RAGE PEN (2025)

RAGE PEN (2025)
David Blackmore and Michael Hampton
Soft cover, mitre sawn head and foot, perforated fore-edge. H210 x W148 mm. [108] pages. Edition of 100. Acquired from Folium, 13 November 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Folium, the publisher, describes RAGE PEN as “developed from a relational piece of the same name held at Chisenhale Studios 2017/18”. Per the Museum of Modern Art, relational aesthetics is

A mode of art practice that establishes spaces, situations, or environments for a variety of social interactions. In essence, the social space or interaction becomes the work of art itself. The term was popularized by French critic and curator Nicholas Bourriaud in 1998.

RAGE PEN‘s environment was a safe rage room equipped with a variety of handheld tools. Anonymous members of the public, or “ventees”, were invited to name an object that had caused them frustration, don protective equipment, and enter the shuttered room to smash said objects. The interactions filmed and photographed by David Blackmore formed the images in RAGE PEN the book. Holding the book with its mitre-sawn top and bottom edges and its perforated, still-sealed fore-edges, we might suspect that we are being invited into our very own private relational aesthetic piece.

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