ARTISTS WHO MAKE BOOKS XX …… Hanne Darboven XXX …… Hans-Peter Feldmann XXX …… Wade Guyton XXX …… On Kawara XXX …… Martin Kippenberger XXX …… Walther König A CONVERSATION XXX …… Sol LeWitt XXX …… Richard Long XXX …… Gordon Matta-Clark XXX …… Bjarne Melgaard XXX …… Annette Messager XXX …… Lynda Morris BOOK AS ARTWORK, 1960 TO 1972 XXX …… Jack Pierson XXX …… Sigmar Polke XXX …… Richard Prince 7 …… Introduction XXX …… Gerhard Richter XXX …… Dieter Roth XXX …… Edward Ruscha XXX …… Taryn Simon 18 …… Tauba Auerbach XXX …… Josh Smith A CONVERSATION XXX …… Wolfgang Tillmans 28 …… John Baldessari XXX …… Andy Warhol 34 …… Alighiero e Boetti XXX …… Lawrence Weiner 40 …… Christian Boltanski XXX …… Christopher Wool 46 …… Marcel Broodthaers 52 …… Stanley Brouwn 64 …… Benjamin H. D. Buchloh LOOKING BACK AT BOOKS XXX …… Catalogue XX …… James Lee Byars XXX …… Index XX …… Sophie Calle XXX …… Image Credits XX …… Maurizio Cattelan XXX …… Acknowledgments XX …… Paul Chan XXX …… Author bios A CONVERSATION A Conversation with Tauba Auerbach (b. 1981, San Francisco, California)

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 Z Helix 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

5 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 Vingt ans Après, vol. 1 Vingt ans Après, vol. 2 Vol. 1 (back cover) Vol. 1 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— words with these overlays. This initial act of oblitera- and taking up art, he published seventeen artist’s the pages on which the titular poem is printed in tion escalated when he took his remaining copies books. His first official artist’s publication is a ver- Baudelaire’s volume of complete works—the original of Pense-Bête and half-encased them in a base of sion of Alexandre Dumas’s two-volume Vingt ans page headings, “SUR LA BELGIQUE” and “PAUVRE plaster of Paris. By making the books impossible après (Twenty Years After, 1969), in which he employs BELGIQUE,” are left along the top of each leaf, below to open, he closed them off from viewers. It was, as actual copies of the mass-market paperback set. Over which Baudelaire’s poem has been entirely erased. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh described, a “burial of the each cover, Broodthaers placed a wide red belly band On the final page is a note from Broodthaers: “One literary.”3 In Broodthaers’s telling of that moment, on which his own surname is written in block capi- cannot call this book a pirated edition such as was he made of the book a “prohibition,” and what fasci- tals; below, “R. Lucas” is credited as “éditeur.” Other the common custom of publishers in Brussels during nated him was that “no one had any curiosity about than this display band, the only change to Dumas’s the romantic period. If piracy there is, it turns out to the text; nobody had any idea whether this was the book is a short interview between Richard Lucas and be a reference whose particular form is a reflection final burial of prose or poetry of sadness or pleasure. Broodthaers, in which they discuss their interest in of present controversies that go beyond a precise No one was affected by the prohibition.”4 The sense the work of Dumas as well as their individual activi- geographical framework. That at least has been my of futility that he had faced as a poet was somehow ties twenty years earlier; the interview is pasted into aim.”7 The artist is referencing a particular history confirmed, made final, by obliterating the content the first volume. If Broodthaers wondered whether he of piracy in Belgium: due to the lack of copyright within the covers of his poetry book. His audience “could not sell something and succeed in life,” Vingt agreements between nations in Europe in the early did not care that the books could no longer be read, ans après seems to be one such attempt. Eschewing nineteenth century, Belgian presses could reprint and in this the artist seems to have found a perverse sculptural interventions or any other deletion of the French books without paying royalties of any kind, pleasure. As Buchloh argues, “It was in the erasure text, he simply appropriates Dumas’s text wholesale; so that the newest French works could be bought or suspension of reading and the displacement of the eye-catching red band with Broodthaers’s name there for a steep discount. But Broodthaers claims the literary that some of his most important works rebrands the work within, acting as a mold in which Vol. 2 that his book cannot be called a knockoff—within (operating under the cover of books) would subse- Dumas’s authorship is evacuated and his words are its covers, almost nothing remains of Baudelaire’s quently be accomplished.”5 cast into a new form—an artwork. original work. This deletion marks the book’s actual If the book became a “prohibition” for Broodthaers Like Pense-Bête and Vingt ans après, Un Coup de content, which calls into question traditional notions at the outset of his artistic career, he nonetheless dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Cast of the Dice Will of originality and intellectual property. continued to engage with it. After swearing off poetry Never Abolish Chance, 1969) also involves erasure

Marcel Broodthaers 6 Marcel Broodthaers 7 L’Hotel

Les Dormeurs

Sophie Calle 8 Sophie Calle 9 HANS-PETER FELDMANN (b. 1941, Düsseldorf, Germany)

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 Folder 1 Folder 2 shot over the coming decade than have been taken 1 in the entire history of the medium. Bilderhefte 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 them into notebooks with a thick kind of glue,” the “this world of paper,” finding—and creating—pat- artist told curator Kasper König in a 2005 interview. terns and rhythms amid its streams, engineering “Collecting was and still is a very important aspect. consonances and dissonances in the visual swarm Even today, I very much enjoy making small books we produce. First, and still most often, constituted of my own which I bind or stick together myself.”3 as books, Feldmann’s photographic accumulations Although Feldmann considered becoming a summon a strange elasticity from the material— painter, his application to study at the art school in defamiliarizing commonplace images so that we Düsseldorf was rejected, and he instead spent two see them anew and juxtaposing the beautiful, the years working as a sailor. Upon his return, he began horrific, and the banal in ways that destabilize the producing his first works, theBilderhefte , or picture supposedly fixed character of each. The artist’s proj- booklets, which are small stapled albums (often no ect constitutes a distinct brand of André Malraux’s more than a few inches in height and width) with musée imaginaire, as Feldmann compiles what the gray covers on which are stamped the artist’s last French theorist once called a “history of what can name and the number of offset-printed black-and- be photographed.”2 white images included. For example, 12 Bilder from Feldmann was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1968 contains twelve images of airplanes; 11 Bilder, 1941, and spent his earliest years living through the made the following year, features eleven pictures heavy Allied bombing that targeted industries in and of women’s laps. The title page of the latter reflects around the German city during World War II. The son the authorial indeterminacy that runs throughout of a drugstore owner, he began his life as a collec- the artist’s output. At the top, it says “11 bilder von Folder 3 Folder 4 tor by gathering up the stamps affixed to the shop’s feldmann” (11 pictures by feldmann). And then below, correspondence and filling albums with them. “I “fotos wolfgang breuers.” Like the other images in the cut out these lovely little colorful pictures and stuck Bilderhefte—forty-five shoes, ten sailboats, eleven

Hans-Peter Feldmann 10 Hans-Peter Feldmann 11 WOLFGANG TILLMANS (b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany)

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 Soldiers: The Nineties 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- different tactic. As Simon Watney writes in the pref- Tillmans’s early fascination with news photos four news images, with its caption intact: an Israeli tered toner and arranging the results in zines and ace to the artist’s first monograph,Wolfgang Tillmans informed his book Soldiers: The Nineties (1999), soldier is comforting a female colleague after a sui- unframed triptychs, then convincing a local café to (1995), central to Tillmans’s practice is the belief that which brings together newspaper images of service- cide bombing. This sequence reflects Tillmans’s display the results. “photographs can be made to narrate ideas and val- men and women, who act as a powerful metonym for understanding of the ways in which comparison and This dual interest in publication and exhibition ues according to the way in which they are arranged the international geopolitical conflicts of the decade, display revise our perception of meaning, an insight reflects the artist’s concern for various modes of and edited.”2 A typical installation might feature along with a few of Tillmans’s own photos: groups of that itself comes out of his own critical consumption reception and distribution. Tillmans rose to promi- variously scaled images on diverse supports—maga- boys playing on the beach, riot police, portraits of a of photographic media in the news. nence in the early 1990s with compelling images of zine pages mounted to the wall by plastic corners, man wearing combat boots. Presented without any A book from the same year, Total Solar Eclipse, youthful subcultures for style magazines such as xeroxed newspaper enlargements, unframed ink-jet text other than the captions that occasionally accom- addresses a phenomenon that poses yet another chal- i-D and The Face, going on to explore astonishingly prints suspended from binder clips, and abstract pany the clippings, the black-and-white reproductions lenge to clear representation. This slim, elegant book diverse facets of the visual world in artist’s books and chromogenic prints presented together in tiled arrays appear on off-white, newsprint-like stock (although convenes Tillmans’s original eclipse photographs, gallery shows: bodies, both naked and clothed; pure on walls or in off-kilter, overlapping groups on table- the jacket is a black halftone printed on glossy yel- facsimiles of pages of data, scientific drawings, and abstractions of color and line; sunsets, rainbows, tops—encouraging viewers to circulate around his low). In one clipping, a soldier, his eyes obscured by images of planets and moons in space. The artist moons, eclipses; cars and supersonic jets. Whatever images in a markedly three-dimensional manner. But a dark stripe of redaction, folds his arms behind his has spoken of being obsessed with astronomy as a the photographic genre, however, Tillmans consis- as a bookmaker, Tillmans prompts a more propulsive back. Another spread pairs a full-page image of a child, speculating that the telescope was his “visual tently shoots with 35mm film, using available light, through line. Via his selection, design, and sequenc- crowd of fatigue-suited soldiers, reaching out their initiation into seeing”: “The question of perceptibil- and never retouches.1 Such a straightforward tech- ing of photographs, the artist seeks to advance what hands as if to touch someone outside the frame, ity, of the ability to distinguish between nothing and nical approach might hint at a strong commitment he calls the viewer’s “momentum” through “a stream with a much smaller reproduction of a lone soldier something, has been a central interest of mine. . . . to unmediated representation, but Tillmans aggres- or flow [of images] that while visually predominant, wrapping a dark-haired woman in an embrace. The This is as interesting politically as it is scientifically.”4 sively transfigures his images through an altogether is also a ‘text.’”3 latter image appears again later in a larger grid of In exhibitions, his eclipse photographs have been

Wolfgang Tillmans 12 Wolfgang Tillmans 13 ANDY WARHOL (b. 1928, Pittsburgh; d. 1987, New York)

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 A Gold Book 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 “promotionals,” vehicles to showcase an illustrator’s and the first in which color takes a prominent role, as what might be thought of as a highly sophisti- publisher. Recently reinvigorated scholarly interest talents to prospective clients, but in Warhol’s hands 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy also intro- cated coloring book, each features differently hued, in his books represents an overdue turn of attention they became full-fledged works of art. duces a favorite subject—felines—which along with hand-inserted tissue guards distributed between its toward this less-appreciated but nevertheless crucial Warhol appears to have produced roughly one shoes, fairies, and flowers would appear frequently pages. Because most of the run was given away as aspect of his shape-shifting career.2 promotional per year between 1952 and 1960, and in Warhol’s books across this period. gifts, extant copies today are frequently inscribed Trained as a “pictorial designer” at the Carnegie they are for the most part whimsical in form and In 1957, following a trip to Thailand with his com- by the artist, only adding to the sense that they are Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon content.3 The first two—Love Is a Pink Cake and panion Charles Lisanby, Warhol created A Gold Book, effectively unique works. Unlike those in previous University), Warhol moved from his native Pittsburgh A Is an Alphabet—were created with the writer Ralph the most fully developed and sophisticated of his publications, A Gold Book’s drawings suggest a to New York in 1949 and immediately sought work as Thomas Ward and were signed “Corkie & Andy,” book projects to that point. A collection of some new brand of languorous romanticism that is fully a commercial artist, finding jobs as both a window using Ward’s nickname. A collection of slightly twenty ink drawings, offset printed on white and Warhol’s. Wordlessly presented and full of a sense of dresser and an illustrator. In 1951 he created the first bawdy verses and a wry abecedarium, respectively, gold paper and occasionally hand colored, A Gold longing, the images have a campily classical quality of what would be dozens of examples of art for trade these early books suggest a balance between text and Book draws together the fascinations of the nearly to them, figuring a typology of desire, a register of fiction; across the decade he would produce book image—words by Ward, line drawings of faces and thirty-year-old Warhol—“Boys Filles fruits and flowers those things—from footwear to boys—whose beauty covers for publishers such as Doubleday, Simon figures executed by Warhol using his trademark blot- Shoes . . .” reads a list printed on the colophon in the lends itself to gold and filigree. & Schuster, and New Directions. During this time ting technique—that would evolve over the course of hand of Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola—in new and The penultimate example of Warhol’s burst of Warhol created his first important bookworks, a series the next books into a more image-driven scheme, as elegant ways.4 Although A Gold Book was printed bookmaking creativity across the decade of the of small volumes in modest runs of a hundred or so in 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy (1954). in an edition of approximately one hundred, every 1950s, Wild Raspberries of 1959, was conceived as copies. These were ostensibly designed to act as The first of the promotionals to be bound in hardcover copy is essentially a handmade object. Designed a similarly precious object, and presages the artist’s

Andy Warhol 14 Andy Warhol 15 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 filmWild 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

16 17 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 Four Basic Kinds of Straight Lines 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.

Serial Project #1

Pense-Bête

Sol LeWitt 4 Sol LeWitt 5 Marcel Broodthaers 2 Marcel Broodthaers 3

CHRISTOPHER JOSH WOOL SMITH (b. 1955, Boston) (b. 1976, Knoxville, Tennessee)

Although Christopher Wool is unmistakably, Josh Smith can’t stop making images multiply. Since emphatically, a painter—one of his generation’s the early 2000s he has populated his paintings, prints, most celebrated—he has developed a significant drawings, and books with hundreds, even thousands book practice in parallel. One might assume that his of variations on simple visual motifs: a jumping fish, a engagement with language, especially in his signa- single leaf, his own name. Across Smith’s panels and ture paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s, pages, this propagation quickly turns a solitary leaf Tennessee Fish Book would have provided the entrée to the publication into a forest, a single fish into a vast school, but these format, but his bookworks have often consciously shapes and signatures are not his subject matter, eschewed words, instead focusing on drawings 93 Drawings of Beer on the Wall exactly. Rather, they function as prototypes for itera- and, especially, photography. But the page is, of tion, formal scaffolding for highly expressive mark course, in many respects a structural analogue to making that allows the artist to focus on proliferation the rectangular form of the canvas, specific content and permutation. While he has been compared to photocopied pages of junk mail, doodles on subway minnow,” “coppercheek darter,” “southern studfish.” is composed of pages of the titular newspaper cut notwithstanding, and the processes the artist uti- artists from Keith Haring to Jean-Michel Basquiat to maps, graphic patterns made with rubber stamps, In comparison to many of Smith’s more chaotic scrib- and bound into tiny, cube-shaped volumes. Smith’s lizes in the making of his books—diverse forms of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Smith himself disavows any and sketches of presidents, airplanes, and outlaws.4 If bles, these fish have been rendered carefully—as Pizza Book (n.d.) includes a cover fashioned from reproduction, erasure, chance, repetition, détourne- interest in expressionism, admitting that “the idea these gestures and subjects, which can seem tossed though copied from a field guide—but with the color the cardboard package of a frozen pepperoni-and- ment—also play vital roles in his painting. The two of [it] completely embarrasses me.”1 The subjective off or arbitrary, appear unworthy of being memorial- absent, making the drawings’ utility for identification vegetable pie, while the interior pages come from threads of his work have fed off each other for more bravado associated with that movement is super- ized in book form, a medium that typically signals almost nonexistent. While Tennessee Fish Book is a shipping- and art-supply catalogs, the New York Post, than thirty years.1 seded by his need, instead, to constantly produce. that its contents merit longevity, this paradox is cen- photocopy book, zine-like in feel, Smith’s Fish Book and stock-image sales booklets, which have been Wool grew up on the south side of Chicago. His 1984, the book, made by Xeroxing a sketchbook full of He seems to guide his book practice according to tral to the books’ significance. Through the collation, from 2008 displays the artist’s tendency toward handi- guillotined to a consistent size and hand bound. mother was a psychiatrist, and his father was a gesturally loose red marker drawings, is a physically Dieter Roth’s brash motto: “Quantity, not quality.” sequencing, and proliferation of his idiosyncratic craft. A compendium of reproductions of Smith’s While a book of junk-mail catalog pages otherwise molecular biologist who taught at the University of simple affair, bound along a three-punch edge with Trained as a printmaker, Smith explains that collection of ciphers, Smith makes clear, page by woodcut prints of jumping fish, the Japanese-bound destined for the recycling bin may seem like a rather Chicago.2 He moved to the East Coast in 1972, plan- simple brass fasteners. If the drawings themselves he chose rote subjects in college so that he could page, that his true subject is reproduction itself. volume is wavy and marbled with a varied tan hue, slight concept for a book, a slyer take on appropriated ning to study studio art at Sarah Lawrence College, would seem to look back to his decade-earlier stint focus on techniques of reproduction: “I didn’t want Smith usually produces books in relatively small as if it has been faux-aged in a bath of tea. Although printed matter can be found in Macy’s Book (n.d.). in the northern suburbs of New York City, but he at the Studio School, and especially to the tower- to have to spend time in the print shop—valuable editions, often numbering forty or fifty, and he fre- the woodcut reproductions are photocopied, the book In black-and-white photocopies, Smith reduces the dropped out after a year and moved to Manhattan, ing influence of Guston, the techniques that Wool time—thinking of ideas.” Instead, by modifying and quently augments each copy with a fast watercolor as a whole seems to wink at the tradition of the livre scale of the eponymous department store’s advertis- where he began to take classes at the New York employed to create the images, and to reproduce recycling predetermined designs, he could “just learn wash or a small pencil doodle. Tennessee Fish d’artiste, in which a set of original prints is produced ing circular—the kind often found tucked between Studio School with Jack Tworkov, Harry Kramer, them in the pages of the book, represent a decisive technically how to do things, and memorize them.”2 Book (2004), for example, a hand-stitched book with in a luxurious edition. Here, Smith photocopies his sections of a Sunday newspaper—to five and a half and, occasionally, Philip Guston—all painters whose epiphany. The artist allowed the marker to bleed Smith’s printmaking studies also introduced him to splashes of aquarelle adorning its cover drawings woodcuts and distresses the product, giving the look by seven and a half inches. In a particularly winning style incorporated muscular abstraction with drawn through the sheets of paper, so that each new page a type of Japanese bookbinding in which thread is (in which the fishes’ exterior contours have been of artisanal rarity to multiples pulled from the Xerox touch, Smith’s facsimile edition even includes two elements. would begin with some trace of the one before and hand wound through a series of holes punched along modified to resemble Tennessee’s outline), collects machine. loose ad cards (usually left unbound in the hope In the early 1980s, with his own style still in flux— give the book as a whole a sense of forward motion, a sheaf’s edge, a simple technique that freed him, pencil drawings of fish native to Smith’s home state, While many of his book editions feature such that they will fall out and attract attention) carefully an early review of his work described it as a “cross and copied it without cropping so that the edges of as he says, to make books out of “pretty much any each one carefully numbered. Goldenrod-yellow handmade interventions, Smith also engages in clipped to size and placed near the gutter. The seem- between a Jackson Pollock and a Formica table- the pages, and indeed the bits of the copier itself, loose paper I could find.”3 This anything-goes attitude pages at the beginning and end of the book list the the relatively more impersonal practice of binding ing triviality of the gesture of making a book out of top”3—Wool made his first artist’s book, 93 Drawings are visible. This transparency about process, and a persists in Smith’s many book editions (numbering corresponding species names, many of which are unaltered printed matter into books—a tactic that junk printed matter is complicated by Smith, whether of Beer on the Wall. Produced in an edition of five in certain mode of controlled chance and strategic more than a hundred titles to date), which include wonderfully evocative: “blue shiner,” “stargazing Roth pioneered in his series daily mirror (1961), which by hand binding the readymade pages or

Christopher Wool 8 Christopher Wool 9 Josh Smith 6 Josh Smith 7

Binding: Hardback Format: 305 × 254 mm (12 × 10 in) Extent: 336 pp Number of images: 450 col and b/w illustrations Word Count: 95,000 ISBN: 978 0 7148 7264 3

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