected reception of
stroked surface.
And it is not only canvas art that takes
up this anti-imagistic initiative. Minimalist
sculpture has its own complex generic rela-
tion to the painting tradition and, beyond
that, to the emergent volumetrics of the
book form. The insistent objecthood of the
sculptural shape is caught up in its own ma-
terial as well as retinal dialectic that comes
to reject the “theater” of exhibition (again
Michael Fried’s critique of the minimalist
object on “display”) in favor of a more par-
ticipatory decipherment of the no-longer
“literal” object as instead derived, and pro-
gressively diversified, from an implied ma-
trix of rational configuration (think of Sol
LeWitt’s multiplied and interlocked sculp-
tural forms). 28 Spatial dramaturgy is sup-
planted by graphic and abstract seriality,
modeled ideas rather than temporal spec-
tacle. Looking becomes a new kind of de-
coding, of mobile reading. And, in the case
of 3-D art in this postminimal vein, books
are as good a place as any for that call to
decipherment, even with no words on view.
In order of ascendancy and reversion
from this point forward in the career of
the illegible museum book, then: whereas
the early conceptualist volume once moved
to transliterate an already sign-saturated
world, from the 1980s on the rise of the arti-
sanal (rather than theoretic) book has sud-
denly swung the other way to incorporate
the world’s objects, especially its natural
textures, not as signs but as material tokens,
pastiching in and braiding together the out-
side of signification from the collaged leav-
ings of the real—a less contingent upgrade
of synthetic cubism between covers (or in
Debray’s “mediological” terms, another re-
coil from the symbolic in a nostalgia for the
index). After that antithetical switch from
sheer inscriptive succession in the concep-
tualist book through the hyperbolic materi-
ality of the artisanal volume, it is a further
reversal, often simultaneous, that takes us
to our present topic, with all its multiple
topoi. For with the rise of the found and
altered book-work rather than the art(ist)
book in any of its previous avatars, the ob-
ject veers again toward ideation rather than
the glamour of sensuous tactility. This turn
diverts the whole closed book—tampered
with or compounded by others like it in an
installation setting—away from any luxuri-
ousness of material support, any textured
excess whatever (except by sawtooth or
X-Acto-blade subtractions), into the very
trope of itself as instrument—or structur-
ing increment—of culture.
The artisanal codex, with or usually with-
out words, is an extreme book. The book-
work, again, is an anti-book: foreclosed
within a received form—and bringing this
mass-print norm into conceptual relief by
antithesis and negation. In sum, modern
printed books have certainly for a long time
incorporated visual signals other than ver-
bal shapes—whether that imaging was figure
drawing (in the livre d’artiste) or, later in the
genre’s mutating career, merely lexigraphic
or numeric ciphering (in those conceptu-
alist notebooks that Lippard calls “artist’s
books”—more workbooks than book-works).
More recent yet are those codex forms that
eclipse writing by haptic materialities verg-
ing on the density and flair of gallery handi-
craft (artisanal books). But this reskilling is
countered in the same years, and by a re-
turn to some degree of conceptualist pur-
chase, by the more deliberate demediations
of anti-book sculpture and installation art.
So that all three alternative and more explic-
itly mixed modes of codex presentation—call
them livres at first “artistic,” then “concep-
tual,” then “artisanal”—stand in contrast to
a new materialism of the bibliobjet: its ma-
terial insistence more as rectangular solid
than as graphic assemblage, informational
system, or sewn craft. This is the case even
when the folded innards of such a concrete
form, in the cut and flayed book-work, are ex-
posed by such extreme vivisection that their
paginated function is travestied by its very
extrusion and display. There and elsewhere,
what comes forward are the more abstract
geometries (and frequent social ironies) as-
sociated with bookwork as the mischievous
sculpture of its own disuse. The results,
as noted, often verge on laughable in their
egregiousness and panache: the found object
aestheticized by the new skilled labor of des-
ecration. And they may become in the pro-
cess, as book forms, even more fully concep-
tual objects—because even more rigorously
denuded messages—than their progenitors
from the late 1960s.
REPETITION COMPULSION:
BOOKWORK’S COMIC MUSE
I keep stressing the wit, as well as the mild
outrage, of these deviant books, how wryly
readybound |    79
 “funny” they can seem, what a theater of
the absurd they may stage with no other set
design but their single prop on offer (or hun-
dreds thereof)—or sometimes a lone actor
repetitively defacing the pages in sequence
(as in the performance pieces of Ann Hamil-
ton). However soft-pedaled, the comic tone of
these works, inflecting other moods they may
also induce, resonates in particular, above
and beyond other touchstones of carnival,
grotesquerie, and satire, with philosopher
Henri Bergson’s approach in his influential
essay “Laughter.” For Bergson, the main-
29
spring of the comic mode operates as a re-
duction of the living form to symptoms of
inanimate and mechanical function. Such a
turn to automatism is manifest especially in
various patterns of “repetition,” a keynote
stressed in italics in the overview of his sec-
ond chapter (107). On the treadmill of the
subject’s own estranged embodiment, the hu-
man animal is turned to mobile mannequin,
its gestures gone spasmodic—as such silent
comedians as Chaplin or Keaton were so bril-
liant at exploiting. Serial iteration is funny in
itself when determining bodily movement.
But the serial repetition of human accou-
trements and tools, out of all proportion to
their use value, can also be comic. Pace Berg-
son, for whom “the comic does not exist out-
side the pale of what is strictly human” (62),
books themselves can be funny when frus-
trating human use. With all reading balked,
a virtual “slapstick” mode is often displaced
onto the status of the museum book form as
it reiterates itself in stacks and piles even
while being reduced from human(izing) in-
strument to strictly mechanical object. The
result is that the typically “internalized” af-
fect of the read book, a reading no longer
feasible, reflects back, after all, on unavailed
80    | chapter two
readers (now mere gawkers) as a mirror of
the curtailed status of their own literacy.
Once we grant that books are among the pre-
eminent machines of the human, then when
these books decline to mindless instances of
an iteration, they seem in turn to subtract a
certain register of humanity from the view-
ing subject. And when such mass-produced
tools no longer hold out the promise, by what
is held in them, of eliciting, manifesting, and
valorizing the subjectivity of their potential
users, but instead rebuke or occlude it, all is
leveled to object status in the ruts of itera-
tion. In a discrepancy nothing if not funny
to begin with, gallerygoers file in series past
these serial forms no longer functionally re-
lated to them.
A canonical example: the fall 2009 dis-
play at MoMA of a founding book installa-
tion from the first years of conceptualism.
Hanne Darboven’s 100 Books 00–99, from
1970—one hardbound volume for each year
of that last century, varying between 365
and 366 wordless pages each—is perhaps
unmatched in the poker-faced stringency
of its ambition. As the affectless record of
time itself in passing, each page contains
only a rectangular outline of its own blank-
ness en abyme, with a numerical series at
bottom right, and all of the volumes wedged
together in incapacitated dovetailed adja-
cency—so that there would be no conve-
nient turning of their pages even if there
were anything of interest to turn to. All it
takes in order to apply Bergson’s theory of
laughter to the book object, then, is to over-
ride (or extend) his first principle—that
comedy applies strictly (on a pervasive the-
atrical model in his thinking and examples)
to human behavior. As soon as one allows
a scope beyond this, it is easy to see that
his threefold taxonomy of repetition can
apply to nonhuman provocations in the ob-
ject world, including, for instance, the book-
work—as Bergson himself almost acciden-
tally recognizes in tracking the impulse to
laughter back to childhood “machines” like
the jack-in-the-box (105–6).
According to his broad template, comic
automatism is conveyed not just by flat-out
“repetitions” (119–21) but also by “inver-
sions” (121–23), with the constitutive itera-
tion sensed when the baseline feature to be
repeated is merely implied by reversal in
its new illogical manifestation. Bergson’s
further category, a kind of reversible in-
version in its own right, is that of “recip-
rocal interference of series” (123), another
crucial rubric pitched into italics. He ex-
plains here, in a footnote, that he is using
“interference” with the meaning “given to
it in Optics, where it indicates the partial
superposition and neutralisation, by each
other, of two series of light-waves,” so that
it becomes a model for the humor of any
“equivocal situation” (123). In this sense,
the deviant alternative (or contrary itera-
tion) is found to overlap upon its own norm,
doubling and undoing it, in what amounts
to a simultaneous repetition as superimpo-
sition, with “pun” the “least reputable” (138)
instance of this effect. Stretching beyond
straight­forward “repetition” to the point of
mechanistic absurdity, then, the other two
modes, inversion and reciprocal interfer-
ence, approximate what Bergson goes on to
generalize as the pervasive comic principle
of “transposition.” This wholesale shift in
register from commonplace to comedic is
understood to redirect “the natural expres-
sion of an idea into another key” (140).
Instead of a jack-in-the box, our philoso-
pher might have mentioned the pop-up book.
Children gape and smile when the princess
erupts in front of her frail cardboard castle,
not laughing at her as if she were a stage
clown but enjoying, rather, the book’s own
mock-magical enactment, as instrument, of
its own text, its blossoming from flat page
into 3-D space. Again and again. So it is that
what Freud would later theorize both as
the fort-da game of mastery by repetition
and, later yet, as the relation of jokes to
the unconscious, with their condensations
and displacements, are each anticipated in
Bergson’s 1901 essay. Once enlarge the op-
tion of comic behavior from human agents
to their normal humanizing instruments in
the book shape and it is therefore clear, with
the unreadable book-work, that mechanical
reproduction, ordinarily “transcended” in
reading (Genette’s vocabulary), is either
“inverted” in these cases to the blank rep-
etition of the object, its multiple pulping or
stacking into the shape of some other objec-
tive construction, or else is “transposed”
into an alien medium altogether, like stone
or soap, where it is refigured in simulacrum.
What Bergson would call transposition re-
sembles at times what these first two chap-
ters have been calling tropology.
We’ve noted already how modern art’s
most elementary repetition-and-reversal
in the readymade finds a later incarnation
when the mass-print multiple of mechani-
cal reproduction becomes the altered mu-
seum one-off. The “reciprocal interference”
of this Duchampian comic mode produces
the double vision of artifact in “superposi-
tion” upon product across the elided place
of text, aesthetic or otherwise. In the land-
mark Fountain, the claim to signed sculp-
ture is funny because the work’s indistin-
readybound |    81
 guishable visual lamination of aestheticized
copy upon industrial model can’t prevent
our recognizing that the signed “original”
is indeed interfered with, in its transfigur-
ing repetition, by the toilet bowl it repeats.
The legacy of this “transposition” (and
“reversed” authentication) persists into
the readymade book object, however much
that found volume is then manhandled and
unmade. For here is the spectacle of use
value contorted by straight-faced repetition
(if also defacement) into aesthetic capital,
leading on in turn to other inversions and
“interferences” as well. Time and again the
informational or narrative content of the
displaced, displayed text is transposed into
its material form and repeated (rather than
simply disappeared) there—as, for instance,
with the hyperbolic literalization of a meta-
phoric idiom. A giant wind machine whip-
ping through enlarged photocopied pages of
Margaret Mitchell’s best seller would be no
lower a comedy in installation art—repeat-
ing as it does the central trope of the plot’s
own abrupt historical transformation in the
very format of its perusal—than is Clercx’s
“repeated” text of Ponge’s Soap (see fig.
1.8) divided between its carving in a lano-
line block and its alphabetic leavings on a
wash towel. Content absurdly repeated as
form is often in this way a “transposition”
of the figurative into “another key,” or just
as often the other way around: a set of dis-
placements that derive, as Bergson sees it,
from a prototype in wordplay itself. In the
reception of book art, such are the unspo-
ken verbal turns that are often translated
back to the shaping play of form.
But aside from the two-in-one repetition
of the visual pun and its cousin effects, a
deeper Bergsonian rule can be seen in force.
82    | chapter two
The very transit from bookstall or study to
museum takes its modernist paradigm, I’ve
wanted to show, from the primal “repeti-
tion” of Duchamp’s urinal: that last-plus-one
iteration of the mass industrial duplicate
that breaches the invisible border between
assembly line and display across a strate-
gic and arrested doubling. Breaking from
the factory series only to this extent, Du-
champ’s porcelain form is still a repetition
with a difference: the unmarked iteration
of the instrument as nominated artifact,
which in its diversion from the industrial
circuit stops the chain of infinite duplica-
tion—stops it with a hiccup and a quantum
leap at once. So, too, in the case of a found
book—disowned, loaned out functionless
to museum space, the imprint whose own
inherent seriality is pushed one step fur-
ther by passing over from purpose to its
empty double in disuse. Whether moping
alone in its dysfunction or damage, paired
with its print duplicate or its avatars in later
editions (as in the minimalist single-title
archives of Richard Prince to be discussed
in chapter 5), or multiplied with countless
others of its indiscriminate ilk in either a
fortress or a dumping ground of print mat-
ter (Bateman, Bendtsen, Krén, Spector),
the museumized book is the delegated rep-
etition to which a former human prosthesis
has been converted, an item now no longer
answering or even opening to human desire.
Its comedy is that of anthropological dislo-
cation not unlike the repetitive motorized
tics of the Bergsonian comic body. Readabil-
ity is tripped up by the intractability of its
own expected but now rude, mute form. Dis-
lodged from one series and repeated in the
cited form of display, the book as industrial
duplicate becomes mere (comic) dupe.
 Such a declension can, in sum, be comic
in modality even when not terribly funny,
sometimes more like black comic. Certainly
the found or faux book, defaulting on its
proffered legibility, knows its ominous vari-
ants in the lead-and-steel reductions of An-
selm Kiefer’s unusable libraries or the serial
negations of Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust
memorial. For the most part, though, the
recognition induced by such demediation,
even at times by Whiteread’s own work, is
that of a grin rather than a grimace. And
even with the most monitory of such book-
works, one may at first smile at the scale,
effrontery, and oppressive wit of it all. So
strong is the undercurrent of the risible in
the genre that even its apocalyptic or mor-
tuary charge operates as the felt obverse
of an essential comic “dehumanization”—
a Bergsonian “mechanization” by empty
repetition—and this in regards both to the
word’s given vessel and to the filing by of its
stymied readers. Again: Western culture’s
first interactive medium delinked from all
somatic access or operation, seized up by
demediation.
NONMONUMENTALITY
Built upon this comic discrepancy between
text and its plastic repetition as object, we
have watched a specific art history fold
over and back on itself in moving forward.
We have seen (thanks to Crow’s framing of
the issue) how a tension between the ra-
tionalization of art and the maximizing of
its visual luxuriance, passing in and out of
oppositional authority across transitional
moments of art history, recently converges
on the variable tenets of art(ist) books and
the neo-conceptual prominence of the illeg-
ible or deactivated book-work. The latter,
as bibliobjet, is a case of sculpture degree
zero: a thing “complicit” in the end with in-
dustrial duplication and its merchandising
circuits. This commercial connivance with
an ethos of consumption, what we might
call this mass-cultural imbrication, can be
illustrated almost at random from current
book-works, influencing even the catalog art
that disseminates their installation views.
When the recent volume on an exhibit
at the New Museum in New York called Un-
monumental binds its spine with ragged-
edged and thickly textured everyday fabric
of different patterns and colors from book
to book, the effect is certainly not to ap-
proach the craftwork of artisanal produc-
tion or to enhance the value of the catalog
as bibliophile’s artifact. Rather, the pur-
pose is to stress the nonmonumentality,
the patchwork accidentality, of its own fab-
ricated form (including its own return to
the index)—as well as that of the several
book sculptures it happens to document
(the Debord brickbat among them). 30 These
also include a geometrically reduced assem-
blage by Tom Burr called Recline II (2005)
extrapolated from the famous back-jacket
photo from Truman Capote’s collection
Other Voices, Other Rooms, where Capote
is languorously posed in what looks like a
chaise lounge. Photo side up, the book itself
is now seen reclining, at perpetual rest, in
that always “other room” of gallery space,
on the inner fold of the plywood abstraction
of such a deck chair, where no reader ever
reads.
Without the book, or the striped cloth
that further evokes the depopulated furni-
ture of leisured reading, Burr’s four geomet-
ric planes hinged together at odd angles on
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 the museum floor—the folding forms that
have become his signature shapes—would
have made for a kind of retro-minimalism.
Tricked out with everyday appurtenances
as they are, however, few bookwork con-
structs could more immediately illustrate,
given Burr’s conjunction of found object and
magnified angled thing, the contemporary
climate of consumer and media “complicity”
in art production than this portable fold-
ing sculpture, at once celebrity conscious,
baldly “unmonumental,” and brashly un-
skilled. That ambience of “complicity”—a
31
kind of knowing affinity—is Johanna Druck-
er’s in her recent periodization of interna-
tional art since modernism. The overlap of
this emphasis with Roberts’s more specific
argument about the labor-values of post-
conceptualism can be unexpectedly crystal-
lized (given Drucker’s previous work both
as book artist and historian of the mode)
around ever more frequent manifestations
of the bibliobjet and its component place in
larger hybrid constructs like Burr’s. Though
not related directly to her work on the re-
flexive book text in The Century of Artists’
Books (1995), there is, a decade later in Sweet
Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity
(2005), her threefold breakdown of the same
century’s art into modernist “autonomy”
(code word: medium specificity), postmod-
ernist “contingency” (the variable and resis-
tant manifestations of art as idea), and mil-
lennial “complicity” (cultural appropriation,
assimilation, and hybridity). 32
In sculptural terms, even apart from
bookwork constructs, one may view the
current backlash against minimalist auster-
ity as a kind of engulfing maximalism, vora-
cious for found matter and other quotidian
grist. And beyond an emphasis on the pas-
84    | chapter two
tiche mode in recent painting and sculpture
in Drucker’s later study, she touches as well
on the user-oriented video and network in-
teraction so important for Roberts. At the
earlier and purist end of her trajectory,
however, lies modernist autonomy—and
its reductive last gasp in exactly what Fried
saw as a minimalist “literalism” (in which
sculpture was just monolithic shape, like
painting just paint). This mode of hyper-
modernism concerns the material substrate
of art making—and the artifact’s acknowl-
edged disclosure thereof: an imaging turned
inward upon its own matter in the exile of
all representational benchmarks. Following
this, and rejecting an absolutism of medium
for a manipulated contingency of means in
the signaling of aesthetic “information,”
postmodernism concerns in part the cita-
tional distance kept from any originary im-
age by the discursive channels of its recep-
tion. Since then, and according to Drucker
still, art of the new millennium incorporates
the mass culture against which the previ-
ous modes pitted themselves—now openly
poaching, one might say, rather than slyly
quoting from the cultural surround. 33
Another way to cast this historical triad,
though not Drucker’s in so many words:
intrinsic, deconstructive, eclectic. And an-
other way, closer to Roberts: skilled, nomi-
nalist, collaborative. In what (following out
Drucker’s emphasis) one might call a maxi-
malizing of material options, current trends
in aesthetic imaging, no longer medium pre-
occupied—but not strategically demediated
either (as was often the case under concep-
tualism)—now consort with the products of
commercial media and commodity culture
in a less elitist colloquy with spectators. 34
In material terms, the result is often a me-
dial hodgepodge of sheer stuff, whether fab-
ricated or assembled. Sculptural elements,
for instance, are clutched from the flux of a
world whose materiality they don’t pretend,
let alone begin, to transcend. Unreadable
books among them (though unexamined by
Drucker in this new context), things under a
regime of complicity are just lifted from the
world and resifted. One can think of them as
assisted left-behinds.
Apart from their persistent museum life
as tokens of material and cultural complic-
ity, Drucker’s long-standing interest in book
objects does, as it happens, intersect Rob-
erts’s posthistory of the readymade at one
brief point that helps clarify my own empha-
sis on the Duchampian “readybound,” even
in those cases where such a seemingly ap-
propriated volume is only simulated to be-
gin with. Though Roberts scarcely dwells on
it, he does include a distinction in passing
between books as industrial products and
books as artisanal constructions. To un-
derscore the gulf between mass print and
the handmade, despite a so-called collage
or montage aesthetic in modernist texts, he
has just remarked that “no novelist would
dream of sticking different found images or
objects in each of the published copies of his
or her book” (50); he then drops into a foot-
note to acknowledge the exception of “art
objects in the form of books,” those objects
so very different from products. For these
are not “books subject to a process of repro-
duction” (75). Yet it is not just the “artist’s
book” (75), as cited by him (and by which
he means the postminimalist sensuality
of the artisanal codex), but the “assisted”
readymade of the so-called “altered” book
genre that would also make Roberts’s point
as well. For it is there that the suspension
of functional text as factory product is per-
formed upon the object itself rather than by
its handmade surrogate.
Roberts nowhere mentions Duchamp’s
own early contribution to the “treated” (or
mistreated) book phenomenon, his 1919 Un-
happy Readymade: a book object now lost
(after having been intentionally sped on
its way to extinction), but preserved in a
1920 photograph and a subsequent paint-
ing by Duchamp’s sister Suzanne, emerging
there like the angular folds of a neo-cubist
codex. 35 This was the sister who originally
executed the idea at Marcel’s behest. She
was instructed to leave a book strapped to
her Paris balcony and thus laid open to con-
tingency. It hangs there until it is disinte-
grated under the vicissitudes of real-world
weather, come rain or come shine, the diur-
nal assaults first bleeding and then bleach-
ing its text, then eroding its underlying cel-
lulose basis. The inescapable sequence of
this destruction, losing print text before
its material backing, reminds us that most
demediations in bookwork practice, short
of this inexorably “lost object,” are equally
partial: words go; overall form remains;
bookhood emerges equivocated. In The Un-
happy Readymade, the abstract laws of spa-
tial form in mathematical diagrams, as well
as the book’s own inherent rectilinear for-
mat—the very elements of geometry in both
principle and instance—are submitted to
the actual seasonal elements of terrestrial
space and time.
And the bigger point. If to suggest that
Duchamp’s confrontation of culture with
nature operates “discursively” as a new ver-
sion of the vanitas with book—pitting the
fragility of human artifacts, even in their
reach for eternal axioms, against the fury
readybound |    85
 of duration itself—amounts to turning this
book-work’s desecrated objecthood into a
second-order “text,” then we have business
as usual with altered objects in this mode.
Such a sacrificed codex proves the rule of
bookwork in whatever medium—here the
appropriated “mixed medium” not only of
binding and folded sheets and imprinted
text but also, laid out together on page after
page, of words in-mixed with graphic fig-
ures. Such a hybrid textual surface, once it
has submitted with others like and beneath
it to the vagaries of climate and thus to the
abjection of its composite physical support,
can therefore offer up over real time a sig-
nificance wholly divorced from signage. On
an expanded communications model, and
like so much later bookwork, it delivers its
message from the far side of meaning.
It is surprising, perhaps, that Roberts
overlooks this text object amid the ready-
mades, an object that I would stress as in-
deed a founding readybound—surprising,
except insofar as its recognition might help
secure the very link Roberts is out to mini-
mize between Duchamp’s industrial inter-
vention and a later conceptual art. For that
weathered book addresses in part the “un-
happy” gaps between the signified and its
contingent signifiers on which conceptual-
ism often focuses: here the world of ideal
form versus the vulnerability of its own ma-
terial designations in text and diagram.
PASSAGES AND DEPAGINGS
Ultimately no surprise, though—since the
marginalization of bookwork in larger art-
historical schemata is familiar enough. Even
Drucker’s scholarship, as indicated, makes
no effort to match up her separate and pre-
86    | chapter two
viously published interest in artist’s books
with her later periodization of more general
art trends—partly, of course, because only
a very few of the books she has previously
cataloged would fall into the realm of treated
readymades rather than traditional book
craft; would count, in other words, as book
art in this sense, rather than artist’s books.
But it is surely possible to see the altered
or disused book (rather than the artisanal
enhancement of the handmade collector’s
item)—the book as ironic thing rather than
manifold object of perusal—to be operating,
in its demediation as message, somewhere
between conceptualist distanciation and
magpie complicity. It operates there as the
found object abjected, common property
made strange.
Two extreme and striking examples in
Drucker’s preceding survey make this clear,
especially in her comparison of them with
a third piece, this by Buzz Spector, in a re-
lated mode of distressed bookwork. Spec-
tor’s 1994 mistreated book is given pride of
place in closing her treatment on “The Art-
ist Book as a Rare and/or Auratic Object.”
Its title, A Passage (fig. 2.7), can be seen to
play on a multichapter vector of transit as
well as an open-page excerpt. For it turns
out that every leaf of this hand-printed book
by Spector is “altered” by being ripped off
toward the left, leaving a wider and wider
remainder of jagged-edge surface each time.
At a glance, the downhill slope of the pages
still sustains a visible if skewed rectangle of
lineated print. The further trick, as we real-
ize on closer inspection—and who doesn’t
smile with metatextual delight on recogniz-
ing this primal Bergsonian repetition?—is
that the same text has been printed on each
page, so that the rips do not in fact prevent
Figure 2.7.  Buzz Spector,
A Passage (New York:
Granary Books, 1994),
81/2 x 61/4 in., 360 pages,
edition of 48. Typography
by Philip Gallo; offset
printing by Brad Freeman;
bound by Jill Jevne.
Hand-torn by the artist.
Courtesy of the artist.
a continuous deciphering of this one dis-
continuous excerpt. We can imagine the
nonexistent Borges story it might have been
conceived in homage to: “The Infinite Ex-
cerpt.”36 In Drucker’s fine description of this
work by Spector—including the reflexive
anecdote about Talmudic citationality it re-
counts on its staggered, terraced surface—
only the pun of the title in its running heads
goes overlooked; or call it a Bergsonian
lexical “transposition” in this rigorously
“reciprocal interference” between repeated
page and composite volume, text and Text.
I pick out this added verbal irony simply as
another of the spatiotemporal synecdoches
of the reading act that characterize so many
book-works—even when no legible words
are included. For with the noun “passage,”
any metaphor of traverse in the language of
textual progress is literalized as the down-
hill slice and slide through the entire book
from first to last: like one fierce pass with a
serrated blade.
Drucker groups Spector’s Passage with
other examples of the “unreadable” book,
despite the composite legibility of its un-
precedented multipage, single-paragraph
extract. She contrasts it with books her-
readybound |    87
Figure 2.8.  Maurizio
Nannucci, Universum
(1969). Research Library,
Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles (91-B26310).
metically “bound shut” (178) in her later
chapter on “Self-Reflexivity in Book Form”:
pieces, in our terms, where textwork has
been subsumed entirely to bookwork. With
the usable codex turned upon itself as im-
penetrable thing, it is no longer an inten-
tional or functional object, no longer a text.
The wit of such self-inflicted impairment as
linguistic conveyance is, again, very much
in the Borgesian spirit of some mystic bib-
los withheld forever in the inaccessible pen-
etralium of its own mystery. A 1993 work by

88    | chapter two

David Stairs, owned in one copy by (of all
holders) the New York Public Library, is a
round book of a few inches’ diameter closed
by spiral binding along its whole circumfer-
ence. Its punning title, Boundless, suggests
(by “transposition”) the limitless specula-
tion opened by bookwork at large when it
is all binding, no text. And mentioned in
connection with this work, by Drucker, is
Maurizio Nannucci’s 1969 Universum, from
the high moment of conceptual art: a clas-
sically bound book with a comparable (Bor-
gesian) pun for its title and boasting two
(rather than one) elegant curved spines, a
comic “repetition” thus sealing its pages off
from both points of entry at once, with Vol.
I announced on one end, Vol. II on the other,
yet with all internal succession blocked
(fig. 2.8). 37
Though its marbleized slipcase
is more like the tomb of reading than its
sheath, at least there’s no putting this two-
faced book the wrong way in.
Ultimately, too, there’s no difference be-
tween first and second installations, original
volume and sequel, when the temporal form
of reading has been so implacably canceled
in the first place, re-versed upon itself; or in
other words when, in both Stairs’s work and
Nannucci’s, the volumetric shape of text is
locked down as intractable monolith rather
than functional manifold. Perhaps in allu-
sion to Nannucci’s early unopenable book-
work, one of the artists we began with (Ger-
man conceptual sculptor Wolfgang Nieblich)
ups the irony in a different way with his
1996 Das Paar. In this redoubled and undone
“pair,” we find the convergence at right an-
gles, spines out, of two bound volumes cast
in bronze, so that their “open” ends fuse
tight in mutual incapacitation. With the
shape of four curved spines visible in this
pair of pairs, there would be no way into
any of the pages even if they weren’t cast in
metal to begin with. All instrumentality is
canceled in the objecthood of their Siamese
twinning, even as these “pieces” might be
used, metonymically, to hold other and real
books closed on a shelf. Like much unpagi-
nated bookwork, their art is exhausted in
the frustrated use of their bookhood itself,
the nominated scope of their content (how-
ever vast, as in Universum) lurking always
beyond confirmation. Self-contained, im-
penetrable in the most basic sense, they do
not open mental vistas to the literate mind;
rather, they travesty such phenomenologi-
cal parameters in the antisocial objecthood
of their withdrawal from any and all text-
work beyond their ironic titles (the legacy
of Fountain yet again). Whatever prose or
verse they might conceivably imprint, they
are as containers entirely closed worlds.
Stopped at the surface of the thing, though,
we may still feel primed to look further into
the art-historical discourse such works
wordlessly inscribe.
ART BOOK AS BOOK ART
And if such neo-conceptual bookwork—the
desisted readymade proliferating unplugged
in an exponentially networked culture—has
a way of rehearsing as tacit compendium the
history of postwar art practice, that com-
pendium can actually be made explicit, even
as evacuated. No better way to capture, in
epitome, bookwork’s relation to those aes-
thetic practices grouped under the heading
conceptual art (before probing, next, the
categorical demediation that underlies such
practice; and then, in the fourth chapter,
turning to a single exhibition that stages
readybound |    89
 this relation between book sculpture and
wall-works in shared space) than by look-
ing to one of conceptualism’s most inci-
sive practitioner-theorists in his own turn
to book sculpture. I refer again to Brian
O’Doherty, whose sardonic and enthrall-
ing Inside the White Cube is itself, happily
enough, an all-white foursquare book-work
in its 1999 edition, and who, in the previous
decade, turns his hand, literally enough, to a
commissioned history of postwar art. Were
this assigned volume in fact to have been
written and typeset, according to his pub-
lisher’s contract, rather than just simulated,
it would have been in a sense a duplicate to
begin with even before mass publication:
another book like the famous retrospective
from the publisher Harry Abrams bearing
the same title, brought out as early as 1958.
Belatedness is not exactly the point, how-
ever, in Brian O’Doherty’s failed transac-
tion with his publisher, Praeger rather than
Abrams, over two decades after that early
attempt to canonize the contemporary. The
upshot, in the Praeger contretemps, is one of
the most conceptually charged book-works
in conceptualist experimentation—and cer-
tainly one of the funniest. For O’Doherty
finally meets his deadline by delivering up
a painted wooden simulation of yet another
book by the name Art Since 1945, with the
reproduction of a minimalist canvas on the
cover, a black-on-gray cruciform abstraction
by Ad Reinhardt that is not mechanically
printed but hand-repainted. Reverting as
“author” or “authority” from discursive to
manual skill, O’Doherty nonetheless feigned
surprise at the insistence of the publisher
that his advance be returned for failing to
meet the terms of his commission. Though
not producing an art book, he pretended to
90    | chapter two
think that his publishers might be willing to
pay for book art instead. He then went on to
exhibit (in the manner of Hans Haacke and
other such interventionists) the publisher’s
terse correspondence along with the trompe
l’oeil rectangular solid in his installation
display of this nonindustrial book object: a
museum-worthy piece that is neither an art-
ist’s book, on the one hand—because not a
book at all—nor, on the other, the template
for mass reproduction.
The handmade has in this instance be-
come a travesty of the readymade, rather
than the other way around. The empty den-
sity of wood, rather than the pressed, sliced,
and folded instrument of the bound page:
that’s one extreme reach of denied content
in the book-work. The ironies multiply and
38
collide. Who needs to look inside such an
art-history book, anyway? We all know the
old and oft-told story, the tired discourse
of the Masters and their upstart inheritors,
even the subtler interplay between the ra-
tionalists and the visualists. By the same
token, any full discursive account of art’s
postfigural evolution would include such
ironic conceptual gestures as the metatext
before us in O’Doherty’s offering: in a sense
the summa of the postmodern moment in
its ironies of representation. Art Since 1945,
proffered as a strictly sculptural “volume”
rather than a manuscript waiting to be type-
set—a volumetric thing in real rather than
negative space, but a textual negation just
the same—is therefore the digest of an ep-
och after all. A digest, yes, but also a lone
inert version: repeating its tenets in yet
one more example rather than synthesiz-
ing them in overview. You paid me for Art
since 1945. Well, here it is, a case of it at its
leading but always retrospective edge—an-
other resistant instance, O’Doherty might
have added before returning his advance, in
the typical form of a cryptic conceptualist
disquisition: a Text book after all. A number
of its implicit lessons will be pursued in the
coming discussion of canceled mediation
across associated two-dimensional genres.
Having tracked in this chapter the art his-
tory of the non-auratic object as it emerges
into book form, readymade or not, we need
next to spell out the broader theoretical in-
ferences of its medial negation as unread
pages.
EMPTY BOXES, HOLLOWED
WHOLES
In anticipation, we can turn for a moment
to one of the most austere demediators not
only in contemporary bibliographic prac-
tice but in related graphic interventions
as well—or contraventions. Contemporary
London word and book artist Fiona Banner
covers the entire materialist span from the
conceptualist lexigraph through faux books
to their sculptural assemblage. In a recent
show called The Bastard Word at Toronto’s
Power Plant Gallery, Banner redraws the
covers of “25 dummy books” concerned with
the techniques of figurative art, called Life
Drawing Drawings, books thus as superficial
as the lessons in representation they impart
(fig. 2.9). In a yet more sculptural piece, she
stacks twenty-five three-dimensional fake
books on a packing carton marked with the
work’s cryptic name in Letraset, OR, Nude
Fin Version, the antiseptic white spines
above it bearing titles like Weird Nature,
A–Z, Chronic Frame, and the summarizing
Beyond Words. All of them at once disused
and simulacral—their covers unbacked by
real text—these book forms are as empty as
the box from which they pretend to come.
Earlier yet in her career, in the largest-
scale lexigraphic exercise I know of from
the whole realm of conceptual art, there is
her 1994 remediation of cinema by text (and
hence its pictorial demediation). This is a
work so little “beyond words,” so epically
obsessive in its logorrhea, that reading time
almost approximates screening time. For
Banner executes an extreme reach of optical
demotion by stretching to panoramic width
her bland verbal “translation” of every shot
in David Lean’s 1962 film, Lawrence of Ara-
bia. As if in a perverse return of screen story
to punning storyboard, Banner writes out
these words onto a huge Panavision-scaled
sheet titled The Desert, as spatially expan-
sive in its visually desiccated width as the
film is long. The 70mm sound epic has dis-
appeared in its spectacle, as if by reversion,
into sheer silent intertitles. From a trans-
literated optical experience to a dummy
textual one: yet again, in the compass of a
single artist’s work, indeed across its own
developing experiments, we can watch the
evolution of bookwork out of textwork.
But it is the logic of Banner’s faux vol-
umes, rather than her voluminous texting,
that this chapter closes in and down on. In
engaging the legacy of Duchamp, this same
chapter set forth on the deliberately odd
and rocky meeting ground of titled sculp-
tures, titled books, and titled toilet fixtures.
It has pursued what amounts in this way to
a triangulation of objets d’art, text forms,
and industrial readymades under the cat-
egory of the bibliobjet—in the typifying
form of the altered readybound. And this
is the broad category of bookwork whose
often madcap, frequently polemic, some-
readybound |    91
Figure 2.9.  Fiona Banner,
Life Drawing Drawings
(2007). 29 mixed media
drawings on paper, 29
dummy books. Photo
credit: Steve Payne.
Courtesy of the artist.
92    |
times all but demented premise of deme-
diation we need next to compass in more
general and themselves categorical terms.
From the now-canonical readymade to the
neo-conceptualist readybound: such is a
trajectory that, historicized in this chapter,
is broadened to other art practices in the
next—so as to be more clearly retraced, in
its own terms, as an evolution from depur-
posed object to a thing of demediated plastic
form, all graphic information held back.
In this process, so we’ve just seen by
Banner’s example, the venerable history of
deskilling can at times be manifested in a
tactical skill of its own. As benchmark for
chapter two
museum deviance, the progeny of the ready­
made in the readybound can therefore be
evoked even by gifted simulation. Banner’s
figure-drawing études are found books,
too, or images of same, but further duped
in satirizing their own promotion of the de-
rivative: the aesthetic paradox of the skilled
copy. Duchamp of course removes all craft,
let alone originality, from the site of display;
only the act of such display, its gall and its
candor, can take us by surprise. In a later
conceptualist vein of reflexive deskilling,
however, Banner turns manual dexterity di-
rectly back on itself in a leveling of original-
ity, finding the perfect surface for this rever-
sion: the mass-print art manual instructing
draftsmanship as an exercise in repetition.
We have been reviewing so far the art-
historical legacy behind such contemporary
fabrication. We next contemplate the logic of
demediation involved, for instance, in sub-
suming an entire course of drawing lessons
to a single exercise—so that the resulting
books, in an assemblage like Banner’s, are
in fact told only by their covers. Discussion
will then, with the fourth chapter, be readied
for its second main phase. Banner’s “dum-
mies,” in other words, should help prepare
us—after a chapter on related ventures in
the demediation of the page surface via paint
or manual alteration—for encountering the
nugatory or gutted contents of the many
closed-cover book-works tallied and anato-
mized in the final three chapters, where texts
are not just found, mounded, and disentitled
but sometimes simulated as such.
In a gallery exhibit somewhere or other
these days, you might well find 1,980-some
used copies of 1984 heaped as if for destruc-
tion in the incineration tubes of Orwell’s
novel itself. But you might also find, affixed
waist-high to some other or the same gal-
lery’s wall, an enlarged wooden chevron,
a foot deep and two inches wide on both
wings, wrapped in an enlarged paperback
cover around its nonexistent pages and
called Thomas Pynchon’s V. Either gesture
could be taken to mock by dysfunctional
repetition, from within homage, the un­
assisted readymade, either by hyperbole or
by parody. Paradigms come slamming up
against each other from their far poles. The
readymade and the counterfeit alike con-
verge upon the book-work as alienated ob-
ject, with numerous new things of this sort
coupling and multiplying in the exploded
field between.
As we began by seeing, the term book
object certainly begs a question, whereas
book-work has attempted to press it. The
object of a book is to be read, to be taken up
and on and in by a subject. Bookwork resists
this textual transfer in order to interpret its
material conditions—and the very expecta-
tions they embody. Whether the book ob-
ject is crafted in effigy or merely confiscated
from the commercial flux of publication, its
reduction to thing is the demediation that
reworks it, puts it back in play—where we’ll
continue to find that bookwork is as book-
work does.
readybound |    93
C H A P TE R T H R EE
D E M E D I ATE D M EA N S
W hat exactly does “demediated” mean?
And to what aesthetic meaning can
it accrue? By subtraction what is added?
Or if that seems wrong, what by removal
is revealed? What features, of a book, for
instance, are extracted by suspending its
conveyance function, an arrest of its mes-
saging? In pursuit of such questions across
the broadest possible terrain, we have so far
tracked the shifting interplay of materiality
and linguistic mediation in a contested art-
historical genealogy from the readymade to
the conceptual text-work—and beyond into
the nonartisanal book-work deployed first as
impersonal template of minimalist seriality
and then as monolith of the inoperable. We
move in this chapter to adjacent turf in or-
der to clarify the demediating gesture of this
last mode, the appropriated or sculpted book,
from the position of two highly specialized
art practices that bear on the question, from
opposite directions, without bearing the full
negated weight of a 3-D book form. These
are the painted similitude of the book and
the defaced multiple of its own printed form:
in particular, the meticulously depicted but
flatly inaccessible art library in oil versus the
real but hand-mangled page.
By thinking of this difference within the
specific terms of demediation, or, more to
the point, in trying to specify those terms
through these contrasting examples, one
recalls that cases are sometimes far more
extreme yet—whole book pages painted
out, bleached away, drilled through, burnt,
slivered, sunk in plaster, or buckled beyond
recognition. Or simply denied in their nor-
mal access. And without material violence,
the irony of immanent disuse is approached
on another front—quite literally by inver-
 sion—when conceptual book sculptor Buzz
Spector installs subsets of his own library,
on given book artists, by turning the cata-
logs and monographs backward, spines and
covers averted. Without defacement, but
merely facing them away, Spector serves
up a freestanding post-cubist assemblage
of utter unreadability within manifest hom-
age. And then photographs it as an installa-
tion view for further museum display. Much
potential misunderstanding over what lies
ahead can be staved off by noting that in
such work the pictured art books have lost
their discursive and pictorial medium alike,
but only within the intervention of Spec-
tor’s own hybrid medium of assemblage and
Polaroid photography.
Same with the conversion of literature’s
stylistic medium into a sculptural (rather
than photographic) one. In an expressly lit-
erary form of materialist demediation, Doug
Beube, extracting the print text of a novel
from its binding, folds its still-sewn pages
back upon themselves, and then once again
along the diagonal at each corner, in order
to reshape verbal text in an accordioned
pattern of structural recurrence more ab-
stract and symmetrical than the details of
setting and event would allow. With deliber-
ate anachronism, he calls this arbitrary but
patterned “cross section” of the fanned-out
novel, with its unexpected linkages and
overlaps, a “hypertext.” By any other name
Plot II (1993) offers in this way the visual-
ized imposition—its effect optically obliter-
ating rather than shaping in this case—of
formal recurrence upon narrative content.
Demediation, in short, is always a medial
act, even when it subsumes narrative writ-
ing to origami. That’s the point that needs
holding on to.
96    | chapter three
Our grip on it is tightened by alignment
with the textual ironies of conceptual art
more broadly. John Baldessari’s self-titled
Everything Is Purged from This Painting but
Art; No Ideas Have Entered This Work (1966–
68), a parodic rejection of the conceptualist
mandate, spells out its titular and all but par-
adoxical claim in carefully painted black cap-
itals across the center of a pale taupe canvas
scaled like that of an oversize major painting
from the day. No ideas, maybe, but no techni-
cal artistry either. If this is art, it’s only by
way of concept rather than craft after all.
So with much conceptual bookwork. Explicit
worded “ideas” are purged from the 3-D con-
fines of the unpaged codex form, even while
no so-called book artistry is allowed to “en-
ter” it either. All is excluded “content.” But
this is because, ironically, such resistance
to both discourse and image is exactly “the
idea,” the intent. And its art.
THE USE OF DISUSE
Book shapes held up to view but kept from
reading: such is the preeminent readymade
that concerns us. Ready and waiting, but
unmade: depurposed, detexted. Cases ag-
gregate to a category, and that is now our
topic. Already taking its conceptual mea-
sure in the preceding chapter, we’ve begun
weighing the heft of referential negation in
the thinged text, the intentional linguistic
object entombed or drained by disuse. Over-
determined in several ways by the post-
modernist art history from which such ob-
jectless things emerge or retreat, the illeg-
ible—and so delegitimated—book form has
been seen so far to carry the industrial copy
into new territory. This is the case whether
or not the imprinted matter is seized from
the world or simulated (and thus twice cop-
ied), representative or merely representa-
tional, appropriated or synthetic, taken up
or faked. One way or the other, to become
book art, rather than an artist’s book in any
sense, requires in the main a surrender of
pagination to sculptural form, message to
sheer mass.
But one continues to ask what, more pre-
cisely, sets bookwork off from those other
things of jettisoned social use known as
readymades, whether transmission mech-
anisms in the first place or not, like turn­
tables or telephones, toasters and urinals
(to say nothing of the text-toaster I once
saw, I forget where, that popped up two un-
burnt paperbacks ready for consumption.)
What accrues to that extra dimension of
loss in imprinted language or visual text,
especially when derived as if by reversal
from the “information” aesthetic of concep-
tualism? Closing in now on the treatment of
bound pages as unique visual objects—in
particular the pages and dust jackets of
art books over against the graphic layout
of magazine photo-spreads—we continue
focusing the question of subtracted media-
tion around the notion of the codex format
in hardbound or periodical form. In this
chapter’s main heuristic contrast, the books
in question are, on the one hand, entirely
painted volumes, with the magazine pho-
tos, on the other, entirely isolated from all
binding. These two deliberate constraints
on the coming evidence yield book-works
degree zero, from which we can then build
up again—within a firmer terminological
framework, and upon the expanded ground
of numerous added examples—to a more
satisfying account of that museum provo-
cation I’m calling the 3-D bibliobjet.
HYPERMIMESIS VS. LITERALISM
We begin with a contrast underdeveloped
in the literature on post-1960s art: between
the assimilation of picturing to photostatic
lettering in certain conceptual text art and
the hypertrophic mechanical exactitude of
photorealist painting. Emerging out of the
same post-abstractionist moment as did the
brandished skills of photorealism, concep-
tual word art breaks with the dominance of
surface visuality by confronting its technici-
ties from beyond themselves. As wording
rather than painting, text art often literal-
izes in advance the thinking one brings to
pictures, jaded or jejune. At the same time,
addressing on its own separate front a cul-
ture saturated by automatic visual record,
painting no longer tries to compete with
photography but to replicate it (from an in-
ner and often ironic distance): to make art’s
standards not just technical, as in a sense
painting’s had often been, but mechanical, a
precision tooling of the hyperskilled brush.
Photorealism doesn’t attempt raising paint-
ing to the exactitude of photography. In its
most serious practitioners, it is the painting
of photography, secondary, remediated, in-
evitably skeptical.
A thumbnail history (spotty, to say the
least) might be of use here in the evolution
of the photorealist gesture across a century
of American art—as in effect a complex
practice of demediation (rather than sim-
ply medial transposition). Thomas Eakins
bleeds almost all color but a sepia under-
tone from his grisaille (or monochrome) oil
painting of a horse-driven coach, in hom-
age to Muybridge’s so-called chronopho-
tography. The homage seems a double—or
genealogical—one at that. For in 1879, in-
d e m e d i at e d means |    97
 fluenced by the equine motion studies that
Muybridge was at work on in California,
Eakins had originally painted The Fairman
Rogers Four-in-Hand (A May Morning in the
Park) in full color, the flurry of the horses’
hooves included. Twenty years later, at the
same scale, and just half a decade since the
advent of motion pictures (technical legacy
of Muybridge’s chronophotography), Eakins
repaints the image—a canvas now held by
the Saint Louis Art Museum—as if it were
a nearly black-and-white film frame. But
it’s not a simulated photographic still in
the least. Instead, in Eakins’s bravura ex-
periment, painting’s full chromatic range
is openly demediated by both arbitrary
constraints and by intertextual allusion
to the photomechanics of motion analysis,
even as stroke and texture capture all at
once the optic dynamism lost to the serial
schemata of Muybridge’s sequencings. De-
cades later, in another tour de force of near-
monochromatic simulation, Grant Wood,
in a little-known painting called Victorian
Survival from a Dubuque library collec-
tion (fig. 3.1)—an image whose trompe l’oeil
nameplate appears affixed to its internal
frame—gives us a tombstone-like lozenge
of vignette portraiture in the daguerreotype
mode. Wood’s image isn’t photorealism, ei-
ther, of course. As stressed by its title, the
vestigial image pictures nineteenth-century
photochemistry on display, recessed and re-
framed, rather than duplicating its effects
as its own executed (rather than merely
quoted) pictorialism.
Not unlike Eakins’s canvas as well,
Wood’s painting offers not some straight-
forward remediation of the mechanical but
a demediating return back past the dawn
of automatic imagining to the medium of
98    | chapter three
skilled painting that used to do perfectly
well in the treatment of human forms and
features, both at rest and on the run. And
not just painting—but alongside that, in
Wood’s case, sculptural relief. This is to
note that Wood’s particular metahistorical
effect seems redoubled by the inclusion of
a further demediation marked by the low-
relief broach painted around the sitter’s
neck. Here is a profile in raised carving that
sets off, by an unflattering contrast even in
its diminutive form, the curiously flattened
full-face image the necklace is there (by
the sitter’s own intent) merely to decorate.
Across the plane of composition as a whole,
paint thus works to capture automatism’s
inevitable failure of mimetic depth in this
early stage of photographic technique. In
an encompassing irony of Wood’s title, then,
what “survives” the Victorian, for all its in-
novations in media science (including the
deliberately pictured telephone going just
out of frame to the left), is the finer art of
realist painting itself, able to preserve the
representational artifacts as well as the hu-
man lineaments, separately or at once, of
a past era. And to do so, at that, with an
inbuilt distance amounting to medial irony.
To be sure, it is a huge further leap from
this 1931 conception to the full-frame photo-
simulations of the late 1960s and 1970s,
canvases aspiring to an illusionism whose
mechanical exactitudes seem—as if by re-
ciprocal inference—as unhuman as they
are typically unpeopled. Which returns us
to the origin of this postmodern mode in a
Figure 3.1.  Grant Wood, Victorian Survival (1931). Oil on
composition board, 321/2 x 261/4 in. Owned by the Carnegie-Stout
Public Library, Dubuque, Iowa; acquired through the Library’s
Lull Art Fund; on long-term loan to the Dubuque Museum of Art.
Art © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood
Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
 double swerve from abstraction and figure
painting alike. And which finds there an
oblique common cause, by way of refused
expressivity, with the totally nonpictorial
“lexigraph.” Over against the photorealist
agenda stands, that is, the more obvious
conceptualism of textwork. Often exil-
ing image altogether, or at least all image
but the retinal trace of letter forms, the
deskilled production of conceptual lexi-
graphs—which can be generated from the
automaticity of stenciled lettering or even
photostatic enlargement—offers an art that
imitates nothing. The furthest thing from a
new calligraphy, these textings are not for
the most part the painting or drawing of let-
ters as if they were graven images. At times,
they come across instead as the painting of
occluded vision itself as a cognitive before
an optical process, ideological as much as
physiological, in any case discursive rather
than tangibly cursive.
Yet like photorealism in its “imperceptible”
way, this art too is an act of translation: not
of still photos meticulously reproduced as oil
or acrylic images, but of the expectations of
the art object itself—visual, cultural, com-
mercial—lifted into the key of the explicit.
These are expectations translated, that is,
into those ordinarily half-articulated but en-
tirely phrasable assumptions that precede all
looking—and that would necessarily condi-
tion, in fact, any suitably knowing and ironic
art-historical response to (just for instance)
the photorealist image on an opposite gallery
wall of the same founding conceptualist de-
cade. The indulgent extreme of visual fidelity
and the wholesale desecration of its cult are,
in this sense, part of the same metapicto-
rial project of the 1960s, hypertrophic in one
case, deflationary in the other.
100    | chapter three
Book art straddles in its own way the
two camps as well: an extreme realism of
the copied copy versus an extreme reduc-
tion of text to a medium under erasure. As
simulacrum, on the one side, there is the
look-alike book that isn’t; on the other, the
onetime book (including a lexical sequence)
that no longer quite is. The virtual versus
the left-behind. Just as with the distinction
between the technicity of photorealism and
an alternate ethics of suspended pictorial-
ism in conceptual word-works, so the con-
trary poles of book art amount to more than
the difference between hypermimesis and
its refusal, between trompe l’oeil mechani-
cal imaging and a quite different trumping
of the reading eye. As we’ll continue to see,
renditions of the book form can appear
in such different modes as painted wood
blocks with simulated covers (Steve Wolfe)
or sculpted metalwork so underdefined
(Anselm Kiefer) as to distance the cultural
object into a blank recognition of its form
alone, quite aside from any content alluded
to. In either case, the codex is an icon of ver-
bal life as we know it, apart from its specific
textual impact in any one instance. Once
something has been reduced in this way
from use value to pure form, its aesthetic
objectification is total. At that point its mat-
ter is the manipulated stuff of painting or
sculpture alone, not of text. The gallery wall,
floor, or pedestal awaits it as its only possi-
ble fate. On the other hand, once a published
book, hand-printed or mass-produced, has
been lifted from circulation and manipu-
lated into disuse, kept from readability, at
once held up as form and held back as func-
tion—whether by rending, shredding, glu-
ing, sawing, overpainting, or surface scari-
fication—the same gallery space awaits it as
the aesthetic residuum of utility rather than
its outright simulation. Either way, whether
simulacrum or out-of-print variorum edi-
tion, whether dummy text or appropriated
best seller in the shape of a found paper-
back, each book-work is alike dysfunctional,
defunct.
Much should be coming clear, then, by
locating book art in the general set of ocular
denaturalizations known as conceptualism.
The further such bibliobjets depart from
the livre d’artiste—that is, from the picto-
rial adjunct of the legible, the decorative
celebration of rhetoric’s own “colors”—the
closer they come to all the other inscriptive
and typographic gestures bunched together
under the rubric of conceptual art. Even if
a particular book-work renders such ges-
tures no longer visible as ironic discourse,
quarantined by quarto or folio, trapped
between covers as if by a straitjacket, the
result takes its place in the ranks of concep-
tualism. As reconceived by defamiliariza-
tion, the book form as traditional medium—
like the surface of painting in its one less
dimension—loses its claim on transmitted
“scenes,” lexical or quasi-pictorial. It does so
in order to fascinate us anew with its mate-
rial ingredients: in the book’s case, papers,
typefaces, threads, leathers, even volume
and density per se; whereas in the parallel
case of conceptual painting, walls, canvases,
marking, letters. But there is more than a
parallel estrangement at work in this. There
is a curious hierarchy as well, an insinuated
priority. Book art is the logical extension of
conceptualist graphics—as well as the re-
ductio ad absurdum of its display aesthetic.
Once reduce pictorialism to text snippets
and alphabetic arrays, which merely say
rather than show what they mean, and the
inevitable next step, after having castrated
painting into mere pagelike text forms, is to
disfigure the page itself as mediatory format
in literate culture. Here lies a deep interme-
dial flashpoint of conceptualism. A visual
art that has surrendered almost everything
to become merely readable (that has, in
one reigning critical terminology, “dema-
terialized” its own pictorial means) comes
thereby into a diametrical relation with the
book that is only visible as such, not legible.
If, once reconceived in this way, certain
paintings seem more like texts than like
pictures, then, by the flip side of the same
token, real books end up seeming more like
sculptures than like texts.
MINUS FUNCTION
Such a reciprocal symmetry—within a
larger practice (and rhetoric) of estrange-
ment—produces a manifest aesthetic inver-
sion. In conceptualist textwork, that is, the
vertical image arises as a screen, a baffle,
forcing upon the would-be viewer an active
reading rather than a distracted glancing.
In conceptualist bookwork, by contrast, the
horizontal page—or the cover that blocks
it—appears in the form of a medial impedi-
ment rather than an instrument, forcing
upon the onetime reader a mere viewing.
Pigment or ink, pictorial or print plane: the
medium and the material support deter-
mine from the start all accustomed routes
of uptake. To impede this passage either
from seeing to picturing or from seeing to
reading—to dis-embed and thus defamiliar-
ize its graphic codes, ocular or linguistic—is
the work, the unmasking (and even at times
the unmaking) work, of demediation. Un-
masking can in this sense take the contrary,
d e m e d i at e d means |    101
 the almost contradictory, form of masked
access itself: a prevented trespass upon all
that is highlighted by being withheld—in
Genette’s terms, all that textual immanence
so seemingly near and yet so far. Demedia-
tion is thus the minus function of represen-
tation in the field of the absented signifier.
And so an expanded definition, turning
as it does—almost paradoxically, but only
at first blush—on the difference between
the materiality of a medium (passive) and
its presumed disappearance in the work of
mediation (active). It is only around this
crux of conveyance that one encounters, in
fact, the need for such a term. As demon-
strated by one example after another so far,
and shoring up our preliminary definition
at the start, demediation is the process, car-
ried out in whatever primary medium of its
own, by which a transmitted image or text is
stalled or canceled over the obtruded fact of
its own neutralized mediality in one aspect
or another. And this blanking-out of visual
or textual content can proceed at one repre-
sentational remove as well. Textual demedi-
ation, that is, can manifest itself not only in
those tangible book forms or excised pages
whose wording is averted or defaced, but
also in the painted book-work, or bookwork
painting, whose images (as in the spines
and open plates of the redrawn art folios
we are soon to examine) elide their depicted
print basis in a “reversion”—a conceptual
return of sorts—from mechanical repro-
duction to hand-applied marking. This is
what I meant by “precede at one represen-
tational remove”—where of course the labor
of demediation can only appear to us in the
(second-order) medium needed to manifest
its effect.
To mediate is to convey, to bridge, to
102    | chapter three
deliver, to transmit. To demediate is to
block, to put signals and signs into remis-
sion. To mediate is to cross; to demediate
is to double-cross, to sabotage the message
function. Mediation operates in part within
informatics, demediation only within art—
even when that art, as in conceptualism, is
so conceived as to strip away the routine
aesthetics of its medium to expose the la-
tent motive of statement, of discourse it-
self. Clarifying from opposite directions
the work of demediation in the special case
of the illustrated page surface—repainted
“faithfully” in one case (art volumes opened
and closed on their shelves), “betrayed” in
the other by excision and aggressive retex-
turing (photographic pages submitted to
controlled damage)—the coming discussion
points a direct return to the category of the
demediated bibliobjet, with its added third
dimension of a content not brought out but
mostly emptied out by form. This chap-
ter’s brief departure from sculptural book
shapes should thus help station them more
securely in a recognizable array of recent
aesthetic practice, where depicted volumes
as well as real pages—rather than just the
abstract scriptive surfaces of lexigraphic
pattern—are hardly unfamiliar. Bringing
painted volumes and altered volumes to-
gether within the same cognitive frame, we
can try attending to the complementary
negations involved in both these modes of
nonsculptural bookwork: both to the metic-
ulous painting of book forms on a magnified
shelf, so realistic as to disconcert the wall
space of any gallery in which they are hung;
and, by contrast, to the readymade stuff of
actual bound reading matter when, sliced
from its binding, its very surfaces are sacri-
ficed to abusive handling. To name names:
contemporary artists Naftali Rakuzin and
John Sparagana, based in Paris and Chicago,
respectively, the one a practiced renderer in
oil of art-book printing, the other a poach-
ing recycler of commercial photographs
torn and nimbly puckered.
Spurring such a comparison is, in the
first place, an urge to stand back, to oper-
ate for a moment within the broadest pos-
sible categories. Sometimes shelved books,
magazines, and brochures are full of pic-
tures. Less often, paintings on the wall
depict books and magazines on shelves. In
rarer cases yet, shelves, and even the rooms
that contain them, are made of books. But
in this chapter we’re bracketing off that
last category of book sculpture, of what-
ever sort, to focus instead on the difference
between book pictures and picture books.
This involves, in the main, a sustained com-
parison between bookshelf images in oil or
crayon, under glass or not, and high-gloss
magazine images under duress: a contrast
between pictures of things and pictures as
things, rendered versus rent and roughened.
When eventually moved back into a third
dimension, this is a contrast related to the
ongoing distinction between objects that
represent a book and—in another version
of demediated content—books that, reduced
instead to things, image something else:
figure a shape other than their own, even
if only some unique aspect of their typical
reception.
DE-PICTION:
FASHIONED VS. FOUND
Canonical in orientation at every level,
Naftali Rakuzin’s work is all commanding
facture—expert, contemplative, allusive,
cumulative. Sparagana’s is instead a raid
on the ephemeral, co-opting and trans-
formative. What this difference gives us
to contemplate, in effect, are variants on
the fashioned versus the found in a new
technical relation. It is in this way that the
comparison between these contemporary
artists, precisely by not being a close one,
helps us toward a wider grasp of textual
demediation. On the one hand, in Rakuzin’s
work, books appear on shelves where they
belong, art books exclusively, mostly closed
but sometimes opened to a photo-print
reproduction; yet not real ones, neither
the shelves nor the books nor the photo-
prints—just, in his paintings, “oil on can-
vas” in the depiction of such stored visual
information. On the other hand, down off
the actual rack, real glossy magazines are
dismembered by Sparagana and then deli-
cately mutilated, with a single torn page or
two at a time put under glass as a new kind
of aesthetic specimen after having been
“distressed” almost beyond recognition, or
in other words “fatigued” by a deft artisanal
manipulation that amounts to a new con-
ceptual oxymoron: the destructive reskill-
ing of a mass medium. In sum: the hand-
made painting of art books and their own
expert mechanical reproductions, including
spines, covers, and internal layouts, versus
the hand-defaced estrangement of commer-
cially bound photography. If one can coun-
tenance these as even roughly comparable
modes of demediation (or, again to prevent
confusion, two divergent media of demedia-
tion)—exemplary in exactly the spread of
their difference—then the phenomenon of
material negation this chapter is working to
compass under this term will have attained
some extra measure of categorical clarity.
d e m e d i at e d means |    103
 Rakuzin’s painted art books offer sheer
art without the actual book. Each depicted
form’s original mechanical mediation—as
opulent print text—is subsumed (i.e., re-
moved) by an equally lavish brush-craft.
Oppositely, the crumpled pages from mass-
issued periodical volumes serve to demedi-
ate photographic clarity by the manual dex-
terity of Sparagana’s finger-tip defacement.
The image content at each pole of these
planar rather than sculptural book-works
is, of course, unmistakably overdetermined.
We could, otherwise, be comparing just
any portrayed books on any painted shelf
to any manipulated pages ripped from their
bound originals. Examples are many. But
the unique contrast between illustrated
histories of painting and high-tech commer-
cial photographs, each denied their original
pictographic basis—either by painstaking
reproduction in another pictorial medium
(oil or pencil rather than photo-print) or by
near destruction of the image plane itself—
serves to narrow the contrast at hand to a
categorical divide in the modes of demedi-
ated photomechanics.
By an initial contrast with both, however,
look to a graphic variant in a more concep-
tualist vein, another cover image—“found”
and if “altered,” only by rephotographing.
Nothing could be further in tone or picto-
rial tonality from Rakuzin’s Vermeers and
Cézannes than John Baldessari’s This Is Not
to Be Looked At, as discussed in chapter 1,
which delivers the grainy photo of an Art-
forum issue, only the price and not the date
legible, with the Frank Stella painting fea-
tured on its cover drained of all color and
interest. That photographed magazine is
not to be looked at in either sense: not to be
looked over or into, since it is only a photo-
104    | chapter three
graph; not to be looked at as representation,
since it is artless and unrewarding. Rather,
as suggested, it is to be thought about, its
purposes as aesthetic dissemination recon-
ceived. Added to which, in a further distanc-
ing, is the fact that the pictured painting
itself, as referenced by the demonstrative
pronoun of the title as well, can’t simply
be looked at either—and not just because
it isn’t there, only its photo, but because it
comes as such already embedded in a peri-
odical discourse whose print is continuous
with the canvas’s own reprinting. This is
not to be seen; it is to be understood.
And there is another disparate compari-
son to Rakuzin’s work that bears mention,
a deceptive (in both senses) precedent,
one that the non-ironic serenity of his art-
historical deference constantly deflects:
namely, the trompe l’oeil book. There is no
tricking of the eye in Rakuzin’s work, which
makes the demediation of inner text less
jokey but no less integral and thematic. By
contrast, a signal American instance waits
suspended—in two senses, one real, one il-
lusory—in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
For there amid the art objects themselves,
the paintings and sculptures, any museum
visitor—seeking provenance, biography,
context, historical gloss of any kind—may
find a well-thumbed text seemingly hung
by a short looped ribbon on a barely visible
hook, as if available for browsing. This is a
text that promises to further identify and
elucidate the mute works around it: namely,
the official catalog of the gallery itself. But,
no: here instead is the anti-book, forerunner
of many a faux volume in later 3-D exhibi-
tions. This is Raphaelle Peale’s Catalogue,
a Deception (plate 7), whose wear and tear
by previous users is arrested forever in this
represented form; and the frozen fold of
whose cover makes us wonder if there are
“intings” in “a museum” somewhere, if not
in Philadelphia, to which these fake pages
do afford commentary.
Categorically different in this respect,
Rakuzin’s art catalogs and museum mono-
graphs allude without illusion, certainly
without full “deception.” He pictures books
of and about visual representation that
have undergone a secondary visual repre-
sentation, but with the added twist (and
internal distinction) that, along with the
catalogs being painted, there are, on open
page or closed cover, some actual paintings
that have been, so to say, repainted in the
process (figs. 3.2–3.4). Here is where the
industrial readymade of print culture and
its unskilled labor are, in Rakuzin’s rever-
sal, returned to technique by artisanal de-
mediation, reskilled by distance itself. And
secured for a certain degree of conceptual-
ism, rather than strict pictorialism, in the
process. For whether in partial recognition
on spine or cover, or opened and turned
toward us as full-page plates, the so-called
four-color process of automatic photo­
duplication is recognized to have conveyed
to some actual reader, as viewer, a more or
less accurate imprint (though without ges-
tural trace or impress) of the famous artist’s
original painting. The conviction this car-
ries can only find its documentary automa-
tism subtracted, rather than compounded—
in a word again, demediated—when the im-
age is redepicted (always, as it oddly sounds,
a partial de-picting) by craft like Rakuzin’s
in the labor-intensive exactions of skilled
stroke and hue. By the cited measure of
photographic mediation itself, these subse-
quent images in oil are always to be found
“imperfect,” or say liberated to imperfection,
by the interventionist delicacies of new fab-
rication. Or say found “wanting,” which is
closer to the ocular desire they evoke.
PAINTING PAINTING BOOKS
The whole issue of making and matching
via schema and correction in the evolu-
tion of realism (Gombrich) narrows when
the schema is entirely received in the first
place from finished and published results
of landmark works in the evolution from
realism to post-impressionism, Poussin to
Cézanne. Rakuzin’s art doesn’t just compla-
cently lean on tradition. It puts the tradi-
tion right there in front of us, leaning on the
easel—and, through it, on the private shelf
it renders. That’s why one of the things the
viewer does in looking at Rakuzin’s books is
to read them, and not only their titles. And
the text of his pictures might go like this,
naturalizing their own thematic exaggera-
tion: for any painter of ambition, some par-
ticular history of painting—a line of emula-
tion and mutation—will be open to view, to
the discerning viewer, in any canvas adding
to it. In Rakuzin’s work, yet more explicitly,
this tradition comes before perception in ev-
ery sense, refreshed from within by citation.
They are more than “oversize” in the li-
brarian’s sense. Across the gallery space in
Moscow, Paris, Tel Aviv, or London, these
swelling folio volumes appear a little nearer
to you than they really are. Or, more to the
point, you to them.1 Though nothing like
photorealist close-ups, they make an exorbi-
tant claim on the eye, oddly intimate. Rather
than receding—as they would in an illusion-
ist bookshelf—they loom large. And by their
titles alone, even without releasing a given
d e m e d i at e d means |    105
 artist’s reproduced image, they speak vol-
umes. Naftali Rakuzin remembers the first
book cover he designed as a child, for Gulliv-
er’s Travels. Retaining something of this in-
nocence and wonder, his later homages still
convey a Lilliputian’s awe at the towering
influence of the tradition he so luxuriantly
revisits—and enlarges upon. Not illusions at
all, his paintings offer optical allusions to
the painterly archive they expand by reca-
pitulating—in all its cultural heft, shelf by
shelf. The art of the book seems diffused
before our eyes to the received Book of Art.
These are not a painter’s typical reflexive
still lifes: not atelier scenes, with brushes
and palettes heaped on a workbench, half-
finished canvases angled against the wall.
Rakuzin paints instead the source rather
than the instruments of his art, but already
made his own in those lateral cadences of
color that orchestrate his compositions. The
history of art comes before us bound for vi-
sual uptake and variation. Reversing the
miniaturizing effect of photography that ex-
plained for André Malraux the origin of art
history as we know it, Rakuzin’s books, be-
yond their inscribed titles, disclose at times
an amplified catalog image as if—by the
provocations of scale alone—it were strain-
ing to break out into its original propor-
tions, or at least its native texture, if only
through another artist’s intervening stroke
and pigment. Reversing as well the histori-
cal trajectory defined by Walter Benjamin,
the effect is again to demediate “mechanical
reproduction” in a return not to origination,
exactly, but to renewed “aura.”
Son of a book illustrator, Rakuzin was
himself trained to add images to books. By a
considered reversal, now he makes second-
ary images of books, indeed illustrated ones.
106    | chapter three
These are the art volumes he has gathered
around him during his travels—from Russia
to Israel, New York to Paris—in his quest for
a still-life technique worthy of his heroes:
Chardin, Cézanne, and Morandi. Retriev-
ing his early skills in the lettering of book
covers, Rakuzin delivers up the painters’
iconic names in a masterly display of differ-
ent typefaces, block or serif, perpendicular
or cursive. Yet these identifying spines are
far from trompe l’oeil. Rather, they dispel
the literalist eye view, replacing an ocular
glance with the overview of invested recog-
nition. The folios are not physically bulking
so much as imaginatively engulfing in their
spur to rumination: a Platonic group por-
trait of one artist’s private canon, where the
lack of crisp or rigid definition, each volume
harmonically assimilated with the others,
becomes in its own right definitive.
CULTURE MORTE
Not for holding, then, these books are just
fractionally withheld by technique, with its
slight veiling of detail, as if they are recog-
nized rather than seen by the adept mind’s
eye: a library forever virtual. Rakuzin avoids
the expedient photographic interface of so
much postmodern work by moving to canvas
via pencil sketch—deliberately in the manner
of still-life execution down through the cen-
turies. One result is that the emblazoned ti-
tles of his companionable books appear soft-
ened by mental use, more acknowledged than
deciphered. In their initial drawing “from
the life,” they dodge photographic interven-
tion in order to evoke exactly the still-life
archive that Rakuzin is already (and in the
other sense) drawing from. In a process he
calls “translation”—with his metaphor itself
Figure 3.2.  Naftali derived from bibliographic rather than visual
Rakuzin, The Nature of  
Still Life (2007). Oil on culture—the finished canvas, in its passage
canvas, 60 x 92 cm.
Courtesy of the artist. from delicate sketch to thinly applied oil, ar-
rives as somehow trans-muted as well, satu-
rated more in affect than in hue, hazed by the
sfumato of the familiar. The high-sheen print
stock of art publication thus dissipates, by
way of recovery, into the weave and texture
of the original images on photographic file
within such books, sketches and paintings
both.
Misted ever so slightly in this way,
Rakuzin’s repictured prints are no sooner
redrawn for us than withdrawn from us,
not in the least fogged by nostalgia but
blended in a planar space of cause and ef-
fect at once: the simultaneous background
and foreground of present craft. For all the
linear precision of Rakuzin’s brushwork, the
relative low-fidelity of treatment comes to
seem a matter of keeping faith with—as if
the exposed and softening grain of the ma-
terial support, paper or canvas, were the
mark of the imaginatively ingrained. Tacit
commentaries in their own right, these re-
painted texts of art’s history are glossed by
memory and desire rather than re-seen in
high-gloss mimesis. And out of their low-
ered resolution comes the heightened re-
solve of the new painter himself.
d e m e d i at e d means |    107
 Unshadowed by deathliness, the French
term nature morte simply identifies the
“still life” as a time-canceling excerpt from
the nonhuman world—often including
books among its objects of paradoxical de-
sire and disuse. But when the still life ren-
ders books almost exclusively, as in Rakuz-
in’s oeuvre, and art books at that, it is la vie
of cultural transmission that is arrested in
review. As representative modern artist in
the still-life mode, Cézanne appears either
on the spine of one book after another or
unfolded by example in double-page plates
of Cézanne/Still Life with Fruits. His work is
found as well, so we’ve seen, on the cover
of the eponymous volume in The Nature of
Still Life (fig. 3.2), the wordplay of the bor-
rowed title commuting between the world
under representation (“nature” in that
sense) and the “essence” or leading features
of the figure-free genre.
As it happens, that book’s chosen vi-
sual treatment by Rakuzin borrows most
directly, of all his shelf pictures, from the
optical tease characteristic of the quasi-
illusionist mode, with the central volume
easing out just over the front edge of the
shelf into spectatorial space along with the
curve of the ribbon bookmark to the left. All
one needs to do, on revisiting our fantasy
gallery beneath the book-shaped towers
of the Bibliothèque nationale, is imagine
the same paperback volume placed (rather
than painted) on a damask tablecloth next
to a guttered candle and a bowl of actual
rotting fruit, and titled in French Le nature
de la nature morte, to sense the ontological
gap needing to be leapt here—rather than
closed—between the book portrait and the
book sculpture, in their common as well as
contrary terms.
108    | chapter three
THE SIGNATURE TOUCH
In the lower-right corner of Rakuzin’s paint-
ing Seurat appears the oil simulation of
one of the pointillist’s renowned charcoal
sketches, at the bottom right of which we
see in turn Rakuzin’s minuscule surname
signed over its surface. In his own hand-
writing, and even in its anomalous place-
ment this time, the gesture seems indeed
like the tipped hand of Rakuzin’s whole
aesthetic. Given that the book pictures
themselves are frequently signed by him in
the most reduced and discreet of lettering,
the suggestion may arise—and who would
doubt it?—that Naftali Rakuzin is the real
auteur of the repainted books we see as
such, made his own by a demediation that
is followed fast on the heels by new mastery.
Which is why, with no such opportunity as
offered by the Seurat drawing, he usually
signs across one of the horizontal shelves
themselves, as if between the parallel lines
of their underdrawing. His self-declared
technique is thus tacitly identified, literal-
ized, as the sustaining support of the same
tradition that inspires him.
Then, too, on the score of such reflexive
acknowledgment, who would be surprised
to find—among the narrow nameless pub-
lications wedged in alongside the folios and
assorted bulletins—a thin catalog or two
from Rakuzin’s own exhibitions? For this
is an artist whose large-format works must
submit, with each new show, to their own
double reduction on the miniaturized page
of photo-print dissemination: made smaller
even than real volumes, let alone smaller
Figure 3.3.  Naftali Rakuzin, Sims Reed Catalogue (2009). Oil on
canvas, 116 x 81 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
 than the aggrandized expansive space of his
privately imagined archive. Only in person
can one see Rakuzin’s books through his
own wide-eyed gaze. It is irresistible to add
that I had opened this paragraph, with its
imagined canvas of auto-depiction, about a
year before the artist did indeed follow up
on his June 2009 London exhibition with
just such a mise en abyme of his own shelf
portraiture, the Sims Reed Gallery brochure
from the show—with the not quite full-size
detail on its cover thus inset at a strangely
receding scale amid some of the other real
catalogs its cover image duplicates (fig. 3.3).
And once again, in Rakuzin’s craft, no
photograph comes between the photo-
graphed paintings in or on real books and
their aesthetic treatment as oil renderings.
No photorealism here; just venerable still-
life painting—yet distilled to the archive of
its own tradition. According to Rakuzin’s
aesthetic, the catalog reprint of the canon-
ized masterpiece must be unprinted by way
of his reconception—as much as another
textual object might be simulated, manipu-
lated, or defaced in the faux book of sculp-
tural conceptualism. To encounter the so-
called art book in this way is not primarily
to appreciate the art of books or the theory
of art, either one. It is simply to enter the
history of art at its receiving end. And to
take up with its present output—in Rakuz-
in’s own canvases. The reprinted image is
made anew. Made a new one, a painting.
The artist’s search for a method took
him to New York in the early 1970s, where
his brush with conceptual art returned him
instead to the brushwork and representa-
tion of his earlier Moscow training, and
this without the mimetic servitude—and
pervasive low-level irony—of the compet-
110    | chapter three
ing photorealist school of that same ’70s
period. What might have been an autobio-
graphic closed circle, however, becomes an
open exploratory spiral of aesthetic reflec-
tion. For in a deep-going sense, Rakuzin’s
work is indeed touched by this watershed
postmodernist moment—and both its fork-
ing movements, as we’ve surveyed them
above: hyperrealism versus the iconophobic
rebuke of pictorialism in text art; on the one
hand, the demystification of painting by its
reduction to the near-mechanical duplicate
of a mechanical snapshot; on the other, the
disintegration of the painted image into the
verbalized filters of its recognition within
a presupposed discourse—institutional at
base—of the aesthetic in particular as well
as of visuality in general. The result at each
pole: mechanically clear-cut images; me-
chanically clear-cut stencil lettering about
the nature (or non-naturalness) of any pic-
torial image whatever—and in the absence
of all such. It is within the tensions of this
double context that this one painter’s re-
turn to tradition exerts its real pull.
TYPEFACING
Rakuzin’s swerve from anything like the
word-works of a conceptualist trend takes
him a full 180 degrees, instead, into the hon-
orific writing-out of painters’ names rather
than the discursive prevention of their im-
ages—and indeed, further yet at times, into
the “de-printing” and recopying of their al-
ready reproduced paintings, though never
in the prevailing mode of pop simulacrum
or postmodernist citation. At one contempo-
rary extreme, then, as avoided by Rakuzin:
sheer words, absolute optical opacity, con-
cept exiling percept in demurral from the
fetishized museum object. At the other,
equally avoided by Rakuzin’s painterly book-
works: aesthetic delectation vacuumed out
by a “transparent” photomechanistic image
that seems no more artful than the press
of a button—or, with brush in hand, than
the ongoing flicks of a technician’s wrist. In
between: the letteral finesse and pictorial
brio of Rakuzin’s textured execution, where
the publisher’s now-digitized font types are
reinvested with a craftsman’s outmoded but
remotivated skill.
Both the conceptualist irony and the
automatic photomechanical reduction that
Rakuzin skirts are easy to sense lurking
on the flip side of those allusive shelves.
To gauge the full seriousness of his de­
mediation, his return to pigment from color
printing and industrial typeface, one can
imagine the gesture otherwise. Who needs
the auratic masterwork in the age of photo
duplication? Who needs the museum in the
age of the high-definition art book? And, for
that matter, what is the new art piece ever
doing but painting its way into the archive?
And what is the history of art, anyway, but
a litany of name brands in fancy folios and
high-profile fonts? Even when, in formats
similar to Rakuzin’s, an art book’s illus-
trated cover might be turned toward us, or
a plate turned inside out, a distanciating ef-
fect could well be dominant: either putting
the reproduced reproduction so out of fo-
cus, or at such an anamorphic angle, that no
precision would be discerned, no borrowed
appreciation achieved; or else duplicating
the original so lavishly, so slavishly, that we
are in fact in the presence of a simulacral
Cézanne—or at least the stunning double of
an expert photo of one. How close the mise
en page would come, in a case like this, to
the abyssal freefall of metapictorial irony is
not hard to sense. Nor hard to exclude from
consideration when faced with Rakuzin’s
very different book pictures.
AGAINST MECHANICal
REALISM
Rakuzin’s inscribed canonical surnames are
thus in every way the inverted shadow dou-
ble, indeed the intended mirror correction,
of conceptualism’s deconstruction of the
ocular signified by lexical form. The mono-
graphic titles maintain a deference to genius
rather than its continuous deferral by the
mocked discourse thereof. There is wit here,
but not the usual wit of iconophobic inge-
nuity. Technique turns wryly back on itself,
but not with a skeptic’s tongue in cheek.
These images do not paint themselves into
the corner called postmodernist irony. It
would be better to call them postcanoni-
cal: reviewing as they do the tradition they
honor, rethinking its lines of transmission
into current aesthetic practice. Never does
one suspect a mere intertextual send-up: all
painting copies an already existent copy; all
is citation and pastiche; innovation is only
the infinite regress of the derived. Rakuzin’s
paintings are not discursive in this easily
knowing sense. Instead, they station them-
selves in regard—regard to, regard of—an
illustrated discourse that they have no wish
to demur from or repudiate. These are not
metacritical statements. They are technical
investments.
So, in the very reflexivity of their con-
cept, they invert the conceptualist prior-
ity of word to image. At the same time,
Rakuzin’s work would invite just as insis-
tent a contrast—he thinks so too—with that
d e m e d i at e d means |    111
 opposite school represented by another
contemporary painter working entirely in
the photorealist rather than conceptual-
ist mode. This is the deft technician Paul
Béliveau, who paints photorealist “details”
of shelved books in a series called Les Hu-
manités, volumes truncated top and bottom
to about half their actual height and then
multiplied tenfold or so in dimension. What
is left, at up to six-foot scale, represents a
few vertical inches of the photos and letter-
ing on the spines of illustrated popular biog-
raphies—Lindbergh, Callas, JFK, Marilyn—
industrial images that Béliveau’s exacting
brush translates, by the scrupulousness
of a second-order mechanicity, into monu-
mental simulacra. Borrowing the “aura” of
the original only in the devolved sense of
an international personality’s “star power,”
these illustrated biographies, at their in-
flated human height, bear the mark of cul-
tural objects larger than life. Having de-
parted entirely from the anthropomorphic
scale of a held book to that of an incarnate
fame, these enlargements—magnifications
seems the more apt optical term—offer a
decisive contrast to Rakuzin’s absorptive
still lifes. The frisson of Béliveau’s illusion-
ism has only and precisely to do with the
way his painting mimes a photographic
detail, with no off-frame space suggested.
There is no temptation to reach in for the
mammoth books. There is no inwardness
whatever to their frame. Nor do they reach
out to us. The reflexive irony of these can-
vases, such as it is, seems circumscribed in
the recognition that the photorealist artisan
is painting at one and the same time—with
instrumental precision—not just industrial
typeface but, here and there, actual photo-
graphic details of these legendary figures
112    | chapter three
from the wrapped spines of their documen-
tation, thus redoubling the dissemination
of an already and entirely “mediated” fame.
He does so by putting no visible distance
between his technique and the borrowed
iconic reprints he lifts from publishing
technology.
The contrast with Rakuzin has in part to
do with the idea of spatial recess, of what
might lie at right angles to the canvas’s pan-
orama of spines. Béliveau is more than adept
at catching the slight curve of glossy jackets
tucked around his gargantuan hardbacks,
all fitted flush to each other on the shelf—
but that curvature stays minimal and illu-
sory. These paintings have no more depth
than a photograph. By contrast, Rakuzin’s
books do not appear flat and fixed in the
same way. They have imagined sides—with
covers sometimes turned 90 degrees to-
ward us. And insides too—sometimes fac-
ing out. And, through it all, they have the
look not of real books but of their painted
evocation. When I asked him about Béliveau
in correspondence, Rakuzin granted that
he has “something in common with me, but
very superficially. He makes painted photos.
I make paintings. At least I hope so.”
The remark is worth pausing over. For it
may well install a complex grammar of differ-
entiation. Aren’t the common denominators
between these two craftsmen “super­ficial”
precisely because, and in the non­pejorative
sense, Béliveau’s work is deliberately so: a
remediated surface image, or several in a
continuum. And wouldn’t it be fair to let the
subsequent syntax of Rakuzin’s comment
translate further into the near paraphrase
“I paint paintings”—where paint would dis-
cover itself as two kinds of active verb at
once: not just cognate (paint my paintings)
but transitive (paint others’ paintings, as
they appear on covers or printed pages)—
in the way one makes paintings of people
or scenes? In other words: “I remake paint-
ings.” One contemporary painter, Béliveau,
claims his belated place in the history of art
only when visually, if all but imperceptibly,
remediating the work of mechanical and
industrial reproduction; the other painter
sedulously demediates the printed archive of
that precedent tradition. What results is of
course a medial gesture in its own right, but
not until the intervention of print and press
has been cleared away. For Rakuzin wrests
a given canvas (fully or partially glimpsed)
from its status as reproduction into the
realm of the freshly produced: a participa-
tory treatment rather than a simulated im-
print, taking up with the predecessor rather
than just knocking it off.
BEYOND DOUBLE NEGATION
At this juncture, it should be possible to bear
down more closely on what one might hope
to gain from the term demediation. And
again by contrast with the received alter-
native. The act of remediation implies that
the transmissive function of the original
has been retained despite its new overlaid
means. Computers, say, borrow the data-
storage impulse from bibliographic culture.
Instead, demediation lifts away from the
mission of transmission itself, from the me-
dial function, so as to contemplate the space
between canceled means and new manifes-
tation. Remediation activates and thereby
foregrounds the mimetic or communicative
operation, duplicating an original order of
effect at a second degree of portability or
transmission. In contrast, demediation
tends both to reframe and evacuate the
original treatment and intent, replacing its
means toward a new end.
One can ponder the complexities en-
tailed in this distinction by contrast with
certain facile conclusions to which it can
too quickly lead. In photorealist paintings,
for instance, the precisions of stroked or
airbrushed acrylic, sometimes even a thin
oil application, turn the transitional prompt
of high-resolution photographs into high-
definition canvases, landscapes or espe-
cially cityscapes, usually vistas without fig-
ures. In such cases, we are to think mostly
of the off-frame figure behind the onetime
lens. At urban rather than domestic scale,
the photorealist painting tends to become a
still life by default rather than by aesthetic
selection—not Dutch tabletops, of course,
but rather L.A. used car lots or New York
storefronts, yet motionless nonetheless,
inanimate. Apart from the avoided chal-
lenge of perfect humanoid duplication in
such work, this exclusion of the living body
from the original photo tends to emblemize
by metonymy the supposed removal of hu-
man presence—including its expressive or
“stylistic” imposition—from the simulated
automatism of representation. And what
about the secondary reproduction of such
effects? By a certain ironic loop in the cata-
loging of hyperrealist canvases, photography
re­mediates the already photo-duplicating
brushwork with enough appreciative detail
(such is the printer’s technical goal, at least)
that one can detect here and there on the
repictured canvas the medial intercession
of the artist’s temporal labor as well—even
in its concerted illusion of instantaneous
capture. If it succeeds in its archival func-
tion, the professional photorealist catalog
d e m e d i at e d means |    113
 doesn’t make the paintings look any more
like photographs—except in scale (though
this is of course no minor thing)—than they
would on the wall.
Hence the exception that would cement
the rule. To paint again any such art book
reproduction, whether or not the reprint
of an already simulated photo-print (as in
the case of a photorealist canvas), is openly,
and doubly, to undo the manifest medial
(that is, mass-productive) function. Such a
demediating operation can be highlighted
by internal contrast within a single can-
vas, as happens when Rakuzin repaints on
an upper shelf an early, prepixilated Chuck
Close self-portrait, the huge 1967–68 acrylic
canvas serving now as folio book cover; on
the shelf below, a Rembrandt self-portrait
as volume cover, the baroque light of this
image shading his eyes as if he were wear-
ing glasses as large as Close’s (fig. 3.4). This
paired de-duplication, if you will, begins by
embedding the enlarged and grainy photo
simulation evoked by Close’s vast canvas,
along with (over and above) Rembrandt’s
different oil style, in a larger still-life tableau
of unusable closed catalogs; and then routes
the two instances of photo duplication back
around through a new draft stage—via pen-
cil sketch—to an original oil treatment of
Rakuzin’s own. Put it that these Close and
Rembrandt covers are not remediated by
Rakuzin so much as translated to Rakuzins,
their pictured textual and commercial func-
tion quietly demediated in just that way.
And add that they become auto-portraits
in their own right: not of the Paris painter
but of his shelved trove of inspiration. In
a related vein, the Australian photoreal-
ist Victoria Reichelt has turned lately to
trompe l’oeil bookshelf “portraits” that are
114    | chapter three
accurately full-size, rather than interpreted
by enlargement as in Rakuzin’s works—
or “popped” up further into hyperbole in
Béliveau’s. Reichelt’s most notable earlier
paintings had been the black, white, and
gray renderings of predigital photographic
equipment in museum-like isolation against
bland backdrops, bringing oil to the pre-
serving rescue of the medium (and its rap-
idly antiquated machines) that in a previous
century threatened to eclipse it—or at least
bringing paint to the record of that newer
medium’s outmoded apparatuses. More re-
cent than these technological studies, her
bookshelf renderings—themselves based on
photographs of actual private libraries—are
titled by proper name as implicit “portraits”
because the books alone are meant directly
to bespeak the personality of their collec-
tors, as in the oil work Alasdair Macintyre—
with no philosopher, only philosophy books,
on view.
The very concept of portraiture has, of
course, a special valence in the ontology
of the preserved (and hence transmitted)
image. But books can live again in art as
much as faces. In etymology begins typol-
ogy. A medium mediates, gets from there to
here. Painting is one such. She’s long dead
in Lombardy, but here she is still. A mass
medium mediates without limit, its repli-
cations potentially endless. Photography
is one such. He’s everywhere on the Time
cover this week. Remediation in turn mul-
tiplies one mediation by means of another.
The reprinted painting in a museum catalog
is such a remedial image. Alternatively, de-
mediation removes the means itself from its
original, cancels the primary message func-
tion for another sedimented and metatex-
tual one. Again, imagine Rakuzin’s process
Figure 3.4.  Naftali returned to three-dimensional bookwork.
Rakuzin, Chuck Close
(2002). Oil on canvas, Art catalogs in simulations twice as large as
150 x 150 cm. Courtesy
of the artist. useful lined up on a museum floor in a per-
manent state of wry unopenability would
serve—in their indifferent attitude (their
inert stance) toward museum display—to
cancel the same mediating function that is
surrendered in Rakuzin’s case by their cel-
ebratory rendering in oil.
So once more into the breach: the vis-
ible breach, though invisible as such (as
difference or gap, that is, rather than as
d e m e d i at e d means |    115
 optical surface), between an object of me-
diation and the medial negation effected by
its secondary representation. In Rakuzin’s
canvases print and photo-print, glossy
stock and applied color ink, disappear into
paint, and their functions with them, when
he does over his folios in oil. This gesture
requires further pausing over in turn. If al-
ready these paintings have risked seeming a
digression from one’s thinking about book-
works, at least the reason for this shouldn’t
be that they are paintings rather than sculp-
tures. In being adduced to expand our sense
of medial negation across a field of postcon-
ceptual practice broader than that repre-
sented solely by the bibliobjet itself, these
painted books, and hence these bookless im-
ages, orbit the very core of the issue. For the
art of demediation indicates more than de-
mediated art objects. It names, as noted, the
transitive process of subtracted mediality
taking place within any new objectification,
including any new mediated representation.
Rakuzin’s paintings aren’t demediated—
his library is. As bookshelf representations,
they are pictures. As paintings of books
of photographed paintings, however, they
replay an initial demediation whereby the
original canvases of the Masters are trans-
ferred to photo-print in plates and jacket il-
lustrations. They do so by returning these
same images—through the remediation of
new paint—to “mere” portraits of those
same books. In this regress of “repetition”
(our adjusted sense of Bergsonian seriality
when crossing between commercial object
and its strictly artifactual replica), these
two-dimensional book-works can also bring
a smile of recognition to the spectacle of
their elided content. In the end, what better
access to the tradition—how better to sam-
116    | chapter three
ple the archive of its accomplishment—than
through the eye and hand of its present-
day avatar? Furthermore, the proximity of
Rakuzin’s draftsmanship to the conceptual
field of book sculpture is glimpsed in a flash
if one imagines any one of the painted vol-
umes in an appropriated 3-D instance: a real
art book open to facing photo plates that
have been aggressively painted over in min-
iature detail by new brushwork.
Manifestly, the art of demediation, as art,
always has its own medium. Even found and
singed books nailed together in the shape
of a crucifix have a medium, or a mixed one,
cellulose and ash and iron. Demediation,
again, doesn’t refer to some posited denial
of mediality. It is a transformational ges-
ture, describing the changes art of this sort
works rather than what it works in, or what
it consists in doing rather than the materi-
als (or their absence) it consists of. Deme-
diation names the way art in one mode or
medium can isolate the found or simulated
instance of another medium and evacuate it
of its rendered means—and hence, at times,
of its intended meaning in transmission. All
art requires a mediating form. The active art
of demediation, always to some degree con-
ceptualist in this regard, is, as we’ve seen, to
peel back a layer or two of this inevitability
to recover its ground—or groundlessness.
That’s what demediation means. It dis-
solves the original in the oblique copy, the
optical allusion. Rather than renewing the
medial function in the mode of the illusory,
let alone the illustrative, such work cites it
under suspension or erasure. If Rakuzin, as
we’ve seen, were simply reduplicating the
art-book reproduction by an oil treatment,
he would in a sense be sustaining its merely
illustrative function on or between the cov-
Figure 3.5.  Jordan ers of a curatorial or critical survey, citing
Kantor, Untitled (The  
Bar) (2009). Chromo­ the already-published image for wall-hung
genic color print on
metallic paper, mounted notice, quoting it. And in doing the same
on Gatorboard, 43 x 59
in. Edition of 3. Image with books of repainted photographs that
courtesy of Ratio 3,
San Francisco. are sometimes his subjects, he would be
a photorealist en abyme, rather than full-
frame. He is neither. Painting paintings, even
while making them, is what he does. But as
if to keep the distinction potent, sometimes
Rakuzin seems to be edging in that other di-
rection of late, especially in his recent color
drawings and oils of open books contain-
ing reprinted black-and-white—sometimes
color—photographs, now of Moscow, now
of Tel Aviv. Yet always provisional, these
“reprints.” Always with a proviso. Even in
such rendered photo albums, Rakuzin isn’t
repicturing the mechanically transcribed
realism of the documentary photo so much
as subtracting its instantaneity and exacti-
tude by the inferred duration of a softening
brushwork. Again the obverse face of hyper-
realist irony.
Same, more commonly in his work, with
those open books of rephotographed paint-
ings. It is there that he derealizes the au-
d e m e d i at e d means |    117
Figure 3.6.  Jordan Kantor,
Untitled (X-ray) (2009).
Digital radiography printed
on Duralar in aluminum
lightbox, 41 x 56 x 5 in.
Image courtesy of Ratio 3,
San Francisco.
118    |
thenticating museum photograph into a new
image altogether, the re-enlarged easel-scale
double of an offprint duplicate. He unpaints
the copy. This is not a mystified double ne-
gation, of course, where the copy of a copy
amounts to the original. But it does aspire
to an original nonetheless. At the very least,
his images resist the uninvested circulation
of the imprint, where mimesis is reduced to
sheer dissemination. They don’t remediate
this service by their copying. Rather, they
demediate its strictly documentary rather
than aesthetic force. Transmission is re-
placed at brush point by new immanence.
chapter three
The work in question is there before us.
This one—not the image of that one. That’s
the way to make a painting, Rakuzin seems
to suggest: to take up its inspirations from
within.
Rakuzin enters art history from the rep-
resentation of its archive, whereas another
contemporary artist, Jordan Kantor, enters
it from the science of attribution and pres-
ervation. Imagine an illustrated monograph
called Manet’s Mirror, featuring on its cover
his famous A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882),
the waitress reflected in the huge mirror be-
hind, the volume itself tilted toward us in
superb reproduction on one of Rakuzin’s
art shelves: Manet’s breakthrough oil tech-
nique both there and not there at once, in
its demediated evocation. That’s an effect
we’re by now familiar with. But repaint-
ing can even further demediate such a ca-
nonical image, as we see in Kantor’s work
(honored in an award show at SFMOMA in
the winter of 2009). As represented in Ma-
net’s defining canvas, art history’s found-
ing break from realism into modernism
yields up some of its formal secrets, some
of its compositional abstraction, by curato-
rial X-ray. This is what Kantor’s three-part
homage begins by reminding us. Taking off
from such laboratory imaging of the can-
vas, where unexpected zones and curves of
pure tone grow dominant after the removal
of all chromatic rhythm and texture, Kantor
repaints this photochemical probe in black-
and-white oil under the 2007 title The Bar—
and then, two years later, in another appro-
priation, shows it in a full-size negative ver-
sion, a chromogenic print on metallic paper
(fig. 3.5), the arms of the barmaid all black
rather than white, et cetera. But the nega-
tion doesn’t stop there. He then rounds out
the circle of demediation by taking a more
extreme X-ray of his own painting (2009),
which bores beneath pigment itself to reveal
only the stretchers of the canvas, its screws,
staples, and hangers, all sharply delineated
when displayed in the museum variant of a
pathologist’s lightbox (fig. 3.6). At this point
Kantor’s work has flayed away all paint to
reveal the backing material conditions not
of a nuanced composition but of visibility
itself as surface feature. Arrived at this
conceptualist dead end, demediation has
scoured from the pigmented surface all aes-
thetic media whatever in the reduction to
pure forensic imaging. Again, demediation
moves beyond double negation. Even in the
radiographic terms posed by Kantor, two
negatives don’t make a positive; they probe
instead the material ground from whose
base they have departed.
from BRUSH POINT TO
FINGERTIP
By way of a further contrast with Rakuzin’s
demediated art photography in oil, we can
now attempt putting his body of work, as
promised, into conversation with an artist
who operates at the far polarized limit of
contemporary practice. Representational
painting is confronted in this way by sheer
conceptualist appropriation, no repainting
or rephotographing involved; pictured photo
books contrasted with effaced photo-prints
from found magazines. The goal of this
comparison is an illustrative triangulation
among (1) (re)painted art monographs, (2) ag-
gressively unbound and delicately beaten-up
photographic pages, and, in transit to the re-
maining chapters, (3) the freestanding volu-
metrics of altered book-works in their fuller
art-historical environs, and fierce variety, as
museum objets—all in a further clarification
of demediation’s deep inter-art gesture.
With seas between in nationality
and technique, how does one think to-
gether, think into relation, Rakuzin’s art-
historical homages and the internally col-
laged manipulations of John Sparagana’s
found glossy photos? These have been torn
from the pages of commercial fashion adver-
tising and worked over until whole segments
of the image disappear into the coterminous
plane of his own deft but deskilling labor of
defacement. If each process, the brushwork
d e m e d i at e d means |    119
 of Rakuzin and the rubwork of Sparagana,
can come clear in isolation as a pertinent
case of demediation as regards their pictured
objects, then their alignment can point a way
forward to the broader use of this term—and,
more particularly, the fuller place of three-
dimensional bookwork under its heading.
Rakuzin, a seasoned draftsman and painter;
Sparagana, a late conceptualist bricoleur and
collage artist: each could, though in quite
different ways, be called a photo-irrealist.
This is because their work operates the de-
mediation of the photo-print at two stages
in its relation to art history, one artist of the
intertext carrying us back beyond the dawn
of auto-duplicated originals in its circulation
of master images, back to the single executed
canvas or drawing; one artist of the found, at
the contemporary end of print culture, seiz-
ing upon the magazine fashion ad and, in
foiling the commercial transparency of its
appeal, extruding from its picture plane a
new and functionless beauty. To find in them
a common term is thus to lend it; and in turn
to lend to it—extracted from such discrep-
ant instances, abstracted to its most general
feature—a certain categorical force.
FROM HISTORICAL
TO PERIODICAL
To move from Rakuzin’s still lifes, including
his reproduced urban photo books (Moscow
by day, Tel Aviv by night), to torn pages from
real photo spreads is just the leap it seems—
but across a certain common ground: the
undermined ground of textual purpose, of
motivated mediation. Rakuzin’s catalogs and
monographs are not in the ordinary sense for
consultation; Sparagana’s advertisements no
longer market their products by tantalizing
120    | chapter three
association with the glint and polish of their
own production values. The friction of hand-
induced fatiguing robs them of cool, even as
it may enhance their mystery. Not whole vol-
umes but their stolen pages, not magazines
as such but only an included picture or two,
these readymades are so altered they are al-
most shredded. Halted just short of destruc-
tion, they are turned under manual pressure
to optical reconstructions. In a sense more
literal than even McLuhan had in mind, the
medium really is the massage, the surface
damage itself.
Between thumb and forefinger—via a dex-
terous precision arising from within an oth-
erwise deskilled tradition of conceptualist
collage—Sparagana disfigures by a labored
crinkling the often androgynous glamour
photos he excerpts, matting the high-gloss
surface, stealing its sheen, conceptually re-
thinking the so-called high-concept slickness
of Madison Avenue graphic design. In effect,
he redesigns his found photographs for look-
ing rather than staring. Voyeurism is blocked
by an experimental visuality across a fret-
ted plane of materialization. These images
are demediated, then, not in some obvious
colloquial sense whereby they would inter-
rupt the flow of high-profit media in image
culture, decommercialize its mass appeal.
More specifically, they subtract its message,
the pitch of its picturing. Often, in the haz-
ing over of mercantile transparency, they
introduce, in effect, an additional sheet of
fabric to the fashion materials on display,
in one case doubling the diaphanous chif-
fon cage of a designer skirt so that its own
two-ply moiré pattern in the photograph is
partly veiled to the right by the more frenetic
weave yet of scrunched paper rather than
silk (fig. 3.7).
Figure 3.7.  John No word, no discourse, invades the se-
Sparagana (2008),
altered magazine lected fashion-magazine photographs to
page (detail).
Courtesy of the begin with. But on their own terms, the
artist.
images are potently rearticulated by Spara-
gana from within their seemingly internal
duress. Fatigued they are, but only to be
rehabilitated: turned from aberrant texture
into ironic and discrepant textual systems
of their own, rather than transparent pho-
tographic armatures of the advertising in-
dustry, which is how they began their (oth-
erwise) transient life. Or put it this way:
these disposable images have been rescued
for the status of things again rather than
consumerist signs. They have thus come
forward, in their own page-at-a-time synec-
dochic sense, as mutilated bibliobjets. And
as such, they claim kin with much other
contemporary appropriation. Though still
within a Duchampian heritage of the found
and reconceived thing, the contemporary
defacer, from Spector to Sparagana, has, in
the process of demediation, not just pro-
longed the avant-garde’s rejected prestige
of expressive “touch” but inverted it into a
reskilled aesthetic of ripping, fraying, and
scarring.
HAND UNMADE
The distressed field of rubbed image in
Sparagana’s production becomes almost a
d e m e d i at e d means |    121
 partial scotoma (to borrow a term put into
play by Hal Foster in another context).2 The
abraded surface opens a window onto reti-
nal dysfunction itself: often a two-paned
window, retaining (while sometimes later-
ally shifting) the diptych format of the origi-
nal magazine framing even while effecting
the arrest or retardation of its original “sce-
nario” in the act of consumption. In their
nontransparency, these optical baffles can
at times seem to cooperate with the image
they assault and finally shatter, if not with
the commercial visual “text” they elide by
obscuring. Here is where mediation is so
markedly to be distinguished from materi-
ality. Negate the former by altering the lat-
ter, and a new message may seem to emerge.
In what Sparagana’s lushly pulverized rect-
angular segments intermittently refuse to
show, in what they “screen out” with their
reticulated meshwork of “stress” (and
hence rhetorical counter-stress), in all this
they have something other to assert, some-
thing to make us re-see.
In them, spoilage invades the technically
pristine magazine shot only to “refigure”
(Mieke Bal’s apt emphasis in her writing on
Sparagana’s work) some unexpected dispo-
sition of bodies and desire within it. Un-
3
predictable, unintended, commercially un-
funded, something happens, not just to the
page but to the image. Nothing is done to
these photographs but a careful wrinkling.
They are not retouched, only touched—that
is, pinched, bunched, stressed. Everything
transformative about them comes from
within their own material ground, rough-
ened but unsupplemented. In this blocking
of transparency with their own ghostly dou-
bling from within, the phantomized image
that results is the revelation of materiality
122    | chapter three
from within mediation, so that the spectral
fascination of these roughened readymades
takes its immediate toll on the marketing
image. In her retextualization of these ob-
jects under conceptual attention, a work
like Sparagana and Bal’s Sleeping Beauty:
A One-Artist Dictionary turns the artist’s
altered pop archive into a optical lexicon
itself, a primer for the reading lessons his
pieces inculcate. Fatiguing meets its natural
antithesis in visual invigoration when the
signature effect of demediation is every-
where manifest in the continuous visibility
of the artist’s “hand”—which, retaining
the enigma of contingency in its frictional
effects, makes fresh handiwork of damage
and disuse.
Here is where the comparison with
Rakuzin grows especially instructive. For
with the painter’s book-works in oil, photo-
print mediation is disappeared into the re-
alized materiality of pigment on canvas: a
return of the repressed aura of skilled paint-
ing from within the very citing of its mass
reproduction. What returns from latency in
Sparagana’s attacked pages is, by contrast,
only the mere fragility of his images—de-
spite their original steely confidence as
commercial products. In desecrating these
radically secular images, one might say that
the artist resacralizes sight itself. He does
this by taking into his own hands, and ma-
nipulating by scrupulously induced frayage
and iconoclasm, the cultural manipulation
such images themselves originally intend.
Against the visual rhetoric of the ad, often
sidelong in its own inferences, Sparagana’s
art of departure adverts to a deeper tension
yet within the images, where even cool can
seem chilling, their most provocative and
alluring surfaces optically aloof.
Plate 1.  Brian Dettmer, Key Monuments (2009). Courtesy of the artist and Toomey Tourell Fine Art.
 Plate 2.  Steve Wolfe, Untitled (A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man) (2003). Oil, lithography, modeling paste, paper,
and wood, 8 x 53/16 x 3/4 in. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring
Augustine, New York.

Plate 3.  Adam Bateman, The Flesh, The Spirit, and Father Smith
(2005). Books 96 x 96 x 96 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Plate 4.  John Latham, Painting Is an
Open Book (1961). Books, plaster, wire,
wire mesh, wood, ceramic tile, glass,
burlap mounted on board. Collection
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T. B.
Walker Acquisition Fund, 1987. Courtesy
of the Latham Estate and Lisson Gallery.
 Plate 5.  Hubertus Gojowczyk, The Latest
News from the Years 1732 and 1733 (1999).
Courtesy Moeller Fine Art, Berlin
and New York.

Plate 6.  Jonathan Callan, Rational Snow

(2002). Book and aerated concrete, 21 x 28
x 48 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Plate 7.  Raphaelle Peale, Catalogue Deception (after 1813) (Catalogue for the Use of the Room—a Deception). Oil on panel, 41/2 x 11 x 1 in. Philadelphia
Museum of Art. Courtesy of James Peale.
Plate 8.  John Sparagana, NW 8.5.09 (2009), detail. Sampled magazine pages on paper, 201/2 x 16 in. Courtesy of the artist and CTRL Gallery, Houston.

Plate 9.  Naftali Rakuzin, Anselm Kiefer (2008). Oil on canvas, 60 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Plate 10.  Xiaoze Xie, The MoMA Library (46–50) (2005). Oil on canvas, 40 x 60 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 11.  Vincent Desiderio, Cockaigne (2003). Oil on canvas, 1117/8 x 1533/8 in. © Vincent Desiderio. Courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York.
Plate 12.  Matej Krén, Passage (2004). Courtesy of the artist.

MATERIAL DIFFERENCES
In this way, the distressed and at times
ultimately distraught rectangle in Spara-
gana’s work both doubles and reframes the
original image instead of simply delimiting
certain superimposed patches of ocular de-
fault across its surface. In this layering and
resectoring, the sites of surface tension are
found providing new depth and new concep-
tual latitude at once. Sparagana’s images do
not set out just to flay or flagellate a skin-
deep commercial culture. Instead, they layer
it with a distancing webwork whose criss-
crossed lines of stress and microfracture of-
ten net the unexpected. The intrigue of the
artist’s fatiguing remains a resolute aesthetic
of the unmade, an art more of tactical nega-
tion than of creation ex nihilo, singularizing
again the mass-produced and over-“exposed”
image, taking it out of circulation via the
crystal grit of the craftsman’s painstaking
labor. Bal stresses in passing the materialist
reduction of glossy stock to rag “fabric.” We
might say that in crushing out the polished
surface of his readymades, Sparagana be-
comes the sabotage artist of the otherwise
high-profile, cleanly delineated image, crum-
pling it to cloth or pulp rather than processed
paper, dropping it back from imprint to its
underlying condition as pressed matter: in
sum, demediating it by return to its frail and
overtaxed material support.
The occlusion in play is something more
like a sieve than a curtain, a crosshatched
random microgrid. The discovered image
within the found one remains strangely
crisp in its own splintered and scrimlike
emergence from the pregiven field. Such di-
aphanous fencing out of the original media
shot—in the mode of internal divergence—
opposes the glossy point of departure in
commercial technique not with the murky
but with the dis-integrated image. The re-
sult is a surface shattered or “crazed” rather
than opaque, both cellular and interlaced—
and with a conceptual depth still struggling
through in only partial blockage, so that
its spectral superimposition looks to have
been lifted away from the original backing
to become the transfigured thing itself. And
what we’ve come down to, then, with this
particular form of the assisted readymade,
is again the case of material form without
media service. However we name the hands-
on medium of Sparagana’s own artifacts, the
photographic mediation they allude to with-
out quite reproducing has been intercepted
in mid-resolution on the retina.
It is this immanence of the remade that
contrasts Sparagana’s works so directly with
Rakuzin’s. Where the last chapter began to
situate disused books within the heritage of
an anti-modernist, and in the thick of a post-
conceptualist, field of installation display,
this chapter has needed to think through
more fully the role of demediation in the
pacifying of text object into intransitive
thing. In Rakuzin’s painted shelves, unlike
with real volumes torn and worn, books from
the cultural archive are present by pictorial
image only, seen without being consulted,
at best figuratively “sampled.” Gone are art
catalogs and bulletins. Left is their sketch-
based painting—and this, most often, in the
very manner of their absent contents. We
return next, in the remaining chapters, to
mostly closed books in three rather than two
dimensions—though still within the con-
text of the conceptual text forms in which
such bookwork, exiled from any lending li-
brary, finds nonetheless its true aesthetic
d e m e d i at e d means |    123
 exchange. We do so for a further look, in
particular, at those synecdoches of reading
time, its duration per se, that can, strangely
enough, achieve de­mediated spatial form in
the plastic art of the bibliobjet. Once remove
the time of reading along with the legibility
of its prompting graphics, and what is ma-
terialized—in the vacuum of any functional
medium—is the sheer material backing of
prevented or sequestered imprint: the return
of the impressed, as it were, but without the
visible and motivating inscription or the at-
tention spans it invites.
A halfway house en route (and in theoreti-
cal return) to the genre of the closed book as
readybound or surrogate—and this within
the either tacit or often exaggerated context
of mass-print duplication—can be found, as
it happens, in Sparagana’s most recent ex-
periments, which expand beyond magazine
photos to include, in their alternate formats,
a demediation of the surrounding print in-
formation as well. The intense optical vacil-
lation of Sparagana’s new paste-up work—
collage as mirage—not only combines image
and text but compounds his technique of fa-
tiguing with a slicing up and fanning open of
the illustrated page, so that each collaborat-
ing medium, photo-print and typeset, can be
watched all but disappear through the cracks
of its own multiplied imprint. Whereas, be-
fore, a single duplicate page was divided up
so that a bruised and blurred sector of its
image could usurp the allotted square inches
of the “original,” Sparagana’s more recent
multiple-copy effect has, in contrast, a struc-
ture more difficult to discern. Slicing across
four or more identical pages of a magazine
spread approximately one roughened line of
print at a time, including the photos embed-
ded in the typeset columns, Sparagana then
124    | chapter three
arrays the horizontal strips, slightly out of
alignment at their left and right margins, so
that they expand the resulting image verti-
cally into what is revealed, only up-close, as
a striated layering of multiples, here from
Newsweek (fig. 3.8). As no urinal called Foun-
tain could ever do, Sparagana’s latest altered
pages, in their splaying and spray of text and
image, take the fact of duplication back into
themselves as internal replicas.
His exercise in the shredded magazine
page, rather than the altered book, thus as-
sumes its fastidiously worked place within
a conceptualist tradition running back to
the Journals Series by John Knight in the
late 1970s. Yearlong subscriptions to popu-
lar magazines were mailed to high-profile
artists by Knight and then reconvened for
museum display in vitrine cases, where the
multiple issues were stacked in terraced
rows, fanned out laterally, or otherwise ar-
rayed for institutional validation as lavishly
mass-produced visual ephemera: conceptu-
alist serialism borrowed directly from the
print marketplace. 4 Sparagana narrows the
logic so that his reworked object is the de-
composed composite of a single print run,
conceptualist seriality turned against itself.
Seen from a certain distance, however, and
by a fractalizing trick of the eye, the image
of the slivered multiple appears to resolve
into a blurry enlargement of the whole in-
tact page. Over this defaced lexigraphic and
photographic text, the gallery eye reasserts
its hegemony after all. But it isn’t just an out-
of-focus scintillation of the printed image
that Sparagana’s breakdown achieves. In an
unexpected, almost eerie intermedial irony,
Figure 3.8.  John Sparagana, NW 8.5.09 (2009). Sampled
magazine pages on paper, 20 1/2 x 16 in. Courtesy of the artist
and CTRL Gallery, Houston.
 the crisscross fissuring and tessellation of
the magazine collages resemble nothing so
much as a pixilated breakdown of exactly
the kind of digitally transmitted image that
would in fact have generated this contempo-
rary newsprint layout in the first place (plate
8, detail) and that may one day obviate its
paper basis altogether.
Such visible but illegible print rows,
rubbed nearly blank at times and then alto-
gether muffled in content by their cascading
repetition, serve in this way to inflect Spara-
gana’s previous work in distressed photo
spreads with the further and false lure of an
occluded reading act. But what is most strik-
ing in conceptualist terms about these new
pieces is that they have taken the founding
condition of mass-media publication—the au-
tomatic multiple—and submitted this feature
itself, through an artisan’s bricolage, to its
visible demediation as wall art. Duchamp’s
industrial multiple as readymade has thus
found a brilliant new manifestation in the al-
tered “book.” While removed here from the
codex form of magazine dissemination, nei-
ther text nor image comes to us pure. Each
bears with it instead the usually invisible
fact of its multiplication as a now-obtruded
surface feature. By this ocular demediation
of text and image together, one reads the im-
age of mass reproduction itself. And in this
recognition, once our jaw stops dropping at
both the exactitude and the accidental optics
of its technique, we may manage a smile as
well at this ingrown Bergsonian “repetition”
and its abstract—and far-reaching—irony.
In three dimensions rather than two, in
fact, this industrial repetition is what so
many books in the anarchic libraries of in-
stallation art have lately tended to evoke,
as well as in the broader spectrum of the
126    | chapter three
conceptualist “reading scene.” For a no-
table international site of such collected
lessons in their full transmedial scope, an
exhibit putting us through our paces in the
following museum tour (called Learn to
Read), this chapter’s look into the logic of
de­mediation has certainly worked to prepare
us. We’ve concentrated temporarily on the
two-dimensional figure of codex material
in contrastive modes, ocular versus haptic
in emphasis: the book depicted, the actual
magazine depictured, but with no turnable
pages in either case, no tabled content in a
mechanical book form. This concentration
has established a kind of materialist baseline
before our return to the bibliobjet in the re-
maining three chapters, helping to measure
from here out the difference made by the
canceled textual depth of a still-visible third
dimension. So that the disparity of compari-
son in the present chapter has been meant in
advance, and as already suggested, entirely
for the purpose of triangulation. Painting
is the most venerable of media, advertis-
ing photography the most ephemeral. The
difference spanned between Rakuzin’s and
Sparagana’s techniques, between canoni-
cal homage and the manual impedance of
image commerce, narrows almost to a sus-
pected double pun in the latter’s deskillings
of the journeywork photo, his laborious
demediations of glitz by aesthetic friction.
For with an artist like Rakuzin in view, it’s
as if the very “touch” of the Masters has
been reduced by Sparagana to mere grasp,
to fingertip abrasion, with even the “mass
medium” surrendering itself to manhandled
mass—and then, in the latest work, decon-
structing its planar coherence even further
through the return to visibility of its own
multiple condition.
 With Rakuzin and Sparagana at the far
ends of contemporary technique (library
still lifes versus tampered-with actual pages),
the instrumental fixity of the image is none-
theless in each case schematic, formal, ab-
stracted—even when radically hands-on in
the case of Sparagana’s fingered surfaces. By
contrast, book-works, cohabiting with us in
the same three-dimensional display space,
can seem even more palpable yet in their
demediation. There “in the round” before
or alongside us, pages of the once or never
book answer to a different degree of inutility
than their painted or excised versions within
a frame. The book-work’s canceled reading
is immanent to its own form, rather than
merely incident to it as a secondary effect
either of devoted representation or spoiling
manipulation. With an actual book shape
in museum space, whether appropriated or
simulated, the refused interior has a special
force. Its inaccessible pages—pressed closed,
carved up, even detonated, but in one way or
another “real” in their number and binding—
speak more forcefully, because unheld and
unopened, to (and of) all they withhold. This
is the material testimony we will go on not-
ing and cross-examining. For, unreadable in
itself, the book-work continues to read read-
ing. And it does this even when the books so
installed are too big to hold, too impervious
to enter, and too forbidding in their alien
materiality to imagine legible. Anticipating
as I do, in characterizing such an extreme
repudiation of textuality, the steel-framed
shelvings of Anselm Kiefer’s leaden books—
to be discussed after our scan of the Tate
Learn to Read exhibit—is a way of bringing
forward a final image by Rakuzin, from 2007,
that ratchets up one notch further into re-
flexive conceptual irony his typical demedia-
tion of fine art catalogs (plate 9). In this case,
his magnified cover serves all the more ob-
viously to miniaturize the bulking forms of
the sculptor’s tombstone-size lead volumes
shelved by the score.
In a widespread oddity of standard re-
mediation, photographs of Kiefer’s vast
me­tallic libraries tend to make the muted,
mottled shapes of his annealed tomes look a
little like sketched rather than sculpted vol-
umes, no doubt by optical association with
the shadings of pencil lead (an effect that
clearly extends here, in the reproduced cover
photograph of Rakuzin’s canvas, even to the
photographed steel mullions of the vaulted
Grand Palais glass ceiling). But as oil master,
Rakuzin’s further remove from the tonnage
of impenetrable lead volumes in his reprise
of that exhibition cover has an enhanced the-
matic effect. That slate-gray inlaid photo of
Kiefer’s huge drab spines produces a kind of
chromatic lacuna in the green, gold, and blue
tones coruscating across Rakuzin’s oversize
(but now only relatively so) book edges. That
gap in tonality inscribes a conceptual regress
as well. It is as if the repainted museum
photo-print of the Kiefer monoliths has been
reduced to the actual (and otherwise invisi-
ble) pencil sketches through which the image
has already passed in the meticulous stages
of Rakuzin’s own sketch-to-oil craft. And
more. For here is one of Rakuzin’s most deci-
sive works, as vertiginous as the best of them.
In it, on it, we have an art of sculpted books
you not only can’t peruse but can never even
open, rendered in a painted art about books
you can likewise neither open nor decipher.
But whose originals in Kiefer’s work, whether
or not conjured by museum discourse and its
illustrations, you must learn—in their own
thunderous silence—to read.
d e m e d i at e d means |    127
C H A P TE R F O U R
O B J E C T LE S S O N S
L earn to Read—and, while you’re at it, to
decipher several very different hands
at once. Such was the title of a multi-artist
exhibition in the Level 2 Gallery of the Tate
Modern during the summer of 2007. That
rubric alone was a lesson plan. By contrast:
look to see—the usual imperative of realist
painting for centuries. Take in a visual sur-
face so that it takes you elsewhere. Walls are
natural places for pictures, since in effect
(since Alberti) paintings have regularly been
conceived as windows. But when, under
modernism, they grow opaque with abstrac-
tion, you suddenly have to think about them
rather than via them, as an act of painting
rather than a feat of picturing. After centu-
ries of looking with (as if through) the sur-
face of art, the spectator sees instead the
abstract work of the canvas—no longer a
“picture plane” but merely a planar image—
without that doubled vision of a sighted
space within and behind its frame. Optically
and cognitively both, you are asked, under
certain coercions, to look entirely into the
matter of that surface, by way of investiga-
tion rather than envisioning. Beyond this,
abstraction has one more phase. It remains
for certain forms of conceptual art, as we’ve
seen, literally to write out (in both senses)
our dominant modes of viewing in the ab-
sence of evocative pigment and stroke alto-
gether.
Following upon the exponential commer-
cialization of the international art market
getting under way in the postwar moment of
American abstract painting, conceptual art
is thus able to confront the museum cult of
financial valuation and display with a coun-
terdiscourse of its own, terse, vernacular,
ironic. Especially when a lexigraphic cover-
 age bears with it no pictorial content what-
ever, the look-see of presentation is inter-
cepted by idea on the blocked way to scene,
even if only to the scene of paint’s own dec-
laration. As if it were a foundational course
in nonnative language acquisition, the gal-
lerygoer in the realm of conceptualism, an
expatriate from spectacle, has to learn all
over again the ABC’s of looking from the
movement’s reductive, defetishized sur-
faces. Whereas the technique and finesse of
realism had to be seen to be believed, their
deflation by the textwork of conceptualism
reminds us, by resisting any strong pictorial
grip, that believing can be a kind of mental
seeing in itself, pat and preformatted. If that
reminder, as an aesthetic lesson, retains its
pedagogic force even still, across a wide
swath of current experimental work, it is
because each new object justifies its obliga-
tion to instruct us in the adjusted terms of
its own unexpected visual use.
And the bookwork not least: each case an
object lesson in its own entirely displaced
legibility. Although in traditional painting,
by your taking in of a pictured view, you
may briefly be taken in (both acceptations
of the idiom) by the spatial ingenuities of
the realist canvas, with conceptual surfaces
you are blankly excluded by the refusal of
“recessed” content. The success of the com-
munication is left up to you, in your men-
tal space. With bookwook too. The result
is the inversion of a norm. Whereas the
spatial depth of classic painting is a visible
but false one, the internal space of canceled
reading matter in the inoperable book-work
is invisible but real. But this is to say, almost
paradoxically, that each such work provides
a strange rite of initiation into the mystery
of a cultural form denied its natural objec-
130    | chapter four
tive: to mediate, to transmit. As the once-
held object lessens its hold on us in book-
work, the thing in the form of the not-book
stands declared as mere physical rudiment:
site of reading matter without its sight,
material base of transmission without the
signals. The objective disappears into the
sheer object as mere thing. Read to learn is
thus overturned along with look to see. In
each case, forestalling mediation in the re-
considered face of materiality, one must all
over again, and from the tangible ground up,
learn to decipher what remains.
Hence the title of that Tate Modern ex-
hibit. Reading means, at base, learning the
conditions and rules of mediation. It requires
a mastering of the codes: mastering them in
their structural disappearance into meaning.
But if they don’t disappear, if either lexical or
graphic codes of inscription hang opaquely
before you, let alone the book object dumped
or stacked in front of you, no mediation takes
place. The conditions and rules can be neu-
tered by their own overexposure as much
as by their closing down. Such cases are, by
being extreme, exemplary. They are in fact,
and within the Tate show itself, obverse and
complementary: a learning to read either in
a metatextual curriculum whose very para-
digms are laid bare or, alternately, when
there is no coded writing on view at all (or at
least not enough of it to channel attention).
In the latter case, we find the demediation
that comes from the closed or dismantled
book: the native temporality of reading spa-
tialized under arrest, suspended as if in am-
ber, translated (without linguistic mediality)
from duration to sculptural form.
But then, too, in this very respect, some-
thing quite typical in this Tate show—rather
than anomalous—is further exemplary. To
deposit book-works of this sort in their in-
structive place amid the variegated text-
works of such an exhibit serves to replay in
microcosm the affiliated role of book sculp-
ture, alongside lexigraphic inscriptions of
all sorts, in the ongoing range of conceptual
experiment over the last four decades. All
art of this stamp—or stripe, or lineation—is
not just conceptual, then, over and above
perceptual, but also in its way precepto-
rial. And, even if fewer in number than their
two-dimensional equivalents, book objets
are as much a part of this lesson plan as wall
texts. Having examined so far, in successive
chapters, the objecthood of the book-work,
its relation to conceptual art, and then the
logic of demediated treatment that regularly
underlies these twin theoretical fields of
non-artifactual making, we can now watch
the two actually united under this shared
valence in a single exhibition.
TUTORIAL INSCRIPTION
In the 2007 Learn to Read show, altered book-
works thus appear in the instructive prox-
imity of handmade text-works in a way that
clarifies two relations at once, each to the
other and both to their common postmodern
lineage. For the works on paper bear an un-
mistakable kinship, even four decades after
its heyday, with exactly the aspect of the con-
ceptual art movement that gets summarized,
in the same year as the Tate gathering, un-
der the title of a retrospective monographic
survey called (capped words run together as
one seventeen-letter lexeme on the spine)
WORDSTOBELOOKEDAT. In and beyond
1
the injunction or imperative of its title, the
Tate’s Learn to Read selection offers similar
words to the wise: lots of words and word
forms, miniature and inflated, truncated,
typed, printed, scrawled, compulsively hy-
phenated, on scrolls, canvases, photographs,
plate glass, and manuscript stacks. In this
ensconced realm of conceptualist écriture,
the bulk of these lexigraphic works are not
pictures of pages, even of lone ones not add-
ing up to a text. They are, by any other name,
pages in their own right—yet equally severed
from any textual continuity.
And amid the wall art that predominates
in Learn to Read, its dispersed tuition in-
cludes a “text-book” or two to help anchor,
or at least diversify, its lessons and their de-
liberate hurdles. In the absence of any cata-
log published for the show, the act of repre-
senting these wall-works and book-works in
further words (from my own handwritten
notes and sketches)—and so perforce re-
conceptualizing the show’s many two- and
three-dimensional pieces—may be a wan
substitute for the exhibit itself. But it can-
not be said to betray its spirit. Rather, it con-
firms and extends its premises. Such art is
primarily in the head to begin with. Drawing
and painting that resist almost all graphic
images beyond discursive notations, just as
sculpture made from the ordinary compila-
tion of such notations in books, or from the
mere paper and cardboard backing of these
volumes, translate readily enough into a
mental reformulation by any and all view-
ers. That’s the point of such art, often its
polemic. What you think is what you get.
Even visual art—these Tate exercises
remind us—is never exclusively mediated
by optical forms. The eye is no tabula rasa.
Excluding the image altogether, and putting
words in its place, is a start at pointing this
up. Never transparent, the flattened sur-
faces of visual representation are forever
object lessons |    131
 translated in reception. They pass in this
way through an eye coached by cultural as-
sumptions into whatever force, meaning,
and value they are to achieve. Intercepting
this translation at the receiving end, spell-
ing out its inferences, acknowledging their
barren but crucial mediacy in the absence of
all picture: this, as we know, is one impor-
tant conceptualist move. It is a territorial-
izing move, of course, and by no means re-
stricted to the works that deliver its explicit
lessons. Whether mounted vertically or
horizontally, on walls or pedestals, as draw-
ings or sculptural objects, the text-works
of Learn to Read can be said to speak for
themselves, without need of pictures. But
only insofar as they offer instruction in the
always ad hoc and intrinsic syntax neces-
sary to parse them. And only as they imply
in turn that all gallery objects, even realist
pictures, are texts to be read.
Beyond its service as a general primer
in the conceptualist legacy, then, our rea-
son for retouring this exhibit in the present
context has to do with the way the actual
book-works collected there—those three-
dimensional accumulations of tampered
with or damaged texts—emerge in a decided
continuum with the greater number of two-
dimensional word-works. Emerge, in short,
as conceptualist sculpture. Walking slowly
through the Learn to Read show—and paus-
ing for comment over some of its representa-
tive departures from representation—should
help demonstrate the place of such textual
composites, these multipage but demediated
book forms, in its cumulative procedures.
More specifically than the title intended,
this exhibit offers the proverbial “teachable
moment” for any contextualized sense of the
bibliobjet. For if pictures must be read to be
132    | chapter four
genuinely seen, book objects must be seen
as such to be fully read: a fact inculcated by
the exhibition even where all latent fullness
in the reading experience, all textual “im-
manence” in Genette’s sense, even all lexical
engagement whatever, is in fact forestalled.
Exhibit? Exhibition? Rarely has a single
show seemed less showy, less a showing
than a telling. And at the same time less nar-
rative, more strictly a grammar lesson. Re-
peatedly in this gathering of text and book
art, what we look at, without seeing through
them even briefly, are the marks that make
for lettering or the folded objects that con-
tain it. Reading starts from scratch with
each text-work. So that Learn to Read sug-
gests no telos of expertise. Tutelary rubric
for the exhibit, it develops, more aptly, as
the tacit subtitle of every work. One learns
to read each time out, all over again, from
the material ground up, inching one’s way
across or down the optical plane of inscrip-
tion, mastering the self-embedded cues
even (and because) the message is angled
nowhere beyond its own lexigraphic param-
eters. Textual access is achieved only by the
artists’ having implanted—without explic-
itly imparting—each work’s own eccentric
new codes, generating in process their own
inscriptive points of departure.
Some degree of the conceptual impetus
behind Learn to Read derives from its total
indifference to taxonomy. In this respect, its
concentration of effects mirrors the world
outside its walls. Signs are everywhere.
Jumbled, blended, peremptory. They are
the tutoring force of culture itself. Learning
to read them is at once crucial, almost in-
voluntary, and potentially deceptive. In the
five dozen or so works assembled without
subdivision in the Level 2 Gallery, it is not
visual literacy so much as de­cipherment per
se that is reschooled by each wall or win-
dow text, each floor or ceiling object. But
this silent seminar in the ways of the word
does ultimately fall out into manageable
categories of effect. They concern, usually
by disconcerting, the different functional
base of each work, including its sometimes
pastiched media of signification. Broadly
divided, they turn on the linguistic or ab-
stract function of textuality versus its mate-
rial or concrete basis, with each orientation
converging on the few notable book sculp-
tures stationed en route. At issue, and of-
ten in question, is the palpable as well as
ocular ground of verbal dissemination. The
issue gets manifested in one of three ways:
bringing to the fore, by turns, the optics of
linguistic registration, the prompting graph-
ics of material inscription, or the material
underlay of the support itself.
Before examining the more or less aggres-
sive disclosures of material surface beneath
the traces of inscription, we can start at the
linguistic and graphic end of the spectrum
(often involving the submergence of the lin-
guistic function in the graphic mark). Here is
where the strictly alphabetic and phonemic
matter of the signifying verbal text comes
to us by exaggerating its visible forms in
print or script. The first and perhaps most
obvious instance of this category is that of
spatialized wordplay—“play” in the tensile
sense, potentially oscillating and ambivalent.
Such effects tease or test the spectator’s feel
for language as an abstract more than visual
operation, lexical rather than pictorial. They
resist this deep assumption by turning the
graphic array—the placing and spacing of
bundled letters—into a compositional topog-
raphy of its own. It is in this way that—even
while intensifying some reductive message
or formulation, sometimes mock-solemn in
its delphic pretension—such works can de-
mediate its impact as language and return us
to its conditioning readability as such, ocular
rather than oracular.
LINES . . . SHAPE . . . WORDS
Lines do shape words. But not always. And
not unambiguously. And not without recur-
sion, where the shape returns from within
the word as its graphic basis, sometimes
demediating it absolutely in the process.
So with the first piece in the show, by (as it
turned out) the “book artist” whose work
I had discovered in a Chelsea gallery just
weeks before arriving in London. This is the
young conceptualist Peter Coffin, whose
New York piece, a plinth-mounted open
book, its pages tucked in on each other in
bunches, looked from a distance like nothing
so much as the NBC peacock logo—before it
is revealed on inspection as a mid-Victorian
edition of Goethe’s Theory of Colours (fig.
4.1), its own pages yellowed with age but
with only the central two revealing bands of
color tinting along their folds. Demediated
as text, it is as if the manipulated thing has
been remediated as proleptic emblem of the
next century’s medial breakthrough in color
transmission.
Equally allusive at the Tate, though no
longer in the bookwork mode, is Coffin’s
floor-mounted mouthful piece Untitled (Line
after Bruce Nauman’s “The True Artist Helps
the World by Revealing Mystic Truths”). Thus
identified is a meaningless twisting “line”
of thin neon tubing that captures Nauman’s
1967 send-up of aesthetic profundity from
the other direction: not by bland assertion,
object lessons |    133
Figure 4.1.  Peter Coffin,
Untitled (Theory of
Colour) (2004). Book,
3 x 111/2 x 8 in. Courtesy
of the artist, Andrew
Kreps Gallery, New
York, Galerie Perrotin,
Paris, and Herald Street,
London.
134    |
as in the original wall-hung “line” of glow-
ing, mock-transcendental claptrap, but by
the desertion at once of image and wording
in an embodied sculptural “linearity” gone
wild. The linguistic meets the graphic over
the body of a dead or fossilized metaphor, a
mere idiom. Here, that is, the textual sense
of a “line” is translated back into the drafts-
man’s more literalist sense as a stringy light
sculpture with no pretentions to “revealing”
chapter four
any signifying shape, let alone the fashion-
ing of mystic truths. Originally distanced in
this way from the informational aesthetic of
certain conceptual gestures, even Nauman’s
comic oracular has been demediated—and
with this reminder by Coffin in the process:
that art’s revelation, its gift, is to manifest
only itself. Insisting that art’s work is simply
to take place, to occupy space, not to reveal
an otherworld of meaning, Coffin has thus
removed Nauman’s lampoon of luminous
pronouncement from the vertical wall of
its empty message and reduced it to a non­
alphabetic arabesque sprouting from the
floor in a single thicket of neon squiggle. The
point is, of course, Nauman’s own—though
in a newly demediated key. For art’s tutelage
must often be a learning to unread its own
grandiose assumptions.
Also confronting us in this initial display
space is a rectangular canvas by Graham
Gilmore boasting only two words in large
colored caps, a piece from 2000 reflexively
titled Vull and Noid. On the image plane it-
self, just those two nonexistent nouns of
nonexistence hang one above the other in
that order, with no “and” or ampersand.
The image is only readable, therefore, by an
intertextual recognition of its sponsoring
colloquialism (derived from legalistic tau-
tology)—and whose substantives are linked
in this case by the anagrammatic switch of
their initial letters. 2 Readable, that is, only
paralinguistically—except for the pictogram
that emerges from the circular O when filled
in, and thus blanked out, by solid paint. The
blind eye of this occluded circle activates
three codes together: lexigraphic (the letter
O), numeric (the zero of cancellation), and
pictorial (a dark hole). This manipulated let-
ter shape thus punctuates and punctures at
once, obtruding the very disk of evisceration
within a scrambled idiomatic redundancy.
Together, then, the annulled vocabulary and
the orthographic vacuum read each other in
the shared vertical plane of inscription.
Hung next to Vull and Noid, there is an-
other anomalous O in the untitled “sculp-
ture” by notice-board artist Bethan Huws,
but here, unlike with the automimetic O
of “NOID,” the ironies do not verge into
the visual. They remain lingual, lexical,
graphophonemic rather than graphic. The
only thing plastic about this art is the porta-
ble white alphabetic characters that compose
it along the grooved black background of a
miniature events marquee: a locked vitrine
case more like a church front’s list of Sunday
services than a glazed gallery frame. By a
spatial ambiguity of insertion versus extru-
sion, the superscripted O is either prying in
alongside, or being squeezed out from, the
inscribed rather than unwritten vowel of the
word “God.” With the uncertain priority of
Huw’s “Go\o/d,” there is no predication to
go by, just an interchangeable adjective and
proper noun. God is either good, or else good
(goodness) is God, or maybe goodness is too
often driven out in the name of God. Or per-
haps (idiom again rearing its head) there was
no exclamation mark in the kit of portable
letters, or not enough o’s, for either the ap-
peal—or the expletive—“Good God!” What-
ever the suggestion, the mere alphabetic
integers don’t decide for us. These inserted
plastic graphemes simply keep the question
open by the irregular space they make.
LABELS, METATEXTS,
PICTOGRAMS
Purest of the appropriated readymades in the
Learn to Read exhibit, and carrying to an ex-
treme and witty breakpoint (with high con-
ceptualist simplicity) the typical dominance
of word over image, title over picture, is a
canonical, indeed a world-historical, piece on
loan from Paris: Portrait de Lisa Gherardini,
épouse de Francesco del Giocondo, dit Monna
Lisa, la Gioconda, ou la Joconde; Acquis par
François 1er en 1579. INV. 779. In this “work”
by prolific Berlin conceptualist Kirsten
object lessons |    135
 Pieroth, we are given to see not Leonardo
da Vinci’s painting itself in whatever mode
of replica, but rather the embossed metal
wall plaque that annotates its accession
number and the various names under which
the painting’s fame has spread. It’s just this
referential wall piece that comes to us, ac-
cording to its own new caption, “Courtesy of
the Louvre Museum, Paris.” Not all wall ob-
jects, even at the Louvre, are pictorial. In this
case, only the wry smile remains, without
the Mona Lisa. It makes you wonder whether
this identification plaque would be missed for
the duration of the loan—replaced perhaps in
Paris by a typical mounted photocopy with
a sign reading “temporarily on loan to the
Tate Modern, Britain” in lieu of the absent
nameplate. (Fantasy scenarios of just this
sort, I’m suggesting yet again, seem part of
the conceptualist fallout.)
Combining the lexical with the visual at
an even lower degree of pictorial impact (if
it weren’t for the compositional wit of its
bifold format), Maurizio Guillén’s Reconcili-
ation, from 2003, is a diptych comprised of
two side-by-side sheets, evoking even in
their noncontiguity the facing pages of an
open book. On one appears, in small print,
the dictionary definition in bold of “cleave
1, VERB split, divide.” On the other: “cleave
2, VERB stick, cling.” The gist of the distinc-
tion is a cleaving apart versus a cleaving to
(with the rebus pun in this second case on
the verb plus its enunciated, rather than just
recognized, superscript—“2” as the infini-
tive particle “to”). And of course cleaving,
both senses, is exactly what these separated
pages of a one-word-per-page dictionary
would do if they were a part of the co-bound
codex format their very adjacency evokes.
Then, too, a further visual or spatial irony
136    | chapter four
is routed back through the linguistic empha-
sis of the piece. At another level of seman-
tic recognition, the division between two
senses of a word is a wedge driven straight
down the middle of the reading act.
It may also be noted that as we drift
over, in our response to this work, from
its spatial to its linguistic ironies, and back
again—or in other words from its language
game back to its layout—another categori-
cal shift seems under way. Word art, vis-
ibly inscribed on detached but associated
pages, becomes tacit book art on a sliding
scale of association, whereby the probed
linguistic basis of the composition gestures
beyond itself, across the dividing line of the
diptych, to the material foundation of the
bound book in its metatextual form as dic-
tionary: preserve of the lexical codes. Like
the semantic cleaving of a single alphabetic
cluster, pages also divide from each other as
a defining difference within the same.
We move further from the predominantly
linguistic to the isolated graphic basis of an
associated page-craft with a work by Kris
Martin that shrinks the linguistic sign to
sheer punctuation. It does so by giving us
only the reductive closure of a famous book
stripped of all argument or narrativity, in-
deed of all text markings entirely—except
for the last encircled dot of finis, the final
period itself The autobiographic volume is
not just demediated. It vanishes altogether
behind the one-point landing of its last
foregrounded pinprick of imprint, marked
by a highlighting circle like a ringed target.
Call it book sculpture degree zero: reduced
not only from three to two dimensions but
from line to point. Uncaptioned, the piece
wouldn’t seem “textual” at all, just pic-
torial. The very “point” of titling this cir-
cumscribed dot by authorial shorthand
and place-name pun as End-Point of “The
Ballad of Reading Gaol” (O. Wilde) cannot
be limited just to conventional typography.
It, too, becomes a kind of onomastic rebus,
not unlike the colored-in O of “NOID.” In-
voking the zeroing out of Wilde’s fate in the
jail of “reading,” even the abbreviated first
glyph of Oscar is found to enclose, given the
prison house of script, the puncture wound
of his own destined end, putting a veritable
period to his self-contained verbal genius.
In this we have begun to read a case of de-
mediation to the nth degree.
A work of this kind negotiates an entirely
reversible transition, within the textual,
from the verbal to the graphic. Rehearsing
the same transit, a nearby piece by Vittorio
Santoro maximizes language as handmade
visual trace. The Obstinate Silence of Things
(2006) is comprised of its own title writ-
ten over itself, the second inscription just
a shade above and to the left of the first,
so that the letters interfere with their own
decipherment in the mode of a graphically
represented audiovisual reverb: the “noise”
or dissonance of pictorial silence itself. And
in a similar vein of performative graphics,
though again lending the overtone of mi-
metic visualization to abstract word forms,
there is the untitled work by Friedrich Ku-
nath from 2001, where the lone bulking word
“TOGETHERNESS” appears in what grade-
school art classes call bubble letters, in this
case fighting for elbow room against the
press of too much propinquity. If these sim-
plicities are “hard to read,” even just a little,
it is because they are slipping away—and to-
gether—into pictures rather than arbitrary
signifiers, remediated as icons to the extent
that they are demediated as glyphs.
Another and more oblique reduction
of text art to its material base, not in the
graphite of inscription but in the pencil
sharpening that permits it, appears in a
piece called 28 Years. Simon Evans’s au-
tobiographical retrospect is annotated on
the cellulose rings of a circular plane—like
a severed simulated tree trunk subdivided
with explicit historical markings. But this
wooden timeline, clarified by pencil glosses
arrowed into it, is composed not of a real
tree but of its pulped and then discarded
form: that is, of meticulously deposited
pencil shavings, curl after curl forming the
wood-based representation of ring upon
arboreal ring across the paper surface. In
Evans’s conception of duration’s inscribed
timeline, the autobio/graphic act leaves as
its one surest trace the facilitating debris of
its own record.
Facing this minimalist study (in the
pencil as self-consuming agent of recorded
subjectivity) is an overscale lexigraph of
entirely nonmanual signifiers, a text-work
by veteran conceptualist Robert Barry that
takes as its invisible backing the floor-to-
ceiling plate-glass window of the gallery
itself, looking out on a small stand of trees
in the entrance plaza to the museum and be-
yond it to the Thames skyline. The view is
not an un-occluded one. Pasted across it at
every angle, including upside down, are cut-
outs from highly reflective Mylar sheets—
forming half-a-foot block capitals—of sev-
eral aerated and sometimes weightless
terms from art appreciation like “FEEL-
ING,” “WONDER,” “SUBLIME,” “DESIRE,”
“BEYOND,” “ABSURD,” and so forth. These
are words that intervene between museum
culture inside and urban culture without,
St. Paul’s in the distance. But they do so
object lessons |    137
 only by reflecting the spectators (or their
backdrop in the gallery hangings behind
them) upon the angular spaced surfaces of
the otherwise nearly invisible letters, their
material base having disappeared in the mo-
ment of lexical recognition. Barry’s piece is
called Intervention, a kind of spatial play on
a situationist cliché. Here the intervention is
more like a material interface—and a visual
pun. Recognized as a conceptualist emblem,
his paste-ups offer another case, both in and
beyond the museum, of our seeing the world
through words.
So far, we have traversed the linguistic
wordplay—or paralinguistic material iro-
nies—of certain reading exercises en route
(such is the Tate’s injunction) to the tute-
lary reading of their material preconditions
as such. The recurrent manifestation of tex-
tuality’s physical support—as in the glass-
backing of an airborne alphabet of reflective
cut-outs flocking together as metacritical
buzz words—has come repeatedly into view
as part of the exhibit’s manifold inquiry into
the instrumental basis of wording and imag-
ing alike. This is an effort that begins by dis-
tinguishing the markings on a surface from
the physical basis per se of that supporting
plane of inscription—or, in other words, the
textual images from the underlay of sur-
face itself. Following out a larger trajectory
of aesthetic modes, one may say that text-
works drift over, in this respect, toward the
ultimate materiality of book-works, where
the physical infrastructure of the legible—
woven, threaded, backed, and bound—is it-
self altered or rendered inoperable. But this
drifting, this conceptualist chain of associa-
tion, operates only by passing through vari-
ous stages of exaggerated materiality in the
presentation of the book object.
138    | chapter four
BOOKS AS SHELF ART
Nothing could make this clearer, perhaps,
than the halfway house of the book rebus in
a piece by Damien Roach. There, in the par-
adoxically named stabile called Mobil, lan-
guage is carried to begin with on the backs
and spine of its normal textual conveyance,
with the canonical vessel of language—the
book itself—emptied out and contorted into
a single alphabetic signifier. Roach playfully
arranges books, associated utensils, and
punningly summoned further objects in
a wall-hung spelling lesson in 2- and fore-
shortened 3-D. In Mobil, legibility depends
entirely on the frontal line of vision. It is
determined unit by unit through the de­
mediated objects of its alphabetic rebus. To
begin with, in our “reading” left to right, an
old-fashioned black-and-white photographic
dust jacket bears the do-it-yourself title Cre-
ative Crafts for Today. That’s the only real
book in the piece. But the internal text is
illegible, turned upside down so that the
codex form itself can shape an inverted V.
Thus instigated, the equivalent shape nec-
essary to complete the M of the unfinished
noun (or adjective) Mobil is next formed by
a writing rather than reading implement, a
pencil leaned at an angle against the wall.
There, meeting its tip (when seen from the
proper angle, front on), is a vertically placed
and unopened “Address and Telephone
Book—made in Taiwan.”
Two so-called books, then, the second a
schema of pure form awaiting private con-
tent, along with the pencil joining them: the
materials of reading and inscription make
for a single and inaugural cipher, the letter
M. Next, the o of Mobil arrives as a sawed-off
mailing tube seen from the side—and bor-
Figure 4.2.  Damien rowed from the commercial world of poster
Roach, Mobil (2007).
Mixed media. Cour­ shipping. Another such tube forms the bowl
tesy Sies + Höke,
Düsseldorf. of the b, with the upward leg of that conso-
nant completed by a vertical length of mask-
ing tape on the wall behind it. All depends
on looking from just the right vantage, so
that everyday objects, in their mediating
functions, are de-utilized to a new signifying
purpose. Next in line for semiotic usurpation
as lower case i, a match box (perhaps with
associational overtones of its cousin match
“book”) is stood on end, its narrow side to-
ward us, and then topped off by a pushpin
in the wall above to complete the dotting of
that evoked letter. And for the final l, we get
an industrial flange like a bookend—or in-
deed like the support for a bookshelf on some
other wall. (With no image available from the
Learn to Read show, I illustrate this mode of
“wall text” installation from a similar work
of the same year, with different objects fol-
lowing on from the inaugural in-V-ersion of
the A-frame book (fig. 4.2).
In the reading of such modular “mixed-
media” sculpture, letter and image coincide
and underwrite each other. Beyond the
perspectival channeling of recognition as
we scan from left to right, the contingent
legibility of Roach’s material series reso-
nates with the impulse behind the whole
object lessons |    139
 Tate exhibit. The inference might unfold
as follows. Not unlike pictorial art, read-
ing has optical and directional constraints
of its own. You need to look more or less
straight on—and move laterally. Turning
mere material entities into continuous text
in the act of cognition: that’s the readerly
norm. But even while stressing this aspect
of the reading act, writ large here in its
unique bricolage, Mobil seems sprung from
a more ingrained and idiomatic visual dual-
ity yet—and a deeper visual pun. Reading
matter: an everyday catch-all phrasing. But
whereas we normally read in them, here we
more literally read books: now as the first
half of the alphabet’s middle letter M, then
as the downstroke of its second half. Form
has become the content of its own perverse
new vocabulary. While remediated into let-
ter shapes, Roach’s books are at the same
time blatantly demediated as separate texts.
Even more so in a 2005 piece not on display
at the Tate, being as it is even further re-
moved from any sense of symbolic lan-
guage in metonymic association with the
book object. This is the “variable” instal-
lation of stacked books, spines and covers
turned toward us, called River, trees, clouds,
sky, where the eponymous chromatic zones
are indicated first by blue books at the bot-
tom, then a mix of green and greenish yel-
low, then beige and grey above those, then
a spectrum of baby to dark blue at the top.
The demediated book multiple has become
almost a landscape painting.
In our quick walk through Tate’s Level
2 Gallery, we have considered not only
those works of a materialist cast that re-
vert (and in the process openly advert) to
their graphic basis as inscription. We have
encountered as well those pieces that fore-
140    | chapter four
ground more directly the physical support
of page or paper (or window), to say noth-
ing of graphite and pencil shavings. From
these, we’ve turned to the book itself “mo-
bilized” as concrete object in a sculptural
assemblage. Another version of this last
found-object mode of book art, this con-
ceptual appropriation in composite form,
follows next—and from the same corner of
the gallery. And from that work, we’ll move
to a final pair of examples in the yet more
familiar mode of what one might term volu-
metric conceptualism: namely, the altered
book itself. The goal has been, of course, the
same throughout: to locate such book-works
(within a single mixed-media exhibition) on
the conceptualist spectrum they may seem
no less to epitomize than, with their extra
spatial dimension, to confuse or elude.
As with the open but upended metatext
of Roach’s Mobil assemblage, that illegible
manual of “crafts” for “today,” the only ma-
terial liberty taken with a clutch of books
in Carol Bove’s Seven Types of Ambiguity
involves the spatial orientation of a single
volume as well, displayed with several oth-
ers on two suspended wall shelves. Visible
to the left of the upper surface is the striking
giant numeral 7 that identifies at a glance the
famous New Directions paperback edition
of William Empson’s eponymous work. The
one book of the installation that is turned
sideways, so that its page edges open down-
ward, has a title parsed and typographically
justified along the right edge of the cover as
Geschicte / Der / Porno / Graphie. No hyphen
is needed across the last two lines, since
the first two syllables of the final word are a
universal nickname in themselves. In visual
terms, behind this “edgy” play with liminal
syllabics, the “graphic” nature of gallery
eroticism is already sampled by association
on this cover as well—in the profile photo
of a naked woman leaning back and holding
her spread legs upward. But here, in Bove’s
90-degree adjustment, it is the angled cleav-
age of the volume itself—in its spine-up po-
sition—that tilts the figure into a hunched
and inward-turned rather than supine pose,
achieving a posture somehow more private
than seductive, contemplative rather than
overtly tempting. And while the eroticized
naked body has become in this way a more
canonical nude, the text of this study has it-
self been demediated by its prostrate and un-
readable position as A-frame book sculpture.
CODEX DUALITY
Demediation is all the more obviously the
case, the textually closed case, in the exhib-
it’s two remaining works in the conceptual
mode of altered books. One “sculpture” re-
duces a famous published novel to a diptych
by returning it to holographic script in twin
piles. One slices a published novel in half to
divide and conquer its subject matter—and
thus drives again a very sharp wedge, knife
sharp, between the book’s dual aspect as
material form, on the one hand, and refer-
ential figment, on the other. In each case we
are back to that initial positing of the not-
book (in Vogler’s term) as distinct from its
nonentity. So that a provisional way to sum
up the broad path of discussion across the
chapters to this point is to note how the ef-
fect of that materialized negation we began
with (the book-work demediated under con-
ditions of display and foreclusion, of what-
ever sort) is to intensify our conception of
the book per se in its divisible and depur-
posed formal qualities, from geometry to
reproducibility. Forced into abstraction out
of its own material abasement, bookhood is
laid open to illegible view. To be read only in
its structural form.
In the first of these remaining book-
works, Kris Martin—the demediating art-
ist of the Oscar Wilde End-Point—now
gives us a literary text’s visible midpoint
in his 2005 The Idiot: two comparable thick
stacks of handwritten copy piled a couple
of inches apart. With p. 764 to the left, and
on the right p. 765, the actual excerpt from
the novel begins “it would have kept him
occupied for a thousand years!” It doesn’t
take anything like that long to reinscribe
a novel—as the curators indicate has hap-
pened, sheet by presently unreadable sheet,
the artist replacing Myshkin’s name with
his own on every reinscribed page. But it’s
no mere afternoon’s work either—even if all
we can read are the detached and recopied
recto and verso of a no longer bound vol-
ume, taking the rest of the two stacks on
faith. This is to say that, line by line and
page by page, the full demediation of print
into the holographic hand—and renamed
protagonist—of a later auteur is a labor that
the exhibit’s “Please Do Not Touch” forbids
our confirming. With no parallel in other
media, whether sculpture or painting, this
institutional caveat is indeed the blanket
demediation of all book art in its uprooting
from use into gallery installation. Sculpture
and painting ask the eye to keep its proper
distance, so that the one-of-a-kind image
can be not merely protected but seen whole.
In contrast, books are multiples made to be
held, to be consumed. Not touching is the
first line of attack in their denaturalization
as cultural implements, the first museu-
mized stage in their reduction to things, re-
object lessons |    141
 gardless of whatever other disuse or mutila-
tion may be inflicted on them.
As, for example, in the most drastically
altered volume in this show, this by that
Louvre appropriation artist again, Kirsten
Pieroth. On an angled Lucite book rest sits
an elegant German translation in pearl-gray
jacket of Jules Verne’s Reise um die Erde in
80 Tagen: Roman, its cover art completed
by a vignetted photograph of the author
and the imprint of the publisher. Only the
artist’s rather than the author’s title of this
apparent found object triggers the concep-
tual work of its recognized sculptural des-
ecration. Around the World in 40 Days, not
the canonical 80, makes us eventually look
at the other side of the volume, where ex-
actly half the pages have been torn away,
page 110 being the last visible on the upright
back side of the violated text. The joke, of
course, has to do with length and distance
in geographic rather than textual space.
One doesn’t belabor it, I hope, by thinking
it through. For it is more than a joke, in this
Learn to Read venue or any other: it is, yet
again, once recognized, a spur to the con-
ceptual. Needless to say, the topography
of world transit would have to be elided
by speed, rather than just truncated in the
report, for the circumnavigation to be com-
pleted in half the time. So that through the
vandalistic wit of this extreme example, one
is reminded, via a rule-proving exception,
how narrative space is regularly felt to peel
away from typographic space and duration
into a rounded world of its own. Such is the
phenomenology of reading, opening in imag-
ination onto audiovisual terrain entirely de-
pendent upon—even while cognitively liber-
ated from—the inching forward of its silent
signifiers, page after page.
142    | chapter four
In this sense, Pieroth’s abrupt trunca-
tion is the fit counterpart of Martin’s la-
borious Dostoyevskian expatiation next to
it. What one “learns to read” in the case of
Around the World in 40 Days—in the cryp-
tic farce of its blunt literalism, by negative
and mangling example—is that the entire
power of reading opens within the differ-
ence between book as thing and text as
event, between matter and referential im-
manence. It is within exactly this difference,
as Kris Martin’s Idiot also suggests, that the
work—the affective work of identification—
alone abides. In reading, it is always a little
like we are writing out the author’s words
for him out of our own experience, project-
ing into the characters, making the plot our
own, not shortening its ferocious or fantas-
tic journey by materialist aggression (as in
the altered Verne text), but letting a novel
have its own way—and take its own time—
with and in us. The extreme handmade de-
mediation of Dostoyevsky’s mass-printed
novel confronts the abrupt comic demedia-
tion of Verne’s—a text torn off, rather than
launched, in medias res—so as in each case
to resculpt our conception of the canonical
text as a thing always in process, contin-
gent, vulnerable, whether overinvested in
or left off too soon.
OBJECTHOOD VS. BOOKHOOD
With the betrayed or manhandled book-
work, in all the variety of its recarved or
distorted forms, disuse is its own excuse: to
abrade or damage or obviate the shopworn
cultural object until it returns to us again,
reconceived and inalienable, as a sculptural
double of itself. Relentless objecthood, it
bears repeating, limns an absent bookhood.
Having attended to numerous graphic works
in the Tate show whose materialist rigor
seems to transcode the alphabetic into the
pictorial, and vice versa—with such rever-
sals sometimes sensed within a single work’s
optical vacillations—we have turned atten-
tion finally to sculptural book-works whose
affront to familiarity insists that we “learn
to read” not just an artifact, and with it a
visual system, but an entire iconography of
human desire. But hold there for a moment.
Book sculpture? The very idea needs some
added deliberation. For to call the objectified
museum book, whether real or replicated, a
sculptural object—as we have done intermit-
tently throughout—approaches, perhaps, to
the most thoroughgoing challenge mounted
(in both senses) by such museum works.
Carved matter has no representational in-
terior. And the book is all representational
interior, all discursivity. In one sense, to
penetrate a book is to read it. In the other,
to penetrate a sculpture is to destroy it. Each
page of a book suspends for utility’s sake its
part in the three-dimensional objecthood
of its support in order to facilitate its two-
dimensional function. But not if those pages
can’t be activated. It is then that something
like the whole dialectic in Michael Fried’s
partisan writing on postwar sculpture—the
polarization between art and objecthood,
presence and a mere theater of display—
tends to collapse around the conceptualist
innovation of the book-work.
In reviewing briefly Fried’s well-known
polemic, as the first chapter began doing,
one can further note that the absorptive ob-
ject, the genuine sculptural artifact as prod
to contemplation rather than mere prop of
its own exhibition, would seem to offer the
sculptural concretization of those absorp-
tive scenes that Fried later, in retrospect,
tallies across the evolution of realist paint-
ing. 3 These include—along with card play-
ers, bubble blowers, madmen, lovers, sleep-
ers, daydreamers, and the like—quite often
a reader lost in a book: not merely sitting for
a portrait (with the textual accoutrement of
his learning or her romantic distraction at
hand) but pictured steeped in the unseen
portrayal of some other inscribed scene. To
abstract (rather than extract) that held book
from the painted scene of reading, and then
to substitute for it (in three-dimensional
space) its material equivalent, and further
to rest this object upon a plinth or shelf in a
gallery space, preventing it there from being
touched and thus enabled—while perhaps
in other ways defacing its pages—is to have
produced a conceptual sculpture. It is, in
short, to have taken that least histrionic of
objects, the everyday codex of information
or narrative, and made it over—even if just
by turning it over to display—into a gallery
objet. A flexible cultural instrument often
meant to spirit us elsewhere—into knowl-
edge or experience not ours beforehand—is
instead turned back upon the mute theater
of its own objecthood, even when this in-
volves in the process the re-alphabetization
(as with the pieced-out Mobil) of its own
skeletal forms. Put it that bookwork, at the
intersection of minimalism and conceptual-
ism, is the redefinition of each in the other’s
terms.
The book object, as we’ve seen, can be
modular as well as autonomous. Some-
times the volume is reduced in its own self-
alienated bulk, squeezed shut, to provide a
mere building block in a representational
edifice: a step in a staircase, for instance,
the increment of an arch, the oversize crude
object lessons |    143
 integer of an alphabetic cluster. In this way
the former text, now mere object, is often
converted from a stockpile of words to its ef-
faced place in a pile of things. Or elsewhere,
it may emerge, as from the throttled eroti-
cism of Bove’s Seven Types of Ambiguity,
into a metapictorial composite of desire and
its distancing: “porno” at least minimally
detached from “graphie” by its own plastic
as well as typographic disposition. At other
times the book form is carved or hacked
away at as if it were the matrix of a sculp-
tural shape not yet realized—rather than
the denatured module of an assemblage.
When demoted from legible volume either to
mere cover image or further yet to blunt un-
adorned materiality, the abstract book form
undergoes—even when not sliced, frayed,
or sawed in half—a violation comparable to
the bisection of a sculpted human body, ex-
posing the inert support of certain mimetic
curves and indentations. Even a more tex-
tualized variant of such alteration—as when
The Idiot is transliterated into a private
idiom, denovelized, and made again diaris-
tic—underscores the common labor of de-
mediation. Books as illegible modules; books
as deprinted stacked inscriptions: two sides
of the same sculptural coin. Either way, the
efficacy of the bibliobjet is occasioned only
by acknowledging what it has closed down;
only if the not-book brings bookhood, in its
very generality, persuasively to mind.
Mediated, of course, the book opens
doors for you (see Gordon Matta-Clark’s
Swing-ing Doors discussed in chapter 5)—
or builds up around you an entire habita-
tion. There is something of this parable,
less explicit of course, in the wordless ma-
terial presence of many a book-work. Each
speaks for the rest even with nothing legible
144    | chapter four
to say for itself. And in this, too, the altered
book, especially the rent or brutally disused
one, is the reverse of ordinary sculptural
imaging. Success in realist representation
requires the neutralization of the unseen
material basis, not its obtrusion. Canvas
can’t be allowed to peek through the duch-
ess’s complexion if the portrait is to do its
full mimetic work, nor a depth of raw stone
be shown instead of the searching outward
eyes of an emperor’s statue. But with con-
ceptual sculpture in the altered-book form,
one begins with a piece of a reality (either
a present text or, as with Dostoyevsky, its
absent pretext): a found object that further
objectification serves to cancel or remake.
Much of the time the book under this con-
ceptualist dispensation, when degraded
from tool to thing, reveals its functionless
mass even in denying our access to it. A re­
sculpted volume from which an overliteral-
ized depth of perception has been chiseled
out, for instance, as in the carved-up or gut-
ted book, goes to what is often so unnerv-
ing—even in the less insistent generality of
cases—about the disused or desacralized
volume. As well as about its metal or stone
simulacra, its painted wooden mock-ups, its
blanked-out stacks of pages, its widespread
disarticulation in conceptual practice.
Such book-works, whether they are tex-
tual wreckages in themselves—or “repur-
posed” as building blocks in an architec-
tonic construct not their own—have thus
been, so we know, demoted to sheer mass
rather than message. It is in this way that
they strike us as the spoiled prosthesis of
exactly that vaunted humanist interiority
founded upon and sustained by such nor-
mative instruments of literate culture and
its identity formations. In the systematic
reduction of books—that is, their negative
“translation”—from the cultural to the
strictly material plane, we can think of the
paradox this way: that the site to which
reading ordinarily repairs for concepts has
become strictly conceptual in its own right.
Storehouses of the idea have been reduced
to a single and preemptive one: the idea of
decimated literacy and its remaking, a les-
son staged at the ritual locus of its own
defiled or reconsecrated vessel—as with
Jules Verne bisected or with Dostoyevsky
returned to the confessional immediacy of,
let’s say, “I”-hand coordination. Under the
aesthetics of appropriation and reworking,
and with the literary work no longer a tex-
tual conveyance but a lost object turned to
artifact, what you see is not, varying Baldes-
sari again, for looking into. What you must
“learn to read” is exactly what is left—as
iconic form—after this refusal of the legible.
POST SCRIPTUM
In museum architecture, as in book-works
themselves, structure is often figurative,
even allegorical. The Level 2 Gallery is a mod-
estly scaled entry-level space, a kind of in-
ternal annex, to the Tate Modern, in a sense
almost a basement structure—call it, at least
with the 2007 show we’ve just toured, foun-
dational—beneath the main warren of up-
stairs exhibit halls. In this room assignment,
too, as well as in the included interchange of
its objects, the Learn to Read exhibit is not
just selective but representative. If it seems
marginalized, that’s as it should be. Its role
is that of a collective marginal gloss: offering
side notes, but clarifying and definitive ones,
to the modernist history of drawing, paint-
ing, and sculpture on display in the spacious
galleries it partly undergirds. And wherever
such conceptualist ventures are hung or in-
stalled in other museums, they address each
other as well as the rest, their sidelong inter-
play rezoning the general space of display.
The self-coaching of such works, the silent
lectures they deliver in—and through—their
own achieved reading by the viewer, makes
them the necessary internal supplement of
museum-going in the multiplex theaters of
modern art exhibition.
Word-works and book-works—yoked
together by the strained consideration of
form and text at once—rethink looking as
discursive thinking even while they visual-
ize reading as a graphic encounter. In the
hierarchical disposition of a state museum,
then, a show like Learn to Read does rightly
precede the ticket counter for special exhi-
bitions. To those—as well as the permanent
collections—it offers one of the best ways
in. Certainly the transit space of that tempo-
rary exhibit has helped to elucidate here, in
practice as well as in theory, the continuum
across text forms—however intermittent in
a given museum—between lexigraphic and
volumetric ironies of the demediated mes-
sage. And, more narrowly, it has offered a
useful contextual prelude to an anoma-
lous piece on display upstairs the following
summer.
Flash forward. Exactly a year after the
Level 2 Gallery show, half a higher floor at
the Tate Modern is given over in 2008 to
a massive Cy Twombly retrospective that
boasts, amid the oversize graphomania of
his canvases, an unusually full sampling
of his minimalist sculptures early and late.
Among them, from as recently as 2001—and
in a bizarre reduction (almost a miniatur-
ized trashing) of his huge lexigraphic can-
object lessons |    145
 vases of scrawled pigment—this inveterate
painter of enlarged and simulated page sur-
faces paints pages themselves in a different,
almost absurdist sense: bunched-up sheets
of “pulp and printed paper” dribbled with
garish colors on a white-plastered wooden
block. Illegible as “printed” paper base
no matter how close you look, this sloppy
mound of arbitrarily stained paper wads is
like the grave site of all inscription. In what-
ever mode of wholly or partially demediated
writing, this former Cold War cryptographer
(turned gestural and quasi-lettrist painter)
here occults the inscriptive surface in a
more vehement form than any of his alpha-
betic or numeric cascades on canvas. The
demediation of imprint matter is absolute.
In the meantime, across town, and
shown in the “print” rather than the “sculp-
ture” room of the 2008 Royal Academy of
Arts Summer Exhibition (along with litho-
graphs, drypoints, and woodblocks rather
than anything associated with industrial
typeface) is a recognizable book that sub-
mits, however, to an equally extreme form
of demediation. I spoke above of the carved-
up or gutted book. Add burnt, too. Kate Mc-
Gwire’s “hand-sewn book, burnt” is called
Seethe. From across the gallery, it looks at
first like a black-bound artist’s book with a
large charcoal disk on the open square sur-
face of its right-hand page: the minimalist
“zeroing out” of content. More severe in its
negativity than this, however, the canoni-
cal black on white of typographic repro-
duction has in fact been transformed to
graphic destruction. For what appears on
closer inspection is a volcanic cavern burnt
in descending diameters of narrower and
narrower circular incineration through the
four- or five-inch depth of the book’s pages,
146    | chapter four
singed bronze only around the top rim and
gouging out legibility’s black hole within. It
is of course a sculpture just as much as it
is a book, but advertised in a limited “edi-
tion” of four. Staring into its seared pit to
find only the destruction of the serial page,
rather than its realization of reference, is a
solicited spectatorial act that figures ironi-
cally the myth of textual depth. It evokes (so
as to revoke on the spot) the strictly meta-
phoric sense of a volume’s “contents,” as for
instance a story’s “inner world,” with any
and all notions of recessional space or its
excavation a figment of textual rather than
material engagement. In this case a “devi-
ant” book, faux to begin with (print-free)
and then set fire to under careful geometric
controls, is a not-book that reminds us what
even real books are not.
THE TOME ANATOMIZED
Parsing in effect the not-book into the once-
book and the like-a-book, Thomas Vogler,
as we remember from the opening chapter,
makes mention of the “troped” as well as
the altered book: the merely figurative book,
as, for instance, the twofold slab of soap or
the salt-lick block by Clercx, each carved in
the shape of an imprinted volume and given
over to the vagaries of time’s use. But in
an important complement to Vogler’s tax-
onomy and examples, we have since noted
how the object that figures a book (by si-
militude as look-alike) can also figure (by
tacit simile) some associated or subsidiary
function of the book as well—in both those
recalled examples from Vogler, for instance,
its eventual “consumption” as product. Vo-
gler certainly doesn’t miss this dimension
in the individual “book-objects” he takes
up; he just doesn’t spell it out as part of a
more variable tropology that can therefore
include the real but altered (the figurally
“deviated” or “turned”) book as well as the
strictly figurative book shape.
For Vogler, one recalls, the major cultural
orientations of the book, as brought into
focus by the not-book, include its mechan-
ics, temporal formatting, scale, content,
and reproducibility. Other ramifications of
bibliographic form have emerged from ex-
amples in the ensuing chapters, of course,
most commonly those closely coordinated
aspects of duration, scale, and content
that facilitate both (1) the phenomenology
of manifested reference from a sequential
material surface and (2) a latent identifica-
tion with the human-scaled events thus or-
dinarily reported on. These are exactly the
two aspects we’ve recently seen troped by
demediation (i.e., by alteration and hand
transcription, respectively) with the me-
chanically printed and disseminated vol-
umes of classic novels in those Verne and
Dostoyevsky “reworkings” from the Tate:
one found book physically altered to figure
its spatiotemporal imaginary (from 80 to
40 days), one troped by a return to manu-
script so as to foreground the intimacies of
narrative identification (from Myshkin to
Martin). Tutored and primed in just these
ways from case to case, any focused effort
at learning to decipher such tropes of the
material thing as textual object, however
tentative, is exactly the immaterial labor
(or otherwise collaborative venture) en-
listed from the spectator. It is this reading
in that helps work into the open the often-
closed “text” (the term applies after all) of
pilfered and fabricated book-works alike—in
all the twists, turns, and sometimes violent
contortions brought on by their deviant
metaphorics.
So flash back once more to the instruc-
tional rubric of that Tate show, which well
might have included under its umbrella the
prolific work of London conceptual art-
ist Fiona Banner (see again her “dummy
books,” fig. 2.9), whose website features, as
its first image early in 2010, an outmoded
hard-copy set of the OED stacked outside
her studio and covered in snow. Where Du-
champ submitted the elements of geometry
to the equally unyielding nature of atmo-
spheric elements, Banner’s weather-bound
volumes are “unhappy readymades” as well.
Instancing the “bastard word” as cast-off,
to borrow the title of her earlier retrospec-
tive, here is the philological archive itself
as the coldest of cold type in an online era.
Further, as with those “dummy books” as
simulated readymades, more recent work
by Banner blocks textual comprehension
by a deflected attention to the material pa-
rameters of print circulation severed from
textual context: atomized facets as ironic
fragments. Her interest in the “packaging”
of textual transmission—especially when
isolated from its adjunct relation to actual
bound pages—extends to the etching of a
faux copyright page called Evaporated Book
(2008). There, the standard denial of any li-
belous relation between fictional characters
and living people is rendered tautological in
the obviation of all text besides its point-
less three-paragraph disclaimer: “All the
characters in this book have no existence
outside the imagination of the Author. . . .”
And so forth. In this case, though, not even
an “existence” on the page. And while this
detached piece of graphic art is given a 2008
copyright and an arbitrary ISBN number,
object lessons |    147
Figure 4.3.  Fiona
Banner, Sleep (2009).
Hand-engraved stone.
Courtesy of the artist.
and claims to be “Set in Times New Roman
12 pt.,” elsewhere in Banner’s work some
copyright claims may instead, however
falsely, seem set in stone—even though all
reading remains dormant, as in the next
year’s Sleep, where “ISBN 0-9548366-8-5” is
chiseled in Old rather than New Roman on
“hand-engraved stone” (fig. 4.3).
The wit of Banner’s work in these pieces
is to sheer off what Gerard Genette would
call the “paratext,” the publication “appa-
ratus,” from any actual publication, so that

148    | chapter four

Figure 4.4.  Fiona we learn to read reading itself in its institu-
Banner, Anatomy of  
a Book (2009). Letraset tional functions. The same comic reduction,
on bound book, 90
pages, 21.6 x 30.2 x or depurposing, of codex paraphernalia ap-
1.5 cm. Courtesy
of the artist. pears from Banner in a full-scale book-work
(rather than ironic print text-work) from
2009, Anatomy of a Book, which appropri-
ates a volume with a blank cover (perhaps
a drawing book) and opens it facedown
for display. Rather than “surgically” alter-
ing it, Banner’s anatomization orients it
toward us by the flat-footed application of
Letraset identifications: “BACK” in cen-
tered bold, “SPINE” sideways, and “FACE”
at a far smaller scale, as if disappearing into
the unnecessarily said (fig. 4.4), including
an internal page that spells out “DEDICA-
TION” in small type. In this quintessence
of demediation, here is a book vacated
rather than “evaporated”—leveled to a self-
citational object—that is only for reading
as such, as “book.” For reading lessons of
this sort, homework is never enough. We
need to keep going back to the galleries for
fresh pedagogic (because analogic) provoca-
tions, where an increasingly bizarre range
of artifacts continues figuring forth, facet
by facet, that cognitive prism known as the
book. And we need to do so—hence the next
chapter—in full view of the book’s cultural
circulation within divergent archival regis-
ters, their principles of exclusion overrun
by a sometimes chaotic inclusiveness.
object lessons |    149
C H A P TE R F I V E
ANARCHIVES
T he last chapter enrolled us, under the
tutelary museum umbrella Learn to
Read, in a crash course on the grammar and
lexicon of book-works within an associated
text-art milieu. Its lesson plan was to review
the neo-conceptualist assumptions of such
book objects in just this textualist light.
The context now widens beyond such ad
hoc schooling in the structural syntax and
vocabulary of codex recognition. We turn
here to something more like the book-work
as encyclopedic stand-in rather than self-
exampling stand-alone—where an underly-
ing logic continues to apply.
If a not-book can represent the phantom
double of the book, clarifying the material
determinants of the latter as cultural and
industrial norm, so can two, three, or thir-
teen hundred books offer a similar cross
section of a larger social edifice and its
textual holdings, however much discom-
posed, dispersed, randomized, or concealed
in their wording. Just as the shuffling of
letters stands to the rules of lexical self-
containment in an ana-grammar of inscrip-
tion, so stands the ana of the discrepant
book installation to the culture of the book
more broadly: a contingent scrambled sam-
pling. The closest thing to this “anarchive”
in Learn to Read was the arbitrary shelving
of volumes in Carol Bove’s Seven Types of
Ambiguity, whose borrowed title was the
merest vestige of a true taxonomy.
Even while representing nothing from
inside themselves by way of accessible text,
such works can nonetheless represent en
masse—and often in a disturbing massive-
ness—not just the book, then, but the ar-
chive of book culture at large in all or any
of its aspects, ranging from the history of
 literacy to the perversions (so we’ll see in
the next chapter) of scientific documenta-
tion. And what tends toward the “anarchic”
about composite book-works in this mode—
especially in their role as arbitrary repre-
sentatives of a yet larger biblio-technology
of information and dissemination—is the
chaos, the inert disorder, the indetermi-
nacy, suggested by the predominantly out-
of-reach page, one after another, sometimes
thousands on end. Document storage of-
ten becomes catacomb or burial mound,
haunted by all that the X-ed out text has
excluded by material allusion. The public
records “office” of the archive (in its etymo-
logical aura of archeion or “administrative
space”) is thus canceled by the more strictly
aesthetic office of radical enclosure in the
unpaginated, illegible book form.
Before crisscrossing the gallery spaces
of such collectively negated books, it should
aid our terms of discussion to compare first
(in two dimensions instead) the intimate
private library of Rakuzin’s art catalogs,
as visited in chapter 3, to images devoted
exclusively to institutional holdings. Just
as that third chapter found it instructive—
in gathering up the broader inferences of
demediation—to take on for comparison
page-based representations apart from
depaginated book sculpture, so again here.
The rare case of deliberately anarchival
paintings, arbitrary in their textual selec-
tion (rather than, so to say, a shelf por-
trait of devotedly assembled volumes like
Rakuzin’s or a selected punished page like
Sparagana’s) can help in drawing out their
more common sculptural equivalents in the
book-work. That’s at least one way to look
at Chinese American painter Xiaoze Xie,
in a 2006 series called The MoMA Library,
152    | chapter five
when he applies his delicate elegiac brush
to partial glimpses, on cold gray shelving, of
moldering folios and other random volumes
in the Museum of Modern Art’s off-site stor-
age warehouse in Queens.1 Torn paper cov-
ers and yellowing call numbers catch the
light—or otherwise page edges turned side-
ways, their topics unguessable—against a
Rembrandtesque obsidian darkness behind
the shelves. In an earlier series of oil works
called 2001–2003 Fragmentary Views, Xiaoze
Xie had instead pictured, also in side view,
various stacks of Shanghai newspapers
whose colorful front-page illustrations are
glimpsed in tantalizing partial segments at
their outer curved edges, developing vari-
ous pictorial motifs in iteration, some al-
most baroque in their bent complexity. 2
Not so with these MoMA stacks (plate
10). Exactly where you might expect some
chromatic and figural detail, on the spines
of an art library’s holdings, the painter
finds instead (or chooses) merely the mono-
chrome remains of faceless scholarly bind-
ings and unillustrated dust jackets. In a
catalog essay whose title happens to evoke
the architectonic debris that anarchival
book-works so often call up in their three di-
mensions, Roger Rothman reads these later
pictures—in their allegorical overtones—as
“The Ruins of Modernism.”3 With the Anglo-
European tradition seen from beyond itself
by this Asian master, it is also as if—after
postmodernism and its own offshoot in
photorealism—his fresh exactitude of tech-
nique, with its lush sfumato, puts the tra-
dition at its own internal distance, just out
of contemporary focus. And does so even
while offering only a random sample of its
entire sweep in the virtual discards of a few
garaged relics. Crumbling parts for the out-
moded, ruined whole—yet gorgeous to look
back on in just this way.
For another version of superseded art
history in hyperrealist painting, see the ex-
treme anarchive—a decade in the making—
of Vincent Desiderio’s giant 1993–2003 can-
vas Cockaigne (plate 11). The work is mod-
eled, by name and format, on Brueghel’s fa-
mous Land of Cockaigne (1567), where three
stuporous figures are in every sense spaced
out beneath a table laden with the leavings
of a meal, the man in the foreground having
a closed book by his side. But this time it is
the painterly tradition itself, represented by
its amassed open folios and catalogs, that
seems supine and used up. Here is a whole
ransacked library of art books, hundreds of
them, each ingeniously recopied (just like
the whole Brueghel composition has been
borrowed and revamped)—but leaving no
fresh nourishment behind. The canvas feels
overwhelmed by the leftovers of a daunting
historical record, its best new efforts at illu-
sionism nothing but allusive and reduplica-
tive. With any less brio of execution, it would
be a capitulation. As it is, this classically
scaled canvas seems a lavish swan song.
RANDOM’S AMPLE
An underlying logic, did I say in the first para-
graph, uniting the single volume of book-work
to the composite or the multiple? Better, per-
haps, to say a recurrent tendency—and this
whether the bibliographic shapes in question
occupy real three-dimensional space or are
instead merely painted (or, as we’ll later see,
only photographed) to represent volumes on
hold. The tendency is again figural, gener-
ating the material trope of synecdoche. All
“exhibited” and thus dysfunctional books,
alone or lumped together, are arbitrary and
partial installments. Randomness suffices.
Whatever the numeric multiple, that is, part
is there for the whole; instance standing in
for prevalence; one-of-a-kind only in the
sense of one-for-all. And this trope stays in
play whether the whole is defined as the time
of reading one book, a duration somehow
concretized in formal shape, or, at an entirely
different chronological scale, when what is
reduced and objectified is the entire cata-
log of literate (or elsewhere art-historical)
culture, for which any single text form—or
several thousand—could be no more than
emblematic.
The volumetrics of unreadable bookwork
can readily submit to both modes of tempo-
ral measure, text-bound and historical alike,
or even the two together. Bearing up under
either pressure, bookwork becomes an inev-
itable and melancholy (when not dominantly
comic) weighing of non-immediacy (or de-
mediation): in other words, of absence, pre-
vention, loss. In the last chapter, we came
upon the temporal synecdoche of demedi-
ated textuality in the case of a “passage”
or voyage (Verne’s circumnavigation) when
denied the latter half of its spatiotemporal
coordinates in reading time. But what hap-
pens to the idea of a larger cultural archive,
as textual plurality, when it too, rather than
a single narrative adventure, offers only the
absent intertext for a truncated museum
book-work?
Dimension is altogether variable in such
scalar ironies. If, as in coming examples,
the closed reading of one inoperable library,
hundreds of books thick, can stand for the
archived literacy of the world, so can a sin-
gle page of meaningless iteration. Here the
dominant textual preoccupations of Learn
anarchives |    153
 to Read would join up directly with the most
abstract horizons of the more traditional
artist’s book. In Ur-Text Volume I (1994),
for instance, San Francisco print artist Pe-
ter Koch extends a rudimentary concrete
poem (literary equivalent of the conceptual
lexigraph) to codex length, unpaginated,
and packages it in aboriginal materials: the
very anatomy of the book as skin and bone.
Just “wordswordswords”—as of course
there usually are in a book, but ordinarily
different ones—are printed in this elided
form line by line, page after page, on “Serpa
handmade paper” with “goatskin thongs,
calfskin vellum, Tibetan bone bead clasps.”
Anticipating the influence of Jorge Luis
Borges (emerging below) on a whole range of
metatextual art and its mystique of the Book
of Books, the primordial volume that is “all
words” (and nothing but the word words),
thereby standing in for the Logos in dissemi-
nation, does so without lexical breaks, re-
turning to the earlier habits of codex inscrip-
tion in book history’s first millennium. (A
spell-checker asked me in the last paragraph
if I meant by “wordswords” perhaps “word
swords.” No, not in this case. But the pen
certainly does grow mightier, because read-
ing grows easier and more rapidly transmis-
sible, when words are sliced open and spaced
apart at their borders, no longer requiring
enunciation aloud to keep things straight. 4)
This chapter devotes itself to just some of
the numerous installation works that might
well carry the title booksbooksbooks—even
while letting no words be seen.
The museum is, of course, a place where
anything but the singular can feel trans-
gressive. When recirculated through ex-
hibition discourse, the book assemblage
may threaten to collapse around a sudden
154    | chapter five
relativism of quantity and quality for the
most part repudiated by aesthetics down
through modernism. From Duchamp’s
counter-modernism on, however, and in-
creasingly in the postwar era, appropria-
tion art regularly entails a sardonic worry-
ing of the singular versus the plural. The
tension is widely evident in today’s galler-
ies, book-works included. For traditional
aesthetic criteria, there’s no safety in num-
bers; far from it. But especially since the
1960s, the beleaguered cult of the singular
teeters over an abyss of the multiple. Or ea-
gerly plunges in.
TWO OF A KIND
Inveterate book collector turned renowned
appropriation artist, in and out of litigation
for copyright infringement, Richard Prince,
besides his famous acrylic reproductions of
tacky nurse-novel covers on oversize can-
vases, has more immediately fused the two
realms of his obsession, pictorial and bib-
liographic, with a rather baffling set of sub-
sculptural book-works. These oddly bland
composites serve to showcase, in handmade
wooden boxes, multiple book printings, usu-
ally two at a time, free of evident irony or
scalar transformation (his stock-in-trade
otherwise). Such (perhaps punningly?)
boxed sets involve balancing off two or more
different hardback editions of the same
bestseller—first, second, fifth printings,
American or foreign. They are marked in
any case by different covers and fitted into
those handmade receptacles open to the
left, spine-side, so that the books are cradled
face-up and readily available to the nonethe-
less forbidden gallery grasp. Such pairings
bear no separate titles (even the catch-all
Untitled) except as they emerge in twofold
repetition from the “cover art,” including in
one anomalous case seven different editions
of Nabokov’s Lolita—with so many pouting
and lollipop-sucking nymphets on view that
the assemblage seems actually to be sam-
pling the rampant erotic phenomenon of pu-
bescent seductiveness rather than celebrat-
ing a single late-modernist masterwork. 5
Usually, though, Prince works with the
minimal plurality of the pair in his twin-
edition setups: two Dharma Bums editions,
two versions of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on
Ice, two Valley of the Dolls, or two How to
Talk Dirty and How to Influence People by
Lenny Bruce. In all of them, as in the Lolita
archive as well, the conjunction of variants
operates under the obvious aegis of capi-
talist supply and demand. Do these works
thereby constitute an allusive glance back
to the origin of industrial duplication in the
book form? And, in so doing, stress its com-
mercial continuity with the pictorial “print
run” of signed lithographs in Prince’s usual
medium? The viewer has only to think so.
Conceptual art, after all. (In this case, these
multiples would evince clear links to those
collected journal runs by John Knight taken
up for their conceptualist seriality in chap-
ter 3.)
In Prince’s book-works, the differential
pairing of those sibling editions is our only
clue to the effect in play. One used book on
exhibit would be a found object of no re-
contextualized interest. The least an artist,
rather than merely a noted bibliophile, can
do by way of unskilled making—and this
seems to be Prince’s minimalist gesture in a
nutshell—is to differentiate the object (as if)
from itself within a formal construct. At the
same time, what might otherwise be seen
as the very definition of aesthetic composi-
tion (patterns of repetition and variation) is
demoted here to an accident of commerce
in the horizontal “frame” of arbitrary adja-
cency. The legacy of Gutenberg collides with
that of Duchamp in these tandem book dou-
bles: the bracketing of the same as different
in a parodic transcendence of the copied by
the modular, duplication by minimal varia-
tion. In the typical case for Prince, paired
nth-generation instances thus serve to con-
figure an auto-diptych of book and book
prime within a micro-archive of the tech-
nical multiple rather than anything more
broadly multitudinous. And from all this, as
lone unavailable residue: the “immanence”
under erasure of the unread narrative.
The archival issue begins, then, as one
of plurality and its not quite random sam-
pling. And comparison remains in order
with a related sector of the same aesthetic.
In conceptual textwork, or in other words in
the stenciled or cursive lexigraph, just a few
words or syllables blocked out on canvas or
sprayed on the wall can make the point, or
at least a point, taken at a glance. Letters
and lexemes are the fragmentary represen-
tatives of a voluminous discourse that invis-
ibly saturates all gallery space. The “white
cube” is never a six-sided tabula rasa just
standing in wait for images. It is a zone of
sharply outlined and entirely preformu-
lated standards that can only be actively ad-
dressed in so many words. It is according to
this axiomatic stringency of the conceptual
art movement that all phrased ironies on
upright surfaces can well seem subsidiary
to the broad fact of mental phrasing itself
instead of pristine viewing. Conceptualism,
in this sense, has the effect of excerpting
the lexicon of either art or social discourse
anarchives |    155
 in the usurped place of the picture plane.
That’s why recognition tends to be instanta-
neous. A little text goes a long way.
Book-works are harder to pin down in
their synecdochic inference at first notice. If
a readily carried point of conceptualist text
art is that language always fills museums to
the brim with its articulated codes of expec-
tation, evaluation, exclusion, and, further,
that the typical new work is still likely to
be seen taking a page from the dictionary
of received aesthetic ideas, then word forms
are hardly foreign matter in the realm of dis-
play. Books deposited in museum space, un-
less they are explicit books on art history,
tend not to be so rapidly contextualized by
that venue. They may be more difficult, that
is, to place, even while, like text-works, their
function is always in excess of that assigned
place, those architectural confines. The in-
tertextuality of the book-work must inevita-
bly exceed the museum, sampling a larger
variorum of culture in an invaded space
devoted ordinarily to sheer form. When in-
truding the unskilled duplicate into the en-
clave of museal artifacts, that is, the appro-
priated book can hardly help but instance
the company it otherwise keeps and here
eschews. And if writing on the wall, a little
or a lot of it, stands for much more of the
same verbiage, isn’t it likely that the closed
book-work form, single or composite, would
stand in as one of many volumes? But if so,
how exactly? Or, more to the point, how dif-
ferently from instance to instance?
LESS IS MORE
In asking what codes, including those anti-
codes of demediation, allow the one as place-
holder for the many in this regard, we are
156    | chapter five
quickly led to rethink singular and plural
precisely in terms of part and whole. How
many copies of the same printing, say, or se-
rial editions of the same text, make a collec-
tion? For that matter, how many pages are
necessary to represent a volume; volumes,
a library; libraries, an archive? These ques-
tions, even if gratuitous or silly outside the
museum, reverberate within its walls when
the space so delimited is made to contain the
volumetrics of a modular book-work, where
the multiple is subsumed to the assemblage
of a composite bibliobjet. These are geometric
arrangements in which all volumes, mani-
fold by definition, are neutralized as text and
amalgamated as form. What genuine internal
plurality is in this way sacrificed to the sheer
multiple? What unfurling temporal experi-
ence to the stasis of formal shape? What—but
also why, and for what?
Examples come to us not just from the
found or the “figured” book but from the
realm of the miniature and the gargantuan
alike. French artist Charles Matton turns
his art of the boxed miniature to library
settings at times, and, with the aid of ex-
acting craftsmanship and illusory mirrors,
produces whole receding caverns of inac-
cessible textual pleasure—including his
2004 Homage to James Joyce, with minus-
cule books both shelved and stacked on a
parquet floor along with a microprint news-
paper simulation, or the earlier reduced
shelves of a dozenfold tiny spines called A
Marcel Proust (2000). As Susan Stewart has
argued about the miniature book phenome-
non in freestanding form, the yearning such
works refer us to is that which even normal
books must satisfy in their own heavily
compressed form: containing whole worlds
within their small compass. 6
Figure 5.1.  Wyn All miniatures are thus conceptual pieces.
Geleynse, Kit 1A:  
Collected Books;   Just as with maximalization, then, the work
Some Assembly  
Required (2006). of miniaturization—an extreme form of non-
Offset lithographic
multiple, 81/2 x 43/4 monumentalism—tends to offer an anoma-
x 16 in. Courtesy
of the artist. lous confirmation of the norm. On a recent
trip to St. Louis, I was just a couple days late,
I discovered, to see a well-known collection
of miniature books on display at the Kem-
per Art Museum. With that disappointment
7
fresh in mind, and right across from the Pu-
litzer Foundation for the Arts at the other
end of town, I doubted my eyes for a moment
when I seemed to spot through another gal-
lery window what looked like, of all things,
an array of miniature books on a shelf. So
they were, but not the real volumes them-
selves—only serially mounted photographs
of these paperbacks as cardboard-backed
images. They were printed at about one-
third their normal scale, and—here was the
interesting conceptual turn—photographed
along all different lines of sight, now spine
out, now cover forward, now angled side-
ways to varying degrees, slanted up or down
at random. It is as if they were separately
lifted from a collective or communal shelf
by several invisible hands at once.
These pictured books were all popular
“reading,” including biographies, detective
thrillers, best-selling novels: a private ar-
chive, but anarchically disposed in Euclid-
ian shelf space by the Canadian video and
film artist Wyn Geleynse, to be assembled
into shape at will (as in a sense one’s private
anarchives |    157
 library always is), but here by the purchaser
of their cutout increments. For they are sold
as a do-it-yourself “edition” by the title Kit
1A, Collected Books; Some Assembly Required
(fig. 5.1). However you arrange the separate
segments, the books’ discrepant angular
sightings remain unchanged. And so it is
that the experimental moving-image artist
has curiously turned his hand to what can
best be described—can best be seen—as a
sculptural montage of texts. Not books on a
shelf for reading, they are instead the neo-
cubist reading of a bookshelf.
In this miniature library as populist an-
thology, a broader tendency in the disposi-
tion of bookwork is quite explicitly on view.
In everything from the solo volume to the
groaning shelf, from fragile onionskin to un-
precious metal, from thumbnail simulacrum
to life-size six-foot volume on industrial
hinges, the volumetrics of the book-work—
single or multiple—can offer itself as the
extract of an absent archive, each text ex
libris after all. Graduating in this way from
artifact to representative object, the book-
work becomes the synecdoche of the social
itself under literacy. Book pieces are frag-
ments of that field of operation, of its ambi-
ence and its impact, known as print culture.
And the synecdochic shock they can deliver
results as often from the overscale as from
the miniaturized.
ENCYCLOPEDICS
No outsize works in this mode are more
famous than those of postwar German art-
ist Anselm Kiefer. But if European history,
seemingly recongealed from molten forms,
can appear in his work as a multivolume
chronicle too late for reading, as we’ll find
158    | chapter five
in the next chapter, so too can the narrower
tradition of art history come to seem belated,
anarchic, beyond normal consultation, an-
other blurred “set” of optical memories. The
first chapter pointed to the book-works of
Slovak artist Matej Krén, extreme demedia-
tions like his pulping of books into mottled
stones or the stacking of them like bricks
in architectonic configurations: anarchives
transfigured into nonmediating structures,
built spaces without messages. The deme-
diations he relishes can incorporate two-
dimensional as well as three-dimensional
effects as well. In distressings more extreme
even than John Sparagana’s fatiguing of
magazine photos, Krén, mining the periodi-
cal archive, selects covers from the journal
Art in America and, applying solvent to
their glossy surfaces, “finger paints” them,
whatever their actual image, into abstract
expressionist color fields, with the very idea
of American art narrowed and reduced to
the blurred veils of its postwar ascendancy.
Child’s play, as it were.
In a more complete sweep across the
art-historical spectrum, well beyond the
special pleadings of a single cultural organ,
Krén arranges ten of eighteen volumes of
José Pijoán’s general history of art (1927)
on as many separate reading tables. But
these are not the volumes themselves, just
their mock-ups with borrowed covers: “ma-
quettes,” empty models. Much of their con-
tents, in particular their illustrations, have
been removed from the real volumes, dis-
solved, bled together, their dye stains trans-
ferred to the collage-like tablecloths on each
station of this ten-table history. For all this
spoilage and sedimentation, these chro-
matic transfers are still—such is the idea—
blurrily evocative of the color range char-
acteristic of painting in each period. If you
want to see the stages of art’s development,
epoch by epoch, on the two-dimensional
surface of a tabletop review—so the infer-
ence seems to go—then any such rehearsal,
rather than being constrained within cov-
ers, might just as well bleed out onto the
table’s own canvas-scaled surface in the
form of deskilled palimpsests. As ironic in-
stallations, these dissolved book forms offer
their own abused archive as an epitomizing
conceptualist advance within the same art-
historical tradition they distill only by first
liquefying. Recalling O’Doherty’s wooden-
block book (rather than woodblock imprint),
offering us Art Since 1945 (one instance at
least), the implication in Krén’s multistage
piece is again that all of art history can
be summed and resumed by the two- and
three-dimensional ingenuities of each new
instance, here by both the volumetric simu-
lacra and the pigmented surfaces beneath.
Art history in the (un)making.
The encyclopedic impulse has in this
case been melted away from information
to mere traces and stains. Elsewhere, it
can be commemorated straight-facedly, a
canonical book honored in the company
of more of the same—and this in a le-
gal rather than aesthetic archive. Barry
Holden and Nina Yankowitz, New York
architects and site sculptors, produced in
the late 1980s the Book Building, installed
on its debut within the public courthouse
in Lower Manhattan: the house of the law
enclosing another of the same. It is a one-
room, four-windowed space, constructed
of 2,500 mostly closed law books, volumes
only opened (but still facedown) when
providing the shingle-like dovetailed roof.
Otherwise, the stacked walls are marked
by wide curved spines turned alternately
out and in, so that the corrugated pattern
of the siding evokes the loose roll of a log-
like structure, more cabin than bunker or
manse: a modest Lincolnesque inhabitation
within the word of law, where logos is fit-
ted livably with lex; but, for all this, where
the anarchy of the illegible collides unde-
niably with the architecture of dissemina-
tion. For within this simplified structural
convergence is displayed—motivating the
commission in the first place—a collec-
tor’s item copy of that auto-archive par
excellence, that compendious book of the
world: the first encyclopedia by Diderot.
Apt home for this landmark topical “in-
dex” of the real is indeed a house of books
whose laws hold firm as if by internalizing
the space-making truth of Diderot’s World
Book. And yet, in the context of other, more
ironic bookwork, and again without even
the least phonetic syllable made visible for
reading in the housing structure itself, one
still starts hearing things. The longer one
contemplates the deadpan simplicity of
this “volumetric” structure, the harder it
is to shake the punning notion that what
we have before us is the rudimentary Law
Cabin of culture. The demediated 3-D rebus
constitutes once again our reading lesson,
well before we sit down to Diderot’s dated
compendium.
Most archival gestures in the realm of
book installations tend to be somewhat
more ironic than strictly commemorative.
Certainly any number of canonical volumes
may come in for dismembering or histori-
cal preemption in something of the way Pio-
ján’s treatment of art history was liquidated
by Krén. Leave it to that master wit of text
forms, Allen Ruppersberg, actually to evis-
anarchives |    159
 cerate and then refurbish an entire middle-
brow commercial archive—and to do so in
part via electronic storage, searchable on
the artist’s website. The New Five Foot Shelf
is named for the P.F. Collier & Son’s 1910
publication of Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf of
Books, a weightily material 50-volume set of
cultural benchmarks compiled by Harvard
President Charles W. Eliot, with the origi-
nal introduction and directives for use re-
printed in facsimile on the web, including
the all-capped subtitle: FIFTY VOLUMES.
FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN TITLES.
THREE HUNDRED AUTHORS. All you ever
wanted to know by reading—and then some:
a portable great books course, all volumes
replaced by Ruppersberg with short, dis-
continuous, and interchangeable narratives
and capped in the fiftieth with his own de-
flationary version of “a chronological index
of the great events in the world’s history”
that amounts to a year’s worth of video clips
from his own studio.
SHELF LIVES OF
THE INTERTEXT
Some artists, as for instance Naftali Rakuzin
in paint and pencil, are far less ironic about
the private archive (in his case the master-
pieces of still-life painting) that schools and
nurtures their craft. In the manipulation of
such a personal library for display, it is only
illegibility itself, the untapped innards of the
closed books, that retains this valued pri-
vacy. But real books closed to us in 3-D space
invoke a different dimension of response—
and one sometimes more impalpable than it
at first may seem. In a 2004 work by Matej
Krén, the suggestion that untold books are
the bricks and mortar of culture itself, even
160    | chapter five
when they have been lost to explicit perusal,
comes through in the dwarfing architectonics
of his structure: two parallel walls of books,
taller than human height, defining a nar-
row corridor down which one spectator at a
time can pass (plate 12). The work bears the
double-edged Franco/English title Passage,
common in Slovak usage as well—offering,
with no single textual passage open to view,
what the artist calls instead a “short-cut
through culture,” channeled and girded by
books no one need read in order to find them
pointing one’s direction nonetheless.
But there’s a trick involved, a sculptural
trompe l’oeil. Though some of the books are
real, some—their doubles and multiples—are
merely virtual. For Krén has here devised an
even more haunting version of the trope from
Gravity Mixer (fig. 1.10). Our passage through
culture is always in some sense a hall of mir-
rors. In this case, the design is so vertiginous
that it needs diagramming to recapture (fig.
5.2), where the shaded-in areas indicate the
placement of mirrors intervening between
the eventual stacks of books (on either side
of the installation, beyond the metal girders)
and the corridor between. In the installation
view (plate 12 again), the swath of real books
is all but indistinguishable from the reflec-
tions above and below, forward and back.
These are mirrorings that remind us, in a
most Borgesian trope, how any one set of
books is conceptually reframed by infinitely
more of the same. And this is a mirrored
periphery in which the human subject in
transit—called by Krén the “pilgrim” across
the world’s booked space—can at any mo-
ment find her own image reflected, in one
direction or another, whenever leaning in
toward text. Whereas Buzz Spector’s word-
play for the similarly titled A Passage (fig.

Figure 5.2.  Matej 2.7) ironizes the reader’s short-cut through
Krén, Passage (2004).
Working drawing. a single volume of one iterated textual page,
Courtesy of the
artist. Krén’s massive anarchive directs us not in
but between the cumulative human wordings
that shape any cultural progress: a wordless
traverse freighted nonetheless by text.
For Krén, as he has said in interviews,
the idea behind Passage is to install, and
hence make visible in itself, the “interface”
between real space and that alternate, vir-
tual space made present to us by books.
Turning by title to another post-print term,
he calls his next and even more ambitious
assemblage Scanner, evoking the process
by which one surface yields to its virtual
duplicate in electro-processing. This is the
grander construction yet that was installed
in the summer of 2010 at Bologna’s Museum
of Modern Art. Inside a forty-foot mono-
lith comprised of ninety thousand volumes
trucked in from the Czech Republic and
forming a semi-circular tower at the back
of a four-story display space—inside this
monumental stacking, even vaster space is
opened. A straightforward tunnel of ingress
(as in Passage) makes room for one viewer
at a time. This is a spectator who—pen-
etrating the fortress—ends up walking the
plank into a mise en abyme achieved this
time by a room-size disk of mirrors pieced
tightly together on floor and ceiling, sepa-
rated by a circle of real books to the height
of about eight feet or so, and then extend-
ing, above and below, by “interface” mirage,
into the untold space of their replication ad
infinitum.
Moreover, in a slow, rhythmic pulse, the
lighting inside this telescoped cavern—and
haven—of text shifts from incandescent to
so-called black light, so that, intermittently,
the recognizable book shapes, all spines un-
seen in this central core, undergo a spectral
transformation that leaves only the thin
edges of their covers visible in an ultravio-
let glow of sedimented strips—as if in radio­
active striations layered as far, high and low,
as the eye can see. The outer versus inner
structure of the codex experience has never
been more fully troped. Outside, the tower-
ing shape of assembled print objects looms
almost beyond precedent, the volumes ar-
ranged mostly at random, spines often out,
sometimes patterned into more consistent
horizontal bands—and all the more objecti-
fied by this plasticity of design. Inside, the
subjective space thus made is multiplied be-
yond comprehension: an iridescent cistern
of possibility, an endless well and dwelling
less of books than of latent texts and their
virtual worlds.
At a scale only somewhat less mammoth,
the prolific Canadian book sculptor Tom
Bendtsen, working repeatedly in the archi-
tectural mode of Krén or Spector, builds
huge cylinders of his unidentified favorite
books approached from without, like me-
anarchives |    161
 dieval towers, by curved stair steps com-
posed of more of the same books. These
sculptural piles appear under rather medi-
eval, or at least scholastic, titles like 1999’s
Argument #4 (12,000 books). Arguments,
8
indeed, are intertextual and built up at
first only from the outside by the shoring
up of cross-reference. This seems implied,
as well, in another installation work in this
series, a foursquare room of stacked vol-
umes, ceiling-free, where a terraced column
of books forms the curve of a Gothic arch
supporting others like them as the portal to
a delimited but potentially endless biblio-
graphic space. Yet here too, as with Krén’s
Passage, there is no actual writing to con-
sult from the volumes accumulated before
us. In terms of any specific “argument,” cul-
tural disquisition itself seems a closed book.
Further, as in all such moundings of
found textual forms—even when the ques-
tion “how many?” isn’t so straightforwardly
answered—further questions collect. Cer-
tainly with artists other than Bendtsen,
it’s clear that we are expected to wonder—
about the apparent discards dumped or
structured before us—whose books these
were once, and whence, and whither again?
Will such borrowings ever be returned to
circulation? What place does their arbitrary
congeries hold in the larger archive to which
their aggregate title (often slant and catchy)
seems implicitly to refer? To know anecdot-
ally that Bendtsen uses volumes from his
own extensive library doesn’t dispel the
initial impression—or its link to the general
practice elsewhere of arbitrary pileage. In
fact other “compositions” by him occupy
a more obviously anarchival dimension of
bookwork than the architectonic cast of his
Argument series. Bendtsen has for years
162    | chapter five
collected, where possible, two copies of the
books important to him, so that he can store
them—and occasionally display them—filed
once by content, then by form: in other
words, alphabetically by title and chromati-
cally by binding, producing in the latter case
a color spectrum that induces in the viewer,
in turn, a reconception of the library as for-
mal rather than functional space, end rather
than means. The serene chromatic pattern-
ing is of course, as textual filing system, a
chaotic imposition of arbitrary surface fea-
tures upon a preselected but now redistrib-
uted intellectual range: a library aspiring at
a glance to graphic rather than textual art.
In 2005 American book sculptor Adam
Bateman, reverting for once to a merely
two-dimensional bookcase, designed flat,
faux shelves fitted out with painted spines
that duplicate and reshuffle Ellsworth Kelly’s
famous “color spectrum” paintings: an anti-
bibliographic archive of chromatism itself
called Ellsworth Kelly’s Library. And there
are literary rather than painterly examples of
such allusive shelvings and sortings, where
textual anarchy emerges from within the im-
press of a supervening but arbitrary system.
British book artist Tom Phillips has recently
branched out in this direction. Past master
of the altered or defaced book, Phillips is
most famous for the stylish defacement of
the Victorian text A Human Monument. Out
of an accidental lexical fold to begin with, in
a single page’s running head, he produces the
elided title A Humument. That’s merely the
first stage, however, of those elisions, redac-
tions, and overpaintings by which he makes
the found volume his own. The painted book
that preceded Gutenberg, and that turned
the architectural decoration of the frescoed
wall both miniature and portable in manu-

Figure 5.3.  Tom Phillips, script illumination, has returned with a
The Library at Elsinore
(2006). Installation view, vengeance in A Humument not just as the
Royal Academy of Arts
Summer Exhibition, 2007. painting in a book but the recurrent painting
© 2010 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York/ out of its text. This is a “treated book” that
DACS, London.
can itself be mass-produced as a conceptual
volume, now in its fourth edition and avail-
able at Amazon.com, new or used.
Treated or mistreated, revamped or
voided, or indeed entirely simulated, any
book—so a tacit inference might suggest—
can’t help but constitute a reading (and
hence overprinting) of previous textual
production. If so, the inference is played
out more recently by Phillips, and at a more
flamboyant scope, with dozens of faux
books made from overpainted real volumes
(amid merely depicted, untitled spines) in an
gray-toned corner shelf installed at the 2007
Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition,
anchoring a gallery whose works Phillips
had also selected and hung. His own trian-
gular sculptural form hovers halfway be-
tween trompe l’oeil bookcase and flattened
conceptualist objet (fig. 5.3). The spines of
arbitrarily found volumes are assembled
and re-identified there (in a narrow variety
of stencil styles) with the titles of all the real
books, either in circulation or out of print,
named for lines from a single Shakespeare
play, including separate volumes cheek by
jowl called An Expense of Spirit and A Waste
of Shame. The effect is sampled here in a
maquette done the year before for a display
at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, singling
out works whose titles mine the “To be or
not to be” speech alone (fig. 5.4).
Mass production of the literary classic
doesn’t stop with editions of a work like
Hamlet but includes all it propagates, as if
such posterity were part of the work it is
and does. The installation piece, called The
Library at Elsinore, is a tour de force of re-
search and array, though not of untoward
sculptural dexterity. It is there mostly to
remind us by title that Shakespeare is the
very lexicon of literary idiom in English.
Like a parlor game objectified, the work’s
immaterial labor is ours to emulate or ex-
tend—if Phillips has failed to turn up a title
that might occur to us. With tacit implica-
tions for art history as well as for its literary
equivalent, this wall of volumes puts us in
mind of textual evolution as a survival of
the fittest at the innermost level, where out
anarchives |    163
Figure 5.4.  Tom Phillips,
The Library at Elsinore
(2006). Maquette detail.
© 2010 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York/
DACS, London.
164    |
of one book’s seminal formulations is gener-
ated a whole cultural archive. Shakespeare
may have the corner on the literary market
(one possible geometric irony of the trian-
gular installation), but this archive of his
derivative intertexts, in the wit of its erudi-
tion, drives a conceptual wedge (another vi-
sual clue) into the very idea of canonicity in
museum culture as well, for which the time
has in many ways passed.
With the “closed reading” of such book-
work, the viewer is always aware of the im-
posed loss of textual function, the manifest
demediation. In the earlier breakthroughs
of conceptual art, by contrast, lexigraphs
tend to evict the image whose assumptions,
with whatever degree of optical flair, their
mere words revisit. Indeed, Phillips himself
chapter five
is represented, in a version of this familiar
textual irony, two years later in the same
gallery space. One from a series of cubic
text-works illustrated and glossed on the
artist’s website, Wittgenstein’s Trap (1999)
amounts in art-historical terms to a rather
direct superimposition of the conceptual-
ist mandate upon the minimalist object par
excellence, a four-foot cube. What actu-
ally presents itself is a six-sided openwork
frame made of thin wire letters that spell
out forward, backward, upside down, and by
mirror-like inversion when seen through the
airy grid of the shape, various permutations
of Wittgenstein’s maxim: “The limits of my
language are the limits of my world.” Fitly
showcased in the 2009 Royal Academy Sum-
mer Exhibition (its main theme identified by
the curator as “Making Space”), Phillips’s
text-work—both conceptual framework and
cage at once, a prison house of language that
is also a permeable armature—does not, in
its explicit address of visual art to linguistic
philosophy, so much subscribe to Wittgen-
stein’s proposition as question it further,
ventilate its supposed trap. For as to such
supposed limits and the inner confines they
demarcate, we are for the moment on the
outside looking in. Objecthood and discur-
sivity enter upon a new ocular dialectic
neither theatrical nor conceptual only, but
more fully and strategically “spatialized”
and penetrable. The found phrase is config-
ured, yet again, as an optical reading lesson.
This rare case of 3-D text-work aside,
volumetric irony in this intermedial mode
is usually reserved for the mostly illegible
bibliobjet. In installation settings, book-
work inflicts its damage on the thing itself,
still there in sculptural shape before us.
With most wall-hung text-work, where one
medium has more decisively replaced an-
other—via a preset linguistic form instead
of worked pigment—the spectator is re-
minded of suspended function in a different
way from the objectified dimensions of the
book form. You don’t ask of a realist can-
vas what it’s for in the first place. Neither
do you ask as much, in facing the museum
wall, when scene or even painterly image
has been replaced by scribble, script, or ty-
pography. The point is generic, at least this
many decades into our response to post-
war textwork. But books are for something
to begin with, instrumental in their native
mediation. As with The Library of Elsinore,
the museum to which they are removed has
removed their own motivation as cultural
forms. Even if not denuded of wording, they
have surrendered its purpose. They are not
message machines any longer, even in part,
but self-antiquated mementos from the
present, superannuated by design.
Response is anthropological as much as
aesthetic. When deliberately otherwise, de-
liberately nonhuman in its irony, the contrast
is clear. An untitled 1960–61 piece by prolific
Swedish sculptor Erik Dietman emblemizes
a strictly instinctual wisdom by perching a
life-size wooden owl atop three dozen closed
books sculpted also in wood, a stack thus fig-
ured to fall well beneath—rather than as the
symbolic elevation of—the bird’s threshold
of attention, let alone consumption. It’s not
that kind of knowledge that the laconic ava-
tar of native wisdom has proverbially come
to represent. But when Homo sapiens as the
book-using animal is implied, as is of course
predominantly the case in book sculpture,
the silence of the unread can be deafening.
Book-works, as we’ve noted, call to mind the
codex not only as among the greatest but as
one of the last strictly material—and neces-
sarily portable—human tools, before digital
“implementation” has turned a once-tangible
agency disembodied and instantaneous. Mu-
seum books can in this way seem isolated for
aesthetic reflection as monolithic remnants
of a vanishing order of nonelectronic civiliza-
tion altogether. Found or fabricated, single
or aggregated, intact or ruined, they are like
archaeological finds in a time capsule of the
present: the last objects, to whose natural
and cultural history—and its truncation—we
will return at the end of the next chapter. But
even when reduced to a curatorial and dated
objecthood, these nonbooks are, in their in-
capacitation as text, the last to object. Ex-
cept by formal inference in their demotion
to things.
anarchives |    165

Figure 5.5.  Marcel Brood-
thaers, Pense-Bête (1963).
Books, paper, plaster,
plastic spheres, wood,
385/8 x 331/8 x 167/16 in.
Courtesy of Marian
Goodman Gallery,
New York.
166    |
UNLIMITED ADDITION
The anarchival function of the book-work
can range widely, as we’ve begun seeing,
from the private libris to an entire cultural
discourse. A wry instance of the former
happens to mark the transition of surreal-
ist poet Marcel Broodthaers into a commit-
ted visual artist in the second phase of his
career—as well as the evolution of treated
books into genuine “depaginated” book-
works, in and beyond his experiments. A
single sculptural assemblage is at once the
tomb and cradle of this double shift, auteur-
ist and generic both. Broodthaers’s privately
chapter five
printed edition of graphically truncated po-
ems based on La Fontaine’s beast fables,
from 1963, called Pense-Bête, compounds
the eccentric typographic array of the po-
ems themselves with overlaid rectangles of
colored paper that completely obscure large
sectors of the familiar text. But this trans-
formation of verse pattern to artist’s book
passes the same year through one more
stage into book art, book sculpture, when
the last forty-four unsold copies of the pri-
vate edition are lined up together in a verti-
cal set, partly wrapped in the ephemera of
the daily paper, and abutted against a nacre-
ous ball half the height of the volumes, the
latter like some madcap spheroid bookend
(fig. 5.5). This composite geometry is fixed
before us by being embedded in plaster so
that the inoperable volumes—beyond the
partial occlusions inherent to the paper
overlays of their interior format—are barred
forever from reading, from the outside in: a
paradoxical archive of one, canceled by il-
legibility.
Had Broodthaers loosely bunched and
heaped these thin memorial volumes, let
alone burned and urned them, the sculp-
tural result, as textual residue, could hardly
be more final. Upon displaying this assisted
readymade, however, the former poet and
bookmaker turned conceptualist sculptor
admitted to being rather thrown by the re-
action—as if his assemblage were mere ab-
stract form rather than literary bookwork.
Unfrustrated by the denied contents of the
volumes, spectators, he recalled, “saw the
object either as an artistic expression or as
a curiosity . . . no one was inquisitive about
the text.” The bittersweet authorial irony
9
of such unsold and now-interred writing,
of the book as discard, has lost its literary
charge entirely in the oddball force of its
plastic composite. Only an “artistic” form
or an object of “curiosity,” with “no one . . .
inquisitive about the text”: suffice it to say
that, against the artist’s intent, a postwar
genre is born.
Book-works, plural. Bookwork, singular.
But the latter is often in itself the produc-
tion of a composite, sometimes a haphaz-
ard pile, a jagged pyramid, a cellulose igloo,
an encircling mirrored tabernacle, or, as in
Broodthaers, a clamped-tight and cement-
firm trove of multiples. And sometimes,
more normatively, the book sculpture is a
phantasmic double and inevitably chaotic
parody of the collected book outside the
museum: travestying its normal contribu-
tion to a weighted shelf, a library, an ar-
chive, even when these are comprised (as in
Broodthaers) only of a single self-authored
print run. Parodic because obviated as
text, disused, abandoned, bankrupt even as
stockpiled. Chaotic because inchoate, unlet-
tered, illegible, and most of all functionally
negated: an anarchive of nonconsultation.
And the difference between all such uncat-
egorized installations and the artist’s book
on museum display is again worth empha-
sizing. The artist’s book is essentially sin-
gular, even if not a strict one-off. Its edition
is limited so as to release graphic treatment
from all the normal limits of an industrial
template. In contrast with the artist’s book,
book art, at least in the form of the livre de-
tourné, pushes against the constraints of
the medium only after the fact. The bibli­
objet of this sort is altered rather than
hand-tailored: it is wrecked or shredded—or
pointlessly replicated—rather than crafted
from scratch. It can in this way intersect the
regime of the multiple, collide with it con-
ceptually, at an often nonartisanal angle.
Isolated random shelvings, tabletop conge-
ries, stacked remainders, reverse assembly
lines of unrecycled leftovers, rejected, de-
fective, dispersed: this is the mode, as we’ve
seen, of a whole range of book sculpture. In
this company, or context, even a single worn
volume on an installation shelf, relic in an
artist’s studio mock-up, can seem, for all its
isolation, a glimpse of the species, the trace
of an absent compendium. Rehearsing the
whole spewed flood of mass-print capital-
ism in arbitrary reconstellations of adja-
anarchives |    167
 cent bound forms, it is often the case that
installed book-works, in whatever curtailed
plurality, are informal libraries of their own,
ad hoc and hodgepodge: archives by default.
But the mass output they sculpt by exem-
plum meets in them its momentary dead
end.
THE TITULAR SUBLIME
We’ve considered in the opening chapter the
phenomenon of textuality by other means.
And one of the surest means for the delet-
tered book-work to install—and instate—its
ironies is, as already abundantly demon-
strated, by a referential tension in its titling.
Not always, of course. Prince’s paired edi-
tions defer entirely to the words on the dust
jackets to confirm their repetition and in-
terplay. Other books, however, recomposed
as book-works, have legible titles put into
regress by the work’s own denomination.
This is true even when, in the case of many
a geometric bookwork assemblage, each
of the constituent volumes simply repeats
itself. Carol Bove, as represented in the
Tate’s Learn to Read show with her shelves
of discrepant texts, achieves elsewhere
a more sculptural form—and taps a deep
linguistic habit of the bookwork mode—in
the stacked volumes of her Tower of the
Prophet (2002): another title in which the
book form oscillates between textual con-
tent and incremental shape. In this case,
the expected possessive preposition, as in
“the prophet’s tower,” is overridden—over-
topped—by the constitutive genitive. For on
closer approach, one sees that said tower
is composed solely of sixty-eight hardback
copies of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, with
dust covers in various states of decline, all
168    | chapter five
stacked skyward in a profane monument to
mass production rather than epiphany.
Same with the implied genitive irony (the
library of glass) in Jerome Harrington’s The
Glass Archive (2005), comprised entirely of
some eighty shelved novels collected so far
that have the word glass in their title. For
both Bove and Harrington, architectonic
figures, whether tower or row, serve only
to refigure an imposed singularity in mul-
tiple form. A library vertical or horizontal,
whose principle of selection builds in no
check against endless proliferation, and no
system of subdivision, offers a case of the
anarchive under unmotivated and arbitrary
narrowing. See also, in this vein, the hedge-
row of volumes collected by artist Joshua
Callaghan between 1995 and 2007 and lined
up on a museum floor: volumes ordered only
by the bandwidths of a reduced chromatic
spectrum determined by the commercial
gimmick of differently colored covers on
multiple print runs of Alvin Toffler’s best-
selling Future Shock. Under the 2007 title
Lots of Future Shock, the impact of content
has been dampened by the play on its mul-
tiplied form.
The point is worth pausing over long
enough to reprise it in more general terms.
When one speaks of anarchic structure
in these congeries and assortments, their
provocation is, of course, as with much
art, that of a controlled chaos. One of the
controls is titling, which can negotiate a
reversible conversion from random ingre-
dients to integral form. As observed often
before, there’s nothing unmetaphoric, even
unverbal, about these nonlinguistic book-
works. In multiplied as well as solo formats,
the silenced textuality of the anti-book is
broken by the frequent comedy of nomen-
clature. Or mock sublimity, as with Tower
of the Prophet. The persistent force of such
bookwork—emptying out the topics of read-
ing so as better to apprehend the spatial or
social form of its operations—is a defining
gesture rehearsed by the kind of titling that
oscillates between the work as work, or in
other words the volumetrics of his sculp-
tural integrity, and the book or books that
comprise its featured volumes. Yielding up
the container instead of the contained is a
thus a formal irony often repeated as nomi-
nal comedy in the title, the whole identified
in verbal allusion to its rudiments. Literary
precedents are everywhere, and not least
in a bibliographic imagination like that of
Jorge Luis Borges. Think of the preposition
in his story “The Library of Babel.” Whereas
it might take a grammarian to isolate the
ambiguous pivot of the objective versus
subjective genitive, any general reader can
sense the verbal anarchy associated bibli-
cally with both the institutional auspices of
the Babelian Tower and its raucous site: the
structure that is Babel’s and the linguistic
babelization that traverses it. A good deal
of conceptual book art seems congregated
around the ambiguity, the semiotic vertigo,
of this quintessential Borgesian trope—and
many others like it.
TIME BOUND
A major American book artist, Buzz Spec-
tor, stresses the ubiquitous “Borges effect”
in the field of altered books. The influence
doesn’t derive strictly from the spatiotem-
poral conceits and paradoxes in which the
great forerunner of magic realism steeps
his plots, reverberating as they always do
with the collaborative spatial and temporal
parameters of the read text. The effect rests
equally with those explicit bibliographic
scenarios, rather than just allegories of
reading, that Borges famously deploys. For
beyond the idea of a single book as its own
world, his is the World of the Book, a figure
of speech that seems implied, for instance,
in the arbitrary conglomerate of Adam Bate-
man’s Sphere #5 (fig. 5.6).
The Borges trope, of course, goes deep.
Archives are historical and cultural reposi-
tories. Anarchives demediate the temporal-
ity of any such heritage, empty out its utility
in a vexed conceptual present. This is often
a present that includes, at least in Borges-
inspired bookwork, a potential outmoding—
anticipated by immanent disuse—of the co-
dex form itself. Altered books tend to find
their true home in precisely that Borgesian
bibliosphere known (both by name in one
instance, and in any number of tacit avatars
elsewhere) as the paradoxical bureaucracy
of the “Library of Babel.” In the implica-
tions of this story, the fragility of textual
consciousness is at one with its universality.
As usual, Borges offers in extended parable
the cultural ironies elsewhere glimpsed in
the momentary recognitions of plastic art,
including even the potential outmoding of
the codex as we know it.
The time of the book is inner and outer
both, cognitively inhabited and implacably
historical. That inner or textual time, of lit-
erary writing especially, is a process of vari-
able tempo, of starts and stops, leaps and
repeats, shifting intensities and continu-
ally readjusted levels of affect. By contrast,
outer time may simply pass, the book as cul-
tural object with it—as other arts besides
literary writing have increasingly foreseen.
Both frames of temporal reference necessar-
anarchives |    169
Figure 5.6.  Adam Bateman,
Sphere #5 (2005). Books
and screws, 30-in. diameter.
Courtesy of the artist.
170    |
ily concern the sculpted book form. For the
force of time—as both an inherent facilitat-
ing medium (propelled by inscription) and
a potential extrinsic nemesis of the book—
tends, as suggested, even when addressed
outside of literature by conceptual book art,
to be decidedly Borgesian in the flavor of its
anxiety or its nostalgia, or both.
Such concerted exceptions as we find
inspired by Borges’s anomalous plots—and
their reflexive plotting (often by allegory)
of the reading experience—only prove the
chapter five
normative rule of reading. For one thing,
books by convention serve to distribute
time, materializing it according to cultural
norms of consumption. They do more than
what Einstein saw as the essential work of
time: to keep everything from happening all
at once. Books also make their time “search-
able”—and with or without an index. Such
is their special—pronounced for book artists
“spatial”—advantage: the alphabetic dispen-
sation of spaced time, facilitating legibility’s
own space-time ratios. This is bluntly the
case with that reversibly designated book-
work Time and Place, by Richard Went-
worth, mentioned in the first chapter, where
detached wristwatches (Look, no human
hands!) hold separate disembodied places
in the thick time of reading or, alternately,
calibrate and clock the space of reading as
material density. Without mentioning books
at all, one story by Borges tells what amounts
to a parable of their archive run amok in just
these twin regards. Given his insinuated role
as alter ego of the sparse and scrupulously
selective stylist who narrates, the agony of
the protagonist in “Funes the Memorious”
is that his unceasing memory amounts to a
book without page separations, a continu-
ous palimpsest of synchronic event: all lived
time having become an onerous and undif-
ferentiated archive—hence an anarchy—of
inscribed moments. This is Einstein’s view
of time turned inside out, where everything
does indeed happen all at once because time
as duration has been replaced by pure furi-
ous memory. It is, one might say, “searchabil-
ity” gone mad as random abject simultaneity.
With Funes, the providential stylist finds
his nightmare obverse in the character who,
in effect, is always reading and rereading ev-
erything at once. And the absolute illegibil-
ity of certain collective book-works is like
the obverse shadow of this madness, a world
of traced experience totally closed rather
than insanely open. One result is that read-
ing’s normal duration can be lampooned.
When Allen Ruppersberg, in his mode as
conceptual book artist, used to caption deli-
cate line drawings of well-known volumes
with an indication of their “reading time,”
his gesture was the equivalent of Magritte’s
This Is Not a Pipe, both in the original and
in Steve Wolfe’s woodblock reworking (plate
2). A picture of a book, like an inaccessible
sculptural assemblage of one or more such
books, refuses the specific serial material-
ity—and hence the engaged temporality—of
the thing itself. It goes dead to reading while
we look, look anew, think again.
BABEL F/X
Thanks to a splendid convening of book ob-
jects by Buzz Spector for a conference exhi-
bition at the University of Iowa in the spring
of 2007, visitors could see more clearly than
otherwise how book sculpture taps into a
whole gamut of metatextual effects. This
is the same Buzz Spector who, as long as
twenty years ago, showed his Borgesian
credentials by piling up books in a vaguely
ziggurat-like shape against the wall of the
Art Institute of Chicago under the title The
Library of Babel, invoking also the similar
rounded shape of Robert Smithson’s 1966
A Heap of Language. Put Smithson’s piled
word forms back into books, or simply keep
them there—even while heaping up the
books in turn into a comparable shape, as
Spector did at the Art Institute—and your
homage to Borges is complete.
Synecdochic, recursive, even fractalized:
such characterizations rush to mind in read-
ing Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” one of
whose fantasized quest romances involves
seeking out the holy grail of précis or com-
pendium: a search for that volume of volumes
rumored to digest and index all the others.
This seems a clear inspiration for a work
in the Borges conference exhibit by Daniel
Olson, his reconstituted The Outline of His-
tory, where each page contains, recursively,
only the index entry that would locate it in
the first place. His is a wry short-cut in the
anarchives |    171
Figure 5.7.  Heather Weston,
Book of Babel (2001), detail.
Inkjet on acetate, wiro bind-
ing, 2 m x 2 m x 8 cm. Cour-
tesy of the artist.
172    |
logic of the book as informational hierarchy
or outline, mocking the very claim of text to
reach past its own lineation to anything like
history in the first place. But Borges’s magic
“Library” anticipates far more specifically
the anarchic structure of certain composite
book-works. Can it be an accident that the six
apexes of the hexagons that define the outer
walls of each endlessly replicated library cu-
bicle also define by architectonic allusion the
spines of six open, overlapping book shapes
in the obtuse angled corners of these incre-
mental rooms? Six walls of shelves in the
chapter five
form, that is, of six dovetailed open books.
That’s the microcosm of the whole library
right there, synecdoche and mise en abyme
of its vast cosmic structure: and a ready-
made conceptual bookwork to boot. Must
exist somewhere, I’d lay money on it.
I had written that last sentence, and the
few preceding it, anticipating my public re-
sponse to Spector’s visit to the University of
Iowa, before seeing, in his conference exhibit,
the remarkable upshot of this logic by British
book artist Heather Weston in her work Book
of Babel, which trumps my fantasy (even
while confirming my intuition) by making
the hinge of each apex of her text-inscribed
Plexiglas hexagons out of spiral metal bind-
ings familiar to users worldwide of pliable
softback manuals: hexagons as explicit in-
strumental textagons (fig. 5.7). Near it in
10
the show was a book-work by Meredith Lyon
borrowing its title from Borges’s The Aleph
and Other Stories, in which the anthology be-
comes a micro-archive of self-consuming fic-
tive encounters. This is because the serial
chapter openings include en abyme a loosely
affixed Polaroid photo of their same spread
pages—as if it might have been developed in
the very time taken to turn them in progress.
What is added by alteration to this bibliobjet
is only the record of encounter itself. With
nothing new to render but the serial avail-
ability of a preexistent volume, textual expe-
rience is deflected into the document of its
own accessibility. It can just as often happen
in reverse: so that the book-work mourns the
reading absented by it.
New York book sculptor Doug Beube is
represented by two very different works in
the Iowa Borges exhibit, one stressing in-
scription, the other immersion. In The Si-
lent Question, we see an elegantly folded and
angled spreadsheet of some imaginary text,
with its pages themselves uncut but with
each of the word shapes punched through
in small abstract nicks and gashes resem-
bling the recto visible in The Arena (see fig.
1.4). What results is that any graphophone-
mic production of the read text, a text with
the mystery of muteness in its very title,
is canceled inch by discontinuous inch of
erstwhile lexical shapes. The paper sculp-
ture comes across less like a book, or even
an accordioned scroll, than like the negative
image of a continuous perforated piano roll,
soundless forever to the silenced eye of the
excluded reader. In this play on textual si-
lence, the work converges with a more recent
piece by Heather Weston, punningly called
Flip Read (fig. 5.8), which was not in the
Borges show but which, by the conflation of
lip reading with the pre-cinematic flip-book
format, perturbs the normal paths of com-
prehension. Serial photos on one recto after
another—imaging a mouth shaping the let-
ters (or rather the phonemes) of nine words,
words never themselves written out in these
pages—alternate with a separate text on the
verso. The lips ask, “How would you cope
with the volume turned off?”—and one an-
swer is, of course, through ordinary books
themselves, which permit the long-distance
transmission of human utterance. But the
book as familiar tool of “communication,” in-
deed as antidote to Babel, is here unsettled,
or say set into structural interference with
itself as transcribed voicing.
“How would you cope?” Another “Silent
Question,” after all. Near the work by that
name in Spector’s exhibit is Beube’s own
punning Volume, a short tower (babelized
again by illegibility) of ten supine books
topped by a prostrate one, thus closing off
the stack—except for the hole that is sawed
through the entire pile, its tunnel entered
only via a magnifying glass, abetted by an
internal reflector, that produces inside the
illegible space of access a disorienting (if not
infinite) regress of inscription (fig. 5.9). Thus
violently demediated in the figuration of its
own volumetric cave, the minimal archive
of ten volumes has been materialized as a
private hive of recessed text. Hive, hoard,
innards. And its equivalent somatic trope at
the receiving end: the inwardness of the in-
ternalizing human agent.
anarchives |    173
Figure 5.8.  Heather
Weston, Flip Read
(2005). First signed
edition of 150. Boxed.
Offset lithography,
paper, and nickel binding
screws. 40 m x 90 mm.
Courtesy of the artist.
174    |
In a related way, photographer Jeff Wall
is also, as essayist, a passing theorist of
reading matter. In a tacit wordplay on the
catachresis spine—that anatomical meta-
phor for which we have no literal term—
Wall has called the book an “exoskeletal
clamp into which machinery has driven
speech.”11 The truth of this—the book as the
force-fed frame of acculturation—can be ex-
posed, so many a book artist would seem to
agree, only when that skeleton is broken on
the rack, the text disemboweled like pulpy
viscera. Then, too, it is important to remem-
ber, as many book assemblages also do for
us, that the “machine of culture” is of ne-
chapter five
cessity the engine of mass production and
potentially endless duplication. So that the
burial site of the book as instrument, as cul-
tural skeleton, needs repeated figuring as a
mass—and often anarchic—grave.
Buzz Spector himself works at one point
in the figurative mode of spines, exoskel-
etons, lodged imprint, and the like. In the
process, he also builds on Michel Butor’s
sense of the book as diptych while producing
the yet more radically demediated version
of Rakuzin’s art-historical archive. This hap-
pens in the minimalist photo-diptych called
33 Art Histories (spine) (fig. 5.10), where the
artist, having mistreated a dozen or more
Figure 5.9.  Doug Beube, art-history books by piling them, open wide,
Volume (2005), detail.
Courtesy of the artist. one on top of the other, then further builds—
or leans, or presses—on the art-historical
tradition by dividing his actual-size photo-
graph of them along their vertically aligned
gullies and spines. The split photo offers a
two-paneled spread of its own, tilted ninety
degrees toward us into the canonic plane
of legibility, but bringing no words with
it—only, if you will, and yet again, the inter-
medial discourse of the book as object. Like
Beube’s Volume, another Tower (or at least
stack) of Babel, by any other name: with its
library’s aesthetic records cloven by custom,
right down the middle, even while undergo-
ing thematic resuscitation by visual pun—
in the quasi-organic evocation of bilateral
structure around the spinal column of the
book’s evolved cultural shape.
And then there is, in Borges’s own “Li-
brary,” the most remarkable of all his Babe-
lian imaginings—even though it too is given,
as is his wont, in an equally lucid if ludic ex-
position. I have in an impossible mind’s-eye
view that rumored central chamber, circular
rather than hexagonal, that has been long
dreamed by the mystics—even though “their
evidence was suspect, their words obscure”
(52). This is the circular room that is all one
book. In the library’s volume of volumes,
anarchives |    175
Figure 5.10.  Buzz Spector,
33 Art Histories (spine)
(2003). Polaroid photo-
graph, 31 x 47 in. Courtesy
of the artist.
176    |
here is a variant before the fact of Stair’s
Boundless, cited via Johanna Drucker in our
second chapter, where the spine defines the
circumference of a disk-like book lying flat
and threaded closed on all sides. With Borg-
es’s conception based instead on the model
of upright library shelving, his magic book’s
paradoxical spine wraps entirely around the
vertical space that houses it, encircling it, co-
terminous with it—so that, by a geometrical
microcosm again, the ultimate inner sanc-
tum of the library amounts to a single synec-
dochic volume closed not just on three sides,
as is the norm, but on the fourth as well, shut
chapter five
off wholly from access by the pressure of its
own exoskeleton, impenetrable, hence inef-
fable. Think about it. That’s what the passage
is there for, what is “conceptual” about it.
Unlike Stair’s stacked disk of sealed pages,
in Borges’s idea each upright page would
be touching every other at their inmost or
central edge, intolerably compressed at that
unleafable pressure point, bursting not just
the seams of their own binding but the very
space of their coexistence, like a mad inside-
out Rolodex with no possible room, no legible
space whatever, for consultation.
Even the Borgesian Buzz Spector would
Figure 5.11.  Buzz Spector,
Malevich: With 8 Red  
Rectangles (1991).
Painted wood and
books (Edition: 3).
Variable dimensions.
Photo: Jody Zellen.
Courtesy of the artist.
have a hard time building that. Yet his many
altered or sculpted volumes, as inaccessible
after their fashion as Borges’s totalized
chamber of text, court impossibility in their
own way. And when revisited by Spector, the
prompting irony of a single work can undergo
transformation into a full-scale anarchive.
With his Malevich Book from 1989, Spector
carves a slightly irregular parallelogram of a
codex and then inserts it into a square white
frame, the whole resembling, at a distance,
a stretched canvas featuring a supremist
square canted slightly out of symmetry. In
another piece from two years later, Malevich:
anarchives |    177
 With Eight Red Rectangles (fig. 5.11), hand-
made books totaling that number, in differing
right-angled dimensions (this time exact),
some too absurdly elongated for use, seem
to have tumbled out—in a perfectly match-
ing pattern on the gallery floor—from their
original slots, of various depths, in a wall-
size wooden framework. It is as if they had
descended from two- into three-dimensional
space, a literalized fall from abstraction into
sculptural representation.
Spector’s blank fabricated volumes thus
remind the viewer of an art-historical water-
shed. For one of the resistances to represen-
tation in Kasimir Malevich’s own abstract
geometry was exactly the (wholly repressed)
recognition value of the modestly scaled
rectangle as anything like a page or book
form, let alone any other real-world fixture.
Spector’s witty conversion of the abstract
rectangle into a geometric instrument is, by
contrast, what so-called cubism was at the
same time inclined to exploit and maximize
on the canvas plane, both in the pagelike
exfoliations of its seated readers (Braque,
Picasso, Léger) and in its whole dynamic
of fanned out and interlocked rectangles.12
Building on his isolated wry allusion to the
latent cultural weight of that lone Malev-
ich shape, Spector’s installation—his use-
less library of eight books as sheer allusive
forms—becomes in this way a pointed an-
archive of aesthetic debate in its own right.
CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE
PLACELESS
Almost as if it were literalizing a trope from
Borges, the first story of John Barth’s Lost
in the Funhouse (1968) is a do-it-yourself
altered book. It is composed of a ten-word
178    | chapter five
microtext called “Frame-Tale” in which the
reader is instructed to cut along the dotted
lines at the right margin, then to paste the
words horizontally printed there—“Once
upon a time there / was a story that be-
gan”—into a Möbius strip, so that even the
momentary localization of the “there” gets
lost by enjambment through the neutral-
ization of idiom (“there was”) in this new
and endless loop of recurrence: the infinite
regress of narrative inauguration. The tale,
and the larger text it fronts, is therefore
no more successfully launched than if the
whole volume were an unopenable, twin-
spined book, with Once Upon a Time (with-
out the ambiguous “there”) entitling it at
one end, the rest on the other, no priority
indicated. This is to say that an actual al-
tered book of that sort (and one calls back
to mind Maurizio Nannucci’s 1969 Univer-
sum from the opening chapter) often lit-
eralizes the maze and mystery of strictly
lexical constructions. It is, in short, partly
because of the frail and uncertain linguistic
linkages maximized by Barth, and the roll-
ing transformations they induce, that books
themselves are the funhouses in which one
does happily get lost, with verbal traverse
becoming at times a Möbius trip all its own.
Books of all sorts, of course. Included
among them are the strange disorientations
of the altered atlas as reference library of
the world’s sovereign terrain. The collected
maps of a book-bound atlas—as indeed a
spatial rather than temporal archive, a com-
pendium of nationalized geographies—have
a curious history in book-works, and not
without Borgesian overtones of its own. In
his 1969 story “On Exactitude in Science,”
Borges imagines visionary cartographers
whose mimetic ambitions are so hypertro-
phic that their map of the world grows as
precise and detailed and as fully scaled as
the world itself. No artist, not even Claes
Oldenburg, could execute that—except of
course in an excerpted “detail” as the one-
on-one overlay of a designated space. But
certain versions of the bound rather than
the boundless atlas, the encyclopedia of
terrestrial space itself, do converge on the
genre of book-work in exemplary ways. Ed
Ruscha’s text-work version of such a map-
less volume from 2003 has just the printed
word Atlas visible on its found title page, the
rest ripped off, removing any suggestion of
specific locale. It is called Atlas Ripped—no
doubt instead of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
And it may owe a different debt, as well,
to one of the last works of conceptualist
Marcel Broodthaers, whose Atlas (1975)
gives only the blanked-out shapes (or pro-
files) of countries and territories cut off from
all context or contiguity. As familiar topog-
raphy is disintegrated into several columns
of silhouetted puzzle pictures divorced not
only from latitude and longitude but from
all formal logic, the world’s graphic appre-
hension devolves upon sheer accidents of ir-
regular geometry. And all the more so when
eight of these reductive national cameos,
all at the same scale, are bound in a one-by-
two-inch thumbnail volume under the title
The Conquest of Space: Atlas for the Use of
Artists and the Military (1975). How easily
these geographic abstractions, freighted by
history, can flare up as military incidents in
nationalist border disputes is exactly the
emphasis of such a global compendium car-
ried further, into a related mode of irony,
by the dismantled atlases of Doug Beube’s
in the next chapter (see figs. 6.2, 6.3): the
miniaturized anarchive of contested terri-
tory, its do-it-yourself abutments—disputed
because mutable—in a bookwork politics of
arbitrary binding and seaming.
BIBLIOCLASM AS
ICONOGRAPHY
Whether torn or left intact, the flanged
structure of the book form provides, more-
over, a well-oiled and ever-revolving door—
or its variants—into imagined space, page
by turned page. Original “cut” artist Gordon
Matta-Clark has a set of architectural draw-
ings from the early 1970s for a door-frame
assemblage that he has then sliced into,
several sheets deep. The pictured radius of
the door’s supported sweep is braced in this
way by a negative architecture of its own,
a kind of paper trench rather that wooden
wall, and this in the sunken recesses of his
metatextually named Swing-ing Doors. But
what codex isn’t just such a portal? Inspired
by Matta-Clark, there is, among the over-
scale architectonic dislocations of Richard
Wilson’s site sculpture, a recent “piece” that
results from sawing out a three-shelf deep
disk of dead space right into a library wall,
breaking through to the struts behind—as
if to remind the viewer, no longer reader,
of the shared material density (and equal
vulnerability under certain illustrative out-
rages) of wooden planks, wallboard, and pa-
per stock alike.
In the denaturing or repurposing of the
book, its conversion from object through
thing to objet d’art, what is involved is often,
as in the work of Matta-Clark or Wilson, a
quite aggressive assault on legibility itself,
as also in Doug Beube’s punched-out but
nonetheless unarticulated Silent Question.
As mentioned in the first chapter, Ann Ham-
anarchives |    179
 ilton has a performance piece called tropos
that involves the singeing out of every word,
as read in sequence, of a number of open,
untitled books, in a suggestive parody of fu-
nereal consumption. Books that disappear
13
as you read them: Funes in reverse. Else-
where, Hamilton lines the floors and walls
of a performance space with lead type as a
play on the pervasive discursive space of the
word we inhabit. For a commission at the San
Francisco Public Library in the early 1990s,
Hamilton produced, with Ann Chamberlain,
her own self-indexed, babelized library by
lining the walls with 50,000 user-annotated
and digitally outmoded shelf-list cards.
Hamilton is openly alluding to another
Borges story with her untitled (aleph) from
1992 when she constructs—in a kind of ar-
chival metatrope—the material equivalent
of that impossible point, in Borges’s “The
Aleph,” where all time, all knowledge, con-
verges: namely, in Hamilton’s installation,
a vast stack of books, uncontained by their
shelving, that have imploded upon stray
mannequin limbs (from a stuffed wrestler’s
dummy) extruded from its caving but still
partly vertical wall of text. Performed there
is the crushing out of individual life by the
weight of received knowledge, of overloaded
reception per se.14 In this appropriationist’s
equivalent to the sculptural tonnage of Kief-
er’s leaden dead weight in the next chapter,
the anarchive can seem not only claustro-
phobic but exterminating. And where Hamil-
ton effaces or elides the contents of books to
foreground their objecthood and the spatio-
temporal event of their consumption, Buzz
Spector, in the late 1990s, makes a further
book-work out of photographing in Polaroid
form—with their backs turned from us, en-
tirely effaced and unreadable—(All the Books
180    | chapter five
in My Library) by or about Ann Hamilton, as
he also does with an even more substantial
collection of catalogs and monographs on
book artist Dieter Roth. Even as a private
bibliography rather than a cultural archive,
the influential backlog may induce a certain
defensive gesture from within homage.
TONGUES OF FIRE,
BLOCKS OF PRINT
But a moment more on that Hamilton con-
ceit in tropos: the reading that uses up by
burning out, like a silent lapping of invisible
flaming tongues. It can’t help remind us of
book burning, from the Spanish Inquisition
through Nürnberg to the future bibliopho-
bia of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
Indeed there are more word artists than
Hamilton who use fire to ignite the word in
this unnerving way—and do so in multiple
defacements that evoke whole archives under
assault. A French conceptualist, Jean-Paul
Marcheschi, has bound thousands of diary
pages in hundreds of red bindings, shut tight
in one work and stacked on display tables:
a random anarchive. In a complementary
experiment, he has then torn out scores of
their pages, arrayed them on his studio floor,
and streaked them with the so-called “brush
of fire”—so that their words bleed into the
melting tallow and pitch of his torch: drip-
painting as fire-bombing.15 And in the most
haunting “incendiary” elegy to the book
I’ve seen, another French site-specific art-
ist, whose name (as in some plangent Borges
story) I’ve now sadly lost—working in a kind
of radically negative space of absent sculp-
tural form—removed, about a decade ago
now, all the books and shelving from a vast
library slated for dismantling, adjacent to the
Musée Fabré in Montpellier, but only after
filling the room with a light dusting of soot
from rubber tires burned slowly for hours in
the middle of the floor, leaving only the ashen
outlines of the book profiles along the pale
painted walls. A library’s worst fear becomes
its last testament.
More recently, book artist Rachel Melis,
in a mixed media and flame-demediated
library of burnt-word art called Seed Mix
(2004), spells out the names of seeds on
open pages of tree-derived paper, dips them
in beeswax, and toasts them golden brown
before displaying them, some open, some
closed, in a museum bunch: an anarchive
of char. Which recalls of course that self-
incinerating Danger Book: Suicide Fireworks
from chapter 1, whose museum presence is
only the residual embers of its gunpowder-
volatile engagement as turned pages: ashen
nuggets where textual surfaces once were.
Well short of this noncombatant IED, this
improvised exploding device of textual pre-
vention, the way any and all book burning
makes one nervous is only one step beyond
the deconsecration of text by any form of
museum disuse, from vandalism to sheer
inertia.
Sometimes volumes are so fireproof
that they are not even books at all, just a
blockish negation of text, stone-cold to all
attention—a negation at least as total as the
annealed exclusion of reading in Kiefer’s
lead tomes. The typical private archive can
in this way obviate its own constituents by
structural irony, as when German artist
Georg Herold, in a 1995 installation called
Xtoone, inverts the normal makeshift book-
shelf dear to student life—cement blocks
with wood planks—into an all-wood struc-
ture supporting cement rectangles where
the books should be. But the negation of use
can be a quieter inversion of purpose, too, as
we saw with those installation photographs
by Buzz Spector where monographs about
conceptual artists (Hamilton and Roth),
whatever their titles, have their backsides
turned toward us in the limited invitation of
nameless and unidentified pages.
BIBLIOMORTE
Spector’s museum display of an inverted li-
brary at the remove of photographic rather
than typographic imprint calls up another
exercise in anarchivalism that I came upon,
a few years back, in researching painted
rather than found or photographed books.
It is often the case that a particular exhibi-
tion, by “getting the concept,” can find just
the perfect setting, however oblique, for a
given book-work. And in the process resume
an entire tendency. An extensive 2002 show
in Bologna on still-life painting “from Manet
to the present day,” under the wordplay of
its main title La natura della natura morta
(whose English translation is in fact the
book pictured by Naftali Rakuzin in fig. 3.2)
included many painted books on tabletops
down through modernist and postmodern
examples, culminating in a sampling of
still-life sculptural installations. There, the
American conceptual art team of Clegg &
Guttmann were given pride of place with
the last cataloged piece in the show: a three-
dimensional bookcase chock-full of volumes
on both sides, rising to the height of the av-
erage spectator. Or so it looked from across
the gallery. Up-close, the sheen of the dust-
jacket spines resulted in fact from the high-
gloss Cibachrome print that represented
them on two faces of what came to be no
anarchives |    181
more than a deep and freestanding museum
frame—void at the center where the actual
texts would have been—rather than a well-
stocked wooden shelving (fig. 5.12). One
might have recognized the trick from earlier
pieces by these artists, including the eclec-
tic samplings on photoduplicated shelves
known under titles like Knowledge #21: each
similitude a plenitude in little, each pictured
swath of books a synecdoche, one might say,
for Babel’s whole inventory.
When, by contrast, the books are obses-
sively preselected in Clegg & Guttmann’s
work, monomania begins to look less like
the contrary than the complement of anar-
chy, chaos-driven in its own right. For that
extraordinarily convincing trompe l’oeil in
Bologna had avoided random filing by an
obsession with obsession itself, airless and
wracked by suspicion—as if all the world
were out to fool you the way these paper-
thin simulacra of book edges succeed in
Figure 5.12.  Clegg & Guttmann, False Perspective—Reflections
on Claustrophobia, Paranoia, and Conspiracy Theory (2001).
Courtesy of the artists.
doing. This 2001 piece is called False Per-
spective—Reflections on Claustrophobia,
Paranoia and Conspiracy Theory, the sub-
title and its preposition—as we know to be
typical of many such book-works, in three
or two dimensions—being put into play be-
tween bibliographic content and sculptural
form. Then, too, with the fake books devoid
of all source for speculation, the only oper-
able “reflection” is demoted to the visual.
It is reduced, in short, to the aluminum-
mounted photo surface of the glossy book
mural itself as it catches its glimpse of pass-
ing spectators—never readers—in the spec-
tral recess of the shelf’s illusory depth. In
museum space, as we’ve noted in one exam-
ple after another, the archive is not ours for
the asking. In bookwork, even without semi-
reflective surfaces of any sort, we see not
text but a blank cathexis of our desire for
it, or of course our fear of it—and perhaps
an odd catharsis of either impulse. Hence a
further and final chapter. For effects of this
sort can be political as well as psychocul-
tural—can hardly help being.
anarchives |    183
C H A P TE R S I X
POLITICS AND THE
BIBLIOBJET
O f course our topic has been political all
along, its objects subversive in at least
the loose sense of ambushing cultural ex-
pectations. And while book-works have not
been consistently framed in these pages as
incurring a surplus labor of interpretation,
there is no denying this further Marxist in-
flection (as in John Roberts’s approach to
Duchamp). And no forgetting, in particular,
that such works often estrange the object
of industrial production by stripping from
it the nonalienated labor of its authorship,
its text. With such bibliobjets finding their
place in the continuing initiatives of concep-
tualist practice, and its situationist roots,
they repeatedly mount—even when only in
the most bald and reductive form—a politics
of resistance to the given. This is the given
in that mold associated for centuries with
the main source of its promulgation, with
the very dissemination of received ideas at
large: bound leaves of circulated imprint.
In the anti-reading of bookwork, content
in its easily recognized forms gives way in-
stead to the formative stuff and structure
of its transmission. Wordless textual sub-
stance is confined to only one of its ordinary
senses. Isolated for once beyond any chance
of merely passive recognition, the material
rudiments of reading, however concrete in
their dimensions, are taken in the abstract
rather than for granted. Which means
thrust into reconception.
If this demediation may in general seem
only obliquely political, certainly some
works wear their historical and ideologi-
 cal animus more directly on their shredded
sleeves (or otherwise damaged covers). In
the exquisitely decimated postwar book-
works of ceramic sculptor Takako Araki,
for instance, close in spirit if not treatment
to the apocalyptic leaden folios of Anselm
Kiefer, one finds the material vulnerability
of books as a synecdoche for the threat of
mass annihilation. In Araki’s work, it is no
accident that among the signal victims of
human violence should be the transcribed
Word in whose name it is often perpetrated.
This is the polemical stress of one among
her several disintegrated Bibles, held in
Switzerland under the 1981 title—in the
double sense of historical “record” and sa-
cred “testament”—Témoignage de la bombe
atomique. The sculpture’s mangled surface
and serigraphic print overlay offer petrified
testimony to obliteration: both seared evi-
dence and blistering witness.
Compared to an ongoing nuclear angst,
the force of much bookwork is confined
rather narrowly to its own endangered sta-
tus as cultural object. Yet we’ve already
sketched the broader aesthetic tradition in
which it nonetheless partakes. Among its
many linked impulses, conceptual art, in its
sweeping first phase, often set about substi-
tuting information for pictures; bookwork, in
reverse, deletes or defaces information from
the sculptural shell of its most obvious ves-
sel. Substituting form for function, the anti-
book puts in the place of legible text, in its
very space, no more than images (or tropes)
of its functional presence. And merely cit-
ing the book as form, rather than anything
of its linguistic content, has its own kind of
incitation, familiar enough in an against-the-
grain aesthetic. Bookwork, subtracting the
delivered product from its vehicle, brings at
186    | chapter six
once to mind and to view all else that the
book has always been besides the conduit of
linguistic data. Sometimes the politics can
be glancing, tacit, or perfunctory, even when
the comedic vision is also a little chilling.
German artist Jürgen Kierspel stacks three
open—unsprung—mousetraps on a oblong
wooden board in the unmistakable evocation
of a fanned-out codex form under the title
The Trap-Book (1987), with the neutral asso-
ciation of textual captivation taking on new
edge, new teeth. Even in the case of altered
rather than simulated volumes, books are of-
ten troped as trapdoors to an infrastructure
of ideological presuppositions.
In encounters with 1960s wall text, ev-
eryone saw at once the cultural politics
involved in being made to contemplate the
idea of a picture rather than its passive plea-
sures. Same with the idea in bookwork, the
very concept, of textual intake—rather than
any taste of its facilitated satisfactions. Well
short of singed and intermittently legible
Bible pages, as in Araki’s monitory tomes,
every faux book hung unpaginated as mu-
seum object, or mounted otherwise for dis-
play, rethinks the otherwise tangible access
by which, in the grip of book reading, things
absent are transmitted to us in a referential
present. Every such rethinking broaches a
politics of deferred gratification in a newly
resistant, because bluntly self-conscious,
ritual of nonconsumption.
Still, this doesn’t rule out the possible
surprise of this chapter’s title. On first
glance, even Duchamp is wittier than he is
political, let alone Buzz Spector. In the wry
charge of dislodged presumptions, however,
there often lurks—even when not surfaced
as overt social irony—an underlying poli-
tics of demediation. Robbing a conveyance
of the conveyed, despite the material if no
longer palpable residue of this reduction, is
the baring of an essential device even from
the midst of its incapacitation: isolating, in
other words, the very matter of each and any
mediation. To expose in this way the ma-
terial fundament of transmission is, at the
very least, to demystify its intersubjective
aura. And if this can seem at first funny, it’s
only because of the deeply naturalized norm
from which it so emphatically veers. Until
this chapter, given the evidence behind us,
one could certainly be forgiven for thinking
that the presiding spirit of bookwork is the
Comic Muse, however tinged with irony.
This might have seemed the case even with-
out Bergson to theorize such reactions for
us in the second chapter. Bringing together
too many books at once, immobilized in a lu-
dicrous profusion of detexted rectangles, or
blocking any one of them from its own nor-
mal uptake in reading, these works regularly
bring a smile. Things “out of nature” tend
to do that. With bookwork, call it a smile of
nonrecognition in the museum context.
Then, too, if the human devolves to
mechanization in Bergson’s model, it is just
as comical (and potentially just as politi-
cal) to see the “sub”-human agent elevated
to tool-using animal. With his conceptual
word and book art already sampled in chap-
ter 4, an “altered magazine” work by Peter
Coffin invites alignment with the “dummy”
covers of Fiona Banner in chapter 2 (see
fig. 2.9). For in his Untitled (Koko), a photo
“portrait” from 2002, Coffin reproduces
a mirror image—complete, in his tamper-
ing, with reversed logo and its subsidiary
lettering—of an award-winning National
Geographic cover from 1978. Originally the
picture of a female gorilla taking her own
picture in a mirror, the image is yet again
reversed by Coffin’s secondary, doctored
shot—and optically demediated as legible
cover. For the great ape now seems look-
ing out at us through the reader’s normal
vantage point on the other side of the peri-
odical’s graphic frame and hovering letters,
a frame that operates more obviously here
like a window rather than a page. Through
it, the zoological object is caught taking our
picture this time rather than we its (fig. 6.1).
Beyond the Darwinian/Lacanian joke, the
mirror reversal mocks the ongoing voyeur-
ism of mechanical record and lays bare a
popular fetishizing of the exotic. Through
its demediating turn from popular geo-
graphic ingenuity to full conceptual irony,
Coffin’s inverted image marks also the tacit
rescinding of an aesthetic as well as scien-
tific permit: a license to gawk. For in this
case, by the logic of a lettering that only we,
and not Koko, can decipher—yet across a
hurdle of alphabetic inversion amounting
almost to the impasse of illiteracy itself—we
find ourselves on the inside of the textual
page, as cage, looking out. In this way does
Coffin’s play with optical depth over against
the shallowness of popular zoology turn his
parodic cover into almost a 3-D magazine
objet after all, a book-work manqué.
Duchamp’s gambit is therefore thriv-
ing still. Urinals nominating themselves as
“fountains” become museum collectibles in
the same (because paradigmatic) way that
fake magazines, art manuals, or whole li-
braries do. Only after the enlivening “shock”
subsides (a recoil whose true model is the
punch line’s double take, often manifested,
so we’ve seen, as a kind of sculptural pun or
rebus)—only then, beyond the punch, is the
further goad often recognized, and this un-
politics and the bibliobjet |    187
Figure 6.1.  Peter Coffin,
Untitled (Koko) (2002).
Digital C-print, 14 x 11 in.
Edition of 6. Courtesy of
the artist, Andrew Kreps
Gallery, New York, Galerie
Perrotin, Paris, and Herald
Street, London.
der its fuller conceptual, institutional, and
ideological pressure. For if we’ve sufficiently
appreciated the social and industrial animus
as well as the sarcastic verve of Duchamp’s
gesture of the readymade, then we may be
prepared to see how even the comically dis-
located book-work, too, can be latently po-
litical even at its most amusing, as well as
overtly so at its most dour and scourging.
This is, and importantly, more than just
a politics of museum display in the mode of
a nonrepresentational and counterbourgeois
materiality—and more than just a theory
of labor over and against the prototype of
industrial production. Bookwork may lay
claim to a civic politics as well, which tends
to emerge as an ethics of information in the
realm of bureaucracy and its dehumanizing
violence. In the two main cases before us,
Anselm Kiefer and Christine Borland, what is
thereby resisted in the cognitive disposition
of the book-work is a force institutionalized
either by state power or by a rationalized
scientific establishment. Even as their oppo-
site use of illegible versus programmatic text
forms defines the far poles of such “sculp-
tural” practice—abstract, on the one hand,
discursive, on the other—no two artists were
ever less amusing in their installations than
Kiefer and Borland. Elsewhere, though, the
wittier thrust of many book-works doesn’t
render these objects less ideologically inci-
sive—and cutting—when they choose to be.
It is surprise itself, a dislocation funny or
otherwise, that often pries open the concep-
tual and directs its energy.
MEDIAL RECESS
In anticipating the tragic overtones of Kief-
er’s postwar work—to be explored below
in connection with Whiteread’s memorial
to the slain Jews in Vienna, as well as Bor-
land’s bookwork revulsion from the writ-
ings of a Nazi anatomist—an intermedial
comparison comes to mind from WWII’s
annals of atrocity in narrative fiction, here
realized on film. Like many of the installa-
tions to follow in continuation of the preced-
ing chapter, this cinematic instance draws
its political resonance in part from its mani-
fold status as the textual synecdoche of an
entire cultural archive. Stressing access to
the literate coin of a given community, the
film that features the “bibliographic” shot in
question is a generational allegory of post-
Nazi Germany. The narrative reaches its cli-
mactic turn in the rapid assembly of a mini-
malist book sculpture, titles unseen, framed
almost full-screen as an abstract tabernacle
or tomb of books. Though for a moment this
is all we actually see, what we understand
from it depends on its function within an
elliptical narrative scene.
Imagine, by contrast, and with no narra-
tive to orient it, its full-blown equivalent in a
gallery installation: a couple shelves’ worth
of books removed, stacked up, squared off,
and rising far enough above a bedside table
so that the height of a human body would
fill the gap between the books’ uppermost
surface and a noose suspended above them.
Perhaps a grotesque conceptualist vanitas?
A sense that reading can take your very be-
ing from you, remove you terminally from
the real? Or use up a whole life? Or bring you
even to the brink of despair and willed self-
destruction? Which is it? Or perhaps quite
the opposite? If reading is prevented by
closed covers, could the result be no life at
all, no real access to the world? A suspended
animation? An asphyxiation of the best self?
politics and the bibliobjet |    189
 So that books wait there, latent and viable,
as a material alternative to spiritual nega-
tion and nonexistence? Especially with no
book titles legible or, if seen, so random as
not to be in any way suggestive—and with
no further context provided—there would
indeed be many different ways to read that
tabletop and ceiling installation in a modern
gallery, each of them tacitly political if only
in some diffuse sense: cultural critique by
any other name.
But some book assemblages, their con-
text narrowed and italicized, can be more
recognizably political yet. Given its em-
bedded place in a particular screen narra-
tive, the foursquare extemporaneous book
sculpture I have in mind, exaggerated in
close-up as it is, permits the late prison
scene that includes it to operate far more
specifically in a context of Holocaust re-
crimination. It does so when the female
character whose hands have assembled
these books on-screen now stands, and
steadies herself, upon them, only her feet
and ankles visible at the upper edge of the
frame before we cut away to another space.
That former scene, so abruptly fled from,
elides the death by hanging whose very
possibility, as ethical action, its book ob-
jects not only implement but symbolize.
With the retributive meaning this makes
possible for the perpetrator herself as well
as for the viewer, here is a perverse and in-
verted case of massed reading matter as ul-
timate moral (if also lethal) support.
In the politics of this image, context is
everything. The main protagonist of The
Reader (directed by Stephen Daldry, 2008;
from the 1995 novel by Bernhard Schlink)
is a former Auschwitz prison guard more
ashamed, at her murder trial, of not being
190    | chapter six
able to read and write than of the former
killing she enabled and in one case perpe-
trated. It is clear that illiteracy doesn’t “ex-
cuse” or even “explain” barbarity, as the
film’s last conversation goes out of its way
to make explicit. Yet only the human sub-
ject entered into culture by way of acquired
literacy—as achieved by now for the main
character through two decades’ worth of
borrowed books from the prison library—
can take the full measure of that former
brutality. No particular texts are required
reading. Only a going out of oneself into in-
scription, however, can make clear the re-
ality of otherness. So learning to read, as
epitomized in the emblematic platform—
and scaffold—of those stacked volumes, in
their miniature archive of so-called “hu-
mane letters,” now elevates the penitent
reader to the level of one “fit” to stand trial
(in the idiom of mental competence) be-
fore her own judgment. Condemned more
harshly in her own mind than by the actual
state bureaucracy, she has in her last scene
instrumentalized in a new way the very
books that have brought her to this condi-
tion of self-consciousness. Mounted upon
them, she internalizes her sentence at last,
rendering it uncommutable by dying just at
the point of official parole. All we hear from
the warden in the next scene, given the
absence of a packed suitcase, is that “she
never meant to leave.” Like death by hang-
ing, the role of books in this self-execution
thus remains unsaid, and with it the intro-
spection these books have induced. It is
left unspoken—as in so much freestanding
museum bookwork as well—for us to read
out from the sheer placement of those vol-
umes. Literacy training becomes the very
work of allegorical cinema.
 GLOBAL REZONING, textual TOPOGRAPHIES
Quite apart from this one narrative film’s de-
liberate reframing of an iconographic book
assemblage, it is also the case that immo-
bile book-works in a gallery display can have
not just a sensed stress within the politics of
aesthetic forms but a more pointed geopoliti-
cal irony in their own static but composite
shape. We saw in the last chapter the use of
the world atlas, altered or defaced, as geo-
Figure 6.2.  Doug Beube, graphic equivalent to an encyclopedic anar-
Border Crossing— 
In the War Room chive. In topographic adaptations by Brood-
(2006). Altered atlas,
zipper, 19 x 221/2 x thaers or Ruscha, such bookwork can breed
5 in. Courtesy of
the artist. chaos in the nationalist pastiche of any global
perspective. In a more explicit geopolitics of
the atlas as assisted readymade, from 2006,
and with or without any such conceptualist
precedents in mind, Doug Beube slices up
an entire volume of the Wide World Atlas in
clean-edged segments and reattaches them
with aluminum zippers in perverse new terri-
torial configurations (fig. 6.2). In another and
more “literary” work from this same period,
called Interlocutors, Beube has given tangible
form to the notion of intertextual reference
by the zippering together of separately bound
print pages rather than map segments into
politics and the bibliobjet |    191
Figure 6.3.  Doug Beube,
Fault Lines II (2009).
Altered atlas, 18 x 12 x 1 1/4
in. Courtesy of the artist.
192    |
a material but textually impenetrable com-
posite.
Yet the violent ad hoc collage of his ver-
sion of the “wide world atlas” (rather than its
worldwide norm, its width now contingent
and expandable instead) carries a keener
political edge at every forced juncture—and
precisely as a malleable topographic archive
in willful disarray. Even without recalling
that Julius Caesar’s military campaign strat-
egy in the Gallic Wars is thought to have in-
novated one of the influential early uses of
the codex format, when he had his scrolls
and maps folded into accordion formats for
easier access at the front, we still sense the
chapter six
full martial ironies of Beube’s own regional
compendium: a work in the designated me-
dium of “altered atlas, zipper” that returns
the codex back to the mix-and-match folded
scroll of recombinant sectors for a global
rezoning under the mock-militaristic title
Border Crossing—In the War Room (fig. 6.2).
Deterritorialized in any of its familiar pat-
terns, the repository of national boundar-
ies, once multiplied arbitrarily, is reduced to
another sardonic anarchive of transgressed
political entities—and hence arbitrary fields
of aggression—in a contested no-man’s-land
of mutable incursions.
A similar assault on potentially aggres-
Figure 6.4.  Doug Beube,
Speakers: Italian to English
(2007). Altered books,
iPod, recorded voice, col-
lage, speakers, 63/4 x 5 x 1
in. Courtesy of the artist.
sive nationalist demarcations occurs in the
nonseismic fissures evoked by Beube’s 2009
altered book called Fault Lines II (fig. 6.3),
where the cleavings are so completely and
symbolically man-made as to be revealed in
the extreme manhandling of an atlas hori-
zontally severed to produce new “parallels”
carved from the global archive, new imagi-
nary latitudes. In this arbitrary cascade of
remade global bandwidths slung over each
other, here is a combinatory license as liber-
ating as a child’s composite book: Make your
own world! Fault Lines is a companion piece
to Beube’s earlier Interfaith, which treated a
Bible in the same way, crisscrossing rather
than just cross-referencing its passages,
and thus allowed one’s own associations,
even ad hoc parables, to emerge from the
almost braided layering of text. These works
are clearly linked by a shared corrective po-
lemic. If religion is in the eye of the beholder,
and national boundaries are fungible, then
politics and the bibliobjet |    193
Figure 6.5.  Doug Beube,
Speakers: Italian to English
(2007), detail. Courtesy of
the artist.
194    |
the God-given rights to territorial violence
are abrogated on the spot. The mercilessly
partitioned book-work stands as the homeo-
pathic cure for territorial contestation.
Concerned with the cultural geography
of language itself, Beube’s most ambitious
book-work installation is the 1994 project
named in truncated form to indicate medi-
ated Speakers of more than one sort, both
the immigrants learning English who take
part in recorded interviews and the elec-
tronic conduit of their audial playback.
What gets figured in the resulting book-
work, given the term’s of Régis Debray’s me-
diology discussed in the opening chapter, is
a return of the logosphere from within the
graphosphere, a process ironically accom-
chapter six
plished across fifteen different and parallel
assemblages ranged around the installation
space. In each, one altered book is found
resting on the base of another lying flat, the
upright shape carved out like the shallow
cone of a concave audio speaker, its shaved,
faintly imprinted rings operating almost like
the cartoon image of reverberation—yet an-
other materialist deconstruction of the lo-
gos, the sounding word, in book art (fig. 6.4,
in a 2007 variant of this work).
With a further political twist, the mimetic
semblance of Speakers routes this damage
through a politics and an ethics of language
acquisition per se. Surmounted in one case
by Cassell’s Italian-English dictionary as
a simulated hi-fi unit, the underlying or
“supporting” volume is an Encyclopedia of
the 20th Century, almost up-to-date by the
mid-1990s. In every such horizontal text de-
ployed on pedestals around the original in-
stallation space—each topped by a different
national dictionary of English equivalents,
Erdu-English and so forth—there is em-
bedded a playback apparatus (in the 2007
iteration, an iPod Nano plus Edifier-brand
speaker) that lurks invisible within a hollow
chamber of the closed lower volume (fig. 6.5).
These emit the recorded answers of various
new immigrants—potential citizens every bit
as hyphenated as the dictionaries they con-
sult—to questions about the hurdles of ac-
quiring, and then being assimilated to, their
adopted language. With this multiple circuit
of paired books producing a cacophony at
first for the viewer entering the exhibition
space, these serial stations of display—and
co-opted textuality—are in the other sense
broadcast stations as well, from which, once
again in a fantastic Borgesian mode, one does
indeed hear the dissonant urban mélange of
so-called non-native speakers: fifteen retro-
fitted towers, one book high at a time, of Ba-
bel’s new stereography. Yes, certain books re-
ally speak to you: another tacit axiom in the
work of book shapes found and metaphori-
cally refashioned. But only if you know their
language. For which other books are merely
primers, instruments—textbooks intended
to assist (though here converted to witness
out loud) the very difficulties of verbal accul-
turation. Beube’s installation, reassembled,
could well take its place in an audiovisual
sequel to the predominant works on paper
of the Tate’s Learn to Read show, with his
anarchive of dictionaries and encyclopedias,
as well as his later map-works, exposing the
imposed codes of belonging.
ARCHIVE VITALITY:
THE CIVICS OF ACCESS
For a further example with some of its foot-
ing in the last chapter as well as in this one,
let us approach what is no doubt the larg-
est and most political book sculpture of all
time: one bringing a smile to the face of its
mass spectatorship, without the least trace
of farce or sarcasm, as it channels the higher
comedy of conceptualism. And let’s make our
approach by way of a single book cover that
strikes a similar though far more modest
note—about a civics of the canon—with its
own photographed book sculpture. The lat-
est volume of critical essays by philosopher-
novelist William Gass is called A Temple of
Texts. To visualize this architectonic meta-
phor, the Knopf dust jacket image from 2006
shows a few standing books as lone stan-
chions, mostly out of focus as if in the reced-
ing depths of memory, but still there not just
as landmarks but as the building blocks of
cultural continuance. With this emblem of
the canon in mind, we can look back to—and
in imagination stare (up) at—the megalithic
and more politicized form of a real if tempo-
rary temple, thousands of volumes strong,
whose metropolitan resonance is inseparable
from what can only be called the festive com-
edy of its hyperbolic scale.
Looming triumphant as the ultimate
redemptive anarchive of our last book-
burning century, this is the astonishing site
sculpture designed and orchestrated for a
central square in Buenos Aires by concep-
tual artist Marta Minujin in 1983, after the
fall of the junta and its oppressive regime.
Here was an architectural simulation called
The Parthenon of Books/Homage to Democ-
racy in which previously banned volumes
politics and the bibliobjet |    195
Figure 6.6.  Zhang
Xiaogang, Sleeping  
Boy on the Book (2008).
Cast bronze, 91/2 x 341/4
x 235/8 in. Edition of 6. Pho-
tography by G. R. Christmas,
courtesy of PaceWilden-
stein, New York. © 2010
Zhang Xiaogang.
196    |
deported to storage during the dictator-
ship were uncarted and reassembled over a
three-week period into a full-scale model of
the Acropolis temple, symbolic site of unfet-
tered human expression.1 One by one, by the
hundreds and thousands, once-sequestered
texts, given new airing, become the vested
elements of a restoration: the pedestals and
architraves, the pillars and uplifts, of the
demos itself. Not a Pantheon of canonized
work, but a resolutely nondiscriminatory
confluence of textual expression. No irony
attends the compressed inaccessibility of
their contents, their unbudgeable crushed
chapter six
covers, the subsumption of their individuat-
ing texts to towering marmoreal form. Each
is merely the synecdoche—and increment—
of a collectively liberated bibliography: the
disposable monument as retrieved national
fundament. These formerly X-rated and
therefore canceled-out texts are out in the
open again, part of public recognition if not
yet of public use. Thus do they pass, trans-
formed, through their sculptural reduction
as aggregate shapes—and their architec-
tonic apotheosis as such—on the way from
gross interdiction toward their eventually
accessible words. When the installation was
dismantled after a few weeks, and the books
themselves redistributed among the na-
tion’s libraries, a genuine civic archive was
finally at hand. Or such was the symbolic
promise of this monument to transmission.
Scale alone is not necessarily ingratiat-
ing, even in the bibliographic sublime, and
can be rather the opposite. One remembers
the curiously ambivalent case of the New
Yorker cover from October 19, 2009: a lush
sfumato drawing in which a leather-like
umber tone is borrowed from the spines of
colossal, sky-scraping books—a fantasized
new profile for metropolitan density—and
repeated at the spine-like border of the mag-
azine’s own format. With their gargantuan
tan and aquamarine bindings, some of the
books are toppled block-long and stacked
sideways, the rest thrusting straight up
like corporate towers with invisible logos
(titles). The tallest of them barely give way
to a gray-blue haze of sky just visible above
and beyond the textual congestion. “In
the World of Books,” with its lightweight
prepositional play, is actually heavy with
potential discomfort. The drawing by Eric
Hooker may well be intended as fanciful and
celebratory, like all those reflexive covers of
the magazine’s annual fiction issue: here
the concrete jungle remade in the image of
literate culture. Yet it could easily be taken
instead as a neo-futurist nightmare, with
any sense of a text’s inviting story replaced
by many-story monoliths dwarfing the lone
gent seen plowing forward at ground level
amid the depopulated caverns. With his
right hand outstretched in mid-stride but
forever empty, he is making his solitary way
amid the architectonic masses and bulking
shadows of a daunting anarchive not scaled
for reading at all but looming instead as a
stark and inhospitable totality. In contrast
to these oppressive urban giants of discur-
sive authority, perhaps a thin soft-cover
magazine as urbane refuge?
At a scale dramatically different from
this image, let alone from the actual Parthe-
non of Books, a more canonical sculpture in
bronze rather than books themselves might
well be taken at first pass to represent—
and certainly to participate in—a libera-
tion (comparable to the Argentine instance)
from a repressive regime of censorship and
proscription. Sleeping Boy on the Book (fig.
6.6) was shown in New York, the year be-
fore that New Yorker cover, by Beijing art-
ist Zhang Xiaogang. This life-size sculpture
depicts a naked newborn hunched over
the open pages of a large inscribed codex.
The child’s eyes are closed, his face turned
sideways on the book that pillows him. He
is oblivious right now, his reading not even
inchoate. But an inevitable awakening from
this postfetal crouch seems in its own right
allegorical. After years of forbidden reading
and the burning of illicit volumes under the
regime of the Cultural Revolution, merely
to be faced with an open text, even in-fans
(tongueless), wholly innocent as yet of lan-
guage, might be to represent the virtual ges-
tation of a new social order. That’s one way
to take it, without explanatory notes in the
PaceWildenstein catalog—given what we
do read about the artist’s general political
sympathies. But when the Chinese inscrip-
tions are translated (as I later arranged for),
it is clear that the allegory operates the
other way around: ironically rather than
correctively. Carved into with the bromides
of rigid dogma, the burnished pages offer
only the clichéd text of a party hack in for-
mulaic support of Mao’s programs. Long
politics and the bibliobjet |    197
 infantilized by ideology, then, the sleeping
consciousness of the Chinese people must
now awake to other books, real ones, with
ideas not written in stone (or etched in
metal): books that, incubating a different
consciousness, can help turn a page onto a
new national history.
THE INDURATED WORD
If Sleeping Boy on the Book presages a new
era where familial and social subjects are
no longer living by the book but reading the
world for themselves, then it invites compari-
son, micro to macro, with the Parthenon of
Books in Buenos Aires: that Western temple
to just such cultural resuscitation at metro-
politan scale. But the massive, again, is by no
means always emancipatory. Textual weight
can suggest an oppression all its own. Ger-
man artist Anselm Kiefer is the most read-
ily recognized wielder of the outsize master
trope in this mode: the enlarged 3-D remains
of dissemination in petrified artifacts of an
otherwise circulated discourse, where the
normal flow of cultural transmission has
succumbed to a total hardening of the ar-
teries. So what does contemplating Kiefer’s
giant sculpted volumes as not-books tell us
about the cultural function of the books they
aren’t? And more specifically, what is such
obviated reading there to figure? Certainly
these stacks of massive book rubble, like
apocalyptic detritus, have grown synony-
mous with the Book of Culture in travesty—
but lodged there in front of us nonetheless
in their smelted wreckage. Perhaps in evoca-
tion of petrified cellulose, the metallic bulk of
Kiefer’s bookwork is tasked repeatedly with
the heavy lifting of historical memory—or
the equally weighty labor of repression.
198    | chapter six
Molded from lead, tin, and steel, his
broad-spread and cumbersomely literal Book
with Wings (1992–94) bears the negative up-
lift of textual burden itself. Here the connec-
tion between sculpted and collaged books
in Kiefer’s work is instructive, the latter ap-
pearing at times (like totems and epitomes
at once) in his gray, scorched landscapes. In
his vast canvas at the Hirshhorn, The Book
(1979–85), an open volume of blank lead
pages—a nugatory diptych in its own right—
focuses the canvas just off center, with the
background expanse divided in turn across
two huge, thickly worked panels offering the
receding perspective of a seared ashen plain.
By its stationing just to the right of the cen-
tral vertical axis, the cleft of the lone volume
marks it all the more obviously as the Book
of a World out of join and joint.
This evocation in Kiefer’s work of the
text as self-canceled biblos, definitive and
encompassing in its obliteration, an annealed
Logos, is extended—more recognizably yet
in his oeuvre—to whole primal libraries of
disuse. There is The Breaking of the Vessels
(1989–90), a seventeen-foot-high bookcase of
all-lead tomes and glass shards. And there is
the similarly scaled The High Priestess (1985–
89), its industrial shelving loaded with what
one assumes are delphic archives to whose
mysteries there will be no present or future
initiation, each in the mode of the Sternen-
fall (Falling Stars) installation at the Grand
Palais rendered from the catalog by Rakuzin
(see plate 9). These books are, as usual with
Kiefer, entirely text-less: the only “lines” in
this case being thin wire filaments that twist
uprooted among the volumetric forms, the
only transparency that of shattered glass. In
these anarchives of survival, Logos is chaos.
The duration of reading, and history with it,
Figure 6.7.  Anselm seems a thing of the past, indurated beyond impersonal geometry in Albrecht Dürer’s
Kiefer, Census (1990).
Steel, lead, peas, retrieval, fossilized and forbidding. 1514 engraving of Melancholia, shown in
photographs, 415 x
570 x 800 cm. Photo: Largest and most complex of his works in reproduction on the nearby wall (fig. 6.8).
Jens Ziehe. Hamburger
Bahnhof—Museum this same leaden mode, and with its perhaps Census is the archive of humanity itself,
für Gegenwart, Nation-
algalerie, Staatliche even more unnerving associations for mod- in a tabling of a “folk,” a “people,” whose
Museen, Berlin. Photo
credit: Bildarchiv Preus- ern German history, is Volkszählung (1991), roll-call can, for instance, turn lethal under
sischer Kulturbesitz/Art
Resource, NY. Courtesy or Census, at the Hamburger Bahnhof Mu- genocidal regimes. From its upper shelf,
of the artist, Marion
Goodman Gallery. seum in Berlin (fig. 6.7), where a three-sided and linking this instrument of “population
library of massive lead books encloses, on control” to a history of surveillance, a di-
the floor inside, a glass polyhedron that al- lapidated 16mm camera overpainted in gray
ludes to the abstract isolation of a similar is pointed at the large metallic film strips

politics and the bibliobjet |    199


Figure 6.8.  Albrecht Dürer,
Melancholia (1514).
200    |
layered inside the base of the polyhedron:
the innards of another kind of collective
modern representation, whose only visible
traces of human record in this case are two
or three separate faded photographs affixed
to the metal ribbons in spaced sequence.
Travesties of the single photo cell in the
filmic frame-line, they are like nameless ID
photos of the statistically enrolled.
In this collateral register of optical rather
than scribal transcription, such detached
and unidentified photographic images ren-
der all the more doleful the otherwise face-
less archive of everyone, the overarching
monument to impersonal tabulation. If a
chapter six
single human life is often imagined respool-
ing the film of its days at the end, in Kiefer’s
sepulchral installation the human multitude
is caught in a permanent freeze-frame. The
very anarchy of individuation is suppressed
at the cost of obliterated record. In all this,
Census—human history as a closed book
in this forlorn, deconsecrated tabernacle—
has degenerated to a negative metaphysical
mold for the kind of Borgesian fantasy to
which other book artists have often turned:
the open stacks of a global and continuously
cross-referenced library of the world, the
existential bibliothèque, here with a denar-
rativized film archive included.
One line of response to Census begins right
there, in the local question Kiefer raises by his
medial crossbreed. Why should his signature
book forms be triangulated in this one case,
by reference to engraved melancholia at the
pinnacle of German art, with a defunct film
apparatus, camera and exposed film both?
What has the book as “symbolic form” to
do with cinema as the seventh art, now
equally prone to outmoding by digital tech-
nology? To begin with, in each instance time
is stopped, history with it—in one case by
tabulation without narrative, in the other by
fixed frames, together the tracks and grave-
marks of loss: a loss “figured” by illegibility
itself as effacement. These two reigning mass
media of the last century, print and photo-
print, charged as they were with recording
its horrors, have each entered the archive as
if it were a mass grave. And more: in each,
evoked under petrifaction, history is thus
demediated. Almost as if defensively. No
names are read, no faces recognized, no hu-
man agents activated, no events retailed, no
information accessed. Modern history is like
a tale that is told, bound tight in a tonnage
of thundering traumatic silence, lugubrious
and useless—except of course as a manifold
cautionary trope. Bookwork tells, en masse,
what no given archive can.
Demediated: there again is the melan-
cholic third term that, given the sculp-
ture’s cinematic debris in cross-reference
to Dürer’s two-dimensional engraving,
serves to inflect in this case Kiefer’s typi-
cal volumetrics of the ungraven tablet. In
an anthology called The Future of the Book,
“mediologist” Régis Debray, without refer-
ence to nonbooks or book-works, enters in
effect upon the same distinction Thomas
Vogler makes in the first chapter between
instance and category, a book and the book,
by identifying the latter manifestation, in
effect, as a “symbolic object”—or, in other
words, a cultural archetype. With deviant
2
and “turned” books as well as with their
standard-issue formats, it is this aspect of
book-works that a full-scale “mediology”
would address. It would estimate not just
the bound volume’s material status as lay-
ered and hinged “power tool” (alluding to
one of Byron Clercx’s laminates from chap-
ter 1) but its shifting cognitive and social
function within media culture. In this sense
we may say that in a case like Kiefer’s, the
demediated book, devoid of all textual im-
press, is turned as pure form to a new social
use—but one best appreciated, now, not by
mediology after all, but by a rhetoric (or tro-
pology) of estrangement.
Borrowed or fabricated, the once- or
never-book is the iconic placeholder, in
museum space only, for a loss historical or
phenomenological, or both. Without giving
you anything for reading but the fact of its
prevention, without putting words in your
head, such unbooks keep reading in mind—
and hence keep on reading our need for the
experience they suspend. And all the more
so when their figured or simulated status as
nonbooks serves in further part to figure
some facet or aftermath of the verbal ex-
perience they politically refuse. This, once
again, is the textual work they do without
being textual works. In Debray’s sense,
then, the book is no less a “symbolic object”
when it is no longer a functional one, a mere
thing, for at that point it has become, by de-
fault, quite entirely a symbol, a totem, a fe-
tish—but as such also at times a figure, solo
or collaborative, for some bracketed aspect
or other of real reading.
To call Kiefer’s lead folios anti-books gets
rather directly to the materialist ironies of
their particular demediation as symbolic
objects. Reading matter is displaced, in his-
torical foreclosure, by sheer mass. As from
the other direction, in Rachel Whiteread’s
“sculpted” book shelving, such matter is
usually evacuated by sheer absence. That’s
in her most typical and optically disorient-
ing work. But this British artist has in fact
addressed the Holocaust in her site sculp-
ture even more explicitly than has Kiefer.
For a commemorative monument in the
Judenplatz square in Vienna, unveiled in
2000, she designed a cenotaph of averted
blank volumes shaped in concrete—all
spines turned inward and unreadable—as
a stark impenetrable bunker whose doors
have no handles and whose books no acces-
sible pages: a vast tragic gravestone for the
“people of the book” (fig. 6.9; detail, 6.10),
whose most moving detail, not captured in
photographs, is the visible and haptic lure of
actual page edges scored between abutted
marble covers. Aboveground and rock-solid,
Whiteread’s work answers by spatial inver-
politics and the bibliobjet |    201
Figure 6.9.  Rachel White­
read, Judenplatz Holocaust
Memorial, also known
as The Nameless Library
(2000). Vienna, Austria.

Figure 6.10.  Rachel Whiteread, Figure 6.11.  Micha Ullman,

Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial,
detail. Photo credit: Gryffindor,
licensed to Creative Commons.
Memorial to the Nazi Book
Burning (1995). Bebelplatz,
Berlin. Photo credit: Daniel
Neugebauer, licensed to
Creative Commons.
Figure 6.12.  Rachel sion to the comparable underground cavern space is saturated by a cultural politics of
Whiteread, Untitled  
(Paperbacks) (1997). in Berlin’s Bebelplatz: the 1995 memorial by loss. In one of her largest plaster-cast in-
Plaster and steel, 450 x
480 x 632 cm. Gift of sculptor Micha Ullman for the Nazi book stallations, under the title Untitled (Paper-
Agnes Gund and Com­
mittee on Painting and burnings of 1933. Though a sunken space backs) (fig. 6.12), and alluding in its tripartite
Sculpture Funds. The
Museum of Modern Art, barely visible under scuffed glass during structure perhaps to Kiefer’s three-walled
New York, NY. Digital
image © Museum of daylight hours, by night, in the symbolic tabernacle of absented text in Berlin’s Cen-
Modern Art/licensed by
Scala/Art Resource, NY. darkness whose memory it enforces, it be- sus, Whiteread’s negative sculpture leaves
Courtesy of the artist,
Luhring Augustine, comes a lit grave of empty marble shelves: behind only crenellated trenches where
New York and
Gagosian Gallery. the anarchive of a ruthless cultural depriva- books once were—irregular “book corri-
tion (fig. 6.11). dors”—hollowing out the solidified space
Apart from such memorials, even White­ between the gaping horizontal grooves of
read’s more familiar work with negative former shelves. These plaster-traced rows

politics and the bibliobjet |    203

 of absence are book shapes turned, in effect,
inside out to a “form” only in the sense of an
empty casting—or negative mold. The thing
on view has become absence itself in the hol-
lowed outline of the book as lost rather than
found object—sometimes, in other works of
this sort, showing faint color stains from the
volumes leached and blurred by the plaster.
The artist who gravitates in her sketches
and drawings to the use of correction fluid
(or “white-out”) as negative medium works
also with the white hole in her sculptures
as the basic compositional unit. Unlike
3
Kiefer’s, hers is book sculpture in the dras-
tic sense of having been molded by the book
before its absolute removal. Yet gone miss-
ing in each artist’s case, each anarchive, is
that founding cultural object of which shape
itself in their works, full or empty, is the de-
mystified “symbolic” remnant.
MELANCHOLY, LIQUEFACTION,
ENTROPY, COLLAPSE
Kiefer’s influence is even more direct in
another artist’s use of the lead rather than
read or emptied book, a deployment that
naturalizes the scale without minimizing
the melancholy of such leaden dead weights.
An extensive 2007 exhibit at the Palazzo
della Ragione in Verona on the “modernity
of melancholy” includes, along with Dür-
er’s original etching (intertext for Kiefer in
Berlin [see fig. 6.7]), an almost black-comic
homage in turn to Kiefer himself. One
of the founders of the 1960s Arte Povera
movement, Pier Paolo Calzolari, produces
a sculptural nature morte in which the al-
lusive bottle of a Morandi-style still life is
accompanied by four life-size (rather than
oversize) lead books on a felt tablecloth hid-
204    | chapter six
ing a refrigeration unit mounted out of sight
on the table’s underside (fig. 6.13). And all
of this is installed in front of a large mini-
malist canvas divided by a thin line of paint
into two unequal zones of an off-white and
off-center diptych, like an angled open book.
On the horizontal cloth surface, Cal-
zolari has in effect substituted grotesque
textual rectangles for all those closed and
booklike boxes resting upright on Morandi’s
painted tables. Perspiring with cool beads
of condensation, the metal books—Kieferian
miniatures—exude a continuous aerated
bubbling of milk-based paint (as if, like the
opaque bottle, they too were flasks of acces-
sible intake). In the tradition of the melan-
cholic still life, some books (as well as their
tabletops) are painted, some (here) just made
of paint. The latter material condition, while
staining this particular and real tablecloth,
transforms the imagined contents of these
metal tomes into a pulsing froth of opacity
and evanescence. Ironizing the material base
of print culture as a thing unstable, fluid—
and in this case undigestible—the stiff lead
forms of the books are pitted against the
frail deliquescence of their oozing content
in a way that renders them culturally inert
even in their ludicrous churning. In the over­
determined context of melancholia, they in-
stall the mixed-media update of the classic
vanitas-with-books in the painting tradition,
where the imprinted script of open pages is
often withdrawn just over the optical border
of fidelity and is, like the unfinished wine or
fruit of other tabletop offerings, put forever
beyond consumption. But in Calzolari’s ki-
netic assemblage, the self-altering book has
Figure 6.13.  Pier Paolo Calzolari, Natura Morta (2005). Mixed
media. Courtesy of Studio la Citta, Verona.
Figure 6.14.  Anselm
Kiefer, Narrow Are the  
Vessels (2002). Concrete,
steel, lead, and earth,
703/4 x 984 x 1571/2 in.
© Anselm Kiefer. Cour­
tesy of Gagosian Gallery.
Photograph by Robert
McKeever.
206    |
become the performance piece of its own il-
legibility. This constant sluggish transforma-
tion of an outmoded mechanical form, here
parodically electrified, seems, in its implied
“tropology,” a reductio ad absurdum of the
book form as perpetual motion machine,
outlasting us all in our vanity. But not in the
form we’re used to—only in an aberration
drained of all utility even in its roiling per-
sistence. Such is the reflexive irony of this
piece, under the shadow of its prototypes in
Kiefer and of the codex’s own faded glory.
Here, in short, is the tabletop vanitas as a
memento mori for the book itself.
At a scale closer to the behemoth tomes
chapter six
of Kiefer, we can look to book sculpture by
Claes Oldenburg, famous for the isolated
pop object as “soft machine.” When he
keeps to the singular, even in text-related
objects, the results are arresting. Done with
his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, his Type-
writer Eraser, Scale X (1999) at the Hirsh-
horn is a majestically goofy monument to a
defunct form of text production, as if eras-
ing its own hegemony before our eyes: the
tool lapsed to totem. In the form of an ac-
tual book sculpture, and therefore evoking
a somewhat less markedly vestigial cultural
icon, their Torn Notebook, as we saw in the
first chapter, may be every bit as valedic-
Figure 6.15.  Anselm tory (see fig. 1.6), its massive shambles a
Kiefer, Narrow Are the  
Vessels (2002), detail. proleptic memorial to that passing scribal
© Anselm Kiefer. Cour­
tesy of Gagosian Gallery. moment when note taking was still predom-
Photograph by Robert
McKeever. inantly done on paper rather than as digi-
tal files. Falling within the artists’ standard
pop register, this book-work delivers a more
vital irony than does the solemn, Kiefer-like
1989 installation called From the Entropic
Library, where decaying works of European
culture, huddled like a shapeless crumbling
Stonehenge, are enlarged in the very state
of their disintegration across the museum
floor. The anarchy of this failing archive is
too blatant in its entropy, yet too colorful
still in its primary palette, to be potently
inflected by Oldenburg’s sudden turn from
scalar farce to political irony. Some book-
works can’t afford to summon the funny,
even if only by auteurist association.
Oldenburg’s pop aesthetic of the over-
blown has in the normal case next to noth-
ing in common with Kiefer’s sepulchral mo-
mumentalism. In these oddly comparable
but ultimately incompatible styles of execu-
tion, two disparate sensibilities seem to be
meeting, from opposite directions, over a
shared theme in the outmoded vestige of
high culture. But even with the overlap of
a clear historicist irony, there is no tonal
common ground. The aesthetic disparity
between the pop and the apocalyptic is per-
haps even more obvious when contrasting
Oldenburg’s editorialized entropy of Euro-
pean culture to the vast random crypt of
modernity in the largest of all Kiefer’s works
(fig. 6.14), on temporary loan to MASS MoCA
from private collectors in 2008. Half a city
block seems to have collapsed in rippled
concrete slabs and their extruded steel gird-
ers, an eighty-foot-long, six-ton assemblage
politics and the bibliobjet |    207
 that evokes a whole architectural epoch in
demolition. Alluding to a phrase from St.-
John Perse, “Etroits sont les vaisseaux”
(Narrow are the vessels), Kiefer’s fallen
narrow walls snake across space as toppled
remnants of the man-made world, at once
the flayed, leveled epidermis of modernity
and its dashing upon the wavelike tide of
history. War, natural disaster, remorseless
progress: no specific explanation is brought
out for these arrested concrete billows. Or
call them—knowing Kiefer—these unfolded
scrolls of time. For wrapped around the
slow curve of one of the twelve vast con-
crete panels strewn along the gallery floor—
almost inevitably (though unmentioned in
any of the publicity or commentary on this
installation)—are the open curves of a lead
book twelve pages deep, its rough codex
form visible at the right end of the assem-
blage (fig. 6.15). Its dozen inaccessible lay-
ers, like the undulating expanse of blank
gray metal uppermost, are offered up as a
kind of found object, familiar but unread-
able, amid the debris of structures devoted
perhaps, when standing, to more obvious
containments and inhabitations. Architec-
tural abstraction meets—and reinterprets—
textual abstraction at their mutual vanish-
ing point in relic and material remains. The
politics of Kiefer’s leviathan-like undulation
of denatured concrete inheres in precisely
the obvious but never settled link—familiar
from all his logocentric compositions—be-
tween the effaced book of culture and the
leveled works of industrial modernity.
FROM THE LIFE
As a final instance, after Kiefer, of politi-
cized installation art, we will shortly be
208    | chapter six
closing in upon the archive of natural rather
than urban history, in particular that empo-
rium of anthropological aberrations known
as the surgery (or anatomy) museum—and
this in its textual dissemination as popular
anecdote. We do so to take the measure of
a polemic book-work openly caustic in its
humanitarianism—and one among several
such metatextual installations in the work
of Scottish artist Christine Borland. Her
interests and procedures stand in obvious
contrast, for instance, to the literary her-
meticism of Borgesian tropes for the book
form. Borland’s projects show how the pecu-
liar epistemological and materialist ironies
of the sculptural book object can actively
cut across the wider political arena of a
given artist’s interventionist work, reflect-
ing back upon the whole history of textual
appropriations—and human co-optations—
which she mobilizes with such relentless
ethical torque. Following a chapter mostly
on the scrambled, fantasized, placeless an-
archive for whose cluttered discourse the
single book form is synecdoche, here is
an artist whose textual rectangles square
off directly against the manipulative par-
ticularities of the biomedical archive itself.
Which is ransacked and satirized with keen
aesthetic justice.
But from her earlier work, a moment of
clarifying background. Artists have tradi-
tionally “drawn” (sketched and borrowed,
delineated and lifted) “from the life”—and,
in the process, killed it into image. Beginning
with the title of her first Glasgow show, From
Life, Borland has focused her art on exposing
in part the unscrupulous, death-dealing na-
ture of biological experiment over the centu-
ries. In her practice, the artifacts and ethics
of medical science are intercepted by con-
temporary installation art from the pointed
angle of her activist sensibility, so that her
minimalism is searingly ironic, her book-
work always critique, her play between text
and body a very laboratory for the resisted
discursification of human life. Medical bio-
graphy is crossed with art-historical irony in
one particularly distilled case, no book in-
volved—but whose protocols of suspended
animation offer parameters for related works
of hers that operate explicitly within the or-
bit of book art. I give this text-free (though
code-based) instance first. As if it were itself
an allusion to Brian O’Doherty’s “white cube”
as sterilized zone of modernist exhibition—
as well as a final send-up of subjectivity in
art—Borland installs a literal white cube (an
equilateral Styrofoam box lined with dry ice,
glazed within like a framed artwork, lid off
to one side). As sculptural assemblage, the
date of her Alpha Foetal Protein Test, Cold
is given as 1998, though the test evidence
itself is retrieved from an earlier date, dur-
ing Borland’s pregnancy check for embryonic
deformities. Inside this miniaturized gallery
box, under glass but otherwise unframed,
she quite literally deposits a fragment of her
once-gestating maternal body in a sealed test
tube: the genetic sample taken from her and
later retrieved (by a belatedly discovered le-
gal right) from the hospital refrigeration unit
in which it had been routinely stored. Be-
yond any previous expressive value or sub-
jectivity in aesthetic “reproduction,” beyond
craft and ideality both, beyond gesture and
concept either one, art in this case delivers
the very essence of the artist reborn in her
work as DNA signature—yet appearing in the
cautionary form of potential genetic expro-
priation. As in her explicit text-works and
book-works to come, the art-historical reflex
is at one with her vigilance against forensic
aggression. The found object—reclaimed for
meaning as are all such readymades—is the
once-appropriated trace of her own capac-
ity for “generation,” the very condition of
creative replication itself.
In a more obvious context of aesthetic
reflexivity, Borland’s recent multivolume
book-work in Zurich excerpts several times
over the Creature’s monologue from the
original German edition of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein—a novel inspired in its own
right by German ghost stories and thus
returned to its German-speaking source
in more ways than one, literary as well as
political. Borland reprints it several times
bound with a borrowed jacket image cop-
ied from the anatomical drawing of a skull
in a German textbook by Nazi anatomist
Hermann Voss, a scandalous text also ex-
cerpted and similarly rebound in several
interspersed volumes. Though his book was
still in public-school use as late as 1978, the
experiments described by Voss are based
mostly on autopsies carried out on the bod-
ies of Polish Resistance fighters during the
war. Across Borland’s enforced nexus of
these no longer segregated texts of moral-
ized science fiction and brutal science fact,
two textual records of human aberration ar-
rive under the same image, metaphorically
under the same neutral scientific cover, of
cold-blooded grave-robbing and mutilation.
The more common ironies of the “dummy
book” and its faux cover are turned here to
medical polemic rather than medial satire.
Borland’s ironic interest in what we
might call the Frankenstein syndrome is an-
ticipated in a 1997 work titled (in the Crea-
ture’s own borrowed Miltonic apostrophe)
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to
politics and the bibliobjet |    209
Figure 6.16.  Christine mould me man? Did I solicit thee from dark-
Borland, After a True  
Story—Giant and Fairy   ness to promote me?, where, even beyond the
Tales (1997). Courtesy
of the artist. direct address, the installation is staged to
figure response more directly. Two identi-
cal bound books of the Creature’s extended
monologue rest on two chairs waiting to
seat anyone choosing to pick up the vol-
umes: the body of each reader thus perform-
ing the very displacement that constitutes
identification (a transfer complemented by
making the apostrophic speech one’s own
in silent enunciation). Moreover, and here
is the materialist reduction more typical of
bookwork, these are texts produced on a
bad photocopier, streaked and scarred and
splotted: an imperfect second-generation
210    | chapter six
duplicate like the abject Creature himself,
flawed at point of “origin.” In a pun on re-
production itself, Borland has thus folded
our most common means of automatic re-
mediation back into the cautionary message
as its visible materiality—not demediated
entirely, but flawed, visibly devolved.
Focused implicitly around the Franken-
stein intertext yet again, the invasive tyr-
anny of medical science during the long
eighteenth century’s rise of the biological
episteme is the subject of perhaps Borland’s
most original and disturbing bookwork
composite. Created for the Turner Prize
exhibition in 1997 and called After a True
Story—Giant and Fairy Tales, it lays open a
Figure 6.17.  Christine book (named with those last four words) on
Borland, After a True  
Story—Giant and Fairy   a pedestal in front of us (fig. 6.16). Its two
Tales (1997), detail.
Courtesy of the artist. facing pages are transcribed from museum
labels purveying narrative biographies as-
sociated with the skeletal remains origi-
nally on display alongside them, descriptive
placards reprinted in a supposedly child-
friendly volume of grotesqueries. This is a
curiosity-mongering Victorian text of giant-
ism and dwarfism that sits under a vitrine
cube and is flagged on the artist’s own wall
label as follows: “Their stories can be found
in the open book, which is a part of the ex-
hibition.” Recounted there, on the two pages
we see, are sketchy biographies of a diminu-
tive early nineteenth-century female from
Sicily and a Irish male “giant” from the late
eighteenth century, both coming under the
anatomist’s knife at their untimely deaths
despite extreme efforts to avoid this un-
wanted posthumous fate: true stories, as
we are assured at the bottom of each page,
“Adopted from Display Labels, Hunterian
Museum, Royal Academy of Surgeons of
England, London.” Once again, ironies of
mediation go hand in glove with a wither-
ing critique of unfeeling science, especially
when the book’s labeled but unpictured
relics are projected into three-dimensional
space—from one museum venue to another,
surgical to aesthetic—by Borland’s mordant
precision and ingenuity.
It is as if the absent visual remains are
materialized in front of us by the very act
of a sympathetic reading-in: both into the
pages and, once their images become literal-
ized, into the gallery space that the wording
now gives way to. For suspended on a wall
ten feet beyond the installed open book, at
the relative height of the 2½-foot woman and
politics and the bibliobjet |    211
 the 8½-foot man, are single glass shelves
supporting the outlined shapes of their de-
nuded bones, once picked clean by science,
here copied by art. Based to begin with on
Borland’s replicas of the museum remains,
these are shapes brought out now only by
a penumbral dusting—as if to insist that all
flesh is long gone under the dissectionist’s
knife. The further suggestion is as clear as
it is unnerving. Even the biblical circuit of
dust to dust—in the normal cycle of the
lived and buried body—has been prevented
by the medical predators, so that it is up
to the artist to complete that humanizing
conceit in another material form. Borland
has achieved this by tracing her own scale
model of the actual bones in an outline of
fine-grained powder affixed to the glass. By
optical inversion on these mortuary glass
slabs—these oversize forensic slides—we
now see in schematic terms, actually see,
what the book is talking about, as well as
the cruelty it elides.
And that’s only the first stage of effect
in complementing the text with the making-
present of its described images, extending
the effect of words by yet more graphic and
damning pictures. Maximizing this verbal
demediation, Borland further translates
the freak-show narrative anthology—as
text—into a phantasmal gallery space that
serves to return us to the book’s conjured
image of the original surgeons’ museum and
its supposedly pristine curiosities. For the
glass slabs have at the same time a further
dimension of death and disembodiment,
one operating at right angles to the initial
skeletal outlines. Absolutely incorporeal,
the shadows they cast appear now like bony
revenants of the described experimental
corpses—less material even than the words
212    | chapter six
that report on them. The whole twofold
effect depends on a kind of optical hinge.
Through each morgue-like transparent
evocation of the dissecting table, Borland
shines an overhead spot, typical of display
in either art-historical or anthropological
contexts: here a literal spotlight on medical
malfeasance that throws a vertical shadow
on the wall beneath, so that the outlined
bone forms are returned to beamed white
shapes, the lost flesh to shadowed dark-
ness. The missing bodies become their own
ghosts (fig. 6.17, detail). Like X-ray images
engraved in light, these luminous doubles of
the traced remains operate also like a pho-
tographic process tracked back through its
inherent visual reversals to an imagined if
absent body structure: the material vestige
as optical effigy.
ANATOMIES OF READING
All photographic associations aside, auto-
mated inked characters on a field of white
print stock, bare bones of articulated signi-
fication, are doubly reversed by Borland into
stark shapes of light on a field of shadow.
These summon in turn certain spectral im-
ages quite literally from beyond the grave,
short-circuiting death’s mortuary ceremo-
nies in the form of immediately plundered
rather than actually exhumed bones. Rather
than a direct simulation of display cases in
a “natural history museum,” Borland’s dis-
tancing turn on the unnatural theatricality
of any such exhibits has instead passed—as
if rehearsing the semiotic triad of symbol,
index, and icon (arbitrary signifier, trace,
picture)—through a veritable gauntlet of de-
mediation in the reversible binaries of black
and white. In her polemic, no gray areas re-
main. The trajectory of her bookwork has
moved, that is, from a reprinted text of lurid
historical details in a gothic popularization
of unscrupulous science (via the cited cap-
tions of the not presently visible London re-
mains) to the indexical trace—and, in turn,
to the projected positive icon—of absent
skeletal evidence in apparitions of weight-
less light.
The deferrals and reversals operate until
the whole optic of the installation begins to
seem like a tandem cenotaph for the vari-
ously removed bodies of these unmourned
anatomical curios. Aesthetic replication
through optical displacement is conjoined
with the disembodied—and ultimately dis-
emboweling—ambitions of a heartlessly
dispassionate and in its own right ethically
eviscerated science, whose archives and
annals are not just consulted in text form,
but rather exposed, projected, anatomized
in themselves, flayed alive in their lack of
feeling. Demediated as cold type, only to be
remediated in corrective affect, the dead
live again in the remains of their common
violation. The book is “part of the exhibi-
tion” indeed, although, unlike with less
programmatic book-works, the tropes of
appalled recognition are for once projected
beyond, and manifested outside of, its ex-
plicitly deciphered text—as spectral proof of
the perverse exhibitionism under critique.
Inevitably invoking the ghostly overlays of
the daguerreotype and the tricked nega-
tives of Victorian spirit photography, what
we find here, in the figuration of an invested
phenomenology of reading, is critique as
virtual séance—converting the literal fact of
a found book to a different kind of phantas-
mal “medium” in its refigured field of force.
What lies latent in the faceless graven
volumes of Kiefer’s ominous Census, the
roll calls of eugenic experiment and exter-
mination—as suggested in his case by a
vast morgue of coffin-like volumes—is made
explicit in the ethical animus of Borland’s
work, which reserves its tropology for a
stress on effect rather than cause, a spooky
empathy with historical characters actually
read into view from within the installation.
Unlike most experiments in this mode, Bor-
land’s bookwork works out from real text
to the further legible ironies of its cognitive
manifestation—rooted with the three instal-
lations we’ve examined, first in binding and
cover art, then in flawed photomechanical
reproduction, then in rudimentary human
acknowledgment at the level of projected
content.
After a True Story—Giant and Fairy Tales
is the third in another inadvertent series as
well. Borland’s piece provides, as it hap-
pens, the third example in this book of an
intermedial triangulation via thrown light
(or its extinct apparatus). In Kiefer, lead
books and dead film, linked to classic en-
graving via the adjacent Dürer intertext,
serve to foreground the demediation of a
closed bureaucratic archive while troping on
the historical nightmare both of its former
implementation and of its present silencing.
In Ann Hamilton’s lineament, on which our
opening chapter came to a temporary rest,
we saw the conjunction of defaced text and
the nonphotographic projection of a reader’s
thrown shadow. Together these were linked
to the allusive intertext from Wallace Ste-
vens about the tabletop “planet” of reading.
Isolating the performer’s body in a shadow
play associated with the extreme material
reduction of text to rewound strands of
type, mere punning “lines,” the effect was
politics and the bibliobjet |    213
 to trope at the same time (by a kind of phe-
nomenological metonymy) on the whole
fantasized planetary englobement that
reading can seem to induce. In Borland, in-
stead, far less abstractly, the questionable
ethics of the biological display case are in-
verted to a diagnostic case of display. And
for a third time a text, open and legible in
this instance, is contrasted with a gesture
of projected light and cast shadow. A cin-
ematic process, having been canceled in
Kiefer and engaged but evacuated of film in
Hamilton, is in Borland backdated to a fro-
zen Victorian slide show. If Borland’s effect
thus remediates the book in a chilling static
phantasmagoria, it is only by demediating
the typographic buffer zone produced to
begin with between the mournful museum
objects and their dissemination as exotic
print narrative. This it accomplished, yet
again, by troping on the very conditions of
textual affect. Through the manifestation of
shadows on the gallery wall, where museum
art regularly ends up, the light-thrown im-
ages in both Hamilton and Borland convey,
however differently, the human recognition
that alone, in the latter case, could correct
the open book’s supposedly antiseptic but in
fact toxic medical neutrality.
Borland’s are metatextual works, in sum,
that use aberrant materiality to refigure the
lines of ethical response. By contrast, most
book-works, self-referential rather than
metatextual, evoke by a more severe deme-
diation their own materiality or its seduc-
tions, as in Hamilton’s lineament, recalling
their otherwise forgotten vehicular status
over a time of reading that is, for instance,
heuristically prevented in Hamilton’s work
rather than, in Borland’s case, recruited and
even visually performed. There is, in fact, a
214    | chapter six
complementary impact—contradictory only
at first pass—in these two very different
book-works, each in its way political. Hamil-
ton’s deconstructive staging would remind
us that the only scene writing actually gen-
erates is cast up by the reader’s own “pro-
jection” from its inert material (the lit but
unloaded apparatus alongside the stripped
and balled-up lines of type): a textual space
globelike in its way but only virtually en-
worlding. By contrast, but also as a way of
putting such projection to use, Borland’s
ethical strategy would force us seriously to
see—and identify with—what we read.
TOWARD A CULTURAL
HISTORY OF THINGS
Beyond Kiefer or Borland, Spector or Beube,
there is a more generalized relation of the
found or fabricated book, on museum view,
to the polis of readers turned spectators.
Not always polemical, but often—and in-
creasingly—political, book sculpture in-
trudes upon aesthetic recognition with a
sense of the imperiled object itself: not just
the book as object, but objecthood per se.
The latter-day displacement of inscription
by data imaging, of writing by the micropro-
cessing of word forms, and hence the exhib-
ited leftover of the codex, is part of a larger
disembodiment of human transaction. It is
only one among many responses by contem-
porary art, faced with this fact, to take it out
on the lingering body of the book form.
The oddness of real altered volumes on
spotlit plinths isn’t just the eccentricity of
displacement between institutional venues,
from library to museum. It’s the oddness
of instrumental culture reduced to things
rather than functional objects, the ready-
bound or its imitation “elevated” to totem.
The museum as temple of representation
has turned to a fetishizing of the real. Mi-
mesis yields place to instance, and a deac-
tivated one at that. And for the good reason
that the real is at a new premium. That’s
the true political weight of such anoma-
lous book repositories on museum floors:
that the real is growing vestigial enough, at
least in some of its most familiar aspects,
to have become aesthetic by default.
Born of late-modernist irony, the book-
work prolongs its own throttled discourse
on into the arena of posthuman technol-
ogy, where the former textual prosthesis of
desire in the psychomechanics of reading
can now make the book object seem—on
display, rather than on tap for immersion—
like a cultural phantom limb. Reading mat-
ter as sheer mass, once exhibited, is fatally
inhibited. That, once again, is the Bergso-
nian comedy of the human tool “repeated”
beyond use. When will Damien Hirst think
of embalming the book object (instead of
sheep or sharks), floating it bloated in one
of his formaldehyde tanks? After all, the
book is in some ways a more endangered
species. Of course this particular book, still
open before you, began with a caveat. The
museumization of the codex form is not
conterminous with e-text. Conceptualist
“artist’s books,” we’ve seen, were part of
the discursive turn in art practice before the
digital turn in social interchange. Yet that
“before” has slipped away into an engulfing
now, and book art seems responding with a
new plangency, at least a new vigilance, as
well as an old sting. A deposited—and thus
culturally deposed—book-work can turn
even the most outré installation into an an-
thropological exhibit. 4
Imagine a futurist sci-fi story in which
a precocious child, curious about so-called
books, isn’t handed one of them as example
but sent to the Natural History Museum,
“Primitive Tools” wing, on-line of course, to
see what one looks like, what it was good for.
A whole ancient history unfolds in reverse:
cerebro-textual implants, ocular pros-
theses, face books, PowerBooks, codexes,
folded scrolls, leather-leashed stone tablets,
all but fossil volumes each: the paleontol-
ogy of Homo scrivans. The ironized science
of such a fiction offers the inverse of those
Borgesian logocentric fantasies about the
world as a measureless library, an archive
so vast as to be galactic, where one never
lives outside of reading and never finishes
the page last at hand before it records the
reader’s own death, ever and already writ-
ten in the text of time. Replacing narrative
duration with sculptural force, and this as
part of their plastic irony, book-works ne-
gotiate between two highly magnetic poles:
the englobing ubiquity of the book and the
vestiges of its antiquity, its totality and its
atavism, immanence and unplanned obso-
lescence. In “detours” (or “détournings”) of
this sort, even the whimsy can be militant.
For any creeping sense that the natu-
ral as well as the cultural history of things
may be coming to its own end in the cyber-
object, the closed book-work might seem
an oracular sounding board. There used to
be, and still sometimes are, things without
“objects,” purposeless, sheer materialities
with no designs upon us. But now there are
also, for instance, textual objects, inten-
tionalities, without things, dematerialized
as fiber-optic streams, the medium floating
free of its “terminals,” airborne, invisible,
instantaneous, and without heft. Sculpture
politics and the bibliobjet |    215
Figure 6.18.  Robert The,
The Medium (2006).
Altered first edition of
The Medium Is the  
Massage © 1968 Marshall
McLuhan & Quentin
Fiore (Random House),
4.85 x 7.7 x .07 in.
Courtesy of the artist.
216    |
itself becomes the funerary rite of things in
an epoch of the weightless. And books oc-
cupy a privileged if vanishing moment in
this ritual of recognition: in one important
sense the last medium to go, to go immate-
rial—and with it the amassed history, rather
than just the “stored” memory, of the rest, a
history capable these days of being electron-
ically scanned and invisibly “filed” away.
The demediation of book sculpture, as we’ve
chapter six
repeatedly seen, only puts further pressure
on the realization of a given text’s particu-
lar material basis—when, that is, it remains
still particulate and material, as distinct
from its signaletic function. By the same to-
ken, textual signals, signs, can now operate
free of their millennial backing in sequential
page forms. The clarifying obverse—pages
without signals: bookwork. And conjuring
more than their blanked-out or locked-down
contents, it is the bookwork multiple—the
anarchive—whose evoked prosthetics of hu-
man memory appears so often piled in ruins
in the epoch of the databank: that one bank
on which, despite rampant inflation, there
will never be a run.
The second chapter mentioned in passing
the book guns (along with the “bookcake”)
of Robert The, their weaponry enforcing a
new use of thumb and index finger in the
over­r idden reading act. This, from the same
artist who once braided together shredded
ribbons of print from the American Heritage
dictionary, under that title, in the form of a
shaggy noose. If words often provide enough
rope to hang by, so as well does their de-
struction forebode a lethal constriction of
the human throat. Another of The’s objects
(to mix tropes the way the artist himself
does when a sawed book becomes an ex-
cerpting saw [see fig. 2.3]) is even more ex-
plicitly targeted at the material reduction of
form to content that it serves to trigger. This
is his version of Marshall McLuhan’s The Me-
dium Is the Massage (fig. 6.18), where palpa-
tion is reversed with a vengeance when the
onetime reader’s hand is invited to massage
the inert mechanism of a former medium.
Again from this one bookworker’s web-
site at bookdust.com, recalling by its rubric
the actual dust collected beneath his former
book-saw: “Obsession with the semiotic ero-
sion of meaning and reality led me to create
objects that evangelize their own relevance
by a direct fusion of word and form. Books
(many culled from dumpsters and thrift
store bins) are lovingly vandalized back to
life so they can assert themselves against
the culture which turned them into debris.”
Apart from any further ethical or sociologi-
cal determinants—but how far apart, how
much ever wholly to the side?—we find en-
capsulated in this motive, and in the concep-
tual ballistics of that 2006 gun entitled The
Medium, exactly the bookwork politics so
often discharged by such objectifications of
material culture: the unmade book as a self-
evangelism won from eclipse, in this case a
hand-cradled instrument “pre-digital” only
in our rearview contemporary sense.
politics and the bibliobjet |    217
E N D PA P E R S
I n its broadest terms, our story has tra-
versed, backstory included, an entire
century. Early in the teens, synthetic cub-
ism tried breaking with the regime of paint-
erly genius when it glued real things onto
its oil surfaces—most often and most no-
tably torn-up newspapers and even books,
their angular geometry representing either
themselves (by example) or something else
(by attenuated mimesis). Fifty years later,
1
as we know, John Latham helps launch con-
ceptualism in a satire of this very gesture
when his Painting Is an Open Book (plate 4)
delivers a blunt plastering of splayed books
onto worked canvas. Even skirting this de-
tour into parody, we can follow the paper
trail of early modernist appropriation (often
printed paper at that) straight through Pi-
casso’s later imaginary alphabets down to
the lexigraphs of postmodernism. What the
cubist initiative deliberately risked (in the
erosion of visual dominance) by introduc-
ing borrowed signage into image resulted
finally in the all-over significations of the
text-work, its scrawled or stenciled lineation
part of an aesthetic of anti-pictorial seriality
in conceptualism.
Such is the contemporary destiny whose
main route many of its practitioners would
be just as likely to trace back, along another
modernist fork, to Duchamp’s more impla-
cable attack on craft within a demotion of
aesthetic object to generalized aesthetic
function. The cubist breakthrough wasn’t
enough for Duchamp. Not sufficient unto
the day was cutting out pieces of the world
and subsuming them either to represen-
tation or to discourse, as in the print col-
lages of the period. In these procedures, the
shock of demediation was too immediately
assimilated to imitation or meaning: either
the newspaper column as guitar handle or
the ironic fragment of text retained as legi-
ble irony within the visual. Duchamp moved
instead to uproot real things, already-made
objects, and transplant them wholesale into
 the zone of aesthetic (re)consideration. So
that, finally, in Duchamp’s late “unhappy”
readymade discussed in chapter 2 (that
original readybound), he had a entire found
book hung out, as it were, to dry—made by
turns to soak and wilt in the rain, to buckle
in the sun. Not distributed as page or cover
fragments in some composite canvas or as-
semblage art, instead the thing itself in this
(by design) “lost” work, the unread geome-
try book, was exposed in toto to the force of
“unassisted” nature rather than to further
aesthetic working.
In a phased erasure of its innate mixed
medium as surface and text, fiber and print,
Duchamp’s unhappy object eventually dis-
appeared. But into its own tacit legacy. This
line of descent in the matter of the appro-
priated object, crossed with the lexigraphic
bias of conceptualism—and double-crossing
it in turn, if only by holding off any chance
of textual access between covers—leads to
that current mode of bookwork performed
at either pole of the freestanding bibliobjet,
the simply found or the drastically refash-
ioned thing. That’s where the paradigm of
demediation has come in. Given the codex’s
inherently mixed substrate and transmis-
sive apparatus, physical, graphic, and lin-
guistic, we have seen that what demediation
in the book-work drops out is what, by de-
fault, it would single out. This is the empha-
sis by elision it places on one of various me-
dial features (or one featured medium) from
among the rest: words in rows. Yet the mat-
ter (either sense) cannot rest there. Not the
be-all and end-all of the normal codex ex-
perience, but certainly its sine qua non, the
very fact of inscribed words in a sequence
cut to order doesn’t, it is true, make a book.
But their absence from a bound fibrous pile,
220    | endpapers
or from its replica in a foreign medium, does
unmake it.
Even as we’ve stressed more than once
(after Brian O’Doherty’s quip) the concep-
tualist transformation of gallery space from
“looking room” to “reading room,” that con-
version often seems reversed again in the
block shapes of incapacitated text: works
that have worked free of lexical significa-
tion while bursting at the seams of their ap-
propriated or fabricated binding with latent
significance. Robert The’s The Medium (fig.
6.18) encapsulates as recently as 2006, with
its “altered edition” as “book gun,” not so
much the graphic as the bibliographic vio-
lence of this whole genre: the book taking
arms against the very expectations of read-
ing. No irony could be more visibly loaded.
Usually the assault is less openly aggressive,
more heavily stationary and flatly evacu-
ated. In our culture’s traditional figuration
of literate activity, there is an imaginary
and paradoxical axis of response that inter-
sects the page at right angles and opens to a
world that is at the same time opened within
us by the book. It is exactly the recessive
space of such a reciprocal inwardness that
is exposed in its mystification, even while
blocked in its potential allure, by the inert,
innardless form of the typical bibliobjet.
From medium to object to concept to
art: that would be the gist of my subtitle
as trajectory, where medium disappears in
order for the object to be conceptualized
as art. But without the opening gesture of
pre-positioning, without the “from,” four
terms now traverse the same receptive field,
each in play even if at different points un-
der negation, or at least relegation, by an-
other. To have brought forward “the art of
demediation” in the subtitle, as I was ini-
tially planning to do, would not necessar-
ily have brought out its oxymoron at the
proper slant. That phrasing, I came to real-
ize, might seem to imply too stable, too ac-
complished, a craft—when in fact the work
of bookwork is never complete on its own
terms, never accomplished without specta-
tors bringing to it their own sense of tex-
tual exclusion. The art of demediation is its
action upon the “cited” object under condi-
tions of disuse: in most of our examples a
former book in alteration to sculptural form
(or, as in several related instances, a pic-
tured photographic page in a form nearer to
that of a painting, its surface worked rather
than simply borrowed). In bookwork specifi-
cally, demediation’s act is the bracketing out
(by subtraction) of an object’s mediating ap-
paratus in legible text in the foregrounding
of its underlying—but also coterminous—
plastic form. And of the concepts to which
it gives rise.
Early thoughts about subtitling aside, it
was soon apparent where discussion needed
to go—and by what incremental stages. With
the book form (as anti-book) reduced from
text to the mere thing of it in the first chap-
ter, analysis would next have to make clear
how the readybound, however “assisted” or
defaced, could be understood in line with a
salient modernist vaunt leading from Du­
champ’s readymades to the refused artifac-
tual mastery typical of conceptualism. And
this art-historical lineage would then find
its defining context (chapter 3) within the
wider field of related demediations in con-
temporary practice. Theoretically reframed
in this way, exemplary instances of single
or multiple book-works serving as object les-
sons in a notable museum show—volumes
transcribed, bisected, or otherwise recon-
figured—would then more readily open out
from that Tate exhibit in the fourth chapter
to broader questions of bookwork’s illegible
“libraries” in the fifth, the anarchive of cul-
ture itself; and from there, in installations
of a more obvious social or ethical animus,
to the ramified politics of the bibliobjet as
assaulted cultural bastion, however explicit
or not its own archival content—explored
(with examples from Kiefer, Whiteread, and
Borland) in installations that evoke the very
Book of Social or Natural Science.
Schopenhauer, we know, liked the notion
that heads might be hollower than books.
But book-works, we’ve also seen, tend to
evacuate their own content for an inverted
aesthetic recognition of all that is missing.
Hence the “collision” between head and
deadened text that we’ve seen staged by
both the “former” book and the strictly fab-
ricated one, each by then a faux livre when
exiled from the zone of page-turned activa-
tion, in lap or on library table, and found in-
stead under house arrest in museum space,
often multiplied there in order more obvi-
ously to summon a larger catalog of disuse.
Demediated, such book forms occupy space
as enclosed absences, effigies of a leading
cultural instrument, which is again to say
reductions of the cognitive object to an-
thropological thing as if on the very eve of
materiality’s threatened evanescence into
electronic virtuality. When further bent,
buckled, or rent, the unread leaves of such
structures offer up, as in some kind of eluci-
dating sacrifice, the mere leavings of mate-
rial literacy: the plenum as rubble.
But let me fend off any sense of exaggera-
tion one last time. Books like the one you’re
reading are likely to be around well into
the future. Art’s point is not prognostic but
endpapers |    221
 conjectural. Even if books continue to work
commercially in the marketplace, continue to
ask of us our attention, book-works often ask
what if not. And, in their spirit, any one of us
may be moved to imagine an installation in
which, for instance, a video screen might be
nestled like the Amazon Kindle in packag-
ing made to resemble that product’s actual
hinged, booklike shipping case, decorated
as it originally was by the manufacturer
with letters, characters, and ciphers strewn
across its white cover in all different jet-black
fonts—as if in the explosive dispersion of
print culture itself. In our imagined satiric
variation, this embedded screen would pro­
ject not some downloaded novel page in pre-
chosen, user-friendly, trade-press format but
a video loop of old-fangled codices set aflame
over a pile of ignited kindling.
CODEX SPECTATION:
CONCEPTUAL
AFTERTHOUGHTS
Time to summarize, then, what the faux,
refashioned, or simply refigured book epito-
mizes. I began by proposing how a gallery
of fantasy book-works does less evidentiary
violence than one might think to a theoretical
account of the genre. This is because what
one imagines about a book is often what a
given aesthetic treatment—via appropria-
tion, alteration, or wholesale fabrication—
will serve to materialize by its demediating
work, subordinating all transmission of text
to the disposition of its enclosure. Removing
the message function brings the substance
of the thing to light in any number of forms
familiar to one’s shifting, intimate, and elu-
sive conception of reading, its impalpabil-
ity as well as its serial apparatus. So that if
222    | endpapers
the anti-book (found or troped) casts light
on its negated counterpart in the real, then
the ultimate nonbook is the strictly imag-
ined rather than constructed book­-work: the
ideational model (in regard to one aspect or
another, often one facet at a time) of a fash-
ioned instance. Extrapolated to (an)archival
scope, the nonbook can in this sense become
all books at once, virtual prototype rather
than single codex, model and discard in one.
But it’s worth stressing again the imagi-
native afterlife of these aesthetic objects
in one’s ordinary encounter with books,
whether for private reading or on public dis-
play. Bookwork, that is, serves to estrange
in its wake all reading material, and mate-
rialities, other than its own. One isn’t just
given to envisaging conceptual book forms
in the mind but is put in mind of such po-
tential ironic exhibitions even in reading
about unrelated book collections. So con-
tagious is the frequent abstract comedy of
this museum genre, in fact, that a passing
episode in an altogether different medium
(a published novel) about misplaced vol-
umes can seem like the reductive invention
of a minimalist bricoleur. In Alan Bennett’s
The Uncommon Reader, ministerial disgust
with Her Majesty’s sudden interest in litera-
ture leads us to expect sabotage when the
queen’s coveted travel reading goes miss-
ing on a state visit to Canada. 2 “Despatched
from Heathrow with the royal party,” the
unnamed books “turned up months later in
Calgary, where they were made the focus of
a nice if rather eccentric exhibition at the
local library” (65). If displayed at the local
museum instead of the library, the installa-
tion might well have been curated by one of
numerous Canadian book artists under the
title Books Once Intended for Reading by the
Queen of England. (There have, in fact, been
several real-world assemblages in this ex-
plicit “books not yet read” vein.)
But more comment seems in order, in
closing, on such fantasized conceptual art,
especially given our anomalous point of de-
parture beneath the Bibliothèque nationale.
We should certainly be in a better position
now, with tabulated evidence behind us
from the real museum holdings and tem-
porary exhibits of several countries, to see
how even wholly imagined book-works can
get us surprisingly close to the conceptual
determinations of the genre. For something
like a “textual imaginary” does indeed lo-
cate the aesthetic effect of actual nonbooks
in their strictly differential force: the “non”
that accentuates the absent positive. This
is their force as the virtualization of text’s
place in cognitive engagement. The move is
to bracket meaning in order to disclose the
somatic apertures and appendages of the
reading act. Such, in short, is the book form
in full demediation within a state of retained
materiality: a materiality whose alienation
or distortion on museum view often feels
private, imponderable, or at least a little
puzzling at first—but may well infiltrate our
later textual experience as an adjusted dou-
ble (and often comic rehearsal) of the norm.
By contrast, text art, rather than book-
work, can seem to offer by instant recog-
nition the summary demediation of visual
culture—either that, or the assimilation of
visible wording itself to Debray’s regime of
the image. Well before any word-by-word
encounter with its specific deflations, in
their frequent anti-establishment recoil
from aesthetic canons or market determina-
tions, the textwork of conceptualism reads
that way, that resistant way, at a first im-
poverishing (and of course repotentiated)
glance. Whereas the conceptual lexigraph
can in this way give us word forms instead
of—or as—image, bookwork gives us only
3-D shapes where collected lexemes should
be. Tampered with or simply revamped by
context, these bibliobjets, even when closed
tight, nonetheless open the full variety of
their material formations to a new—if often
at first baffling—response, one that gets be-
yond any blanket irony of the simply illegible.
Instead, the common double-take in
decoding their tropes: ah, yes, that’s what
it feels like to read, to be hooked or swal-
lowed up by books, or buried in them, or to
imagine ingesting them, to burn through
or seem excluded by them, to pass into or
among them, to take shelter under their
roofing. Et cetera. Or to miss them in pre-
cisely the radical negation of their cultural
service. After the puzzlement, a deep and
keener recognition through refigurement. If
they “work for us,” work properly upon us
in their inducement to the immaterial labor
of collaborative impact, such book sculp-
tures—when actually seen as well as when
merely configured in the mind’s eye—still
emerge before us with the delayed recogni-
tion value of a fantasy come to light. This is
because they “materialize” one or another
latent expectation of what can only be called
the bibliographic unconscious. 3 It is in this
way that invented book-works do some of
the work of actually executed ones. Faced
with the right object under these terms, one
simply thinks bookhood.
Whether found or refashioned or con-
structed, ranging from the unassisted ready­
made to the simulacrum, from the poached
to the molded, each demediated bookwork
works differently to reduce message to for-
endpapers |    223
 mal condition—as well as to generalize some
particular inflection of the reading experi-
ence thus held in check. The far ends of a
spectrum can emerge even from the com-
plementary experiments of a single artist.
Now insistent multiples, now a single open
book, in both cases taking as intertext an
entire disciplinary archive: that’s what we
have seen with Christine Borland’s repeated
Frankensteins (as paired with Nazi anatomy
texts) when compared to her restaging of
museum-label extracts from a lone extant
volume—a veritable collector’s item—about
invasive science, the latter installation under
the cited title After a True Story—Giant and
Fairy Tales.
And in between the readable many and
the readable one come any number of single-
volumed but forcibly illegible book-works
whose auto-archive (deferred as text, held
in abeyance) explains the very force of their
demediation: a vetoed meaning for which
any sampled page can wax synecdochic. Or
less: just half a page, the rest ripped away; or
the least trace of one, all coverage smeared
or seared; or the lost sight of any and all
such pages by the shutdown of the codex
form. Less—or, on rarer occasions, much
more: including in our final example every
single page of the book at once, though still
bound. What follows is like the answer to
a riddle: What single-object conceptual for-
mat would work to read a whole intact book
without our turning even one page?
FLYLEAVES
In the end is their beginning. But simulta-
neously—rather than circling back on them-
selves over time. We come, that is, to the
leaves of a pictured book that seem flying
224    | endpapers
by too fast for decipherment, summing in
plastic form not only the single text un-
der representation but, beyond that, much
that has brought us to this point. For the
instantaneously accessible textual objet is
another (functionless) form of volumetric
demediation, one as rash—and potentially
as instructive—as the discarded or trashed
book. We’ve seen enough bibliographic
sculpture in the course of these chapters to
justify, I trust, a final departure that actu-
ally, in a sense, does close a circle. So we
move to an end now, though there’s no end
in sight for the proliferating phenomenon of
the bibliobjet, with examples of demediated
bookwork in a nonsculptural mode of none-
theless illusory depth—a paradoxical third
dimension in touch with time’s own fourth.
These are the canvas-scaled images by Lon-
don conceptual photographer Idris Khan
that overprint each separate page, recto and
verso, of an entire canonical text.
One volume at a time, flattened to one
pressurized glimpse, they thus turn foreign
or difficult classic texts as if into engross-
ing “page-turners” in their own right—an
optical automatism of readerly desire. Con-
tent vanishes before us in a single smudged
rush—between their own endpapers—in
the simultaneous moment of inauguration
and closure, all in an impacted apparition of
shutter speed. The aura of graphic art that
attaches to Khan’s 2004 print every . . . page
of the Holy Quran (fig. E.1) approaches, the
closer one gets (shown here in detail), to an
architectonics of Eastern script, the spires
and minarets—and even the windblown
cursive banners—of its execution layered
like lacework across the cumulative im-
age and lifting into foggily discernible view
above the main band of density. In this re-
Figure E.1.  Idris Khan, spect the lexigraphic filigrees resemble, as overlays are even more obviously a subor-
every . . . page of the  
Holy Quran (2004), textual ciphers, the upper notes of Khan’s dination of temporal to spatial form than
detail. Lambda digital
C-print mounted on overprinted and self-entombed Mozart . . . the scanned book pieces. From 2005, one
aluminum, 747/16 x 933/16
in. © Idris Khan. Courtesy Requiem or the impacted transcribed pul- of these cataracts of overprinted musical
of the artist and Yvon
Lambert Paris, New York. sations of his other music pieces, whose staves is in fact called Struggling to Hear . . .

endpapers |    225
 After Ludwig Van Beethoven Sonatas, where
the “after” goes to suggest an image always
catching at the heels of sound.
Which brings us once again to the ques-
tion of temporal synecdoche. Not all unread-
able book-works encapsulate their era with
such eponymous brio as Brian O’Doherty’s
decoy text from chapter 2, Art Since 1945,
that painted woodblock volume rather than
volume of reproduced paintings. But a con-
siderable number of altered or mock books
do offer compressed and eccentric rendi-
tions of the temporal content they deny
us: a curtailed journey in Pieroth’s Verne,
for instance, 40 rather than 80 days, or a
“passage” there is no way not to undergo
(but only by spatial travesty) in Spector’s
reproduced and re-sliced single page. In an-
other arresting version of the whole as made
manifest in the part, and to round back to
the “voiding” of photographed books by
Baldessari’s overpainting, we look now to
Khan’s suite of automated rather than found
instances—illegible ones—of the paginated
text in a Western alphabet, less decorative in
its script than the sacred Islamic text, as well
as less variegated than the strokes of choral
or sonata notation. Opened spookily to all
their pages at once, these hugely enlarged
time-lapse imprints come hauntingly close to
capturing the temporality of a familiar read-
ing act in a mere two dimensions. For Khan’s
magnified image fields record in superimpo-
sition—more as if projected on a wall than
composited into a single print—every page,
for instance, photographic plates included, of
Roland Barthes’s book on photography, Cam-
era Lucida, with the illustrations faintly in-
terleaved in curvilinear shadows: apparitions
that emerge (so Barthes’s own text would
have it) like revenants of the already-dead
226    | endpapers
photo subjects—and with the trenches of
coincident overlaid print still somehow dis-
cernible as such, rather than just as rows of
murk.4 The shadowed gutter, though, as with
the Quran print and the other book-works, is
thickened by overprinting into a wide black
gulf running straight down the blanked-out
flange of this manifestly dense text.
There is an art history here, as well as a
delicate technical artistry. The suppressed
drama of reading in the painted scene of
figure with text, so often brought forward
into gallery space with a 3-D book, treated
or not, has surrendered its third dimension
again to secure a further immediacy. Khan’s
bookwork photos, not just of Barthes’s med-
itation or the Arabic text but of Freud’s The
Uncanny and others, are not pictures of a
given book. Rather, they picture its work,
its operation as text, turning it to a kind
of mystic writing pad in its own Freudian
right. In effect, they are its reading—to be
read as such in turn. In this (nonsculptural)
case, however, their negated mediation is
not that of an image but of an event. 5 With
Khan’s impaginations, so to say, we get all
of Barthes’s words at once, as well as their
quoted images, like a fast-forward graphic
cassette of optically traced phonetic lan-
guage. Or the whole uncanniness of Freud’s
disquisition is a single self-ghosted image.
Each textual pentimento samples on the
run a cultural archive turned on the spot
anarchic. All is a-blur with, at best, a kind
of heady déjà vu. In the beginning of these
books, yes, is already their end.
The audiovisual analogy above, to fast-
forward recording technology, is not acciden-
tal, given Khan’s optical “performances” of
various musical scores. Nor are cinematic
comparisons ever far from mind. The de­
mediation of these photo book-works is so
palpable that it spreads by association across
the material conditions of competing media.
With Khan’s layered stacks of book pages or
music sheets operating all in one stable but
oscillating and enlarged plane, these works
lay claim to wall space more as if they were
a rear-projected film print than just a magni-
fied still. Then, too, with the “silver screen”
substituted here by the huge aluminum
surface on which the chromogenic print is
in fact mounted, it is as if the image were
returning, via imprint technology, to some
earlier tintype process in the history of pho-
tochemical display. Uncanny materialization
operates again in league with demediation.
And in their evoked third and fourth dimen-
sions of layered textual space and thick tex-
tual time, Khan’s alphabetic compactions do
indeed benefit from being seen in the same
gallery space with his equivalent musical
laminates: sheet after sheet of scored Wag-
ner or Chopin, Mozart or Beethoven, printed
again on luminous aluminum, orchestrations
as if thrummed out unsounded on the me-
tallic instrument of their own transcription.
By analogy with the temporalized silence of
these prints, the predominantly verbal com-
posites of Freud, Barthes, and other texts do
in their abstract fluctuations, though defying
alphabetic recognition in the graphic regis-
ter, seem nonetheless to be following out the
almost-sonic pulse of silent decipherment.
Along the sine curve of subvocal text pro-
duction, with the prose clustered into bars
and measures of enunciation, the blur almost
becomes a reverb.
Here an important contemporary com-
parison is in order—as well as a striking
historical precedent from, yet again, the
early intensities of conceptual art. It is no
less a past mistress of bookwork’s installa-
tion art than Ann Hamilton, who has turned
of late, again via temporal synecdoche, to
her own strange, spectral versions of the
portrait of reader with book, also in pho-
tographic form. Whereas in lineament, as
we saw in the opening chapter and again in
the last, a standard film apparatus projects
the reader’s faceless silhouette on a wall, in
Hamilton’s work two decades later, a pre-
cinematic effect of the camera obscura—
culminating her recent fascination with the
fixed-focus pinhole camera—records the
time-lapse perusal of a single volume over
the real duration of reading time, with vari-
ous of her subjects, seated round a table at
the Free Library in Philadelphia in 2006,
caught in the blurred turn of pages and the
dissipation of their own gaze into faceless-
ness. They are almost as obscured by dura-
tion as are the multiple exposures of Khan’s
text-works. In a veritable oscilloscope of
“fixated” textual attention, Hamilton’s are
pre-mechanical photographs of the book be-
ing read. In their impacted optical storage,
Khan’s are technically advanced mechanical
images that in themselves read the book.
A middle term is worth recalling, and for
more reasons than immediate contrast: that
is, bookwork in its photogrammatic rather
than just photomechanical film treatment.
In moving at the end of this study from book
sculpture, readybound or dissembled, into
a related consideration of these performa-
tive and photographic book-works, in their
quasi-cinematic demediation as legible text,
another artist’s work enters the picture as
well. We can, in fact, review the postmod-
ernist trajectory of my entire account across
the arc of a single artist’s ventures in book-
work, experiments that involve—at one of
endpapers |    227
 its conceptual highpoints—a similar optical
performance of the reading act. This is the
notorious career of the late British concep-
tual sculptor (and optical punster) John
Latham. Half a decade after his Painting Is
an Open Book (that mashing of book forms
onto canvas [plate 4]), Latham was fired
from his art-school teaching post for hav-
ing his students “digest” a library copy of
Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture—that
is, by chewing each page separately, after
which he “distilled” further their, as it were,
ruminations and returned a sample of the
fermented goo to the library (the book being
long overdue) in a glass vial that is now held
in its leather display case by the Museum of
Modern Art. In the same year, he set fire to a
stack of encyclopedias in front of the British
Library. Many subsequent works of his em-
bed books in plaster (after Broodthaers) or
slam them together with other “material” in
shapes ranging from ceiling-hung asteroids
to floor-standing variants of Du­
c hamp’s
Large Glass. In one case, thirty years after
his 1961 bookwork debut, the Tate’s assem-
blage called God Is Great (#2) finds copies of
the Quran again, as well as the Bible and the
Talmud, embedded in a large piece of glass,
as if floating miraculously in the element of
their contradictory transparence as sacred
truth.
Beyond such museum ravages and public
outrages, however, in the full comedy and
ferocity of their first-wave conceptualism,
one later work by Latham does no violence
whatever to books, only to reading. In his
long career of disuse, pulverization, macera-
tion, and immolation, still the gesture that
takes us forward most directly to Hamilton’s
and Khan’s optical synecdoches for reading
time—and more recently yet, as described
228    | endpapers
in the first chapter, to the projected rather
than vivisected pages of Brian Dettmer’s
Chronicle of the 20th Century under the title
of Chronicle, Chronic, Con—is Latham’s 1971
film Encyclopaedia Britannica, also held by
MoMA. For this “documentary” work, he
has photographed, as if in a parody of mi-
crofilm or microfiche storage, one frame
per page, 1,400 per minute in screen time,
of the whole 32-volume Britannica set. What
results, when screened, is the ultimate an-
archive of information culture manifest in
the illegible scrolling smear of knowledge
spewed up in flux. In distant league with
Latham’s irony, Khan’s own photographic
versions of the “art is an open book” trope
become the printwork equivalent of this mad
flicker film. In both cases, remediation is so
extreme that it turns to demediation on the
fixed-frame even when moving image spot—
and does so with a literalized version of that
optical “interference” from which Bergson
borrowed one of his tropes for the comedy
of repetition. Khan’s and Latham’s automa-
tized literacy is like the fast-forward farce of
a manic reading act in some silent trick film
“transposed” instead (Bergson’s sense) from
robotized body to robotized page.
Such a transposition appears uniquely
condensed and reciprocal in the multiple
rather than just serial displacements of
Khan’s overprinting. Precisely in their
missing third dimension, his images offer
not just a metaphor for the open page as ab-
sorbing diptych but an instantaneous figure
for reading in its ongoing temporal event, a
duration caught in sample and résumé both.
And with the cinematic overtones of their
scale and superimposition, it is tempting
to think of Khan’s “pagings”—in their de­
mediation as text—achieving in a new sense
Figure E.2.  Idris Khan,
Thus Spake Zarathustra . . .
after Friedrich Nietzsche
(2007). Digital C-type
print mounted on
aluminum. 741/2 x
843/4 in. Edition #1/6.
© Idris Khan. Courtesy
of the artist and
Yvon Lambert Paris,
New York.
André Bazin’s master trope for filmwork.
For in the serial densities of their photo-
graphic pentimento, they visualize not just
“time embalmed,” like all photography, but
a more quasi-cinematic “change mummi-
fied.”6 Bookwork here pictures the tomb of
its own continuous renewals.
Pages and their word forms may seem in
Khan to flash by in an almost-stroboscopic
stasis. With the ordinary sculptural book-
work, by contrast, every leaf is left un-
turned. Without passing through its pages
by touch or image, we usually read the bib-
liobjet as thing: its bookhood taking the form
of arrested or illegibly compressed text. So
that the induced work of most book-works,
endpapers |    229
 though far short of electronic networking
in its new forms of disembodied social pro-
duction and immaterial labor, is nonethe-
less the intellectual reskilling of the user
after all. Readers are no longer immersed in
the manual labor of invested page turning
but engaged in the disembodied exertions
invited by a detached rethinking of textual
mediation per se, its rhythms and accre-
tions. Khan’s work goes so far as to read this
broad intention back to us by presenting
the turned pages without the turning. And
so, despite their temporal compressions of
booked experience, his overprinted images
bear close comparison with the xerographic
overlays of Mark Tansey’s paintings. It is
with one of the latter’s bibliographic land-
scapes-with-figure that I closed The Look of
Reading, where the titular Reader of his 1990
canvas, second- and third-person both, de-
notes a receding human form lost in a smog
of print but also the viewer-as-reader hailed
by direct address in the process of negotiat-
ing just such a lexigraphic atmosphere. In
contrast with Tansey, Khan has removed
the figure altogether for a more distilled
figuration yet of the reading experience—in-
cluding the reading of music (rather than its
audition) as a subset of textual engagement
over notational time. What his images read
is the very event of reading.
Though latent with their own enuncia-
tion on a library shelf, books generate a per-
vasive pun when troped into objecthood
and silence on the museum floor. Bound
and gagged in this way, the codex form in-
stalls, as we’ve seen again and again, the
alienated and negating ratification of its
once-expected service: the carcass of read-
ing rather than its present occasion, empty
vessel of any fabled transport. Representa-
230    | endpapers
tion is stripped away to a bedrock—or in
one case (as mentioned early on) merely a
brick—of sheer nonsignifying presence,
mere physical mass. This is neither theater
nor display nor happening. It is suspended
animation: instrumentality called to a halt.
Or, in the case of Khan’s petrified (but still
visually coruscating) overlays of photo-
temporality: transfigured from duration to
weightless spatial lamination. That’s what
makes the giant facing pages of a wall piece
like Thus Spake Zarathustra . . . after Fried-
rich Nietzsche (2007) a bona fide book-work
in its own drastic right, despite its material-
ization in only two dimensions (fig. E.2). For
its demediation reaches deep into a third,
into thickness per se, and then into the im-
palpable but traced recession of a fourth.
Where most photographs are wrenched
from time, Khan’s put time on the inside of
his picture plane. As its title might suggest,
Thus Spake is a mumbled run of graphic
ventriloquism. Thus spake Nietzsche, as if
all in one breath. Where the philosopher
puts words in his own prophet’s mouth,
Khan’s garbled feat of high-velocity texting
follows yet again “after” the Master (the
telling adverb of derivation and tracking
both), thickening Nietzsche’s aphorisms
across the tabula rasa of the photographic
print, always chasing down a focus and a
meaning it can never resolve. A book-work,
in short, by any other name. Eccentric,
oblique, aestheticized, or in other words
disused and estranged, this disabling eccen-
tricity of demediation, by not making good
on a book’s capacities for textual messaging,
aborts one kind of looking to spawn another.
The spectator can only espy the suspended
sender function of the onetime communica-
tive volume with a clarifying (a flattening,
if not ultimately a leveling) gaze. What is
called forth instead of the reading eye is the
ungraspable force of immanent text in rela-
tion to its sheer material form.
BOOK QUIRKS
More than casting us back to the “voided”
two volumes of overpainted book photos in
John Baldessari, then, the photographically
traced temporal palimpsests of Idris Khan’s
aluminum prints can’t avoid calling to mind,
by topic and medium both, the e-mergency
of nonpaper text forms. Theirs is the fad-
ing away of bibliographic tangibility even
from within its lush homage. Yet beyond
this, they round out a larger circuit of this
study’s concern. For if there is from gallery
to gallery a learning curve steep enough to
meet not only conceptual lexigraphs half-
way but the sewn or hewn forms of sculp-
tural book-works as well, then it may indeed
feel in practice (with the given medium in-
operable) like a case of reading by other
means. Khan’s overprinted work operates
by way of a demediating gesture—a deliter-
ating one—so complete that the book image
appears to have become as large in graphic
scale as it should be extensive in linguistic
duration. In this way it can seem calculated
to sustain a certain theoretical resistance to
all medial a prioris, spatial or temporal, con-
cerning the materiality of the bibliobjet. The
inevitable lack of any sculptural third di-
mension to these photographic book-works
becomes a large part of their (enlarged)
point. For Khan’s photos make books by
other means, page over page, engulfing in
scale alone rather than content.
They do so, we can say in review, in or-
der once again to make reading’s immate-
rial labor manifest through metaphor, its
cumulative tracery and mnemonic veils,
its thickening textures of participation. Or
worse. In this sense we can look back now,
in a new pairing of previous examples, and
with a more generalizing instinct earned in
the meantime, to the vehement extremes
they delimit. Such quirky urgency is in the
long run more broadly tutorial. For by way
of a material defacement at one with re-
figuration, we recognize the deep (because
genre-determining) common denomina-
tor between the text that whips you into a
frenzy (Drendel’s shredded and re-bound
Starr Report) and the surcharged and deto-
nated pages (Guo-Giang’s gunpowder book)
that might explosively consume you while
you consume them. Such textual threats put
forward with rare clarity—as if in a flash,
if not an actual explosive burst; spatially
rather than temporally—a defining link in
the disposition of bookwork forms between
tropes of reading’s inner premises and syn-
ecdoches of its expended duration.
And it is of course this duration that
gets epitomized in a single plane by the
one-frame-per-book of Khan’s composite
shots. Bringing his photographic facility
to material shape in the conjuring of older
visual technologies and their metallic back-
ing, Khan’s work serves, as do many other
three-dimensional book-works in their own
way, to theorize the difference as well as the
cognitive continuities between reception in
different modes of mediation. To be kept in
mind of these differences—and sometimes
in view of them, through such configura-
tions as the altered book, three- or even
two-dimensional—is only to heighten at-
tention to what persists despite these vari-
ant forms of mediation. Abstract (sonic)
endpapers |    231
 patterns and inscribed (vocable) signifiers,
melodic lines versus literary lines, are in
each case, in the paired facets of Khan’s
work, awash in duration, streaked beyond
discernment, demediated in honor of their
own unique if residual medium, so-called
sheet music or paper text alike.
That’s what demediation does. It makes
material again the suspended modes of our
reception. In musical scoring under Khan’s
lens, aural resonance oscillates only as wa-
ver; it shimmers with silence. In writing,
demediation ripples instead with effaced
reference, including the removed phonetics
of linguistic representation. And with book-
works in the round, the process of deme-
diation works against abstraction and sum-
mary by closing the door to consumption.
Or forestalling it by making it sometimes
incendiary, self-punishing. Demediation’s
sudden insistent materiality—in the case
of a book-work’s eradicated and dis­a llowed
text—can seem to call up, as well, all those
other weightless materialities, phonemic
and graphemic alike, that instrumental
reading typically overrides. And that’s why
high-definition photographs like Khan’s, in
the canceled third dimension of the pages
they shuffle through, can nonetheless count
as bibliobjets. Like so many altered books,
so many demediated book-works, the effect
(retrieving a phrase from Keats) is the feel
of not to feel it. Not as everyday text. But
without any final voiding either—no mat-
ter how radical the disuse. Negation is not
forgetting. The material latency remains,
pregnant in its own muteness, swollen with
the medium it remembers without releas-
ing. French has it best, both by standard
grammar and phonetic accident: where the
aesthetic action that abolit, even the textual
232    | endpapers
object thus aboli, still lit—still “reads” as
such, as book form—even in its linguistic
abolishment.
The interdict of reading, all right—but
not its driving from mind. Back, then, to the
first chapter. Sawed fragments of War ver-
sus Peace don’t begin, we saw via Genette, to
assault Tolstoy’s narrative conception. This
is just where the constitutive troping of the
bibliobjet accumulates toward a refurbished
sense of immanence in the reading moment.
There’s no attempted mystification in say-
ing so. It isn’t that a dramatic enough reduc-
tion of the phenomenal somehow releases
the noumenal. Obsolescence doesn’t deliver
essence to view. But it can, and often does,
put us in mind of it, of reading’s routinely in-
ternalized contours. This is how the retrac-
tion of content may lead to some renewed
conceptual abstraction of the cultural form.
Pressed paper minus type leaves behind, as
we’ve seen, an absence to be conjured with,
and this by “turning aside” (troping) from
physical and geometric to entirely cognitive
dimensions of such textuality.
Refiguring various immaterial aspects of
the reading experience through the material
parody of its normal conveyance, fragment
or mutant or remnant, does by these means
serve to deposit a certain collective leftover
from the suspended delivery system of text.
So that each nonbook can manage to refig-
ure some intangible facet in the weightless
material freight of each and every real book.
Bookwork, we’ve seen, functions tropologi-
cally across a whole range and scale of ef-
fects. Released from the not-book, figuration
gives us the like-book. Even when not perfect
similes in the form of illusionist similitudes,
like-books install not only spatial metaphors
of the codex form but metonymies of its pro-
cess or affect. Whereas the book as shape is
like a shrine, a coffin, a biodegradable block,
reading is like a slice through textual space,
a circumnavigation, a planet all its own, a
hammer-blow. Bookwork yields up a rhetoric
of rhetoric itself. Or in Christine Borland’s
case, for instance, an ethics. With her spotlit
skeletons projected in front of the open text
of scientific narrative, reading awry can be-
come a seeing of the light.
That’s what bookwork as a genre does:
it studies the book by transposing it. So the
ultimate force of the troped book isn’t that
metaphors turn even nonbooks rhetorical.
It’s that book forms—denied, violated, or
evacuated in content—operate as art only,
in Genette’s terms again, by negotiating the
gap between canceled allograph, let alone
autograph, and a residual idea of imma-
nence. There is a strange feedback loop in all
this. Tropes disembody the bookwork object
into idea so as to objectify those immaterial
and often temporal features that the experi-
ence of a book as mere physical object tends
to defer. But the loop isn’t a facile short-
circuit. It isn’t the case simply that spatial
metaphors make book-works into rhetori-
cal texts in their own right. It’s that texts
are recognized to begin with as making the
traversed space of their own content meta-
phoric, from uphill climb to smooth sailing,
panoramic sweep to vertigo, you name it.
Or, as played upon by Idris Khan: a layered
and cumulative density of encounter. Pul-
verize or dissipate the physical support of
that imaginative prospect, transit, or im-
mersion, and the textual content, which
subsists beneath each and every concrete
manifestation in print, persists still in con-
ception. It is in this way that cause and ef-
fect rethink each other in the processing of
bookwork. Filling with cognitive tropes the
vacuum left by demediation doesn’t work
primarily to disembody the book as object.
Rather, disembodiment, epitomized by tro-
ping, comes to be accepted, all told, as the
true and immanent condition of text: again,
not as thing but as entity.
In the normal course and discourse of lit-
erate experience, books are of the world as
well as in it, populating it while repeating it
by representation. And often, it would seem,
they carve out counterworlds of their own,
valved enclaves of worded text. Unread-
able books are merely things in the world,
all description of it swept away, at least for
a bracketing (and perhaps bracing) concep-
tual moment before they have claimed their
place as texts again, gallery objects, art
messages—often synecdoches at least, else-
where extended metaphors, puns, rebuses.
In that conceptual “before,” that transi-
tional and purely materialist moment, that
almost palpable suspension of serviceable
reference, the no longer vehicular thing—
the suddenly isolated bibliobjet—does its
real and demediating work. That’s its mad
tenacity as well as its abandon.
endpapers |    233
Notes
F r o n tm a tters
1. Named and investigated in the closing chapter
of The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), “Lexigraphs: The
Reader Exiled,” 329–73. These are those canvas-wide
equivalents of a distorted open page (without book
or reader) that I wanted to locate in their distant but
suggestive connection with an art-historical descent
from the iconographic saint with sacred text to the
later secular tradition of reading in easel painting. And
here there is a curiously direct link to the field of book
sculpture to whose investigation I’ve now turned. For
I’ve just discovered from correspondence with the
artist that in a 1995 series called Projected Histories:
Saints, as an intermission from his 3-D book-works,
Doug Beube took color slides of paintings at the Met
that picture saints holding or reading books and pro-
jected them upon the Cibachrome prints of naked hu-
man bodies, so that the leather bindings meld with
the texture of flesh itself, their spines with the human
spine, in what the artist calls “a composite eroticism of
book and flesh.” These amount to the literalized slide-
show equivalent of what the Look of Reading found in
the “displacements” of textual sensuality otherwise
withheld from the viewer and relayed instead across
the compositional format of body and setting alike.
2. For an extensive and richly contextualized analysis
of Nieblich’s multifaceted bookwork as a set of medita-
tions on textual ingestion, see Sabine Gross’s “Reading
Hunger,” in GastroLogie, ed. Eva Kimminich (Berlin: Peter
Lang, 2005), 70–107. From the English abstract: “The met-
aphor of devouring the text thus offers a space of desub-
limation and an act of resistance while at the same time—
by virtue of its character as metaphor—helping to rein-
force the boundary between the two acts of reading and
eating that it brings together.” So accurate an assessment
is this of Nieblich’s preoccupations that we find one work
of his that opens a book flat between the utensils and nap-
kin of a table setting: like a thick place mat and a dinner
serving at once (dig in!).
3. The trendy fashion technology is known as the Lily-
Pad Arduino and was shown operating in Kollath’s book-
works at the Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery, in Brooklyn, visible
in pulsing action on Vimeo at http://www.neatorama
.com/2008/12/01/breathing-books-by-edith-kollath/.
4. See Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books
(New York: Granary Books, 2004). From the same press
the next year, more closely focused on the epoch of con-
ceptual art in relation to ironic book forms, there is Betty
Bright’s No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America, 1960–
1980 (New York: Granary Books, 2005), where Bright re-
serves the term “bookwork” for the illustratively amplified
literary chef d’oeuvre like Blake’s printmaking in Jerusa-
lem, a “work” in a textual sense first of all, as opposed to
her categories of “dissembled” and “appropriated” book
objects. Beyond a different application of the term to ex-
actly such quasi-sculptural emplacements, my emphasis
on the installation book—in its specific debt to conceptual
art—takes an earlier lead from Lucy R. Lippard on the
notes to pages xi v–xix |    235
 1960s manifestation of the avant-garde artist’s book dis-
cussed in the second chapter. This, too, is the kind of work
that most interests N. Katherine Hayles in a focused chap-
ter on encountering rather than reading these objects,
“Experiencing Artists’ Books” (65–99)—and this in a high-
concept graphic format of its own, under the MIT Press
“Mediawork” imprimatur, called Writing Machines (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Hayles weds media theory
to hermeneutics in an expert decipherment of Tom Phil-
lips’s famous altered book, A Humument (1970), whose
hero Bill Toge is born not just lexigraphically, from the
random appearances of the word “together,” but picto-
graphically, when emerging as a jagged cranial shape from
the gullies between words (89). Beyond this prolonged en-
gagement with a benchmark text in the altered book
mode, Hayles’s overall approach to “writing machines”
sheds an important light on the estranged or exaggerated
mechanics rather than the mere textures of the reworked
book object.
C h a pter O n e
1. See the editor’s interview with Beube in Um-
brella 25 (December 2002), appearing on the publishing
arts website Colophon, http://colophon.com/umbrella/
DOUGBEUBE3.pdf.
2. In the background of this coinage lies the influential
stress in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remedia-
tion: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999), where electronic image and text rehearse
previous message forms in their upgraded mode of trans-
mission. Instead of this layering of former by present
functions, what I am calling demediation occludes the
message service, leaving only the material support.
3. Thomas A. Vogler, “When a Book Is Not a Book,” A
Book of the Book: Some Work and Projections about the
Book as Writing, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay
(New York: Granary Books, 2000), 448–66, with examples
from some of the book artists also taken up in my chap-
ters, ranging from Marcel Broodthaers to Buzz Spector.
4. For two-dimensional equivalents of these book
sculptures, see Carter E. Foster and Franklin Sirmans,
eds., Steve Wolfe on Paper (New Haven, CT.: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2009), including two overt ironies of negated
image and textual disuse, respectively: the all-gray cover
with white lettering for a Wittgenstein paperback re-
named by Wolfe Untitled (Study #2 for Remarks on Co-
lour), 1988, and a black-and-white collage involving a
graphite simulation of a Penguin cover for Moby Dick un-
der Untitled (Study for Unread Books #1), 1989—in that
case a book forever unread because never to be opened in
the present form (plates 1 and 4).
5. Drawing out the trope here only indirectly, Vo-
236    | notes to pages 21 –31
gler mention the allusion to Nietzsche’s “philosophy
with a hammer” (463). The effect of the book carving
is located for him in a Heideggerian middle ground be-
tween equipment and its work, tool and use (463–64).
6. In the exemplary form of Bradin Cormack and Carla
Mazzio’s Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–1700 from whose
preface by Alice Schreyer I just quoted (vii), the field of
book studies looks back to the book as an instrument as
well as a medium, a tool of both social and material praxis:
not just a repository of useful cultural data but a mechani-
cal construct for its processing, where page layout cues a
certain performance by the reader. As the comma of the
authors’ title implies, book use should thus be intimately
caught up with any book theory. Given the evidence of this
volume, one might say that the how-to book of early mod-
ern cultural circulation goes straight to the broader cul-
tural question of how to make a book, how to enroll and
program information. In this way, the so-called instruction
manual is matched in other registers by more fully manu-
alized forms of data access, including, for instance, the
layering of pages in the flap-book format of Renaissance
anatomy drawings discussed by Cormack and Mazzio,
where the reader is guided in a three-dimensional tour of
overlapping diagrams from skin down to bones. And since,
on such evidence, book history must be in part a theory of
use, textless book-works are part of that history—if only
in the mode of decisive (rather than incidental) disuse.
7. Gérard Genette, The Work of Art: Immanence
and Transcendence, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), where, as charted
in comparison with other medial forms, the level of
textual “manifestation” (whether “inscription” or
“recitation”; in other words, text or oral production)
is an epiphenomenon of textual immanence, the lat-
ter remaining unchanged despite the mode of trans-
mission (93). Here is where philosopher Peter Kivy,
without mentioning Genette, would hope to obviate
Nelson Goodman’s subsidiary distinction between the
allographic arts of literature and, for example, music
or dance, each of them based on notation and its in-
stances or executions. Kivy wants to understand both
silent enunciation and oral recitation (each in their
own different ways interpretive acts) as defining lit-
erature not over against, but as one of, the performing
arts. See Kivy, The Performance of Reading: An Essay
in the Philosophy of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2006). The book-work, then, would often install a tex-
tual format minus the score to be performed. Put the
other way round: If literature as notation is only an ob-
ject, not yet the realization of its inherent art, then the
illegible book object must find its art elsewhere than in
activated (or lost) language.
8. And since the mode of that study is often figura-
tive and ironic both, the theory of reading above (n. 7)
connects with a general phenomenology of art.
9. Similar historical forces seem at work in the cottage
industry of “reading women” calendars, daybooks, and
other point-of-sale image banks of this sort appearing
from specialty presses and museum publication depart-
ments that have flourished inversely with the rise of elec-
tronic rather than paper reading: images raided from ear-
lier centuries of realist painting in order to evoke a slower
and more leisured time of consumption. See Garrett Stew-
art, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2. The present consid-
eration of “book sculpture” looks to the 3-D equivalent of
those painted books whose pages one can never turn, as
otherwise represented on canvas not just in scenes of
reading but in what I have called the bibliographic still life.
10. Volume 15 (Amsterdam: Archis, 2008), 15.
11. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate
of Reading in an Electronic Age, rev. ed. (1994; New
York: Faber and Faber, 2006).
12. Sven Birkerts, Reading Life: Books for the Ages (St.
Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2007). Something is certainly at
stake in this new graphic wit, and especially when the de-
signs are found updated in mid-publication stream. There
was the hardcover edition of Jeff Gomez’s paradoxically
announced Print Is Dead (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), highlighting the title as one line of an electronic in-
box on the screen of a plugged-in and imaginary e-book—
and with the subtitle Books in Our Digital Age waiting un-
activated a line below in the queue. Hard on its heels, the
subsequent paperback is brought further up-to-date by
brandishing its title on the screen of a Kindle-style reading
platform, with the subtitle appearing now, more tradition-
ally, in a dead space of white background below the trun-
cated human hands that hold up this avatar of the latest
reading machine—as if (and in fact) to our own eye view.
Equivocal “books” within books within books: the reflex
action of print culture’s nervous recoil.
13. Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and
the Assault on Paper (New York: Vintage, 2002), 244.
So devoted is Baker’s text to the material life of the
book object that his publishers have helped turn his
bound diatribe—against microfilm and digitization as
excuses for freeing up storage space by the destruc-
tion of books and newspapers—into a book-work of its
own, its cover slightly warped and wavily blurred as if
it were seen in a dreary microfilm enlargement.
14. I’m thinking first of Broodthaers, in 1969, reducing
further the graphic layout of Mallarmé for his translitera-
tion (or deliteration) Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le
hasard, as illustrated and discussed in Stewart, The Look
of Reading, 345–46; and then of the Duchamp cover for
Surrealism in 1947, taken up in the next chapter.
15. One is tempted to vary an idiomatic pun from
W. C. Fields’s It’s a Gift (1934) about the availability of
steaks in the local grocery, where the clerk could as-
sure the customer that nothing was in fact blocking ac-
cess to them. “Anything in the way of pictures here?”
the baffled postmodern gallerygoer might have asked
well into the 1970s. Yes, lots of words blocking the very
idea of a pictorial view.
16. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The
Ideology of the Gallery Space, exp. ed. (1986; Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 65.
17. La Société du spectacle brickbat, a “mixed me-
dia” piece illustrated in Unmonumental: The Object in
the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Museum,
2008), 84.
18. See headnote by Hermann Pollig, Viola Suhle-
Moosmann, and Erna Haist, Das Buch: Künstlerobjekte
(Bremen: Insitut fur Ausandsbeziehungen und Autor,
1989), 3, with a helpful overview by Siegfried Salzmann,
“Books That Are Not for Reading,” trans. Michael
O’Donnell, 4–9. The objects in the show include an
ominous “wrapped bookwork” from 1986 called Poison
by Sigrid Sigurdsson, comprised of painful letters and
notebooks sealed against reading but bulking before
us in sewn leather silence. From the artist Botund,
there is another variant of the occluded text in Book
Rack, where preservation seems the counterpart to
quarantine: here a dozen important books of Western
culture encased in roughhewn steel sheathing to pro-
tect them from wear and tear and displayed on the six
shelves of a vertical steel case. Unreadability takes yet
a third form, with text vanished from within, in Victor
Bonato’s It Is All Said—There Is Nothing New (1983),
a steel-bound book filled with dozens of window-glass
pages transparent only to their own emptiness.
19. See Matej Krén, Book Dwellings, a privately printed
catalog with English essays (Prague/Brati­slava, 2004), 57.
20. The new Kiefer piece was recently on display at
Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York, searchable on their
website. The Whiteread is illustrated and briefly dis-
cussed in my essay “Belles Lettres and the Bibliobjet:
From the Artful to the Unreadable Book,” in Back to the
Future Book, Vol. 1: The Past Issue (Bern: the Federal Of-
fice of Culture, 2008), 132, where I distinguish, in the main,
between the beaux livres of the annual Swiss competition
that publishes the journal and the faux livres that often
preoccupy contemporary book sculptors.
21. These works by Richard Wentworth, from 2003
and 2004, respectively, are on view at London’s Lisson
Gallery website, www.lissongallery.com.
22. For the initial deployment of this coinage, see
my essay in response to a conceptual book art display
curated by Buzz Spector and published alongside his
notes to pages 32 –39 |    237
 remarks in “Lector / Spector: Borges and the Bibliob-
jet,” in Variaciones Borges (Iowa City: University of
Iowa, 2007), 173–96.
23. This is the evidence from which I kept forcing
myself to avert my note taking, if not my gaze, in vari-
ous galleries on both sides of the Atlantic, so as not
to be distracted by separate if parallel effects when I
was tracking down evidence for what I called the “lexi-
graph”—the either indiscernibly cursive or crisply leg-
ible text-work of postmodern graphic art—for the last
chapter of The Look of Reading. Well after the figured
reader’s curious modernist proliferation from Picasso
and Magritte to Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, read-
ing becomes in this way what the spectator now does
with the canvas in the absence of any scene. As exam-
ined here, book-works begin by bringing a comparable
reduction—not from picture to text but from text to
volume—into the space between gallery walls.
24. See the non-authored Lark Press compendium
called 500 Handmade Books (2008), 138. Elsewhere and
likewise, this same bookworker’s San Sebastiano al
Mare (1985) has affixed to koa wood covers, in coptic-
style binding, broken birch arrows that seem, by op-
tical illusion and narrative allusion together, to have
penetrated straight through from one side of the book
to the other: yet again a transformation of content into
materialized shape, violence begetting violation in the
text form itself. See the illustration of this Drendel
piece at www.centerforbookarts.org.
25. I refer to the place of the “case” in cultural and lit-
erary production, as explored in a recent double number
of the journal edited by Lauren Berlant, especially the first
installment called “Making the Case,” Critical Inquiry 33
(Summer 2007); before that to the specific case of the
“thing” in representation, the thing as distinguished from
the intentional object of image or discourse, as pursued in
another special issue called “Things,” ed. Bill Brown, Criti-
cal Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001); and, since then, to a free-
standing essay—itself responding to a previous exchange
in the journal on the question of medium specificity—that
looks to those hybrid “cases” that put the whole notion in
question: Diarmuid Costello, “On the Very Idea of a ‘Spe-
cific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Paint-
ing and Photography as Arts,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter
2008): 274–312.
26. See above, n. 25. Though Costello’s approach to a
medium and its delimitations lays no stress on “the case”
in or beyond previous discussion in the journal, there is a
tempting convergence of these matters (of medium and
exemplification) upon the foregrounded materiality of
given book-works, altered or otherwise. For distinctions
between the book as copy and the book as instance, the
book as replicated product versus the book as potential
238    | notes to pages 39 – 46
epitome, cannot help but address—within the realm of
aesthetic originality and its abdications—the question of
exemplarity. Museum experience has its own way of inter-
rogating the medial case. Is that thing really a case of
painting? Is this petrified book a case of print culture?
27. All art may be a case of the medium it elects
or even invents, but according to Costello’s analysis—
following Fried and Cavell in the rigor of their tenets
rather than what he takes to be the unexamined vagary
(in programmatic terms) of their preferences—a par-
ticular medium’s purity or essence, let alone its limits,
cannot be determined a priori. Working with as well
as within inherited conventions, art’s role is at least
fractionally to redefine, and sometimes utterly, the me-
dium that instances it.
28. James’s phrase comes up in Bill Brown, A Sense of
Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 67, but discus-
sion of it is more fully developed in his “The Secret Life of
Things: Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism,”
Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999), where he quotes
James exemplifying the thing/object difference—a cluster
of attributes versus a concept—with the distinction of
“grayness and thinness and length” over against “the ap-
perception of a knife” (6). Again, case theory (a knife as
well as the knife) rubs shoulders with thing theory under
the umbrella of medium specificity and its dissipations.
For a knife is recognized as such only as a case of cutlery,
the instance of a utensil, not just as a metal shape. By anal-
ogy, a geometric stratification of pressed and bound paper
requires a linguistic regime to come under description as
the case of a textual object. Book sculpture can estrange
that regime on the spot—and precisely by demediating its
linguistic content.
29. Ambiguously attributed to the preceding year
(“about 1960”) is Book Object, with two damaged half-
opened volumes bookending each other in a bifurcated
box with a plaster bottom. This appears as color plate
16 amid over two dozen scarred, charred, and plastered
book assemblages from 1958–65 in a richly illustrated
1991 catalog for a retrospective at the Museum of Mod-
ern Art, Oxford, entitled John Latham: Art after Physics
(Stuttgart: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1991), 57–101.
30. See John A. Walker, John Latham: The Incidental
Person—His Art and Ideas (London: Middlesex University
Press, 1995), where Latham’s gray overpainted takeoff on
El Greco’s golden-hued The Burial of the Count of Orgaz
shapes the celebratory (orgastic?) uplift of the resurrec-
tion canvas in the following mixed medium: “books,
sponges, metal fittings, corrugated board, Yale key, whisky
bottle, flintstone, plaster, painting on canvas mounted on
bagatelle board,” with four or five of those first-
mentioned books standing in for zones of cloud and fabric,
as if extrapolated from the funeral-service codex in the
hands of the officiating priest at lower right (44–45). In
contrast to Latham’s painting-with-books, the contempo-
rary L.A. figure painter Mike Stilkey, rather than “apply-
ing” books to canvas, uses the combined spines of stacked
books for his canvases, in one case picturing, across hun-
dreds of such spines, a man at work at a typewriter—with
the inevitable suggestion of cause superimposed over
effect.
31. See under the title “The Three Ages of Look-
ing” the translation by Eric Rauth of the eighth chapter
from Régis Debray’s Vie et mort de l’image: Une His-
toire du regard en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), in
Critical Inquiry 21 (Spring 1995): 529–55.
32. See the discussion of Hanson’s figures with book,
including glossy magazines gripped by glistening simu-
lated flesh, in Stewart, The Look of Reading, 7.
33. See Garrett Stewart, “Bookwork as Demediation,”
Critical Inquiry 36 (Spring 2010): 410–57, an article that,
having benefitted considerably in the first place from sug-
gestions by the editor, Bill Brown, has grown to book
length in ways helped toward further clarification by the
response from John Lurz, “Mediation and the Object of
the Book,” appearing in the Winter 2011 issue of the jour-
nal, along with my resulting demurrals, adjustments, and
further thoughts. Lurz’s own interest in the codex ensem-
ble that these sculptural objects tend to degrade—an in-
terest oriented toward book studies and media theory
rather than conceptualist art practice—gravitates to the
isolated tangibility of the book form they install, whether
appropriated or troped, rather than to the further tropes
for the textual experience itself, in its partly (if not ex-
haustively) verbal aspects, that such denatured cultural
forms work to engender. Lurz wishes to extend W. J. T.
Mitchell’s claim in “There are No Visual Media,” Journal
of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (August 2005): 257–66—Mitch-
ell’s insistence that all media are mixed media—to the co-
dex format as well. As partisan of the material turn in cul-
tural inquiry versus the textual turn, Lurz therefore wants
from my piece a more explicit acknowledgment of the tra-
ditional book’s physical medium as object of conveyance
and communication, in all its hands-on aspects, presum-
ably plastic and graphic and haptic all at once: the very
acknowledgment, in fact, that the word-shorn conceptual
book-works I examine make inescapable, almost at first
glance, and that I trust the fuller discussion in these pages
serves to confirm and amplify. Unconvinced at that earlier
stage, Lurz plays on my own description of frequently pul-
verized book sculpture to find me doing the same damage
to the very idea of the book, obliterating a materiality “dis-
regarded in favor of seeing all the things we already knew
about reading a text, just articulated on a different, more
abstract level.” “Already knew”? “Just articulated”? That’s
for him the potential tedium of these sculptures as graphic
“allegories” (his word) of the impalpable. That’s for me
their fascination and their art. ultimately their challenge.
To quote from my response: “What privilege need we ac-
cord to the open secret these materialist book-work re-
ductions may sculpt into view about the codex as physical
object? Why should this take precedence over the far more
surprising way they can also figure reading’s immaterial
dimensions?”
C h a pter T w o
1. John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill
and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (London:
Verso, 2007).
2. Refusing at first all image making, the founders
of Art & Language merely encoded their transatlantic
discussions about exactly this refusal, collating them
into a vast and cryptic filing system, Index 001 (first
exhibited at Documenta in 1972). With certain mem-
bers sheering off after this into studio practice, their
ongoing critique of aesthetic subjectivity seems in
this way compromised, to Roberts’s mind, by being
privately identified and overly isolated as individual
creativity. For a brief discussion of the nonetheless in-
genious and unsettling visual work that resulted from
their practices, what I would now called photographic
book-works among them, see my The Look of Reading
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 362–63.
3. But it is crucial to recognize that Roberts’s view of
industrial deskilling doesn’t fall prey to some techno-
utopianism whereby each new participant in “immaterial
labor” would be released to the freedom of intellectual
fabricator. In conflating the keywords of separate chap-
ters, it is decisive for Roberts that the “post-Cartesian”
artist is “situational” (chaps. 4 and 6), less a maker than an
operator of “recombinant forms” (182) within an “ ‘infor-
mational’ economy” of “social technique” emerging “be-
tween waged labor” and the broader exchange “of com-
municational and affective skills” (185). Roberts resists
what he sees as the emancipatory claims for “mass intel-
lect” in Hardt and Negri (214), associated as such ideas are
with newly theorized “circuits of authorship” in “digital
practice and telematics” (192). In this thinking, according
to Roberts, “the fluidity of technical response . . . confuses
facility with meaning, and immediate access with democ-
ratization” (193). Instead of the complacencies involved in
“expanded facility,” and their own potentially facile cele-
bration, avant-garde practice, avoiding “a fetishizing of
‘computer skills,’ ” needs a deskilled “reflection on facility
itself” (193)—ideally in “collaborative research-based proj-
ects” (217) that, without dissolving the difference between
art and labor under the banner of the deskilled in immate-
notes to pages 49 – 57 |    239
 rial practice, nonetheless inculcate in the spectator a more
vivid sense of “the difference between artistic (autono-
mous) labour and heteronomous labour” (218).
4. Kosuth, Art after Philosophy and After: Collected
Writings, 1966–1990, ed. Gabriele Guercio (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1991), 56. In Kosuth’s late-sixties vanguard
work, the idea—and that’s just the word—is that we
should come to the gallery to examine, if you will, not ob-
jects but assumptions. Whereas conventional modernist
art redefines its medium in process (as in Costello’s argu-
ment), Kosuth would follow Duchamp in throwing over all
normal media as criteria in order to redefine art itself—
and this by a precept made suddenly explicit in its very,
and every, example. Each “case” of art is a case against its
medium’s administrative limits. Writes Kosuth: “Du­
champ maintained the radical alternative all the while
modernism was gaining respectability; it is almost as
though art had to reach a point of maturation before Du-
champ could really be usable” (55). With Duchamp offer-
ing a continuous vector of possibility for twenty-first-
century art, Kosuth sums up the heritage this way: “If one
wants to understand the art of the next century, one un-
derstands that Picasso made ‘masterpieces’ and he be-
longs to the collectors; Duchamp didn’t, and he belongs to
the artists” (220).
5. See Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), as discussed in Roberts,
Intangibilities of Form, 58–64.
6. Writes Elizabeth Wadell in the web journal
Quarterly Conversation, no. 12 (Summer 2008): “The
book seems to be losing control of itself, spewing forth
strange progeny, just as Duchamp’s art spawned un-
expected artistic movements.” See http://quarterly
conversation.com/the‑book‑art‑of‑robert‑the‑cara‑barer
‑and‑jacqueline‑rush‑lee, where there are illustrations
of Robert The’s book guns (discussed above).
7. In this way, urinal qua fountain (qua allegory of re-
cycled waste) hints at exactly the kind of metatextual (and
hence tacitly verbal) reskilling of the industrial prototype
by intellectual labor that Roberts’s overall theory might
permit but that his deliberate level of attention—and,
more importantly, his subsequent allegiances in only cer-
tain directions of avant-garde work—precludes.
8. In this respect, Roberts’s critique of Adorno on
the culture industry concerns the way Adorno’s posi-
tion overlooks the common cause that might be made
between a deskilled cultural production and a liber-
ated force of intellectual labor. Moving art out of the
hands of the gifted and into the discourse of the for-
mer “hands” themselves, the Duchampian route, can at
least begin to retrieve, so Roberts argues, the nonalien-
ation associated with the work of art and distribute it
across social production more broadly.
240    | notes to pages 57 –70
9. Here one can’t help but see the explicitly Du-
champian side of conceptual art in Kosuth’s break-
through series Art as Idea (as Idea). Skill magnetizes;
ideas radiate. The latter, for Roberts, is what becomes
communal, participatory, constructive, civic—in a
Marxist sense, socializing—about the conjunction of
the post-industrial and the post-artisanal at the site of
reception. Deskilling has its own pedagogy and its own
regimen. It isn’t that it’s democratic to be talentless.
The point is rather that it takes work to see the genius
in a case like Du­champ’s urinal, but a work as far from
manual as that which went into it in the unadorned
translation from factory to museum. The viewer is
tasked with recognizing the ideational transfer from
implement to artifact across the elided zone of craft,
where the mere thing, stripped of functional object-
hood, enters as the aberrant “case,” the idiomatic and
paradoxical one of a kind, into the precincts of immate-
rial rather than industrial production.
10. One might extrapolate here from the remark of
conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, about the resistant
iterations and nonlinear energies of conceptual poetry, to
say that the conceptual book invites neither a readership
nor even a viewership so much as a “thinkership.” My
thanks to Glenn Brewer for calling my attention (among
many other energizing suggestions) to this interview with
Goldsmith by Katherine Elaine Sanders at Bomblog, http://
bombsite.powweb.com/?p=4653.
11. Plastic art often pictures just this, the book as
mise en abyme of culture’s own self-image, in a line of
descent I trace in The Look of Reading. From sacred
mosaics of the Logos in dissemination, via scroll or co-
dex, down through the realist painting of novel read-
ing to the glyphomania of both the abstract and the
conceptual “lexigraph” (Twomby to Kosuth) and on
to the contemporary book-work, culture is itself under
scrutiny in the forms of scriptive and verbal dissemina-
tion—or their material blockage.
12. Jean-François Lyotard, “Foreword: After the
Words,” in Kosuth, Art after Philosophy, xviii.
13. Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization
of the Art Object, 1966–72 (New York: Praeger, 1973).
14. Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language
in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 186,
where Kotz notes that conceptual artists “could be
seen as applying classic minimalist strategies to the
burgeoning worlds”—and of course proliferating
words—“of information and the mass media” (2).
15. See Robert C. Morgan, Art into Ideas: Essays on
Conceptual Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996). Other foundational texts in the field include Charles
Harrison’s two volumes on the Art & Language group, first
Art & Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) and
then Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art
& Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Beyond
additional works cited below on various aspects of the
movement, there are two chapters given over to “Concep-
tual Words” in Simon Morley’s more general survey Writ-
ing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), images intersecting
most directly with what I single out as the “lexigraph” of
painting’s postfigural “reading scene” (see n. 11, above).
16. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” (1967), in Art and
Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 148–72.
17. As probed by Roberts, de Duve’s nominalism
supports the notion that the artist is no longer just a
painter but an “artist at large,” his “enunciative acts”
making “statements” rather than objects (59).
18. This would be the final “dissolution of the ar-
tefactual into art-as-idea” with which Roberts begins
an earlier essay on “Conceptual Art and Imageless
Truth,” 305, in the valuable collection by Michael Cor-
ris, Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Roberts
distinguishes there, via Kant and Hegel, the “dialogic
aspirations of Conceptual art” (308)—the reach be-
yond aesthetic integration for community and con-
versation—from the return to modernist autonomy in
certain self-reflexive works of the same moment (Art
& Language vs. Kosuth, for instance). This anthology
by Corris, among many other strong position papers,
has an excellent overall survey of the movement by
Johanna Drucker called “The Crux of Conceptualism:
Conceptual Art, the Idea of Idea, and the Information
Paradigm,” 251–68.
19. Sol LeWitt, from Artforum (1967), quoted in
Alexandro Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of
Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 32.
20. Lucy R. Lippard, “The Artist’s Book Goes Pub-
lic” (1972), in Get the Message?: A Decade of Art for
Social Change (New York: Dutton, 1984), 49, where
she cites works of Dan Graham, Ed Ruscha, and many
other small-format projects.
21. “The studio is again becoming a study” (46), from
an essay coauthored by Lucy R. Lippard and John Chan-
dler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” first published in Art
International 12, no. 2 (February 1968) and reprinted in
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Al-
berro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999), 46–50. In a recent conflation of display and reading,
on view at Chicago’s MCA in the fall of 2009, German artist
David Lieske hangs a 2006 neon sculpture in allusion to
Hemingway: its all-white luminous caps spelling out the
eponymous a clean well-lighted space for books:
again, gallery as reading room.
22. See, under her all-but-punning title, given the
landscape constructions she considers, Rosalind
Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal
Foster (New York: New Press, 1983), 37, where the
Klein group (or Greimas square) is the template for her
discriminations.
23. For a sustained position paper on this point,
see Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
24. In her account of the conceptualist upsurge in
artist’s books, Lippard, “Artist’s Book,” stresses the
role of influential New York dealer Seth Siegelaub, who
in the late 1960s began “publishing his artists rather
than exhibiting them” (50), including the “no-space”
shows of Lawrence Weiner and Douglas Huebler. As
part of this same emergent phenomenon, there were
independently printed books by Hanne Darboven and
serial Xerox works by Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Joseph
Kosuth, and others, as well as bound graphic experi-
ments by Dan Graham and Robert Smithson.
25. Mel Bochner’s artist’s binders, under the title
Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper
Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art (1966), are
illustrated in Johanna Burton, Mel Bochner: Language
1966–2006 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2007), 58–61. Much of the self-theorized production of
the era could be seen as working drawings rather than
drawn works.
26. Illustrated and discussed by Roberts, “Con-
ceptual Art and Imageless Truth,” 314–15, where “im-
ageless truth” has been reduced to an “unremitting”
iteration of textual “noise,” in every sense “static”
even though virtually interminable, and hence—in the
viewer/reader’s temporal encounter with it—“brooding
on being-towards-death” (314).
27. See Thomas Crow, “Unwritten Histories of Con-
ceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art, ed. Alberro and Stimson,
564–69, where, despite many books on the movement, the
history that Crow sees as needed would embed it in the
broader history of the avant-garde. It is in this sense that
a century after the impressionist recovery of visual sensa-
tion from philosophic interdict under the regime of re-
ceived themes—with the “sensual immediacy of colored
and textured surfaces” finally “freed from subordination
to an imposed intellectual program”—conceptual art
arose, on a further front of the avant-garde itself, “to mark
the limited historical life of that strategy” (567). The sub-
ordination of image by idea, or optical by conceptual pri-
macy, bears comparison with Régis Debray’s sense, dis-
cussed in chapter 1, of an iconic hegemony surrendering
to the law of the symbolic within a discourse of visuality
per se, that is, within the third moment or phase or aspect
notes to pages 70 –78 |    241
 of a “mediology” of the image, following on from an aes-
thetics of mimesis or an earlier metaphysics of the
logosphere.
28. On the separation of retinal attention from sheer
display, see Burton, Mel Bochner, where Burton stresses
Jakobson’s notion of the “phatic” as a discursive gesture
designed to open lines of connection between work and
spectator, beginning a process that Burton sees not as “ca-
thartic” (aesthetic) but as “catalytic” (conceptual)—thus
precipitating thought from an original point of “eye con-
tact” in exhibited wording (27).
29. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wy-
lie Sypher (New York: Anchor, 1956), 61–190.
30. Laura Hoptman, Richard Flood, Massimiliano
Gioni, and Trevor Smith, Unmonumental: The Object
in the 2lst Century (New York: Phaidon, 2008), whose
title-page typeface rejects even the modest monumen-
tality of block capitals by using only a dozen of them,
arbitrarily placed, amid a much thinner-lined alphabet
across the seven words of title and subtitle.
31. Since then, in a 2009 one-man show at New York’s
Bortolami Gallery called Sentence, as if each work were a
warped cultural message, Burr’s vertical variant on this
double folding of sewn page and hinged furniture involves
four angled panels of gold-tinted Plexiglas mirrors accom-
panied on the other side of this standing screen by five
copies of a promotional trade book on plastic surgery
called Doctor, Make Me Beautiful, open facedown on the
floor, the entire assemblage titled Golden Age.
32. See Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books
(repr., New York: Distributed Art Publication, 1997), and
Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), where her sepa-
ration of “contingency” and “complicity”—as distinguish-
ing the postmodern from its own aftermath—can’t be
mapped exactly onto a broader sense of the latter (cross-
ing in effect between both of Drucker’s categories) ex-
plored in a book of the same year by Martha Buskirk, The
Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2005), where again the found or altered book
comes in for no particular discussion.
33. This takes place, according to Drucker’s wide play
of evidence in Sweet Dreams, in a new cross-national art
of material as well as ocular hybridity, random and appeti-
tive rather than ironically contingent as to means. Its as-
similative practice comes full circle to erase the uniform
purities of modernism’s “international style” with an adul-
terated and globalized mixed mode. Art from the 1990s on
has evinced, that is, a hyphenated impurity of aleatory
means in an unguarded and indeed heightening sympathy
(or complicity) with the barrage of mediations around it,
absorbing and re-sorting them—rather than staving them
off with its own various strictures either of execution or
242    | notes to pages 78 – 90
conception (whether the onetime stringency of form in
modernism or the astringency of form’s refused priority in
postmodernism).
34. This is an audience whose interest is acknowl-
edged to form a continuum, however strategically inter-
rupted by the semi-resistant or at least retarding work of
art, with the public’s general immersion in popular culture
and its systems of circulation. For such is the sensuous
clutter of the everyday that is not reduced or ironized in
these works but retained in its adjacency. After minimal-
ism and conceptualism, the counterswing could be named
a new proximalism, its relation to extra-museum space
being a kind of scavenging, both polymorphous and ap-
propriative. Aesthetic distance has given way to participa-
tory thinking.
35. The painting, the original photograph, and a
retouched version of it for the Box in a Valise display
are reproduced in The Complete Works of Marcel Du-
champ, 3rd ed., 2 vols., ed. Arturo Schwarz (New York:
Delano Greenidge, 1997), 2:668–69, where the over-
drawn “box” version is seen to return lines of print
and diagrams to the effaced geometry text—this in the
manner, as it happens, of that illegible lineation famil-
iar from the open page in realist painting.
36. For Borges’s influence on Spector and a wide range
of other book artists, see chapter 4. For Spector’s own
writings on book art, forthcoming from Granary Books as
I write, see Active Voice: Essays on Artists’ Books, Books as
Art, and Art as Language, where one imagines the title
pointing to an extralinguistic revoicing of texts all told by
a further and more radical “action” upon them.
37. Without citing the paired discussion of these
works by Stairs and Nannucci in Drucker’s commen-
tary, N. Katherine Hayles mentions both together in
“Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-
Specific Analysis,” Poetics Today 25, no. 1 (2004), as in-
stances of “reverse remediation” (79). Two inversions
make a negative—demediation, by any other name.
38. This is the heralded volume that appears discarded
amid other texts in the installation of an artist’s room by
contemporary California bricoleur Jack Pierson, arranged
in the spring of 2008 for a solo retrospective at the Irish
Museum of Contemporary Art in Dublin. That Abrams
publication becomes a kind of embedded historical bench-
mark that the exhibit itself extends, revises, and in a sense
entombs. And in keeping with the broad field of contem-
porary bookwork, Pierson is not just the assembler of
readymade volumes like this but the unmaker of found
ones, as when he dismantles the pages of the Diane Arbus
catalog for her first MoMA retrospective, sequences them
before us at a single, canvas-scale glance, and paints out
almost entirely each image in a off-white wash—leaving
only faint physiognomic traces whose minimal legibility
now entirely depends, in a neo-conceptualist manner, on
the intact captions spaced out page by page in this wall-
mounted rectilinear collage.
C h a pter T h ree
1. A 2008 retrospective at the Bineth Gallery, Tel Aviv,
for which I wrote the catalog essay “The Book of Art.”
2. Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2004).
3. See John Sparagana and Mieke Bal, Sleeping
Beauty: A One-Artist Dictionary (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2008), where the title suggests the
dormant graphic mystery quite literally rubbed awake
by the force of the artist’s intervention.
4. See illustration of one of Knight’s display cases
in Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Re­defining
Reality (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 268,
where it is found in the near company of Art & Lan-
guage’s 1962 Index 001 and one of On Kawara’s calen-
drical books, One Million Years—Past, from 1969, illus-
trated on 109 and 176, respectively.
C h a pter F o ur
1. Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in
1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Despite
her book’s title, Kotz devotes two of six chapters to
the seriality of post-Cagean music, two to collage and
performance poetics, one to the reciprocal tension be-
tween text and photographic image, and one, finally,
following in the line of critics like Benjamin Buchloh
and Rosalind Krauss, to what we might have assumed
was her overall topic: “Text and Image: Rereading Con-
ceptual Art,” with a strong section on Kosuth, 181–94.
2. In this case, it may well recall another work by
Nauman not in this show: the neon pairing of “Run
from Fear” with “Fun from Rear.”
3. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality:
Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1980), which draws energy from
his earlier polemic against the theatricality of the vaunted
minimalist object in spectatorial space (see n. 4).
4. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and
Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 138–72.
C h a pter F i ve
1. Xiaoze Xie, The MoMA Library (New York:
Charles Cowles Gallery, 2006).
2. Xiaoze Xie 2001–2003 Fragmentary Views (New
York: Charles Cowles Gallery, 2004).
3. Roger Rothman, “The Ruins of Modernism,” unpagi-
nated catalog essay in Xiaoze Xie, The MoMA Library.
4. See Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature
and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), 19–21, for a discussion of the early me-
dieval invention of word breaks and its effect on the
pace of reading.
5. Images of these works are on view at http://www
.serpentinegallery.org/2008/04/richard_princecontinu­
ation26_j.html, sampling a traveling show that began at
the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, in 2008.
6. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the
Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
7. Often the thumbnail texts have legibly scaled and
hence page-filling words not at all proportional to the
reduced binding, so that they anticipate the oversize
lettering in the lexigraphic canvases of an artist like
Christopher Wool, with room for only two or three al-
phabetic characters in a six-foot width of white.
8. As pictured in detail on the cover of Gabriel Zaid, So
Many Books (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2003). Images
of other works by Bendtsen in the Argument series appear
at http://www.tombendtsen.com/Arguments/.
9. Quoted from a 1974 interview with Broodthaers
by Frank Maes, “Pense-Bête, 44 Years On,” for the ret-
rospective catalog Marcel Broodthaers published by
the Milton Keynes Gallery (London, 2008).
10. This and the other book-works discussed here
from the Borges exhibit can be seen online at the Borges
Center website, http://www.borges.pitt.edu/english.php,
including conceptualist master Joseph Kosuth’s appropri-
ated text, Purloined: A Novel (Köln: Salon Verlag, 2000),
each page photocopied from one of a hundred different
novels: so much hypercompressed narrative mediation
that the very concept of a message, or storyline, is shat-
tered to fragments. At the materialist rather than linguistic
end of the bookwork spectrum, see also in this exhibit Isa-
bel Barbuzza’s Universe/Universo (2007), a piece where
bent crests of book pages bunched and sliced off at right
angles are tucked over and under each other in a tidal flux
of universal textual flow.
11. In the mode of his own textual evocations, one
of Wall’s most recent works at his MoMA retrospective
in 2007 involves, as it happens, the backlit photo of an
art book in the hand of a life-size reader, a book visible
to us, over her shoulder, thanks in part (so the medium
of display would seem to imply) to the same kind of
artificial library light that radiates from behind the Ci-
bachrome enlargement in Wall’s fluorescent lightbox.
The remark about the superstructure of the codex ap-
pears in his 1983 essay on conceptualist sculptor Rod-
ney Graham, as reprinted in Wall, Selected Essays and
notes to pages 1 0 5 – 1 74 |    243
 Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007),
91, including a footnote on a sculptural book-work by
Graham in the form of a Judd-like wooden slipcase for
a first edition of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique gé-
nérale, 100, as well as a searching discussion of Gra-
ham’s appropriated and altered text-work based on a
“loop” iteration of Georg Büchner’s unfinished novel
Lenz, rebound in its own slipcase, 89–91.
12. On this subject see my chapter on the modular
page form in cubist composition in The Look of Reading:
Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006), 275–327.
13. Discussed and illustrated in my Look of Reading,
350, where one aspect of the piece, the tabletop textual
defacement by linear burning, when reprinted as installa-
tion image, becomes in effect a two-dimension lexigraph.
14. See Joan Simon’s commentary in Ann Hamilton:
An Inventory of Objects, where stress is placed from
the first on Hamilton’s practice as that of “a reader”
(2), and where the materiality and thematics of the
book are analyzed throughout, including reproductions
of untitled (aleph) and her library installation on pp. 7
and 17, respectively. See also the illustrations of 1994’s
lineament, as discussed in chapter 1, on 122–25.
15. See illustration of Hamilton’s piece in my Look
of Reading, 353.
C h a pter S i x
1. See Roberta Smith, “When the Conceptual
Was Political,” New York Times, February 1, 2008,
with Minuhin’s own photograph of the temporary
structure appearing as the first image in the ac-
companying slide show at http://www.nytimes
.com/2008/02/01/arts/design/01vida.html .
2. Régis Debray, “The Book as Symbolic Object,” in
The Future of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1996), 139–53.
3. In a compelling unpublished essay, Mary Hick-
man-Fernandez has called my attention to a text of
erasure by poet Mary Ruefle, a found book titled A
Little White Shadow that has been whited out by the
poet and then digitally reprinted (Seattle: Wave Books,
2008) in a way that retains the textured look of the
correcting fluid as it bridges over gaps to configure
new patterns of meaning. Hickman-Fernandez com-
pares this not to Whiteread’s use of correction fluid
but to Jen Bervin’s The Desert (New York: Granary
244    | notes to pages 178 – 229
Books, 2008), another appropriated volume from the
nineteenth century that performs its erasure through
a team of seamstresses overstitching the words of the
text in this handmade collector’s edition.
4. Close to home, the atrium of the University
of Iowa Library, a museum space reserved for rotat-
ing book exhibits, is permanently graced by a huge
overhead stabile that has turned the former card in-
dex of the library’s holdings to a delirious anarchive
suspended in inaccessible, post-electronic space: hun-
dreds of former shelf cards with call numbers are seen
still clinging to an intricate, mangled nest of the metal
rods that used to fix them in their catalog drawers but
that now expose them along arbitrary bends and loops
to the slow weathering air of a new day. Upstairs in
this same library, Special Collections houses a differ-
ent response to the passing reign of print-based data
systems: some 1,700 electronically cataloged “artist’s
books,” including in a recent acquisition one of the
sawed-up found volumes by Robert The.
E n d p a pers
1. See a quintessential instance from 1913, Juan Gris’s
reassembled The Book, in The Look of Reading, 291–92, il-
lustrated fig. 6.7.
2. Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader: A Novella
(London: Faber and Faber, 2007).
3. My sense of a bibliographic unconscious brought
to form in bookwork should be compared with the
coded enactment of quasi-textual transactions in such
writers as Scott, Goethe, and Balzac, as discussed in
Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the
Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
4. This image by Khan appears as the cover of Gregory
Batchen, ed. Photography Degree Zero (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2009).
5. Khan’s “experience” of Nietzsche or Freud is the
opposite of a collage sampling, as in Andreas Gursky’s
equally overscaled photo pastiche (2000) of a compos-
ite page from Robert Musil, its enlarged print lifted
from various parts of The Man without Qualities.
6. On Bazin’s influential metaphors, in their appli-
cation to photography and film, respectively, see Gar-
rett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s
Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), 142.

Page references in bold refer to illustrations.
Adorno, Theodor, 240n8
Alberro, Alexander, 241n21
Alberti, Leon Battista, 129
anarchive, 72, 152–58, 167–69,
177–208, 217
Andre, Carl, 67
anti-book, 13, 26–29, 79, 104, 168,
201, 221–22. See also bookwork;
nonbook
Araki, Takako, 186; Témoignage de la
bombe atomique, 186
Art & Language collective, 56, 239n18
artisanal book, xiii, 79, 95. See also
artist’s book
artist’s book, xiii, xviii, xix; distin-
guished from artisanal book and
from serial binders of conceptual-
ism, 75–76, 79, 215
Babel, 169, 171–75, 180–83, 195
Bacon, Francis, 238n23
Baker, Nicholson: on the digital
eclipse of print matter, 235
Bal, Mieke, 122, 123
Baldessari, John, 35, 104, 145, 226,
231; Everything Is Purged from This
Painting but Art; No Ideas Have
Entered This Work, 96; This Is Not
to Be Looked At, 44–46; Two Voided
Books, 39
Banner, Fiona, 187; Anatomy of a
Book, 149; Life Drawing Drawings,
91, 92, 93, 147; OR, Nude Fin Ver-
sion, 91; Sleep, 148, 149
Barbuzza, Isabel, 243n10
Barry, Robert, 137–38, 159; One Billion
Colored Dots, 77
Barth, John, 178
Barthes, Roland, 4, 226–27
Batchen, Gregory, 244n4
Bateman, Adam: Ellsworth Kelly’s
Library, 162; The Flesh, The Spirit,
and Father Smith, 32, plate 3; Rub-
bing: The Flesh, 32, 33; Story Line,
38–41; Untitled, 37, 38, 39–41
Baudrillard, Jean, 76
Bazin, André: on photography vs.
film, 229
Béliveau, Paul, 112–14
Bendtsen, Tom, 41, 82; Argument #4
I nd e x
(12,000 Books), 161–62
Bennett, Alan: The Uncommon
Reader, 222
Bergson, Henri: mechanization and
the modes of comic “repetition,”
80–83, 116; “transposition,” 85–87,
228
Berlant, Lauren, 238n25
Berwin, Jan, 244n3
Beube, Doug, xv, 21, 179, 46, 96, 214;
The Arena, 22, 46; Border Cross-
ing—In the War Room, 191, 192–95;
Fault Lines II, 191, 192–95; Inter-
locutors, 191; Paris, 23; Plot II, 96;
Speakers: Italian to English, 193,
194, 194, 195; Volume, 173–75, 175
bibliobjet, xix, 39; defined, 31; as put-
ting quotes around “book,” 55; as
site of demediation, 91–92, 97
Bibliothèque nationale, 2, 223
Birkerts, Sven, 35
Blanchot, Maurice, 43
Bochner, Mel, 69, 77
Bolter, Jay David, 236n2
Bonato, Victor, 237
 book corridor, 38, 203
bookhood, xv, 30, 35, 52, 85, 89,
141–44, 223, 229
book studies, xviii, 25, 30, 34, 52
bookwork: as archaeology of the
present, 165; distinguished from
book-work as object, xiii, 21, 30,
93; intermedial relation with film,
213–14, 228, 229; and intertextual-
ity, 156; as pages without signals,
216; as the reading of reading,
126; three modes (alteration, as-
semblage, simulation), 21; as the
“unmixing” of the codex medium,
53; as visual punning, 154, 159, 173,
187. See also book-work; demedia-
tion; troped reading
book-work: as conceptual art, 145;
depaginated, 166; as “détourning,”
215; as metatext by default, 13; as
repurposed text, 144. See also livré
detourné
Borges, Jorge Luis, 2, 88; “Borges ef-
fect” in bookwork, 169–70; “Funes
the Memorious,” 171; “The Library
of Babel,” 169, 175
Borland, Catherine: After a True
Story—Giant and Fairy Tales, 210,
211, 212–14; Alpha Foetal Protein
Test, Cold, 209; Did I request thee,
Maker, from my clay to mould me
man? . . . , 209–10; and Franken-
stein, 209–10
Bove, Carol: Seven Types of Ambigu-
ity, 140–41, 144, 151, 168
Braque, Georges, 178
Brewer, Glenn, 240n10
Bright, Betty, 235n4
Broodthaers, Marcel, 35; Atlas, 179;
Pense-Bête, 166–67, 191, 228
Brown, Bill, 45, 238n25
Bruce, Lenny, 155
Büchner, Georg, 244n11
Burr, Tom: Golden Age, 242n31;
Recline II, 83–84
Burton, Johanna, 241n25, 242n28
Buskirk, Martha, 242n32
Butor, Michel: on book as diptych,
5, 174
Caesar, Julius: folding of scrolls, 192
Callaghan, Joshua, 168
246  | index
Callan, Jonathan: Library of Past
Choices, 71; Mass, 71, Rational
Snow, 71–72, plate 6
Calzolari, Pier Paolo: Natura Morta,
204, 205
Caro, Anthony: Open Secret, 23, 25
Castle, James, 31
Cavell, Stanley, 42
Celan, Paul, 38
Cézanne, Paul, 104–8, 111
Chamberlain, Ann, 180
Chandler, John, 241n21
Christopher, Ann, 76
Claire Fontaine (Paris collective), 36
Clegg & Guttmann: False Perspec-
tive—Reflections on Claustropho-
bia, Paranoia, and Conspiracy
Theory, 181, 182
Clercx, Byron, 82, 146, 201; Power
Tool, 29; Purification, 28, 29; Read-
ing Context, 29
Coffin, Peter: Untitled (Koko),
187–88; Untitled (Theory of Co-
lour), 133–34
comedy, xv, xviii, 3–8, 44, 64, 79–89,
134–53, 187–89, 204, 215; of ready-
mades, 10. See also Bergson, Henri
computerized text, 6, 9, 49, 113,
239n33
conceptual art: xviii; in book form,
215; as counterdiscourse, 129; and
écriture, 3, 131; information as
image in, xviii, 11; and minimal-
ism, 143; and seriality, 124, 219; as
textwork, 130, 155–56
Cormack, Bradin, 236n6
Costello, Diarmuid: on medium
specifity, 42–43, 66–70
Crow, Thomas: on academicism vs.
pictorial allure in the dialectical
evolution of art styles, 77–78, 83
cubism, 78, 178; synthetic, 56, 79, 219
Daldry, Stephen: The Reader (film),
189–90
Darboven, Hanne, 76; 100 Books
00–99, 80
Darwin, Charles, 187
Debord, Guy, 36, 68
Debray, Régis, 49–52; on logosphere,
graphosphere, videosphere, 49–50,
194, 223; materiality as return of
the “primitive repressed” in, 50–51;
and “mediology,” 49, 72, 79, 201
dematerialization, 64, 101. See also
Lippard, Lucy R.
demediation, xv, 1, 8, 9, 11, 12, 30,
34, 37, 41, 43, 48, 51, 73, 91–93, 141,
142, 144, 146, 149, 152, 156, 157, 159,
164, 201, 212–14, 216; in contrast to
dematerialization, 70; as conver-
sion into second-order text, 86;
defined, 1, 52; expanded definition,
102; foregrounding of plastic form
over text, 220–21; function within
art rather than informatics, 102;
linked to case study and thing
theory, 68; operation upon a given
medium, 116; and politics, 186–87;
and readymade, 56; and reme-
diation, 113, 114; as trope, 147, 186;
turning reader to viewer, 101; See
also remediation
depaginated book form, 152, 166
Desiderio, Vincent: Cockaigne, 152,
plate 11
deskilling, 56–72, 76–78, 92, 119, 126.
See also Roberts, John
Dettmer, Brian: Chronicle, Chronic,
Con, 18, 228; Key Monuments, 17,
18, 29, plate 1; Tab aka The Boy
Who Knew Too Much, 19
Diderot, Denis, 159
Dietman, Erik, 165
digital turn, xvii
Dostoyesvsky, Fyodor, 144, 147
Drendel, William: Laborem Excerns:
The Encyclical of Pope John Paul
II on the Dignity of Labor, 41; The
Starr Report: Beat Yourself Up,
America!, 40, 41
Drucker, Johanna, xix, 69, 84–87,
89, 176
Duchamp, Marcel, 35; Box in a
Valise, 242n35; Fountain (urinal),
49, 56–58, 63, 72, 82, 97, 124, 187;
Large Glass, 228; readymades, 10,
55, 63–64, 66–68, 78–82, 85–86,
91–92, 121, 126, 147, 154–55, 186–89,
219–21, 228; Surréalism en 1947
book cover, 64–65; The Unhappy
Readymade, 85–86, 147
Dürer, Albrecht: Melancholia, 199,
200, 201, 204, 213
Duve, Thierry de, 58, 72
Eakins, Thomas, 97–98
e-books, 32. See also Kindle
écriture art, 3. See also textwork
Einstein, Albert, 170
El Greco, 238
faux livres: vs. beau livres, 17, 217, 221
Fields, W. C., 237n15
film. See bookwork
Foster, Hal, 122
Foster, Lady Elena, 23
Foucault, Michel, 26
Freud, Sigmund, 13, 81, 226–27
Fried, Michael, 43; and absorption,
143; objecthood vs. conceptual
sculpture, 70, 72, 78, 84
Friedman, Tom: One Thousand Hours
of Staring, 66
Gass, William, 195
Geleynse, Wyn: Kit 1A: Collected
Books; Some Assembly Required,
157, 158
Genette, Gérard: and paratext, 148;
and textual immanence, 30–31, 50,
51, 102, 152, 232, 233
Gibran, Kahlil, 168
Gilmore, Graham, 135
Gojowczyk, Hubertus: The Latest
News from the Years 1732 and 1733,
47, plate 5
Goldsmith, Kenneth, 240n10
Gomez, Jeff, 237n12
Goodman, Nelson: on the “allo­graphic
regime” of print, 30; vs. bookwork
as “alloptropic,” 31
Graham, Rodney, 243n11
Greenberg, Clement, 78, 228
Gris, Juan: Le Livre, 244n1
Gross, Sabine, 235n2
Grusin, Richard, 236n2
Guillén, Maurizio: Reconciliation, 136
Guo-Giang, Cai, 231; Danger Book:
Suicide Fireworks, 41
Gursky, Andreas, 244n5
Gutenberg, Johannes, 30
Haacke, Hans, 57, 90
Hamilton, Ann, 80, 180, 181, 213;
lineament, 46, 47, 48, 49, 214, 217;
photographed scene of reading,
227; tropos, 47, 180; untitled (aleph),
244n14
Hammons, David: The Holy Bible: Old
Testament, 61
Hansen, Mark B. N., 241n23
Hardt, Michael, 239n3
Harrington, Jerome: The Glass Ar-
chive, 168
Harrison, Charles, 240n15
Hayles, N. Katherine, 236n4, 242n37
Heidegger, Martin, 43
Herold, Georg: Xtoone, 181
Hickman-Fernandez, Mary, 2424n3
Hirst, Damien, 50, 215
Holden, Barry, 159
Hooker, Eric: In the World of Books
(New Yorker cover), 197
Huws, Bethan, 135
immaterial labor, 147, 163. See also
Roberts, John
indexicality, 32, 49–52, 79, 83 217; in
semiotic triad with icon and sym-
bol, 212–13
interactive medium, 75, 83
James, William, 44
Joyce, James, 26, 46, 156
Kant, Emmanuel, 39
Kantor, Jordan: The Bar, as deme-
diation of Manet, 117, 119; Untitled
(X-Ray), 118, 119
Kapoor, Anish: Wound, 25
Kawara, On, 35, 76; One Million
Years—Past, 243n4
Keats, John, 232
Khan, Idris: 226–28; every . . . page
of the Holy Quran, 224, 125;
Mozart . . . Requiem, 225; Struggling
to Hear . . . , 225–26; Thus Spake
Zarathustra . . . after Friedrich
Nietzsche, 229, 230–33
Kiefer, Anselm, xv, 23–25, 38, 46, 83,
100, 127, 158, 180–89, 221; Book with
Wings, 198–208; The Breaking of the
Vessels, 198; Census, 199, 200–208;
The High Priestess, 198; Narrow
Are the Vessels, 207, 208, 213–14;
and Naftali Rakuzin, 127, plate 9;
Sternenfall, 198
Kierspel, Jürgen, 186
Kindle, 35, 222, 237n12
Kivy, Peter, 236n7
Koch, Peter: Ur-Text Volume I, 154
Kollath, Edith: “breathing books,” xvi
Kosuth, Joseph, 35–36, 57, 72, 240n11,
241n1, 243n10; Purloined: A Novel,
243n10
Krauss, Rosalind, 73–74
Krén, Matej, 40, 41, 82; deconstruction
of Pijoán’s history of art, 158–59;
defacement of Art in America, 158;
Gravity Mixer, 36, 37; Passage,
160, 161, plate 12; reading troped,
160–61; Scanner, 161; Virtual Rock
Garden, 36
Kunath, Friedrich, 137
Lacan, Jacques, 187
Lakner, Lázsló: Tribal Object 12, 36
Latham, John, 46; Book Object,
238n29; God Is Great (#2), 228;
Painting Is an Open Book, 46, 219,
228, plate 4
Learn to Read exhibit (Tate Modern),
21, 129, 130–32, 129–42, 145, 147, 151
Léger, Fernand, 178
LeWitt, Sol, 73, 78
lexigraph, xiv, 45, 74, 79, 91, 100–102,
124, 129–37, 154–55, 164, 220–25,
2238n23, 230–31; as opposed to
volumetric demediation, 145
Lippard, Lucy R.: on “dematerializa-
tion” in conceptual art, 68, 69; on
“no space” of publication, 76
livre d’artiste, 13, 23, 75, 76, 77, 79, 101.
See also artist’s book
livre détourné, 26, 167
Löhr, Helmut: Faucet, 62–63
Louvre, 4, 136, 142, 147
Lurz, John, 239n33
Lyon, Meredith, 173
Lyotard, Jean-François, 67
Magritte, René, 26, 171
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 237n14
Malraux, André, 106
Manet, Edouard: A Bar at the Folies-
Bergère demediated, 118
Marcheschi, Jean-Paul, 180
Marshall, Bruce, 32
Martin, Kris, 136, 147; End-Point of
index |  247
 “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (O.
Wilde), 136–37; The Idiot, 141–42
Marx, Karl, 36; and “dematerializa-
tion,” 64; and post-Marxist art
criticism, 10, 56–65, 72, 185, 240n9
Matisse, Henri, 23, 76
Matta-Clark, Gordon, 74; Swing-ing
Doors, 144, 179
Matton, Charles, 156
maximalism, 84
Mazzio, Carla, 236n6
McGwire, Kate, 146
McLuhan, Marshall, 1, 60, 120
medium specificity, 42–45, 66, 84,
238n25, 238n28
Melis, Rachel: Seed Mix, 181
metonymy, 32, 68, 113, 214, 230
minimalism, Michael Fried’s critique
of, 143
minimalist sculpture: 10, 72, 78, 145
Minujin, Marta: The Parthenon of
Books/Homage to Democracy, 195
Mitchell, W. J. T.: “imagetext,” 74; on
mixed nature of all media, 239n33
Morgan, Robert C., 70
Morley, Simon, 241n15
Musil, Robert, 244n5
Muybridge, Eadweard, 97–98
Nabokov, Vladimir, 155
Nannucci, Maurizio: Universum,
88–89, 178
nature morte, xvi, 108, 181
Nauman, Bruce, 133–35
Negri, Antonio, 239n3
new media, 6, 74, 116, 236n2, 241n23
Nieblich, Wolfgang: Buchweizen, xv,
19; Der Lügendetektor, xv, xvi, Still
Life, Bookobject, 19, 20
nonbook (not-book), 1, 26, 29–30,
46, 130, 144–47, 151, 165, 198, 201,
222–23, 232–33. See also anti-book;
book-work
Nunberg, Geoffrey, 244n2
O’Doherty, Brian: Art Since 1945,
90–91, 159; on transformation of
“looking room” to “reading room,”
35–36, 73; on “the white cube,” 11,
63–65, 90, 209
Oldenburg, Claes, 11; From the En-
tropic Library, 207; Torn Notebook,
248  | index
23–25, 24; Typewriter Eraser, Scale
X, 206
Olson, Daniel: The Outline of His-
tory, 171
Orwell, George, 42
Peale, Raphaelle, 104; Catalogue
Deception, plate 7
Perse, St. John, 208
Phillips, Tom, 162; A Humument,
162–63, 236; The Library at El-
sinore, 163, 164–65; Wittgenstein’s
Trap, 164
photorealism, 26, 97–100, 110, 152
Picasso, Pablo, 23, 56, 76, 178
Pieroth, Kirsten, 136, 226; Around the
World in 40 Days, 142
Pierson, Jack, 242–43n38
Pijoán, José, 158
Piper, Andrew, 244n3
Ponge, Francis: Le Savon, 29, 82
Prince, Richard, 82, 154–55, 168
pun (visual), xv, 61, 82, 138
Rakuzin, Naftali, 102–27, 152–60;
Anselm Kiefer, 127, plate 9;
Chuck Close, 114, 115; contrast
with Paul Béliveau, 112–13; and
nature morte, 108; The Nature of
Still Life, 107, 108; paintings as
demediation of art photography,
119; as “photo-irrealist,” 120; and
reversal of industrial readymade,
105; Seurat, 198; Sims Reed Cata-
logue, 109
readybounds, 49, 72, 85–86, 91–92,
124, 220–21, 227; as objets trouvés,
55. See also Duchamp, Marcel
Reichelt, Victoria, 114
Reinhardt, Ad, 90
remediation, 91, 97, 98, 112–14, 116,
118, 127, 133, 137–40, 210, 213, 214
retread (vs. effigy), xiii, 52
Rezeptionsästhetik, 66
Richter, Gerhard, 43–45, 68
Roach, Damien: Mobil, 138–40, 139;
River, trees, clouds, sky, 140
Roberts, John: and the artist’s book,
85–86; Marxist reading of deskill-
ing after Duchamp, 56–58, 63–65,
66, 68
Rorimer, Anne, 243n4
Roth, Dieter, 180, 181
Rothman, Roger, 152
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition:
2007, 163–64; 2008, 146; 2009, 76
Ruefle, Mary, 244n3
Ruppersberg, Allen, 76, 159–60, 171
Ruscha, Ed, 13, 35, 50, 191; Atlas
Ripped, 179; Stains, 23
Rush Lee, Jacqueline, 34
Salzmann, Siegfried, 237n18
Santoro, Vittorio: The Obstinate
Silence of Things, 137
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 244n11
Schlink, Bernhard, 190
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 221
Schwenger, Peter, 43–44
Serrano, Andres, 50
Shakespeare, William, 163–64
Shaw, Richard, xvi
Shelley, Mary, 209
Sigurdsson, Sigrid, 237n18
Sims Reed Gallery, 110
Simon, Joan, 244n14
situationists, 185
Smith, Roberta, 244n1
Smithson, Robert, 74, 171
Sontag, Susan, 29
Sowa, Michael, 6
Sparagana, John, 103–4, 119, 152;
altered magazine page, 121, 122–24;
distressing the photograph, 101,
121–23, 158; and intermedial irony,
124; Newsweek, 125, 126–27
Spector, Buzz, xv, 41, 82, 96, 121, 173,
186, 214, 236; and Borges, 169–71,
176–77; curated exhibit at the Uni-
versity of Iowa, 172–74; The Library
of Babel, 171; Malevich: With 8 Red
Rectangles, 177, 178–81; A Passage,
86, 87, 160–61, 226; 33 Art Histories
(spine), 174, 176
Stairs, David, 89, 176
Stella, Frank, 44–46, 104
Stevens, Wallace, 10, 47, 213
Stewart, Garrett: Between Film
and Screen: Modernism’s Photo
Synthesis, 244n6; “Bookwork as
Demediation,” 52; The Look of
Reading: Book, Painting, Text, xiv,
230, 237n20, 244n6
Stewart, Susan: on the miniature
book, 156
Stimson, Blake, 241n21
Stokowska, Joanna: The Library of
Thoughts, 42
synecdoche: as material trope of
reading, 87, 121, 124, 153, 156, 158,
171, 183, 186, 189, 196, 208, 224
Tansey, Mark: Reader, 230
Tate Modern, 21, 63, 129, 130, 136, 145
textwork, 63, 68–70, 76–77, 88–91,
100–101, 130–31, 138, 155, 165, 223
The, Robert: Duchamp, 58, 59,
61; The Medium, 216, 217, 220;
Reader’s Digest, 60, 61; Reader’s
Digest (cake book), 61
Tolstoy, Leo, 232
trompe l’oeil, 26, 90, 98–106, 114, 163;
bookcase, 163, 183
troped reading: xix, 19, 41, 47–51,
79–82, 146–47, 160–61, 169, 173,
179–80, 198, 201, 213–14, 222–23,
228–31, 233, 239n33; and Borges,
169, 178, 208; as distinct from
figured book forms, 28–31, 146. See
also synecdoche
Twombly, Cy, 145, 240n11
Ullman, Micha: Memorial to the Nazi
Book Burning, 202, 203
unplugged reading, 75
Van Bruggen, Coosje. See Oldenburg,
Claes
Verne, Jules, 144–47
Vogler, Thomas A.: and book-object
as not-book, 25–26, 141; and troped
book, 28–29, 52, 146–47, 201
Walker, John A., 238n30
Wall, Jeff, 43, 68, 174
Warhol Factory, 56
Weiner, Lawrence, 69, 72, 241n24
Wentworth, Richard, 38, 171
Weston, Heather: Book of Babel, 172,
173; Flip-Read, 173, 174
white cube, 155. See also O’Doherty,
Brian
Whiteread, Rachel, 38, 46, 72, 83, 189,
221; “book corridors” in Untitled
(paperbacks), 203, 204; Judenplatz
Holocaust Memorial, 189–200,
201, 203
index |  249