Pages

Cristinerose | Josée Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present Pages, an exhibition curated by Buzz Spector including: Laurie Anderson, Hanne Darboven, Rodney Graham, Ron Griffin, Ann Hamilton, Matthew Higgs, Marco Maggi, Stefana McClure, Graham McDougal, Amy Morel, Mark Napier, Alastair Noble, Elena del Rivero, and Buzz Spector. The page is the basic module of reading, but it rarely holds the entirety of a text. When an artwork takes the form of a page, our knowledge that a page can only exist among others conditions our expectations of what is to be read. The 14 artists in this selection of works from the seventies through today make use of the page as a cognitive armature to turn text into image.

Hanne Darboven’s ongoing project chronicles existence through daily “writings” that delineate time’s passage both for the process of their making and as markers of historical time. In her untitled triptych of 1973, Darboven’s pencil scrawled lines seem almost, but not quite, legible. Amy Morel also documents the passage of time in an ongoing series of pie charts recording her daily plans and then her successes and failures in fulfilling them. The epistolary pages of Elena del Rivero are letters never sent and never received. Letter to the Mother (1996) consists of only that word in pink ink repeated all over the page. Ron Griffin’s paintings of found letters invite viewers to read other people’s mail. His meticulous images in acrylic on panel are each only faintly visible through a translucent “envelope” of white paint.

Ann Hamilton alters the pages of books. In her Untitled Letter (1992) small pebbles are adhered to a page’s every word. The neat rows, nestled in blocks that match the proportions of the text beneath, comprise a minuscule terrain. In her Yellow Pages (2003), Stefana McClure transforms inscription to erasure with stylus on transfer paper. Mark Napier’s software project, FEED (2001-2003) treats the Internet as raw material, reading pages of a succession of websites and breaking them down into a stream of text and pixels.

Matthew Higgs excises and frames book pages. Consisting of the title pages of second-hand books he culls from the shelves of second-hand bookstores, Back to the Wall (2002) and From the Center (2000) speak volumes about their new status as objects of art. Two pages from an Ian Fleming novel are the main elements in Rodney Graham’s Study for Casino Royale (1989). The collage incorporates the scene where James Bond is stripped and tied to a chair to be tortured. A close reading reveals Graham’s commentary on the physiognomic connection between opened book and spread-eagled body. Laurie Anderson’s It’s Not the Bullet (1977) is a page with photograph and lyrics to a Reggae tune for Chris Burden. The target is twice evoked in the song; as the art world destiny of her own ambitions and as the metaphorical body of Burden. The collage elements in Graham McDougal’s One More Time (2003) are strips cut from the pages of fashion magazine ads.

The layout of Marco Maggi’s Pages (2003) is a grid of square apertures cut out from stacks of paper encased in white frames. At the back of each excision there is a small shape made of cut, raised, and folded paper. Together, they compose an alphabet of affects. Alastair Noble transforms the first page of Mayakovsky’s epic 1925 poem, “Brooklyn Bridge” into an aluminum sculpture that duplicates the typographical layout of the original Russian text in a grid of metal blocks. Buzz Spector’s Polaroid images of books from his personal library reflect on how one is what one reads. In 33 Art Histories (Spine), Spector has built a stack equivalent to the 33 bones of the human spinal column, but the proportions of the volumes he selected offer a body of another kind of knowledge, waiting to be read.