An artist bought cheap paperbacks for 10 or 25 cents at used bookstores. In little time, the collection grew to 100’s. He organized them by genre—suspense, mystery, and murder—and within each genre, he chose a select few, organizing them again, alphabetically by title. He ripped the covers off, stacked them, sealed them together with adhesive, and wielded a knife.
Afterwards he told me he didn’t want to make too many aesthetic decisions based on tone or color of pages. He said he didn’t want to work with high-art, literary-type books. He offered other explanations when I questioned him over Skype, after having met him at the opening of his show at the Packer Schopf Gallery on November 4. He didn’t seem shifty, but then again his show “Paper Back†is up there for only two weeks (before it travels to the Pulse Fair in Miami!).
The artist: Brian Dettmer: “This is the first time I’ve focused on paperbacks in such large pieces.â€
See—he admitted it’s unusual. Brian Dettmer’s best known for slicing through vintage reference books, cutting around preexisting images and text, thereby creating intricate layered book-sculptures. But for the paperback book-sculptures in the new show, he’s complicated his readings with the knife, cutting out the letters of phrases. He revealed:
BD: “It’s tough working with language in visual art, I think, giving so much focus to such a short phrase. People are going to read into it, no matter what, so I didn’t want them to be too literary or sound too sure of themselves. I didn’t want them to come across as preachy. . . . And I definitely wanted to avoid them sounding too pretentious by being too intelligent or too deep. So the first one I come up with was ‘I Could Tell You But Then I’d Have To Kill You,’ and then I was thinking about the subjects as well, the suspense, the mystery, and the murder, and I was thinking about this situation we’re in with books right now. We don’t really know what the future is with them. And I wanted to use phrases that everyone knows, and I like this idea of cutting them off at the end. . . . It makes it darker, more open to interpretation. Even though everyone already knows exactly how it finishes, you’re finishing it in your head. Then the middle one ‘There’s Nothing To Fear But’ that, without the words ‘fear itself,’ seems even more troubling. But that’s like what’s going to happen to information if we do stop printing books. We’re constantly losing files and constantly having to upgrade. . . . Maybe I’m a bit of a doom-and-gloomer, but if we lose access to inexpensive electricity and information keeps going the way it does, we’re going to lose access to all of our personal and cultural records as well. We’re continuing to rely on constant electricity. Also thinking about how technology and information are so integrated and how vulnerable that’s becoming, but those are my own thoughts. They are such open phrases. They’re kind of cheesy, kind of funny also, but by putting them on there, people can stop there; they can read into it and put their own interpretation onto it.”
Okay, I agree—definitely humorous and dark. He continued:
BD: “When you’re on the right side [of each paperback sculpture], you can read the text, but when you’re on the left side, the letters become more visible, but then it’s also controlled the way the actual words are held together.”
Interesting. . . . But what about the notches in the sculptures?
BD: “I wanted something to tie the text in with the actual sculpture that would integrate the two, and I was also thinking about this idea that the text emerged from pixels but not literally carving a shape of a pixel. Just letting the text, the architecture of the book, the structure of the page dictate where these little things might go.â€
I asked him to explain something else I found a little odd for him but definitely compelling—the ink-jet prints of visual poems on the walls near their corresponding sculptures. For example, pictured here “Prose and Poetry of the Worldâ€:
BD: “I’ve always found when I’m isolating specific lines of text, whether it be from an anatomy book or a mechanical book or even a poetry book because all these fields are so specific—once I’m isolating that text—it takes on a different meaning, the possibilities open up, and so it is a visual poetry. So for this new show, I’ve been focusing more on text, shifting toward that more. With some of the individual pieces, I then began transcribing the actual text into a printed page—highlighting that visual poetry—and hopefully shifting the viewer’s focus to that, at least what’s on the printed page, and then going back and forth between that and the sculpture.â€
We talked about other shifts, more about his works using nonfiction:
BD: “The information [in nonfiction books] is changing over time but, as we all know, the form has changed as well. I think it’s dictionaries and encyclopedias, all of these reference books, that are losing their function the quickest because everything is online. I have 10 or 20 solid dictionaries in my studio right now, but if I need to look up a word, I’ll go online because I can get directly to it. Same with encyclopedias. Because the information is constantly evolving, but the form itself is evolving as well—encyclopedias and dictionaries—these text reference books are the first to go as far as the way books are going. It’s interesting because the content and also the form is constantly evolving and under threat.â€
I asked but shouldn’t—What next, Brian Dettmer? You’ve really outdone yourself here. What next?
Brian Dettmer may or may not be at the closing reception—he didn’t know yet at the time of our talking. But the closing reception at Packer Schopf Gallery on November 20 will feature a performance by Coppice, a Chicago-based duet of bellows and electronics. The performance begins at 3:00 p.m.—sharp.
- Paper Back - November 10, 2011
