Jessica Bardsley
Tony Cruz
Moyra Davey
Eva Kotatkova
FEBRUARY 15–APRIL 6, 2013
Sterling Lawrence
Judith Leemann
figure 6
Gareth Long
Johana Moscoso
Liz Sales
Sebastian Schmieg
Silvio Lorusso
Sebura&Gartelmann
Matthew Girson
fig. 1 (Cover)
Liz Sales, steam, 2010.
c-print.
fig. 2
Moyra Davey,
Newsstand No. 12, 1994.
c-print.
Courtesy of Murray Guy, New York
fig. 3
Johana Moscoso,
Delirio / Delirium, 2013.
fig. 4
Eva Kotátková,
untitled from the exhibition Controlled
Memory Loss, 2010.
Courtesy of hunt kastner, Prague.
figure 7
TEXT & THE READING BODY IN CONTEMPORARY ART
fig. 5
Gareth Long,
Bouvard and Pecuchet’s Invented Desk for
Copying—Construction Diagram—Liam Gillick
Version (Aluminum) , 2012.
Courtesy of the collection of Kate Werble
Gallery, New York.
fig. 6
Liz Sales,
the philosophy, 2011.
fig. 7
Judith Leemann,
Reading Aloud, installation mockup, 2013.
We gratefully acknowledge the artists and Murray Guy Gallery (New York), hunt kastner (Prague) and Kate Werble
Gallery (New York) for loans of artwork that made this exhibition possible.
Installation support by Keshon Johns, Jeremy Jennings, Katherine Kullen, John Browe, Adrienne Canzolino, Michael
LaHood, Kate Morgan, Megan Pitcher, Leonardo Selvaggio, Cristina Valdez, Alex Borgen and Elizabeth Isakson-Dado.
colum.edu/bookandpaper
Gallery Hours:
Monday–Saturday, 10-6pm
Free admission
STRUCTURES FOR READING
1104 S Wabash Ave
2nd Floor
Chicago, IL 60605
STRUCTURES FOR READING
Back in the white cube, writer Garrett Stewart
has called the process of removing books
from their functional environments in order
to rework them as art objects, or bookworks,
“demediation.”5 Referring specifically to books
the visual artist cuts, casts, wraps, tears or
alters, then relegates to the gallery space,
Stewart asserts that an artist “silences” that
text by alienating its bookform from its original
purpose. While this exhibition largely focuses
on books in art (as opposed to bookworks) one
is easily dissatisfied with the complete negation
of meaning that Stewart’s “demediaton” implies. Why does the white cube and an artist’s
hand render a book totally mute?
TEXT & THE READING BODY IN CONTEMPORARY ART
Facebook, for readers) for a primer in the future
of browser-based reading as an individual
activity located within the collective,
networked imaginary.
We also see a commitment to innovation
within the realm of art, except the artists’ space
for production is a speculative one: in the studio
the ordinary object is re-imagined in the
service of affect, aesthetic or subversion.
Johana Moscoso’s emotional prosthetic Delirio
/Delirium (see figure 3) and Eva Kotátková’s
sculptural appendages (see figure 4) may only
make reading harder. And Gareth Long’s Invented Desk for Copying, (see figure 5) a form that
originated in Flaubert’s last novel, Bouvard and
Pécuchet, re-imagines the desk as a communal
space for two.
That a making life is also a reading
life must explain the proliferation of the
book-object sited within visual art...
figure 2
In a recent review of an anthology of Virginia
Woolf’s essays, Benjamin Schwartz, writing for
The Atlantic, pointed out that she “lived by and
championed a generously democratic vision
of literature and of the reading life—‘a pursuit,’
she somewhat wistfully acknowledged, ‘which
devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to
leave behind it nothing very substantial.’”1
Woolf’s claims to non-substantiality aside, it
is often the case that writers and artists are also
the most prolific readers—their lives bound in
an endless cycle of knowledge production and
consumption. That a making life is also a
reading life must explain the proliferation of the
book-object sited within visual art over the last
several centuries, particularly in painting,
drawing and sculpture. And because on a global
scale, the book has been a rapidly evolving
cultural object and commodity, a red hot symbol
of our struggles with contemporaneity,2 it has
been a particularly ubiquitous element in
contemporary art’s newer manifestations:
installation, video and new media works.
Accordingly, Structures for Reading is an experimental exhibition of artworks that engage or
visualize the act of reading, often in new ways.
All the while, they locate books themselves in
relation to the body, architecture, or, what
could be considered “landscapes for reading.”
The exhibition represents an international
perspective from an interdisciplinary selection
of artists. Most artworks modulate, house or
mediate actual books, codex or e-reader.
From the marketplace to the academy,
online and “in person,” the activity of reading
and books themselves (as culture and
commodity) are being urgently reimagined
—most often with an emphasis on the social.
For example, one need not look farther than
The Criterion Collection co-founder Bob Stein’s
entrepreneurial project SocialBook (think
Reading (with that social twist) has also been
the subject of much art institutional inquiry.
For example, the Tate Modern’s Learn to Read
exhibition (2007) explored the expressive
potential of “failed articultions, shifts and
slippages, memories and humor” through the
work of artists like John Baldessari, Shannon
Ebner and Jonathan Monk. In 2013, the GotheInstitute New York Library organized The End(s)
of the Library, a series of commissioned
exhibitions that “address how previous library
configurations have given way to new forms
and revised values in the digital age” while
“demanding new readings of its organizational
frameworks.” The art and literary wunderkind
collective Triple Canopy curated a recent seminar Automatic Reading that considered reading
as what one might call a “parastudio” element
of one’s contemporary art practice:
Reading is frequently understood as a private
encounter with characters, narratives, and, perhaps,
an author… rather than producing meaning, tout
court, reading in a conceptual sense may become an
encounter with an object, an audience, or social
context—or with discourse itself… conceptual reading
establishes new uses for books and texts, even as it
figure 3
takes reading out of the realm of contemplation
and into the space of action.3
While tempting to consider it as such, a conceptual move towards the complex or spatial
“reading”of reading within a multi-faceted art
practice is not new. One need only look to Vito
Acconci for an earnest articulation of reading-aswriting-as-performance as-poetry-as-public action.
When addressing his move “off the page” from
poetry into performance art in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, he claimed:
The pieces took me off my writer’s desk and
out onto the street. But the poems were
already performances: the page was a field
over which I as writer, and then you as reader,
travelled. So the first pieces, conversely, made
me travel through a city the way I had travelled
across a page...
...I treated my body like the page I had been
writing on; I inscribed my body—with bite marks,
with lipstick (Applications, 1970), with wall paint
(Run-Off, 1970)—the way I had tried to inscribe
the page with material objects, the way I had tried
to turn words into material objects that could
be inscribed on the page.4
With both the city and his body as “page”
and the spectator as “reader” this passage
exemplifies the affinity many artists have
for using the terminology of the book and the
language around reading (and writing) metaphorically in relation to their work in complex,
conceptual ways. Judith ’s Reading
Aloud is a series of podcasts for which she
weaves disparate texts into “recursive loops
of almost story.” Her bolt of fabric (see figure
7) commits over five hours of these texts to a
page of sorts: in the gallery this sculpture has
a double life as an artist’s book. Because the
fabric is sold by the yard during the exhibition,
one hopes her texts will be worn as garments,
rendering new articulations of Acconci’s
“body as page.”
In Liz Sales’ work we do see a book that has
been rendered un-openable—the philosophy
(figure 6) is useless as a typical readable object.
But we still understand the title, and she has
given the book a new functionality as a device
for reading an image. Therefore, this exhibition proposes that artists actually perform a
“remediation” of sorts when they site the book
as object or idea within a broader visual project.
Through aesthetic assertions and discursive
frameworks, artists address not only the book
as cultural object, commodity and transmitter
of a specific set of ideas, but also the activity
of reading itself. While not “pure,” a mimetic
activity takes place, and the book’s original text
is rarely altogether lost.
figure 4
Perhaps most crucial to the artist-driven
“remediation” this exhibition aims to make
legible, is that the exhibition itself exists as an
elaboration of Vito Acconci, Bob Stein and Triple
Canopy’s (to name a few) chorus of assertions
that reading is incredibly multi-located within
both the personal “realm of contemplation”
and the more public “space of action.”
—Jessica Cochran
1. Benjamin Schwartz, “The Education of Virginia Woolf,”
review of The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6: 1933–
1941, by Stuart N. Clarke (editor), The Atlantic, December,
2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine
/archive/2012/12/education-virginia-woolf/309168.
2. For more on the idea of contemporaneity and its
relationship to contemporary art, see What’s
Contemporary Art?, by Terry Smith.
3. http://canopycanopycanopy.com/programs/73
4. pressPLAY: Contemporary Artists in Conversation
(London: Phaidon Press, 2005), 12.
figure 5
5. Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).