Abstract
This essay situates Erica Baum’s Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011) within the history of the artist’s book. It does so by introducing her ongoing series, begun over a decade ago, in which Baum makes the quotidian act of folding the corner of a book’s page into a sculptural intervention, reorienting and “reauthoring” source texts into works of concrete poetry. While photographs from this series have found a wide reception within the art world, their movement away from the gallery wall and (back) into the codex has permitted them to take on new dimensions of meaning. For critics more intent on approaching these images as poems, the challenge of rendering Dog Ear’s lineation has been met with consistently unsatisfying results. In taking up a different framework – that of the artist’s book – this essay does not argue against Dog Ear as a work of poetry or, for that matter, photography. Instead, it attends to the relationships between word and image as they are reconfigured by the gesture of folding, which both repeats and crystalizes moments of exposure and concealment. Materiality and seriality intertwine to sustain the unsettled, self-renewing pages against the backdrop of the book as object.
Highlights
How do we sense the afterlife of another reader’s attention? What sort of traces are retained in the body of a book or page that enable questions and reveries that would otherwise evade us? Marginalia may seem like an obvious answer but it is irritating as often as it is interesting, especially when it is our own
How is our attention circumscribed by the interwoven affordances of different media to orient us to what we are reading, seeing, or sensing within or just past the page? What is the shape and sound of the alterity moving across or behind this interface of legibility, opacity, and suggestion? How do the interpenetrating roles of concealment and variability at the surface of these images sustain what I’ll be calling a poetics of gestalt?
There is a foundational distinction to be made between Dog Ear as it appears in gallery or museum settings and Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011, 2016) as it exists in the form of the codex
Summary
How do we sense the afterlife of another reader’s attention? What sort of traces are retained in the body of a book or page that enable questions and reveries that would otherwise evade us? Marginalia may seem like an obvious answer but it is irritating as often as it is interesting, especially when it is our own. A more procedural and inclusive project (one where the hundredth page of every book the artist owns is dog-eared and documented, for example) would make for a different kind of field work regarding text and indeterminacy.
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