Conceptual art

Title: Overread.

Dimensions: 11' x 13'; height variable.

Materials: Paper, wood, ink.

Analysis: In Overread, the artist deconstructs normative conceptions of canonicity, gender, genre, race, class, aesthetics, discourse, periodization, nationality, sexuality, and rationality.  Canonical and non-canonical texts in multiple genres are organized in piles, thereby demonstrating the effect of post-globalized capitalist marketing systems on current structures of academic critical practice.  Practitioners of neo-formalist poetry find themselves in close contact with anonymous evangelical novelists, suggesting the ease with which the market collapses any attempt to erect a thoroughly objective system of aesthetic demarcations.  Moreover, the sheer excessive materiality of the piles themselves illustrates the fantasy of total consumption embodied in the nature of the ardent bibliophile.  While the artist organizes texts according to the first letter of the author's name, they are as yet unalphabetized, thereby breaking down the artificial constraints of categorization imposed by the hegemonic demands of both bookstores and libraries alike.  (On the systems of oppression promulgated by librarians, see Minnie A. Chur-Professor, "Of Decimals and Decimation: Countering the Colonialist Narratives of the Dewey Decimal System," Journal of Thoroughly Unnecessary Scholarship 66.6 (2007): 1-1.5.)  Finally, the spatial and temporal instability of this art installation, which is destined to give way to a rationalized system of shelving, indicates the fearsome power of Western demands for clarity.  See also the artist's earlier installation. 

Comments

[perilla]

Hee hee! Thank you!

(delurking briefly--love your blog, esp. your sense of humor)

[Richard Heft]

Bibliophiles shelve; bibliomaniacs pile.

See Eliot, T.S., "These fragments I have shored against my ruin," not "stacked against my ruin."

[Mom]

Your earliest ephemeral artwork using this medium was interactive in its materiality. At the age of 17-18 months, you repeatedly relocated your father's books from the bottom bookshelf to the floor and surrounded yourself with historical learning by sitting in the middle of the resulting cascading pile. Unlike your current artwork, which is static in its apparent chaos, your infantile production, possibly a self-portrait, invited the viewer and the artist to experience repetitive movement. Specifically, you opened and closed the books with loving care and I put them all back (over and over and over again.)

Never one to discourage artistic experimentation, I bought you a little bockcase where I placed all of your books. Every day you relocated all of them to the floor and sat in their midst "reading" every one in turn.

After a long artistic hiatus, you have now produced a work reminiscent of your earlier masterpiece, but in a mature and eerily intimidating form.

[CCPhysicist]

That was brilliant (in the American, not the British, sense)!

You have clearly recovered from the past school year and are ready to tilt at young windmills once again.

And Mom, well, that left me speechlessly grinning ear to ear.