Borges and I (2001)

Borges and I (2001)
Heather Weston
Leporello, hardcover in cloth. 110 mm square. 6 panels. #88 of an open edition. Acquired from the artist, 4 September 2023. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

The technique among book artists of creating a fresh work within an older one by erasing, excising, or masking the text of the older has been famously used by Tom Phillips in A Humument (1970-2016), Jonathan Safran Foer in Tree of Codes (2010), and Marcel Broodthaers in Image: Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1969). Heather Weston’s twist on this is several fold.

First, simply by selecting Borges’ subtle self-reflexive story Borges and I and retaining its title exactly, she alters the text without even removing a word. The “I” is no longer only Borges the writer or Borges the man, but now Heather Weston the book artist as well.

Second, she isolates and highlights the words from the original to create the new narrative by blind embossing them.

“I map in vain our hostile relationship; I …”

“… go on living, just to confess that those pages cannot save what is good not even language …”

Although Weston the book artist infiltrates the “I” of the title, her narrator seems more the afflicted Borges, whose failing eyesight Weston centers with black paper, fading silver ink, and blind embossed text. These are her additional twists on the techniques of alteration.

Other works of book art in homage to Jorge Luis Borges

Jonathan Basile’s The Library of Babel (2015~). Website. Accessed 3 July 2023.

Lizzie Brewer’s Babel (2019).

Kathryn Shank Frate’s curated exhibition at the Vienna Calligraphy Center. 2019. “Tower of Babel Exhibit” (2019). Accessed 28 June 2023.

Louise Grimshaw’s Ethereal Worlds (2017) celebrates “The Library of Babel” with hexagonally shaped pages of prints rotating on a central post.

Sean Kernan’s The Secret Books (1999)

Ines von Ketelhodt & Peter Malutzki’s Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön (The Second Encyclopedia of Tlön) (1997-2006)

Karen Kunc’s Ten Thousand Things, No. 51 (2012)

Matilde Marín’s Labyrinths “Homage to Jorge Luís Borges” (1998)

Aurélie Noury’s El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Pierre Ménard (after Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Ménard, auteur du Quichotte” in Fictions) (2009)

Hanna Piotrowska (Dyrcz)’s Twórca/The Maker (2016)

Benjamin Shaykin’s Z-A (The Library of Babel) (2011)

Rachel Smith’s Promise the Infinite: Drawing out Babel (2022)

Peter and Donna Thomas’ Ficciones (2006)

See also “Borges & I” (2001). Rollins College Book Arts Collection. 82. Provides a very short video of the book’s opening.