Books On Books Collection – Ryuta Iida

Silent Book, vol. 11

Artistic wooden sculpture resembling a geometrically abstract book, featuring angular planes and a smooth finish.

Silent Book, vol. 11 (2023)
Ryuta Iida
Altered book, camphor tree stump, and glue. H210 × W170 × D190 mm. Unique. Acquired from Fragile Books (Tokyo), 20 August 2024.
Photos: Above, courtesy of Fragile Books; below, Books On Books Collection.

The cover, door, table of contents, numbering, text, and endnotes are all filled with a series of information. I thought to stop and crystallize all the functions of the “book,” … I decided to crystallize it. It took the time to go through the hands of people, the old book that finally reached me, sealed on a pedestal, it is now ripe for its next role. (Artist’s statement)

“Crystallized” is not the first word that comes to mind when viewing and handling this eleventh in Ryuta Iida’s series Silent Book. Perhaps it does for the angled planes of the cut block of camphor wood, but for the coverless codex, folded, draped, moulded, carved, and sculpted come closer. Two names that might not spring to mind (but should) are Giambologna (Jean Boulogne) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Like them, Iida offers us more than a single or primary vantage point from which to appreciate his work. Like Giambologna’s Abduction of a Sabine Woman (Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence) or Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (Galleria Borghese, Rome) Silent Book must be circled and viewed in the round. The nine images below show the work turned right to left in stages.

Artistic sculpture of a book made from a camphor wood block, shaped with angular planes and a smooth, sealed edge, displayed against a neutral background.

A sculptural book titled 'Silent Book, vol. 11' by Ryuta Iida, showcasing an altered book positioned on a wooden pedestal, featuring a curved cover resembling a block of camphor wood.

Far as Silent Book is from the figurative, violent, and ornate features of the 16th and 17th century masterpieces, it still harbors its own complexities of line, shadow, texture, and form. There is a volume of dynamics between and among them that belies the work’s title. Note how the layers of pages echo the wood’s grain, and how the color and texture of the page surface contrasts with those of the book’s top edge, and how that contrast reverberates with the shifting colors of the wood. Iida has moulded and sealed the book block so that the top edge curves to a point in a duet with the cut angles of the wood block.

Artwork titled 'Silent Book, vol. 11' by Ryuta Iida, showcasing a sculptural composition of a camphor wood block and paper, featuring angular shapes and layered textures.

An artistic representation of a sculpted camphor wood book block, featuring smooth edges and a layered design.

Silent Book has many kin in the world of book art, works that make the content of a ready-made volume inaccessible and make something anew from the material object. Too often this sub-genre has been dismissed as a fetishization of the book. This overlooks how Silent Book and its kin make us think about the book as a material for making art and as a source of metaphors, and we overlook what the individual artworks are. By sealing away the content of a book, giving the book block a sinuous shape, and fusing it with a carved block of wood, Iida invites us to look afresh.

In the Books On Books Collection, several other works share this play of inaccessibility with tangibility: Barton Lidice Beneš’s Untitled (1973), Andrew Hayes’ Offset (2013), Jacqueline Rush Lee’s The First Cut and Silenda (both 2015), Doug Beube’s Red Infinity #4 (2017), Lorenzo Perrone’s Kintsugi (2018), and Chris Perry’s 217 Ripples: Sediment (2020). Of these, Offset seems closest to Silent Book. Comparison can increase appreciation of each and their sub-genre.

Both Hayes and Iida have managed to elicit a sense of action and motion from their materials. From one view of Offset, metal embraces the body of the book; from another, the book pushes the metal apart. From one side of Silent Book, the upward-angled block of wood supports the coverless codex folding over and slipping down its pedestal; from another, the book drapes a protective arm over the sideways-angled block.

Views of Offset (2013) by Andrew Hayes and Silent Book (2023)

The titling of the two works raises appreciable similarities and differences. Offset suggests the printing method of the same name, which does involve metal plates. The overall shape, however, suggests some strange assemblage of early letterpress components: the bulbous ink balls (or dabbers) with their handles, the torque bar, and the metal furniture locks. The offset position of the piece’s “handle” also reflects the title. What can’t be appreciated from the images is that Offset wobbles if touched in the slightest.

A vintage illustrated print showing two men engaged in a printing process, featuring a press and decorative plants above them.

“The two of printer’s dabbers” from Jost Amman’s 1588 deck of cards.

A wooden book press positioned on a workspace, featuring a large handle, a platform for printing materials, and two covered objects resembling human figures, with natural light illuminating the scene.

The BookBeetle Press, a portable screw press designed and built by Josef Beery. Reproduced with permission of Beery.

The title of Silent Book refers, of course, to the book block’s being sealed, an obvious visual/verbal pun. None of its information passes the lips of its pages. Like Offset, however, the title is also oblique. Although the derivation of the word book from the Old German Buche (meaning “beech”) is a debatable assumption, it’s widely accepted enough to allow that the block of wood is also a silent book.

Now imagine the substitution of a large block of pink bubble gum for the book material in Offset and Silent Book. Not a block of gum in the shape of a book, but an oversized, unchewed block of gum. Something very different to chew on now, isn’t it? The ways in which book artists manipulate the material and metaphor of the book vary every bit as much as the ways in which painters, sculptors, and other artists vary their techniques, materials, and subjects. Even within the slice of book art that focuses on physical inaccessibility, such as Marcel Broodthaers’ Pense-Bête (1964), Wolf Vostell’s Betonbuch (1971), Jonathan Callan’s Rational Snow (2002), Anselm Kiefer’s Untitled (Constellation Book) (2004), Hanne Stochholm Exe’s Remake (2015), and Neil Nenner and Avihai Mizrahi’s Cover Story (2017), the variety abounds. Ryuta Iida’s series Silent Book is a resounding reminder.

Books On Books Collection – Ivon Illmer

Featured2 Comments

Untitled (2015)
Ivon Illmer
Book-shaped wood sculpture. Top: Almond wood, H100 x W65 x D27 mm.Bottom: Poplar wood, H123 x W78 x D27 mm. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 10 October 2014.
Photos: Books On Books.

From Ivon Illmer’s website: Books preserve history and stories. Each book has its own individual story. This ranges from loving treatment to neglect to ostracism and even burning. The arc almost inevitably stretches from the fate of the book to the fate of man. Everyone should let their imagination run wild when touching the book sculptures and invent their own story for each book. Touching is important, the haptic experience flatters the sense of touch. You “grasp” the beauty of the wood. Imagining the book sculptures in the raw piece of wood is the art. Each piece is unique in shape, structure and grain. Accessed 14 October 2024.

Illmer categorizes his work as “book sculpture / book art”. The carvings from various woods primarily celebrate the shape and tactility of the closed codex. The similitude of the exterior, right down to the fore, top and bottom edges, belies the inaccessibility of the interior.

Untitled

If simply entitled Unreadable Book or A Closed Book, these works would lead us down a narrow path of interpretation. Another easy path of interpretation could be etymological. The derivation of the word book from the Old German Buche (meaning “beech”) is a debatable assumption. Still, it’s widely accepted enough to start us down the path that, since the paper of traditional books is made from wood, so, Illmer’s carved codices just represent another way of using wood to make a book. He could have entitled them Buchmaterial, which in English also captures the same pun between the book’s content and its material. In his self-published catalogue, however, Illmer is explicit that his use of “untitled” is totemic:

… each of my books represents every book published so far. That’s why none of them has a title, and that’s why none of them is based on a real book.

Illmer leaves it to the imagination of the viewer to determine whether and how his works “interrogate” the nature of the book.

Presenting physically inaccessible books is fairly common among wood carvers, sculptors, and painters. A closed or open book appears in the hands of countless saints and Madonnas and carries with it various iconological interpretations, depending on the bearer. From the St. Servatius Cathedral Treasury in Maastricht, here’s a library of letters, scrolls and books in the hands of the Holy Kinship.

Heilige Maagschap (c.1470 )
Westphalian School

And from Lisbon’s National Museum of Antique Art, here’s a Madonna and Child with book, which seems to underscore the interpretation in Christian art that an open book in connection with Mary indicates the fulfillment of the promise.

Madonna and Child (c. 1540-1550), Unknown sculptor, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbonne, Inv 1182 Esc. Photos: Books On Books Collection, 2015, at “Pliure. Prologue (la part du feu)”, Fondation Calouste-Gulbenkian, Paris.

The fifteenth-century Van Lymborch, or Limbourg, brothers of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry fame, however, may be the first to have created an inaccessible book for the sheer pleasure of trompe-l’oeil and trompe-le-main. They made it from a block of wood, decorated its exterior to look like a sumptuous illuminated manuscript, and gave it to their patron as a New Year’s day joke. Another two centuries later in Venice, Francesco Pianta the Younger carved shelves of inaccessible wooden books for the Chapter Room in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco (1657-75). Arranged as if recently consulted and replaced on their shelves, the books provide the studious background for inconographic and allegorical sculptural figures of “Curiosity”, “Wrath”, “Melancholy”, and others. The influence of this particular fantasy has persisted in Venice and found an enthusiastic expansionist in Livio de Marchi, whose project entitled House of Books, begun in 1990, boasted three residential-sized installations by 2025. From the spine- and cover-clad exterior walls, to the carved splayed book for a roof, to the furnishings — everything is made from wood and has a bookish allusion in its shape or function, including the pen-shaped chimney and a pencil-picket fence. The more prolific joker, however, may be Alain Stanké, whose wood sculptures suggest there is no bookish pun he would not carve.

While facetiousness and jokery also characterize the path taken by conceptual book artists by making an inaccessible book the material of the artwork, there is now an edge. Marcel Broodthaers encased his previously published books of poetry in plaster to create Pense-Bête (1964), an elaborate farewell to literary aims. Following Broodthaers, Wolf Vostell purportedly encased his paper-based booklet Betonierungen (“Concretifications”) in a 40 x 28 x 6cm slab of concrete shaped like a book (Frengel et al.), not a farewell but rather an embodied manifesto. Vostell’s Betonbuch (1971) allows for both the interpretive paths of inaccessibility and punning on the book’s material. (Further trickery may be involved; radiographic examinations are inconclusive on whether there really is a booklet embedded in there; see White, below.) Despite, or because of, its title, Barton Lidice Beneš’ inaccessible Untitled (1973) plays differently with titular punning: Beneš has almost obliterated the titles of the condensed books from the spines of his sealed Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series. Jacqueline Rush Lee’s The First Cut (2015) soaks, rolls, and dries the three volumes of the Loeb translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into a single firewood-like chunk; its inaccessibility and title join in a punning allusion to the transformation of Daphne and others into trees or plants to escape the grasp of the gods. Lorenzo Perrone’s inaccessible Kintsugi (2018) casts yet a different titular pun by applying “repair” lines of gold glue to a presumably unbreakable and pristinely white plastered book.

Moritz Küng’s exhibition catalogue Blank. Raw. Illegible … : Artists’ Books as Statements (1960-2022) devotes one of its fifteen thematic sections to inaccessible books, including Vostell’s Betonbuch. Among the ten works included, five of them introduce puns unlike those mentioned so far. They pun on a structural or material feature of “the book”. Timm Ulrich’s Dem Leser den Rücken zukehrend (1970/76) is an hermetically sealed book dummy, whose only text is the title (“Turning your back on the reader”) appearing on the spine of the book. Richard Olson’s Perfect Bind (1978), David C. Stairs’ Boundless (1983), and Nicolas Geiser’s Le non-livre (2006) are each bound on all four sides. Les Coleman’s Glue (2002) qualifies as a fifth inaccessible book with a book-material-referring title, although it does have an accessible table of contents to let you know the different types of glue used to make the different sections of the book inaccessible.

Like art and its history in general, book art is not linear. The point of Anthony Caro’s sculptures that include inaccessible books is not “the book” as it is with the conceptualists. His works carry more directive titles and nudge the viewer’s interpretation away from the inaccessibility and toward the subject the books illustrate or support. His minimalist Book of Eden (1999) is a pulp paper sculpture and lithograph. Its title clarifies, or is clarified by, the two outline images evoking the Adam and Eve myth: an apple and buttocks. Another example is Stave (2013), entitled after his death. The title comes from the source of the work’s inspiration: “a reproduction of an illustrated musical score that Caro had chanced upon inside a catalogue for an Italian exhibition about Duccio” (Sooke). Given Caro’s aims at associating his sculptures with music (see, for example, his Concerto series), Stave is probably not far from the mark and provides a very different example of the title’s directing the viewer’s interpretation. The sculpture may present an inaccessible book, but the suggestions of stave lines and musical notations rise in metal above the open pages. Likewise, Book of Eden‘s lithograph is the minimalist distillation from the blank white paper-pulp book under it.

Stave (2013) stoneware and steel, 46 × 28 × 50 cm.
From Anthony Caro : Bronze and Book Sculptures : 5 April – 24 June 2016. London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 2016.

Anselm Kiefer’s book art is a whirlwind of the above uses of inaccessible books, allusive titles, and the untitled. The several works of his like Das Buch (1979-85) that have an inaccessible lead book hanging against an acrylic-on-canvas background make for interesting pairings with Caro’s Book of Eden. Where Caro backgrounds his blank inaccessible Bible beneath his minimalist lithograph and allusive title, Kiefer foregrounds his books. As he writes in L’Alchimie du Livre (2015):

In the beginning was the word. But in my work, first there were the books made of lead. And those books are interesting in that they are impossible to read, they are too heavy, the lead lets nothing get through, it’s a complete concealment… Lead books are perfect paradoxes then. You can neither thumb through them nor read them, and you will never know what’s inside. (Minssieux-Chamonard, 237).

Kiefer’s Mesopotamia – The High Priestess (1985-89) with its 196 lead volumes ranged across two open book cases contrasts with Francesco Pianta’s loosely shelved, allusive but decorative wooden books in Venice. The work is not background to adjacent artwork or surroundings. Neither is Kiefer’s title an indirect pun allusively signaling after something more like those of other book artists. It is indeed allusive but to something that stands apart from the form and material of the artwork. The distance makes the viewer work backwards from the inaccessibility, the volume, and distressed appearance to connect with the title. When Kiefer uses “untitled” as a title, he often adds explanatory words in brackets after it, as in Untitled (Constellation Book) (2004). Although made of lead, this work, however, is not inaccessible. Its nearly 5.5-foot pages stand open to be read “in the round”.

Johanna Drucker is one of the few writers about artists’ books who has commented at any length on Kiefer’s artist’s books:

Anselm Kiefer’s large-scale books made of heavy dull grey lead, laid open on stands designed to hold their outsized form and ponderous weight absorb the viewer into their profound depths, rather than offering themselves for communication. Such works become affective pieces rather than textual vehicles or message bearing forms, their physical, tactile presence takes the iconic and cultural resonance of book forms and plays it out through an extenuated spectrum of propositions — “what if” this were a book and a book were this, what then? Books of bread, marble, granite, soap and dried leaves pressed with flowers delicate and impossible to manipulate without destroying them. Books of lost objects, found texts, destroyed titles, remade photographs — all gaining some value by using the book form, insisting on its familiar structure as a frame to the otherwise elusive meaning of these constructions. …. (Drucker, 114-15.)

Which brings us back to Illmer’s more totemic works. Each work celebrates the grain and flaws of its material by using the book form. It could do so with a different form (beads, animals, geometric shapes, etc.), but Illmer chose the book. Although an inaccessible book, the object gains s0me value by this choice. And with the totemic title of Untitled, each work demonstrates that title matters as much as material and shape. Untitled offers the viewer’s eyes and hands the challenge that all inert totems offer: to invest its shape, grain, colors, and markings with meaning. But where do such works sit in our appreciation of artists’ books and book art? What are the distinctions between them and those of Kiefer, Caro, Coleman, Geiser, Stairs, Olson, Ulrich, Perrone, Lee, Beneš, Vostell, and Broodthaers? Keep looking and, wherever possible, touching.

Books On Books Collection – Barton Lidice Beneš

FeaturedLeave a comment

Beauty Book; The Life of Gandhi; Untitled (1973)
Barton Lidice Beneš
Mixed media book constructions. Acquired from Rago Arts and Auction Center, 23 March 2021; Allan Stone Gallery, New York; artist.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Beauty Book (1973)
Barton Lidice Beneš
Altered book with human hair. H220 × W140 × D50 mm. Unique. Acquired from Rago Arts and Auction Center, 23 March 2021; Allan Stone Gallery, New York; artist.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Beauty Book consists of human hair wedged between anonymized painted book covers. The use of human hair in artists’ books is unsurprisingly common since it has appeared widely in art in general. Akiko Sakaizumi’s Female Sampler (2001), Diane Jacob’s The Black Hole (2003), Jenine Shereos’ Archive series (2006) and Leaf series (2011-17), Lucy May Schofield’s All the News That’s Fit to Print (20212), Karen Hardy’s Vellicate (2015) and Pull (2018), Sun Young Kang’s Hair (2018), Kellee Morgado’s Don’t Cut Your Hair It’s Beautiful (2020), Alisa Banks’ Afrocentric (????) and History of a People (2023), and Masoumeh Mohtadi’s The Sleep of Reason (2023).

The Sleep of Reason (2023)
Masoumeh Mohtadi
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

The Life of Gandhi
Barton Lidice Beneš
Altered book with embedded nails. H197 x W140 x D86 mm. Unique. Acquired from Rago Arts and Auction Center, 23 March 2021; Allan Stone Gallery, New York; artist.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Beneš’ disrespectfully and adolescently entitled The Life of Gandhi may be the first artist’s book embedded with nails, although Lucas Samaras’ prickly Book 4 (1962) in the Museum of Modern Art might have provided inspiration. Later examples are Floating Concrete Octopus’s* Book of Nails (1992), Daniel Essig’s Book of Nails II (2003), Anne Maree Hunter’s Nailed (2005?), Sasha Meret’s Aggressive Book (2009), Werner Pfeiffer’s Difficult to Fit, Censored Nailbook, and Nailed Shut (ca. 2010-12), and manuel arturo abreu’s Kanga Book (2021). The frequency is considerably less than say treatments 0f Saint Sebastian in painting and sculpture, but the latter had centuries as a subject whereas the book nailed shut has only had decades.

Untitled (1973)
Barton Lidice Beneš
Altered volumes of Reader’s Digest, sanded and varnished. Each H197 x W140 x D85. Unique. Acquired from Rago Arts and Auction Center, 23 March 2021; Allan Stone Gallery, New York; artist.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

With his two Untitled volumes, Beneš may again lay claim to another first-of-its-kind in this category among artists’ books. Two volumes from the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series have had their component titles almost completely sanded off. They have been sealed and varnished to constitute a work more naturally called Untitled than any other work of art assigned that ubiquitous title.

These works of book art and his 1970s mail art interactions with Aart van Barneveld and Ulises Carrión secured Beneš’ position among the Fluxus and neo-Dadaist crowd. His later AIDS-related art such as the Lethal Weapon series (199o’s), made with his infected blood, may dominate his legacy, but these three works of book art sculpture place him alongside John Latham and Dieter Roth as an original and vanguard book artist.

Books On Books Collection – Moritz Küng (ed.)

FeaturedLeave a comment

Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements, 1960-2022 (2023)

Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements, 1960-2022 (2023)
Leopold-Hoesch-Museum and Moritz Küng (ed.)
Softcover with flaps, reversed “Fälzel” stitch bound. H280 x W200 mm. 272 pages. Edition of 1100. Acquired from Walther & Franz Verlag, 10 May 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition by the same name at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, Germany, this tome is far more than an exhibition catalogue. With its thematic structure being a form of commentary on and insight into 259 individual works of 200 book artists, Blank. Raw. Illegible becomes one of the more important reference works on book art to have appeared in the last five years. And this is despite its singular focus on artists’ books blank (most of them), inacessible, or illegible.

The opening spreads for its fifteen thematic sections are shown below.

“wit weiss” takes its title from the third of six blank-page works by herman de vries. In addition to cataloging the other five, the section presents sixteen other variations on the theme, including Christiaan Wikkerink’s Conceptual Art for Dummies (1968, 1977, 2010).

“papierselbstdarstellung” presents us with thirty-three works of “paper self-portrait”. Blank or not, paper takes the conceptual and physical center stage in this section. It’s a pleasure to see the two rare works from the 1970s by J.H. Kocman introducing this group that includes another of herman de vries’ works, one of Bernard Villers’ Mallarméan pieces, some of the output of the prolific polymath Julien Nédélec, a unique piece from Paul Heimbach, Richard Long’s dipped River Avon Book, and more paper-allusive papierselbstdarstellungen.

“Book Articulations” takes its title from the work by Jeffrey Lew, which “articulates” the codex through various poses and color filters, but the fourteen other works included explore other forms of “articulation”. The Oxford English Dictionary gives nineteen definitions. Some of those are obsolete, but we can give Küng the benefit of the doubt that this section’s fifteen works exemplify the ones still active.

“Empty Days” takes its title from the last work in the section, a volume offered as an annual planner whose pages are blank, its months distinguished by different makes of paper, and its bookmarker printed on both sides with reminders of the names of the days and months. Leading with Bruce Harris’ gag book The Nothing Book, the section follows applications of the blank joke to newspapers, notebooks, exercise books, chronicles, and advice books.

The blank books of “life and work” demonstrate subtleties ranging from Paul Heimbach’s careful inclusion of 273 clear sheets to allude to the 273 seconds of John Cage’s 4’33” (1972) to Arnaud Desjardin’s Why I am no longer an artist.

Some of the blank works in “Hidden Meaning” play the joke of being the answer to the title, such as Reasons to Vote for Republicans (2017), a plagiaristic response to Michaels Knowles’ Reasons to Vote for Democrats (2017), published one month before. Other require the reader to uncover the hidden meaning (as in Christian Boltanski’s 2002 Scratch, which reveals images of atrocities when the surfaces of its silvered pages are scratched off) or to hide meaning (as in Russell Weeke’s 2016 blank postcard Hidden Meaning, which has only those words printed in the block where the stamp goes.

The thirty-one works in this section remind us that for book artists, black and white are also colors on the palette and tools in the book artist’s conceptual tool box. “Various colors in black and white” comes from the title of Pierre Bismuth’s 2005 book with onestar press. Onestar boasts that its artists’ books are “strictly unedited by the publisher”, but there is a cost-control constraint: no color inside the books. So Bismuth demanded a different color for each letter of his name and reproduced 139 monochromatic Pantone colors in black and white, representing a variety of hues in shades of gray.

raum means “space, room” in German and is the title of Heinz Gappmayr’s physically and metaphysically blank book. In this section, the other eight blank books take on a more sculptural aspect than others in the exhibition. There’s the massive Your House (2006) by Olafur Eliasson and the slim A Cloud (2007) by Katsumi Komagata, both examples of die cut leaves.

Ximena Pérez Grobet’s Around the Corner (2020) is an extraodinary example of flip-book and fore-edge printing combined. This spread represents the 312 pages of full-page samples of all 259 works in the exhibition.

Redaction, excision, erasure , and substitution are the only four “point blank” methods of making empty words in this section. The rest “verb” the word “empty” and go with pages emptied of words to meet the curator’s criterion for inclusion in “Empty Words”. Two exceptions: Roberto Equisoain’s gradual removal of word spaces and merging of the remaining letters into one in La lectura rápida … (2014) and Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich’s hole-punching of letters in their book naturally entitled Empty Words (2011).

“Anatomy of a Book”, whose title comes from the 2010 unique work by Fiona Banner (aka The Vanity Press), reminds us of how book artists can create works of art by focusing attention on individual parts of the book or simply naming its parts as George Brecht did with This is the Cover of the Book (1972).

The word hermetic means “sealed”. So naturally, “Textos Herméticos” presents ten examples of artists’ books that physically cannot be opened.

Elizabeth Tonnard’s entry The Invisible Book (2012) entitles this section of thirteen works. It was advertised on the artist’s website in an edition of 100, unnumbered and unsigned at the price of €0.00. After Joachim Schmid scarfed up all 100, Tonnard issued a second edition with a limit of one “copy” per customer. It, too, is now “out of print”. The catalogue’s full-page illustration for it is naturally blank, as is that for Enric Farrés Duran’s Para aprender a encontrar, primero hay que saber esconder (which was offered in a physical store for €20, resulting in only a receipt with the artist’s email address so that the buyer could arrange a face-to-face meeting to have the book explained verbally). Likewise Paul Elliman’s Ariel (the aptly named invisible and non-material typeface used, according to the inventor’s correspondence with Küng, to record extinct human and animal languages as well as sounds obsolete machines) is represented by a blank page.

The three invisible books “displayed”! Photo: Courtesy of Moritz Küng, photo by Peter Hinschläger.

There are seven works in this section “Fahrenheit 451”, although one of Dora Garcia’s is not numbered. None of them are blank, raw, or completely illegible. Nevertheless, their appropriateness for the exhibition is particularly underlined by the blackened pages of #241, which can be read if burned (see below).

“Utopia in Utopia” pays homage to Thomas More’s satire Utopia (1516) with sixteen works of varying illegibility, several engendered with invented fonts arising from More’s invention of an alphabet for the Utopians. No blank pages, unless you count Irma Blank’s entry (but we’ve had that pun in an earlier section).

The last section “Sounds of Silence” has only the one entry, and it is a vinyl LP album, not a book. To add to that quibble, there’s oddly no recording of John Cage’s 4″33″ among the tracks of this platter. But as the final entry in the exhibition, it extends the enterprise beyond blankness, rawness, and illegibility to inaudibility!

200 artists, 259 works.

Like Megan Liberty’s exhibition in the same year, Craft & Conceptual Art : Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books, it also demonstrates that the factions of the dematerialized and conceptual works, the democratic multiples, the limited editions and the unique finely or rawly crafted works were not so walled off from one another as implied in polemics, manifestos and critical essays so concerned with defining the “artist’s book”, the existence or placement of its apostrophe and securing its role in the larger history of art. With its captions, numerous full-page images, and curation by Moritz Küng, Blank. Raw. Illegible. joins the list of significant exhibitions documenting the evolving history of the artist’s book that David Senior identified in his contribution to Liberty’s catalogue:

Germano Celant’s Book as Artwork 1960/1972 (1972)
Dianne Perry Vanderlip’s Artists Books (1973)
Daniel Fendrick’s The Book as Art (1976)
Manfred Schneckburger’s dOCUMENTA 6 (1977)
Barbara London’s Bookworks (1977)
Penelope Suess’ Women and the Printing Arts (1977)
Jacki Apple’s Notebooks, Workbooks, Scripts, and Scores (1977)
Judith Hoffberg and Joan Hugo’s Artwords and Bookworks (1978)
Martha Wilson and Peter Frank’s Artists’ Books USA (1978)
Rose Slivka’s Book Makers (1979)
Horace Brockington’s Dialects: Diverse Bookworks by Black and Hispanic Artists (1980)
Norman Colp’s Entrapped: The Book as Container (1981)
Walker Art Center’s Artists’ Books Introduction (1981)
Clive Phillpot’s Collaborations (1982)
Norman Colp’s From Coast to Coast (1983)
Center for Book Arts’ The First Decade (1984)
Center for Book Arts’ Book Artists in Residence: 5 Programs (1985)
Betty Bright’s Midwest Contemporary Book Art (1985)
Steve Woodall’s Out West (1998)

Others that could be added include

Susi Bloch’s The Book Stripped Bare : A Survey of Books by 20th Century Artists and Writers  (1973)
Clive Phillpot’s Artist’s Books : From the Traditional to the Avantgarde (1982)
Klaus Groh and Harmann Havekost’s Artists’ Books / Künstlerbücher Buchobjekte / Livres d’Artistes / Libri Oggetti (1986)
David J. Henry’s 1986. Beyond Words: The Art of the Book (1986)
Jeffrey Abt and Buzz Spector’s The Book Made Art (1986)
Todd Alden’s The Library of Babel (1991)
Carol Barton and Diane Shaw’s Science and the Artist’s Book (1995)
Cornelia Lauf and Clive Phillpot’s Artist/author : contemporary artists’ books (1998)
Mary Austin’s Exploding the Codex : The Theater of the Book  (2012)
Laura J. Hoptman’s Ecstatic Alphabets (2012)
Marcia Reed and Glenn Phillips’ Artists and Their Books : Books and Their Artists (2018)
Venetia Porter’s Artists Making Books : Poetry to Politics (2023)
Stefan Soltek’s Unbound (2023)
Kestutis Vasiliunas’ 1st International Artist‘s Book Triennial Vilnius (1997) to the “10th International Artist’s Book Triennial Vilnius (2024)

and Guy Schraenen’s boxed set of 25 catalogues of exhibitions organized by him and representing the archive donated to Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen, Germany.

Above all, Blank. Raw. Illegible. … Artists’ Books as Statements (2023) demonstrates that the book constitutes a medium for, and genre of, Art. No library or collection that aims to represent book art or Art should be without it.

Bookmarking Book Art – “Bookmorphs from Greece and the UK” at The Hellenic Centre

Featured3 Comments

Bookmorph n. (bōk+μoρφ): a portmanteau word referring to casebound books which have been modified; an emergent branch of sculpture in which textual content is often downgraded; treatments include chewing, cutting, drilling, entombing, pulping, ripping, shooting (with a firearm), siliconising, etc; any codex fundamentally altered or warped by an artist; a site of entropic processes designed to return pages to cellulose fibre, and/or the creation of a fungal landscape; a bibliographic montrosity. Michael Hampton, arts writer, May 2025

The curators’ choice of title and epigram for this exhibition is somewhat daring. Although they have included plenty of bibliographical montrosities that fit Hampton’s definition, there are plenty of bibliographical beauties, too — even among the “monstrosities”. A strong attraction of this exhibition is that it presents so many recent works from Greek book artists. Even more attractive is its hands-on display of most of the works.

Anneta Spanoudaki’s Natura Morta (2025) is a striking case in point:

Natura Morta (2025) Anneta Spanoudaki
Paper cut on different types of paper and photography. 480 × 220 mm. Photos: Books On Books.

Another case in point is Dimitris Skourogiannis’ 100% An Artist’s Bible (2025). To be turned, its large “leaves” require metal rings on the fore-edge.

100% An Artist’s Bible (2025) Dimitris Skourogiannis
Japanese paper, cardboard, wood, fragments of porcelain objects, print, metal rings, acrylic pains, fabris, tulle, and metallic threads. 500 x 350 x 140 mm.
Photos: Books On Books.

Thick leaves seemed to be the order of the day. On heavy black card, Thodoros Brouskomatis’ 10 Artificial Prayers (2025) presents surreal collages challenging the theme of “Madonna and Child” and couplets from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “supplica a mia madre”.

10 Artificial Prayers (2025) Thodoros Brouskomatis
Printed digital artworks on photographic paper, cardboard, and leather. 300 x 250 mm.
Photos: Books On Books.

On slightly thinner card, Aris Stoidis’ To the other side and back (2025) carries a sculptural image on every page. The work straddles the borders of sculpture, photobook, and artist’s book. Stoidis writes, “Ever since my first pieces, I have been “receiving” images that I’ve materialized without really comprehending them myself. They simply exerted an inexplicable power on me.” The book comes in a plexiglas box with a papercut sculpture (not pictured here).

To the other side and back (2025) Aris Stoidis
Photographic prints on card. 270 x 270 x 20 mm.
Photos: Books On Books.

On still thinner leaves, Ismini Bonatsou’s Little Red Riding Hood (2025) nevertheless projects striking depth with its montage of papercut pages, acrylics, and pencil. Just as striking is the contemporary reversioning of the fairy tale.

Little Red Riding Hood (2025) Ismini Bonatsou
Acrylics, pencil, and papercuts. 450 x 300 mm.
Photos: Books On Books.

Given that the portmanteau term “bookmorph” comes from Michael Hampton, it seems appropriate that he has two works on display. Although one of them is under glass, 12 Chairs (bookmorph) (2012), the other is not. RAGE PEN by Hampton and David Blackmore is the UK contingent’s only work produced in 2025. Others from the UK contingent include Sarah Bodman, BOOKEND, Jonathan Callan, Joe Devlin, Stephen Emmerson, SJ Fowler, Rowena Hughes, and the Inscription Journal editors (Gill Partington, Simon Morris, Adam Smyth). RAGE PEN is also particularly appropriate because it requires a ruler to separate its perforated fore-edges. The exhibition provides one along with multiple pairs of white gloves. Really hands-on.

The participating Greek artists also include Eleni Angelou, Nikos Arvanitis, Rania Bellou, Maria Bourbou, Natassa Chelioti-Naga, Ioanna Delfino, Anna Dimitriou, Antonia Iroidou, Eleni Kastrinogianni, Peggy Kliafa, Alexia Kokkinou, Georgia Kotretsos, Nikos Kryonidis, Vasiliki Lefkaditi, Eleni Maragaki, Kyriaki Mavrogeorgi, Despina Meimaroglou, Christina Mitrentse, Fiona Mouzakitis, Kiki Perivolari, Stamatis Schizakis, Ifigeneia Sdoukou, Christina Sgouromiti, Danai Simou, Nectarios Stamatopoulos, Despina Stavrou, Evangelos Tasios, Yannis Tzortzis, and Leonie Yagdjoglou.

Congratulations and thanks to the curators — Christina Mitrentse, Fiona Mouzakitis, and Despina Stavrou — for bringing together this selection of outstanding works.

The Hellenic Centre opens at 11:00 and closes at 17:00, Tueday through Friday, so the chances to visit by the 28th of November are limited. The brief catalogue that documents the exhibition and these few photos cannot substitute for tactile engagement with the works on display. An hour and a half passed in a flicker.

Bookmarking Book Art – Bookscapes Collective

2025/10/182025/12/24Books On BooksLeave a comment

When I wrote earlier that knot theory seems to be having a moment this year, I was unaware that the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret in London was hosting an exhibition called

Knots: Medicine and Superstition

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the Bookscape Collective’s sculpture “After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains” (2025). Hanging from the garret’s beams, this mass of red fibers, ribbon, thread, and wood aptly entwines the auras of art, poetry, and superstition together with the venue’s association with surgical knots and medicinal herbs.

“After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains” (2025)
Sculpture (red fibres, wood, red thread)
Bookscapes Collective
(Chris Ruston; Heather Hunter; Jo Howe; Jen Fox; Karen Apps; Jules Allen)

The sculpture’s title comes from the first line of this sonnet by John Keats (1795 – 1821):

After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains.
The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves
Budding—fruit ripening in stillness—Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves—
Sweet Sappho’s cheek—a smiling infant’s breath—
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs—
A woodland rivulet—a Poet’s death.

As the museum’s caption reminds the visitor:

Knots have been part of everyday life for millennia. Alongside practical uses, they have attracted many superstitious and magical properties. Knots are found among the earliest prehistoric amulets designed to ward off evil, and today knots are essential for suturing the body after surgery, with knot practice forming a fundamental part of contemporary surgical training.

The Bookscapes Collective brings together Chris Ruston, Heather Hunter, Jo Howe, Jen Fox, Karen Apps, and Jules Allen. In addition to the central collaborative piece, the exhibition displays twenty-six additional works by these artists that each reiterate the knots binding together the worlds of science and art.

Update: Here are some images from a visit.

Books On Books Collection – Erica Van Horn (II)

2025/09/132025/12/24Books On BooksLeave a comment

Descriptions of Literature by Gertrude Stein: Handwritten by Erica Van Horn (2019)

Cover of the book 'Descriptions of Literature' by Gertrude Stein, handwritten by Erica Van Horn, featuring a light purple fabric texture with the title and author's name in contrasting text.

Descriptions of Literature by Gertrude Stein: Handwritten by Erica Van Horn (2019)
Erica Van Horn
Limited edition (unknown quantity). H157 x W146 mm. [144] pages. Acquired from Books about Art, 2 July 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Appropriation has its reasons. Gertrude Stein’s description of literature with which Erica Van Horn begins her scribal appropriation of sixty-six of Stein’s exacting and elusive apothegms is particularly appropriate. In the brief afterword, Van Horn explains that she has always been proud of her handwriting and loves writing by hand. So, this book “shows that the next and best is to be found out when there is pleasure in the reason” as its next folio shows: Van Horn’s pleasure in the reason is her pleasure in the reason.

Continue reading →

Books On Books Collection – Linda Toigo

2025/09/072025/12/24Books On BooksLeave a comment

Altered books as artists’ books present a seemingly endless variety.

Some may be the conversion of old books into just-legible new ones as in A Humument redacted with ink, paint, excision, and collage by Tom Phillips, Tree of Codes mechanically excised by Jonathan Safran Foer, or The Eaten Heart scalpeled into existence by Carolyn Thompson. They give us a new work to read page by page extracted page by page from the earlier work, which remains more or less (mainly less) present in our hands.

Others like Marcel Broodthaers’ page-by-page redactions of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés by ink in one case and excision in another or Michalis Pichler’s similar reformatting and excision of the same poem in clear acrylic or Jérémie Bennequin’s page-by-page erasures of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past give us artists’ books that make the altered books illegible but still accessible page by page.

Other altered books as artists’ books are mainly one-off spatial objects that can be taken in in one go — not necessarily in just a glance but in the look or gaze given to a sculpture or painting. The ground up and encased works in Literaturwurst by Dieter Roth. The sealed, painted, nailed, and “hairied” works of Barton Lidice Beneš. The torn works of Buzz Spector. The sandblasted works of Guy Laramée. The glued and carved works of Brian Dettmer. The bullet-hole-ridden Point Blank by Kendell Geers. The pun-packed moebius-sculpted Red Infinity #4 by Doug Beube. They give us artists’ books that make the altered books illegible and inaccessible as books.

With Medieval and Modern History (Suggestions for Further Study for Jack Hroswith) (2013), a schoolboy’s textbook burnt into near illegibility but still accessible page by page, Linda Toigo adds an artist’s book that distinctively broadens the variety of alterations and their outcomes.

Medieval and Modern History (Suggestions for Further Study for Jack Hroswith) (2013)

Close-up of a worn book titled 'Medieval and Modern History', showing faded text and staining on a beige spine.

A casebound, altered hardback book with a textured green cover, resting on a wooden surface.

Medieval and Modern History (Suggestions for Further Study for Jack Hroswith) (2013)
Linda Toigo
Altered casebound hardback. H195 x W135 x D40 mm. 832 pages. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 30 August 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Continue reading →

Books On Books Collection – Cathryn Miller (II)

2025/05/012025/10/14Books On Books2 Comments

recomp (2013-23)

recomp (2013-23)
Cathryn Miller
Hinged and clasped diptych, housing an altered book, explanatory booklet, and loose colophon. Unique. Acquired from Vamp & Tramp Booksellers, 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Recomp (2013-2023) is a collaboration with a colony of bald-faced hornets. Having reviewed Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s decomp (2013), their artists’ book devised by exposing several copies of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to the elements, Cathryn Miller followed suit and hung her reviewer’s copy of decomp in a tree. Over time, the wind, rain, and snow sent the book to the forest floor where it fell apart. Hornets had done their part in its decomposition, nibbling away at its edges and weakening the structure. Their conversion of the book into cellulose for their nest was also the start of their artistic partnership with Miller. Eventually the nest, too, became prey to the elements or marauders and fell and broke apart on the ground. Miller and photographer husband David recorded all this and gathered up the book fragments and broken nest.

Continue reading →

Books On Books Collection – Karen Shaw

2025/04/042025/10/10Books On BooksLeave a comment

In the 1970s, post-Minimalism, post-Conceptualism, Language-based Art, Neo-Dada, Fluxus, Arte Povera, OuLiPo, the commodification of art and the “dematerialization of the art object” — all made a messy milieu for visual and literary artists. According to Stefan Klima, this is also the period when the messy notion of the artist’s book or “book art” gained recognition as a genre with exhibitions curated by Dianne Vanderlip for Moore College of Art and Design, Germano Celant for Nigel Greenwood Gallery, and Martin Attwood for the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Into this environment came Bronx-born Karen Shaw, an aspiring artist and data analyst for the broadcaster NBC. On the job, she learned about the hash function — that one-way cryptographic algorithm that condenses input data of any size into an output of fixed lengths. When she saw that she could change a word into a number by assigning each letter a number according to its place in the alphabet and then summing them up, she arrived at the idea of reducing “the masterpieces of literature, poetry and prose to a number, which would signify the ‘essence’ of the work”.

After applying the approach to Blake, Shelley, Keats and others, she tackled the King James version of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. Here’s her description of the procedure:

I wrote the numerical equivalent of each letter under each letter … in the Bible itself. Then I added up the number/letter of each word until I had the sum for each word, verse, and chapter. I then recorded the sums in an accounting book. This became the second version …. Next I added it all up on adding tapes, one tape for each chapter, which I measured to find out the length of each chapter. I then attached each labeled tape to a rod at the edge of a shelf that had been built to hold the work. This was the third version …. (Sellem, “Karen Shaw = 100”.)

Here was an utterly different form of artist’s book by alteration: an assemblage of a “Rembrandt” Bible’s St. Matthew Gospel with each letter hand-numbered according to its place in the alphabet; each of the gospel’s words summed and recorded in an accounting book with all of its word-sums summed to its essence of 1,116,071; and the “scrolls” of the adding machine tapes for each chapter ranged alongside the Bible and accounting book. For Shaw, this altered-book form of art was merely a first step into a series of discoveries and inventions that led to a lifetime of artistic exploration and creation.

As she plied her calculations, she noticed that obviously many words had the same number. The impulse to collect words equalling 100 (the sum of her name’s letters) led to creating a numerical dictionary — the Sumantic Vocabulary Collection — listing words with equal sums. With that, Shaw began to see words in what she called “the numerical waste” surrounding her: numbers on receipts, savings coupons clipped from newspapers, brand labels, barcodes and pricing stickers and other everyday consumer signage. Strange poems could be derived from them. Eventually “sumantic” — playing on sum and semantics — evolved into “summantics” as her description of her artistic methodology. Her 1978 artist’s book Market Research spells (or numbers?) this out in its foreword.

Market Research (1978)

Market Research (1978)
Karen Shaw
Softcover booklet, saddle stitched with staples, translucent fly leaves. H280 x W215 mm. 24 pages. Acquired from , .
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

In a process I call summantics, I designate a numerical equivalent to each letter of the alphabet according to its position: A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=5, F=6, G=7, H=8, I=9, J=10, K=11, L=12, M=13, N=14, O=15, P=16, Q=17, R=18, S=19, T=20, U=21, V=22, W=23, X=24, Y=25, Z=26. A word is spelled out numerically and added to reach the sum of a word. Consider the number 33. It is the sum of MEAN = 13+5+1+14 = 33, also ALAS = 1+12+1+19 = 33 and:

DIAS CHEAP NAME ALIBI COMB CAMP FIND SEED
THE GATE SAID RAN ILL MAGIC EWE KEEL
CEASE BOLD HERB AFFABLE OR WEE COIF GAY

to mention a few. Numbers are transcribed into words of the equivalent sum and collected in a numerically ordered vocabulary. Since a particular number can equal the sum of various words the choice is determined by mood, imagination, sound, syntax and/or grammatical structure.

Summantics has its origins in gematria, a cabalistic method of interpretation of the scriptures as well as late twentieth century software systems. Where today’s technocrats reduce all manner of human endeavor to statistical data, I reverse the process believing it to be more enlightening, humorous and humane.

Given the humor of the work’s opening, it’s likely that the title Market Research cheekily refers to her data analysis work with NBC questionnaires completed by mothers for tracking the impact of TV violence on their young sons.

In his review of the 1978 exhibition “Artists’ Books and Notations” (Touchstone Gallery, 118 E. 64th Street, New York), Lawrence Alloway noted Karen Shaw’s methodology as another instance of “the ways by which language has entered recent visual art, formerly protected from such incursions by the prestige of Form. If artists use words in their work, it is not because they are now more dependent on writers or on theory than in the past, as has been suggested, but because language has become available as subject matter” (p.653). With Shaw in particular, it was a case of language and numbers becoming available as subject matter.

George Orwell 1984 (1984-89)

George Orwell 1984 (1984-89)
Karen Shaw
Diptych box covered with marbled paper on front and spine, wrought iron numerals 1984 and plastic letters fixed to front cover, translucent flyleaf with inked symbols and numbers, with text colored and cut out from translucent paper, plexiglas glued to wooden case with gessoed interior and 11 found items bearing the number 84, each fixed to the interior wooden panel with a black-bead-headed pin. H360 x W290 x D40 mm. Unique work. Acquired from Peter Kiefer Buch- und Kunstauktionen, 21 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Whether tabulating words or deciphering numbers, Shaw leaned further into three-dimensional assemblages resembling one- or two-page books. The somewhat-damaged homage George Orwell 1984 blends her interest in transposing literary works into hash codes with that of reversing numbers in the numerical wasteland into words with the help of her dictionary. Shaw plays off Orwell’s idea of double-speak by splitting his title in two. The first half is the sum of the numerical values of the letters in “idea”, appropriate for an idea-driven book. For the second half, however, she seeks out words that sum up to 84, letrasets them on clear plastic, and pins them over found and sometimes manipulated objects. A word may allude to its found object, or it may vaguely relate to Orwell’s book, or whether there’s any association at all may be obscure. A Belmont racetrack betting slip makes an ironic match with “foolish”, but seems unrelated to the novel. The German word Verrat translates as “betrayal”, which certainly fits the book, but what it has to do with the queue ticket (manipulated to show “84”) is unclear. That the word “calamity” has spun upside down over its manipulated token is an accidental irony, and what association the overwritten token has with the word or novel is also unclear.

Like Louis Lüthi’s A Die with Twenty-six Faces (2019), built on a collection of literary works entitled with a single letter, Shaw might have extended this part of her oeuvre with other number-titled works: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Had she been inclined, she could have even used Lüthi’s book and its reference to Marcel Broodthaers’ quip “The alphabet is a die with 26 faces”. These might have yielded results more compelling than George Orwell 1984, but she would have still been captive to finding luckily appropriate words with the right word-sums.

Two summantic works not in the collection — Less is More: Proof in 15 Languages (1999) and Summantic Proofs (2019) — are more compelling and uncanny. The fact that so many languages’ words for “less” have word-sums greater than the word-sums for the words for “more” is simply uncanny, and Shaw’s typography, color and layout in her spiral sketchbook presentation are compelling.

Less is More: Proof in 15 Languages (1999)
Karen Shaw
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Also uncanny is her later collection of “proofs” in which she demonstrates that the word-sum for “odd” is an odd number, that the word-sum for “prime” is a prime number, and that the word-sum for “square” is 9 x 9. The pop-up equals sign, the ruler-drawn lines and the hand-colored script in this late mock-up reflect her ongoing artistic drive.

Summantic Proofs (2019)
Karen Shaw
Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

The most striking and consistent of Shaw’s works in the collection departs from her summantic method. It nevertheless embodies the ingenuity, humor, and humanity at play in her art.

Etymological-Entomological Specimens of the World (1993)

Etymological-Entomological Specimens of the World (1993)
Karen Shaw
Nine codex-shaped boxes of paper-covered boards, each opening to plexiglas-covered diptychs miniature books of various sizes posed as butterflies among text, handcut and painted paper foliage and flowers. H368 x W268 x D77 mm. Acquired from Karen Shaw, 8 October 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Jean Sellem’s interview with Shaw in the bilingual review Heterogénesis has been quoted earlier. In that exchange, we are lucky to have Shaw’s reply to question: “Why do you combine the concept of entomology with that of etymology?”

KS : In the past, I always used to confuse those two words. I knew the definition of each of them, but I couldn’t remember which definition belonged to which word. Eventually, I taught myself a mnemonic method to remember which word was which. “Ent” sounds like ant, so entomology is the study of insects, and so etymology is the study of words. When I was looking for a format for my ideas, using entomology pins seemed like the perfect way to attach words to numbers. The closeness of the spelling and the complicity of the two words was fun and made sense to me. The needles themselves are beautiful, long and thin. It just seemed like the perfect solution.

It’s happenstance. It’s the physical material. It’s the fun and humor of wordplay. It’s the artistic eye that finds meanings at the curious intersections of nature and language. All of this in Karen Shaw comes to the fore in the nine volumes of Etymological-Entomological Specimens of the World (1993). The top, bottom and fore edges of these book-shaped diptychs mimic closed books, whose mimicry yields to a mimicry of entomological display cases under clear covering, which in turn yields to miniature dictionaries posed to mimic butterflies. A mnemonic solution to an unwanted confusion of words leads to the book artist’s deliberate visual and verbal punning of dictionaries with insects.

In the interview, the only movements and artists directly influencing her work that Shaw remembers are Dada, new-Dadaism, Eva Hesse, On Kawara, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth and Conceptual Art. For Specimens, she has noted in correspondence a direct inspiration: the interest of Vladimir Nabokov in lepidoptery. Seeing butterflies as miniature dictionaries also overlaps a bit with Nabokov’s perceiving letters of the alphabet as having colors. Nabokov’s chasing butterflies and leaping from letter to color finds a simulacrum in Shaw’s chasing words, numbers, and meaning in her everyday environs with her artist’s book butterfly net.