Altered Books
This engrossing exhibition has been a labour of love over two years for Artspace Mackay Director Michael Wardell. It demonstrates how far the field of artists’ books has diverged since the days of white gloves and trestle tables. Although some bookworks are made to be held in the hand and perused solitarily, ‘Recycled Library’ resolutely takes on the gallery space as one that is to be physically navigated with the eyes attuned to wall and floor as much as flat surface. The exhibition is arranged to pulse from object-based structures, large-scale photographs, collages, to single treated books. One might move from an absorption in one object which may retain its codex form or be separated out as a bank of pages, for instance, and realise that what has been conveyed is as rich in information or fantastic narrative as its book origins. Hence this exhibition takes time to appreciate fully.
Seventeen Australian artists are represented, each by several works. Many belong to the collection at Artspace, others have been made especially for the tour or lent by the artists and their agents. Date-wise they are mostly from the 1990s and 2000s, although there is Paul Partos’s Introduction to a Book and Reconstruction of a Book (1970), which nicely establish the beginning of the viewer’s journey. In the vein of Art & Language, this duo playfully reflect on the move away from minimalism, the artist having carved out and dispensed with the original text (leaving a black rectangle), while at the same time they tease us with their intact ‘headers’. Reconstruction has as header ‘Tough—and Tender—Minded Cubists’; a quaint oxymoron if ever there was one.
Placed nearby, the old ‘reliable’ Encyclopaedia