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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.