Notes on bookness¹ and bookishness² Visual research w/ Francesca Battiato http://notesonbookness.tumblr.com
“With many such gallery objects, the term altered book is useful enough, often designating an appropriated and reconceived shape—as with Dettmer’s plastic surgeries, a new form of the assisted readymade. Yet this doesn’t get at the fundamental transformation involved in bringing the book object into museum space to begin with, where it becomes a thing merely discarded if not actively tampered with, disused, or detexted—in a word, and en route to a general principle, demediated. In and beyond the work of book forms in sculptural reduction, demediation names, in short, the process by which a transmissible text or image is blocked by the obtruded fact of its own neutralized medium.” Bookwork as demediation, Garrett Stewart
