ARTISTS

WHO

MAKE

BOOKS

Hanne DarbovenHans-Peter FeldmannWade GuytonOn KawaraMartin KippenbergerWalther König A CONVERSATION

Sol LeWittRichard LongGordon Matta-ClarkBjarne MelgaardAnnette MessagerLynda MorrisBOOK AS ARTWORK, 1960 TO 1972

Jack PiersonSigmar PolkeRichard PrinceGerhard RichterDieter RothEdward RuschaTaryn SimonJosh SmithWolfgang TillmansAndy Warhol Lawrence WeinerChristopher Wool

CatalogueIndexImage CreditsAcknowledgmentsAuthor bios

Introduction

Tauba Auerbach A CONVERSATION

John BaldessariAlighiero e BoettiChristian BoltanskiMarcel BroodthaersStanley BrouwnBenjamin H. D. BuchlohLOOKING BACK AT BOOKS

James Lee ByarsSophie CalleMaurizio CattelanPaul ChanA CONVERSATION

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5

Working across various media, Tauba Auerbach engages with numerous scientific and formal topics, such as symbolic systems, visual perception, and the structural significance of patterning. Her diverse output includes rainbow-hued trompe-l’oeil canvases, hand-wrought glass helices, elegantly calligraphed text-based drawings, and books—from zines to technically advanced sculptural volumes to unique takes on the exhibition catalogue. In 2013 she founded Diagonal Press, a publishing project devoted to producing books in open editions, in a bid to avoid typical art-market mechanisms (dealers, galleries, price appreciation). In July 2016, Auerbach spoke with Philip Aarons and Claire Lehmann to discuss her book output and the challenges and pleasures of operating her own press.

Philip Aarons: Creating books has clearly been important to you throughout your career. When did that interest begin?

Tauba Auerbach: The first books I made were when I was a kid, bored in my parents’ office, waiting for them to be done at work. I had office supplies to amuse myself with—business cards and hole punches and stickers for their Pendaflex files—so I made a lot of books out of those things. My dad showed me how to sew a book with signatures at some point. I still have it: it has a hard cover wrapped in paper with fruit all over it and a metallic red spine. He really did a good job showing me, but I don’t remember how to do it anymore. Then in my teens and early twenties, everybody around me was making and trading zines, mostly about punk music or graffiti, and I made zines as a way to show my drawings, because I had no other way of doing so at the time. I was never content with folding photocopies in half and stapling them, so for my three-issue “periodical” TWENTYSIX (2003–4), named for the number of letters in the alphabet (I was working as a sign painter at the time) the first one had a giant rubber band as a binding, the second one was sewn on a machine, and the third one was printed with a Gocco [a Japanese silk-screening kit] on heavy museum board that I hand cut and wrapped with a printed band. It was an insane amount of effort for something I think I sold for five dollars, if I ever sold it at all. I mostly just gave it away. I was doing that for a while, and then when I started having exhibitions, I’d often make books to include in some way. There was a book-trading piece in one of my first shows in San Francisco, and an alphabetized Bible in my first show in New York. At some point in 2007 or 2008, I started working on a giant pop-up book called [2,3], which didn’t come out until 2011—it took a long, long time. I started it as a lighthearted outlet for some of the ideas I was thinking about while painting, such as making the distinction between different dimensional states more porous. I got really into the

A Conversation with Tauba Auerbach(b. 1981, San Francisco, California)

Z Helix

76

Vol. 1

Vol. 2

Marcel Broodthaers

Vol. 1 (back cover)

Marcel Broodthaers

Vingt ans Après, vol. 1 Vingt ans Après, vol. 2

and evacuation, although of a different sort. After a two-decade “obsession” with Stéphane Mallarmé’s seminal modernist poem of the same title, to which fellow Belgian René Magritte had introduced him, Broodthaers finally decided it was time to “redo the roll of the dice.”6 Using the 1914 Gallimard edition of Mallarmé’s 1897 work, he covered over his fellow poet’s words—so carefully arranged on the page—with black rectangles of varying weight, redacting it in its entirety. Broodthaers’s Literary Exhibition around Mallarmé, held in Antwerp in 1969, displayed a dozen double-page spreads of the artfully censored poem on the wall. These were also reproduced in an accompanying catalogue, which was printed in three editions: on opaque white paper, translucent vellum, and tin. A more complete effacement of text takes place in Pauvre Belgique (Poor Belgium, 1974), in which Broodthaers transforms an unfinished poem by Charles Baudelaire centering on his disgust with Belgium. A translucent vellum slipcover, reading “ABCABCABCABCA” in italicized capital letters, is placed over a facsimile cover of Baudelaire’s Oeuvres Complètes (Complete Works) so that the original title is obliterated. The front of the slipcover also tells us, strangely, that the volume has been published in Paris in 1974, while the rear swaps out New York for Paris as the place of publication. On the pages within, which are paginated from 1315 to 1457—the pages on which the titular poem is printed in Baudelaire’s volume of complete works—the original page headings, “SUR LA BELGIQUE” and “PAUVRE BELGIQUE,” are left along the top of each leaf, below which Baudelaire’s poem has been entirely erased. On the final page is a note from Broodthaers: “One cannot call this book a pirated edition such as was the common custom of publishers in Brussels during the romantic period. If piracy there is, it turns out to be a reference whose particular form is a reflection of present controversies that go beyond a precise geographical framework. That at least has been my aim.”7 The artist is referencing a particular history of piracy in Belgium: due to the lack of copyright agreements between nations in Europe in the early nineteenth century, Belgian presses could reprint French books without paying royalties of any kind, so that the newest French works could be bought there for a steep discount. But Broodthaers claims that his book cannot be called a knockoff—within its covers, almost nothing remains of Baudelaire’s original work. This deletion marks the book’s actual content, which calls into question traditional notions of originality and intellectual property.

and taking up art, he published seventeen artist’s books. His first official artist’s publication is a ver-sion of Alexandre Dumas’s two-volume Vingt ans après (Twenty Years After, 1969), in which he employs actual copies of the mass-market paperback set. Over each cover, Broodthaers placed a wide red belly band on which his own surname is written in block capi-tals; below, “R. Lucas” is credited as “éditeur.” Other than this display band, the only change to Dumas’s book is a short interview between Richard Lucas and Broodthaers, in which they discuss their interest in the work of Dumas as well as their individual activi-ties twenty years earlier; the interview is pasted into the first volume. If Broodthaers wondered whether he “could not sell something and succeed in life,” Vingt ans après seems to be one such attempt. Eschewing sculptural interventions or any other deletion of the text, he simply appropriates Dumas’s text wholesale; the eye-catching red band with Broodthaers’s name rebrands the work within, acting as a mold in which Dumas’s authorship is evacuated and his words are cast into a new form—an artwork. Like Pense-Bête and Vingt ans après, Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Cast of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, 1969) also involves erasure

words with these overlays. This initial act of oblitera-tion escalated when he took his remaining copies of Pense-Bête and half-encased them in a base of plaster of Paris. By making the books impossible to open, he closed them off from viewers. It was, as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh described, a “burial of the literary.”3 In Broodthaers’s telling of that moment, he made of the book a “prohibition,” and what fasci-nated him was that “no one had any curiosity about the text; nobody had any idea whether this was the final burial of prose or poetry of sadness or pleasure. No one was affected by the prohibition.”4 The sense of futility that he had faced as a poet was somehow confirmed, made final, by obliterating the content within the covers of his poetry book. His audience did not care that the books could no longer be read, and in this the artist seems to have found a perverse pleasure. As Buchloh argues, “It was in the erasure or suspension of reading and the displacement of the literary that some of his most important works (operating under the cover of books) would subse-quently be accomplished.”5

If the book became a “prohibition” for Broodthaers at the outset of his artistic career, he nonetheless continued to engage with it. After swearing off poetry

98 Sophie Calle

L’Hotel

Sophie Calle

Les Dormeurs

1110

Nobody knows how many photographs have been taken in the two centuries since Nicéphore Niépce first trained his camera on the scene outside the workroom window of his Burgundy estate. By some counts, the number is in the several trillions, and the rise of digital imaging (and, especially, the marriage of the camera to the phone) is further swamping the world in photographs at a rate unimaginable only ten years ago. It is estimated that more pictures will be shot over the coming decade than have been taken in the entire history of the medium.1

This contemporary backdrop of simultaneous proliferation and dematerialization adds poignancy to the work Hans-Peter Feldmann has created over the last forty years. An inveterate collector, cata-loguer, and occasional maker of printed images, the artist has staked out a position in what he calls “this world of paper,” finding—and creating—pat-terns and rhythms amid its streams, engineering consonances and dissonances in the visual swarm we produce. First, and still most often, constituted as books, Feldmann’s photographic accumulations summon a strange elasticity from the material—defamiliarizing commonplace images so that we see them anew and juxtaposing the beautiful, the horrific, and the banal in ways that destabilize the supposedly fixed character of each. The artist’s proj-ect constitutes a distinct brand of André Malraux’s musée imaginaire, as Feldmann compiles what the French theorist once called a “history of what can be photographed.”2

Feldmann was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1941, and spent his earliest years living through the heavy Allied bombing that targeted industries in and around the German city during World War II. The son of a drugstore owner, he began his life as a collec-tor by gathering up the stamps affixed to the shop’s correspondence and filling albums with them. “I cut out these lovely little colorful pictures and stuck

Hans-Peter Feldmann

them into notebooks with a thick kind of glue,” the artist told curator Kasper König in a 2005 interview. “Collecting was and still is a very important aspect. Even today, I very much enjoy making small books of my own which I bind or stick together myself.”3

Although Feldmann considered becoming a painter, his application to study at the art school in Düsseldorf was rejected, and he instead spent two years working as a sailor. Upon his return, he began producing his first works, the Bilderhefte, or picture booklets, which are small stapled albums (often no more than a few inches in height and width) with gray covers on which are stamped the artist’s last name and the number of offset-printed black-and-white images included. For example, 12 Bilder from 1968 contains twelve images of airplanes; 11 Bilder, made the following year, features eleven pictures of women’s laps. The title page of the latter reflects the authorial indeterminacy that runs throughout the artist’s output. At the top, it says “11 BILdER Von fELdmAnn” (11 PIctURES By fELdmAnn). And then below, “fotoS woLfGAnG BREUERS.” Like the other images in the Bilderhefte—forty-five shoes, ten sailboats, eleven

(b. 1941, Düsseldorf, Germany)

HANS-PETERFELDMANN

Bilderhefte

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Folder 2

Folder 3 Folder 4

Folder 1

1312 Wolfgang Tillmans

Tillmans’s early fascination with news photos informed his book Soldiers: The Nineties (1999), which brings together newspaper images of service-men and women, who act as a powerful metonym for the international geopolitical conflicts of the decade, along with a few of Tillmans’s own photos: groups of boys playing on the beach, riot police, portraits of a man wearing combat boots. Presented without any text other than the captions that occasionally accom-pany the clippings, the black-and-white reproductions appear on off-white, newsprint-like stock (although the jacket is a black halftone printed on glossy yel-low). In one clipping, a soldier, his eyes obscured by a dark stripe of redaction, folds his arms behind his back. Another spread pairs a full-page image of a crowd of fatigue-suited soldiers, reaching out their hands as if to touch someone outside the frame, with a much smaller reproduction of a lone soldier wrapping a dark-haired woman in an embrace. The latter image appears again later in a larger grid of

four news images, with its caption intact: an Israeli soldier is comforting a female colleague after a sui-cide bombing. This sequence reflects Tillmans’s understanding of the ways in which comparison and display revise our perception of meaning, an insight that itself comes out of his own critical consumption of photographic media in the news. A book from the same year, Total Solar Eclipse, addresses a phenomenon that poses yet another chal-lenge to clear representation. This slim, elegant book convenes Tillmans’s original eclipse photographs, facsimiles of pages of data, scientific drawings, and images of planets and moons in space. The artist has spoken of being obsessed with astronomy as a child, speculating that the telescope was his “visual initiation into seeing”: “The question of perceptibil-ity, of the ability to distinguish between nothing and something, has been a central interest of mine. . . . This is as interesting politically as it is scientifically.”4 In exhibitions, his eclipse photographs have been

Wolfgang Tillmans

The nonchalant elegance of Wolfgang Tillmans’s best-known images rests on the artist’s ability to conjure grace from the mundane. Through his lens, the fractured skin atop a stale cup of coffee becomes a lofty view of a meandering river; cigarette stubs and old fruit on a windowsill resolve into a contem-porary vanitas; a tangled group of friends lying on the beach form a whorl as well proportioned as a seashell’s spiral. But some of his first artistic experi-ments, surprisingly, did not even involve a camera: Tillmans began making art by exploring the surface qualities of the printed page and the possibilities of sequence in the codex form. As a teenager, he made use of the copy machine at his first office job to explore scale and juxtaposition, enlarging found images from newspapers into hazy fields of scat-tered toner and arranging the results in zines and unframed triptychs, then convincing a local café to display the results. This dual interest in publication and exhibition reflects the artist’s concern for various modes of reception and distribution. Tillmans rose to promi-nence in the early 1990s with compelling images of youthful subcultures for style magazines such as i-D and The Face, going on to explore astonishingly diverse facets of the visual world in artist’s books and gallery shows: bodies, both naked and clothed; pure abstractions of color and line; sunsets, rainbows, moons, eclipses; cars and supersonic jets. Whatever the photographic genre, however, Tillmans consis-tently shoots with 35mm film, using available light, and never retouches.1 Such a straightforward tech-nical approach might hint at a strong commitment to unmediated representation, but Tillmans aggres-sively transfigures his images through an altogether

(b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany)

WOLFGANG TILLMANS

different tactic. As Simon Watney writes in the pref-ace to the artist’s first monograph, Wolfgang Tillmans (1995), central to Tillmans’s practice is the belief that “photographs can be made to narrate ideas and val-ues according to the way in which they are arranged and edited.”2 A typical installation might feature variously scaled images on diverse supports—maga-zine pages mounted to the wall by plastic corners, xeroxed newspaper enlargements, unframed ink-jet prints suspended from binder clips, and abstract chromogenic prints presented together in tiled arrays on walls or in off-kilter, overlapping groups on table-tops—encouraging viewers to circulate around his images in a markedly three-dimensional manner. But as a bookmaker, Tillmans prompts a more propulsive through line. Via his selection, design, and sequenc-ing of photographs, the artist seeks to advance what he calls the viewer’s “momentum” through “a stream or flow [of images] that while visually predominant, is also a ‘text.’”3

Soldiers: The Nineties

1514 Andy Warhol

and the first in which color takes a prominent role, 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy also intro-duces a favorite subject—felines—which along with shoes, fairies, and flowers would appear frequently in Warhol’s books across this period. In 1957, following a trip to Thailand with his com-panion Charles Lisanby, Warhol created A Gold Book, the most fully developed and sophisticated of his book projects to that point. A collection of some twenty ink drawings, offset printed on white and gold paper and occasionally hand colored, A Gold Book draws together the fascinations of the nearly thirty-year-old Warhol—“Boys Filles fruits and flowers Shoes . . .” reads a list printed on the colophon in the hand of Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola—in new and elegant ways.4 Although A Gold Book was printed in an edition of approximately one hundred, every copy is essentially a handmade object. Designed

as what might be thought of as a highly sophisti-cated coloring book, each features differently hued, hand-inserted tissue guards distributed between its pages. Because most of the run was given away as gifts, extant copies today are frequently inscribed by the artist, only adding to the sense that they are effectively unique works. Unlike those in previous publications, A Gold Book’s drawings suggest a new brand of languorous romanticism that is fully Warhol’s. Wordlessly presented and full of a sense of longing, the images have a campily classical quality to them, figuring a typology of desire, a register of those things—from footwear to boys—whose beauty lends itself to gold and filigree. The penultimate example of Warhol’s burst of bookmaking creativity across the decade of the 1950s, Wild Raspberries of 1959, was conceived as a similarly precious object, and presages the artist’s

Andy Warhol

Perhaps no artistic corpus of the last fifty years has been poked and prodded more thoroughly than Andy Warhol’s. From his paintings, prints, and drawings to his photographs and films to the grand performance piece that was his life, Warhol—arguably the most significant artist of the second half of the twentieth century—left a legacy that scrambles disciplinary boundaries. Yet his bookwork oeuvre, numbering nearly one hundred when all those publications to which he contributed in various ways are tallied, remains surprisingly under-studied.1 For an artist who famously claimed to disdain reading, books were a touchstone throughout his career. Especially during his first two decades in New York but also in the latter period of his career, when he was perhaps the world’s best-known artist, Warhol was consistently involved with publications as an author, illustrator, and/or publisher. Recently reinvigorated scholarly interest in his books represents an overdue turn of attention toward this less-appreciated but nevertheless crucial aspect of his shape-shifting career.2

Trained as a “pictorial designer” at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon University), Warhol moved from his native Pittsburgh to New York in 1949 and immediately sought work as a commercial artist, finding jobs as both a window dresser and an illustrator. In 1951 he created the first of what would be dozens of examples of art for trade fiction; across the decade he would produce book covers for publishers such as Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and New Directions. During this time Warhol created his first important bookworks, a series of small volumes in modest runs of a hundred or so copies. These were ostensibly designed to act as

(b. 1928, Pittsburgh; d. 1987, New York)

ANDY WARHOL

“promotionals,” vehicles to showcase an illustrator’s talents to prospective clients, but in Warhol’s hands they became full-fledged works of art. Warhol appears to have produced roughly one promotional per year between 1952 and 1960, and they are for the most part whimsical in form and content.3 The first two—Love Is a Pink Cake and A Is an Alphabet—were created with the writer Ralph Thomas Ward and were signed “Corkie & Andy,” using Ward’s nickname. A collection of slightly bawdy verses and a wry abecedarium, respectively, these early books suggest a balance between text and image—words by Ward, line drawings of faces and figures executed by Warhol using his trademark blot-ting technique—that would evolve over the course of the next books into a more image-driven scheme, as in 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy (1954). The first of the promotionals to be bound in hardcover

A Gold Book

1716

fascination with high society and its (mannered) manners, as well as certain modes of production that would later be put into larger operation in the workings of his Factory.5 Made with the celebrated hostess Suzie Frankfurt (the wife of advertising executive Stephen O. Frankfurt), the book was essen-tially a glorified cookbook-cum–social satire. Twenty boldly colored illustrations of elaborate, classically French dishes accompany Frankfurt’s recipes, ren-dered once again in Warhol’s mother’s hand. As Frankfurt’s son later recalled, the system for mak-ing the book had the collaborative, assembly-line method that would characterize Warhol’s later fine art: “Andy drawing the pictures, a team of assistants coloring them in, my mother writing the recipes, Andy’s mother transcribing them.”6 Throughout Wild Raspberries, whose title is a nod to Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries (1957), actresses like Greta Garbo and Grace Kelly are name-checked, as are popular New York mer-chants, all in the service of describing outlandishly extravagant delicacies. The book stands as a signal early expression of the ambivalent relationship to the cultures of wealth and celebrity—in one sense, clearly in their thrall, yet also always training an eye on their excesses and pretenses—that would characterize Warhol’s own later stardom.

Wild Raspberries

54

twenty-five-page section—featuring a series of line drawings based on the twenty-four permutations of the four basic directions a line can be drawn (verti-cal, horizontal, and the two diagonals)—began to reckon with the restrictions of the book as a “site,” a method that would govern so much of the artist’s work in the medium over the coming decades. (In fact, the drawings LeWitt made for Siegelaub and Wendler preceded and became generative of a work in another medium when the artist took a pencil later that same year and drew two of the sets on the walls of Paula Cooper Gallery, creating the first of his more than a thousand wall drawings.) Taken together, these two early moments demon-strate critical aspects of LeWitt’s attitude toward the book as a particular kind of artifact. The receptiveness of the form to both serial systems and, importantly, to the transparent language-based directives that would become the hallmark of his work, made the book an ideal arena for the artist’s permutational investigations of line, shape, and color. Across the next thirty years and more, LeWitt would create books designed to exhaust a dizzying variety of combinatory structures, with deadpan titles that characteristi-cally explicate the conditions of their invention: 49 Three-Part Variations Using Three Different Kinds of Cubes, 1967–1968 (1969), Four Basic Kinds of Straight Lines (1969), Four Basic Colors and Their Combinations (1971), Grids, Using Straight, Not-Straight and Broken Lines in Yellow, Red & Blue and All Their Combinations (1975), Six Geometric Figures and All Their Double Combinations (1980), and so on.

Sol LeWitt

Four Basic Kinds of Straight Lines

Sol LeWitt

Serial Project #1

98 Christopher WoolChristopher Wool

Although Christopher Wool is unmistakably, emphatically, a painter—one of his generation’s most celebrated—he has developed a significant book practice in parallel. One might assume that his engagement with language, especially in his signa-ture paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s, would have provided the entrée to the publication format, but his bookworks have often consciously eschewed words, instead focusing on drawings and, especially, photography. But the page is, of course, in many respects a structural analogue to the rectangular form of the canvas, specific content notwithstanding, and the processes the artist uti-lizes in the making of his books—diverse forms of reproduction, erasure, chance, repetition, détourne-ment—also play vital roles in his painting. The two threads of his work have fed off each other for more than thirty years.1

Wool grew up on the south side of Chicago. His mother was a psychiatrist, and his father was a molecular biologist who taught at the University of Chicago.2 He moved to the East Coast in 1972, plan-ning to study studio art at Sarah Lawrence College, in the northern suburbs of New York City, but he dropped out after a year and moved to Manhattan, where he began to take classes at the New York Studio School with Jack Tworkov, Harry Kramer, and, occasionally, Philip Guston—all painters whose style incorporated muscular abstraction with drawn elements. In the early 1980s, with his own style still in flux—an early review of his work described it as a “cross between a Jackson Pollock and a Formica table-top”3—Wool made his first artist’s book, 93 Drawings of Beer on the Wall. Produced in an edition of five in

(b. 1955, Boston)

CHRISTOPHER WOOL

1984, the book, made by Xeroxing a sketchbook full of gesturally loose red marker drawings, is a physically simple affair, bound along a three-punch edge with simple brass fasteners. If the drawings themselves would seem to look back to his decade-earlier stint at the Studio School, and especially to the tower-ing influence of Guston, the techniques that Wool employed to create the images, and to reproduce them in the pages of the book, represent a decisive epiphany. The artist allowed the marker to bleed through the sheets of paper, so that each new page would begin with some trace of the one before and give the book as a whole a sense of forward motion, and copied it without cropping so that the edges of the pages, and indeed the bits of the copier itself, are visible. This transparency about process, and a certain mode of controlled chance and strategic

93 Drawings of Beer on the Wall

32 Marcel BroodthaersMarcel Broodthaers

Pense-Bête

76 Josh Smith

minnow,” “coppercheek darter,” “southern studfish.” In comparison to many of Smith’s more chaotic scrib-bles, these fish have been rendered carefully—as though copied from a field guide—but with the color absent, making the drawings’ utility for identification almost nonexistent. While Tennessee Fish Book is a photocopy book, zine-like in feel, Smith’s Fish Book from 2008 displays the artist’s tendency toward handi-craft. A compendium of reproductions of Smith’s woodcut prints of jumping fish, the Japanese-bound volume is wavy and marbled with a varied tan hue, as if it has been faux-aged in a bath of tea. Although the woodcut reproductions are photocopied, the book as a whole seems to wink at the tradition of the livre d’artiste, in which a set of original prints is produced in a luxurious edition. Here, Smith photocopies his woodcuts and distresses the product, giving the look of artisanal rarity to multiples pulled from the Xerox machine. While many of his book editions feature such handmade interventions, Smith also engages in the relatively more impersonal practice of binding unaltered printed matter into books—a tactic that Roth pioneered in his series daily mirror (1961), which

is composed of pages of the titular newspaper cut and bound into tiny, cube-shaped volumes. Smith’s Pizza Book (n.d.) includes a cover fashioned from the cardboard package of a frozen pepperoni-and-vegetable pie, while the interior pages come from shipping- and art-supply catalogs, the New York Post, and stock-image sales booklets, which have been guillotined to a consistent size and hand bound. While a book of junk-mail catalog pages otherwise destined for the recycling bin may seem like a rather slight concept for a book, a slyer take on appropriated printed matter can be found in Macy’s Book (n.d.). In black-and-white photocopies, Smith reduces the scale of the eponymous department store’s advertis-ing circular—the kind often found tucked between sections of a Sunday newspaper—to five and a half by seven and a half inches. In a particularly winning touch, Smith’s facsimile edition even includes two loose ad cards (usually left unbound in the hope that they will fall out and attract attention) carefully clipped to size and placed near the gutter. The seem-ing triviality of the gesture of making a book out of junk printed matter is complicated by Smith, whether by hand binding the readymade pages or

Josh Smith

Josh Smith can’t stop making images multiply. Since the early 2000s he has populated his paintings, prints, drawings, and books with hundreds, even thousands of variations on simple visual motifs: a jumping fish, a single leaf, his own name. Across Smith’s panels and pages, this propagation quickly turns a solitary leaf into a forest, a single fish into a vast school, but these shapes and signatures are not his subject matter, exactly. Rather, they function as prototypes for itera-tion, formal scaffolding for highly expressive mark making that allows the artist to focus on proliferation and permutation. While he has been compared to artists from Keith Haring to Jean-Michel Basquiat to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Smith himself disavows any interest in expressionism, admitting that “the idea of [it] completely embarrasses me.”1 The subjective bravado associated with that movement is super-seded by his need, instead, to constantly produce. He seems to guide his book practice according to Dieter Roth’s brash motto: “Quantity, not quality.” Trained as a printmaker, Smith explains that he chose rote subjects in college so that he could focus on techniques of reproduction: “I didn’t want to have to spend time in the print shop—valuable time—thinking of ideas.” Instead, by modifying and recycling predetermined designs, he could “just learn technically how to do things, and memorize them.”2 Smith’s printmaking studies also introduced him to a type of Japanese bookbinding in which thread is hand wound through a series of holes punched along a sheaf’s edge, a simple technique that freed him, as he says, to make books out of “pretty much any loose paper I could find.”3 This anything-goes attitude persists in Smith’s many book editions (numbering more than a hundred titles to date), which include

(b. 1976, Knoxville, Tennessee)

JOSH SMITH

photocopied pages of junk mail, doodles on subway maps, graphic patterns made with rubber stamps, and sketches of presidents, airplanes, and outlaws.4 If these gestures and subjects, which can seem tossed off or arbitrary, appear unworthy of being memorial-ized in book form, a medium that typically signals that its contents merit longevity, this paradox is cen-tral to the books’ significance. Through the collation, sequencing, and proliferation of his idiosyncratic collection of ciphers, Smith makes clear, page by page, that his true subject is reproduction itself. Smith usually produces books in relatively small editions, often numbering forty or fifty, and he fre-quently augments each copy with a fast watercolor wash or a small pencil doodle. Tennessee Fish Book (2004), for example, a hand-stitched book with splashes of aquarelle adorning its cover drawings (in which the fishes’ exterior contours have been modified to resemble Tennessee’s outline), collects pencil drawings of fish native to Smith’s home state, each one carefully numbered. Goldenrod-yellow pages at the beginning and end of the book list the corresponding species names, many of which are wonderfully evocative: “blue shiner,” “stargazing

Tennessee Fish Book

Binding: HardbackFormat: 305 × 254 mm (12 × 10 in)Extent: 336 ppNumber of images: 450 col and b/w illustrationsWord Count: 95,000ISBN: 978 0 7148 7264 3

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