Book Lovers is a collection of novels written by visual artists, first showcased at M HKA - the Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp - in 2013. So far, the archive includes over 200 works by the likes of Carl Andre, Salvador Dalí, Tim Etchells, Joseph Kosuth, Bruno Schulz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Andy Warhol. Apart from the traveling collection, an online database of the books has been set up.
Read Book Lovers for Sale in Amsterdam
The exhibition at Barcelona’s Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Centre will feature audiovisual works from Tom Phillips, Alexandre Singh and Cally Spooner, referencing a series of lectures given by Roland Barthes at Collège de France in the years 1978-1980. In his speeches, he listed all the requirements every writer should meet. He saw the writing process as unreal, and he reflected on the urge to write as such. A solitary occupation, in this case writing a novel, was turned into a collective experience. Barthes pointed out any doubts, uncertainties and delusions, at the same time revealing the writer’s weak points. The curators present the process of creation of art as an analogically solitary process – the audience experiences only the final result of the process.
The Barcelona exhibition emphasizes that the relationship between the writing process and the process of creating its visual counterpart is a collateral art project in the practices of the participating artists. The books from the Book Lovers collection contain numerous references to literary tradition, yet the authors’ approach is typically visual.
Read Book Lovers: The Novel as a Form of Art
One example of such effort is each word in Alexandere Singh’s 2008 The Marque of the Third Stripe – each word in the novel has its visual equivalent in the other part of the publication. An abstract pattern comprised of black and white squares is a sort of transcription of each the words that the artist used by the artist. AlsoIn addition, it serves as a reference for the video installation. The soundtrack is made up of miscellaneous voices reading the novel, which, in turn, correspond with the visual code on the screen. The story is constructed as a novel within a novel. The video installation highlights this layered structure through a perpetual emergence of new codes stemming from the already existent codes.
Tom Phillips started to work on A Humument in 1966 after purchasing W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document, which was first published in 1892.
He covered the pages with doodles, drawings and collages, leaving just only particular words visible. Each of the pages was approached individually while the uncovered words eventually added up and formed a brand new novel. Automatically, Phillips automatically became an author even though he did not write a single word. He transformed 367 pages of written text through ‘visual intrusion’. Since then, his work has been published several times and it remains an open project.
It took 8 months to finish Collapsing in Parts, Cally Spooner’s debut novel. At the same time, she was running Footnotes, a series of performance, film and reading events, which were the actual footnotes to the resulting text in making. The open process Spooner applied in her writing resembles Barthes’ thoughts on preparation ofing thea novel. The artist let the audience stay in control while the book was being written. The promise of creating a novel and the tensions it created were thean organic part of the project. The reaction of the audience and the contribution of the crew members were included in the novel piece.
The book collection and the online novel database are endorsed by M HKA.
The exhibition is conceived as a sort of an afterword epilogue to The Text: First Notions and Findings project – a long-term programme analysing the role of writing in contemporary art, which was released in at Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Centre and was curated by Martí Manen and David Armengol.
The book collection and the online novel database are endorsed by M HKA.
Preparation of The Novel
Fabra i Coats - Centre d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
18/07 – 5/09/2014
source: press materials