artist books
The Unbounded Wor(l)d
Long before the Internet, books were the miracle that carried information far and wide. Some scribbles printed on a page conveyed worlds. But as Marshal McLuhan and Quentin Fiore so deftly showed in The Medium is the Massage, a book is a material technology. It is a thing with limits that inflects information to fit its needs and desires (most notably, perhaps, books tend to be linear).
Books —from codec to clay table, from papyrus to scroll, from hard back to paper back to e-book — are bound by their material form. Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. In The Unbounded Wor(l)d, Marc Lafia reconsiders the book and re-figures it as a new site of possibility, as a geography, as a territory with new ways of knowing, seeing, and enjoying.
Lafia writes with books. He doesn’t write books; he doesn’t write about books. He uses the books themselves as his material to write new books. The focus of the content has shifted from what’s in the book — the words and information — to the form itself. The material here is not words or facts or fictions but bindings, spines, pages, and the vast cultural discourse of books.
Lafia comes at the book from different angles. He takes up found books and uses their pages, bindings, spine, words, covers, contexts, and layouts to re-situate, re-purpose, and re-imagine the book as a new site, re-embodied and spatially situated. Other times, he builds the book from scratch, usually using complex folding techniques that allow the pages to be juxtaposed or splayed.
These books becomes sites, environments, creating new situations from the spatial, unwinding, re-territorilization and dispersal of the once bound. Here, the book is unbound, unleashing new modes of reckoning — of knowing, seeing, organizing, enjoying.
The results are as varied and complex as the creation themselves. We find Somerset Maugham turned inside out; we find the live tweets of a London university riot enduring long past their digital lifespan, the words echoing to eternity; we find trees splayed and literally indexed; we find sawed spines supporting clouds. What was once bound and organized has been reorganized — folded, pleated, and redistributed. Suddenly, the cultural, political, and personal meet at new and surprising angles, an origami of knowing at once whimsical and poignant.
The book as we know it is dying. But this is not an elegy for the book. This is not nostalgia. Lafia takes up the exquisite detritus — books today are sold by the pound — and finds new beauty, new lives, new possibilities. Much as the land artists shaped and re-purposed the desolate and abandoned, Lafia shapes and re-purposes the book, forging new territories out of the pages we are abandoning.
Marc Lafia & Daniel Coffeen
Mr Maughn Himself
Few authors have so completely revealed themselves in their writings as has W. Somerset Maugham. In practically everything he has written there is interjected some intensely personal element which offers sometimes a glimpse, sometimes a searching look into the vast intellect and diffuse personality of the writer. The close relationship between fictional and non-fictional became Maugham's trademark as a writer. The title, Mr. Maugham Himself, suggests something essential of the man, and inspires the artist, who Maugham, thought the highest of being, to create an essence of Maugham by talking his words, all that which is inside the hardback cover, and places them on top and in the former shell of the book places… the 'bottling' them as the hardback jacket sits on top of the pulp of the paper and houses the plastic bottles of Mr Maugham Himself.
Synopsis:
The text block and binding of Somerset Maugham's writings are removed and they now sit atop the hard back cover, which hollowed out, the shell of the man as they sit on top of the pages, bound by yarn and situated with plastic vials.
Edition of 1
$3000
Antoinette
Combines two books, Youth and Sex with Marie Antoinette and places them inside a folio case with arched windows setting off the contrasting narratives of the books with in an architectural space to amplify both the confines of the body and the binding of narrative inside books.
Synopsis (material description)
Prat Paris presentation portfolio packaging box
Pages and sawed binding from Marie Antoinette, Last Queen of France by Evelyne Lever, 2001 and Youth and Sex, Pleasure and Responsibility, Gordon D Jensen, 1973
Edition of 1
$2000
Wandering Plots
All fiction is subject to plot, and many writers in railing against the tyranny of plot, have been accused of wandering plots. Perhaps the greatest fault in writing is wandering. Here the wandering is no fault of the writers, but rather the binding of the book that has been unwound. Though unbound a books pages are still bound by the box, but inside the box, one page does not follow another. They are splayed and dispersed and yes, are wandering. Today we record multiple threads and plots of our lives, in email, twitter accounts, in our texting to multiple persons and each text thread is its own plot - and yet our fiction inside the bounds of the binding of the book is more than ever in search of new plot which might simply be the requirement of a forced enclosure. I have always wondered if there was something in the unbound that could give us new knowledge or sense of our own unconscious and very lucid wanderings.
Description:
Kvittra Box, 15x15x15 centimeters (6x6x6 inches)
Loose book pages
Edition of 10
$1000
black box | beautiful lies
In science and engineering, a black box is a device, system or object which can be viewed in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge of its internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black). Almost anything might be referred to as a black box: a transistor, an algorithm, or the human mind.
The opposite of a black box is a system where the inner components or logic are available for inspection, which is sometimes known as a clear box, a glass box, or a white box.
Edition of 1
$2000
Paper Pulp
Pulp is one of the most abundant raw materials worldwide. It is most commonly used as raw material in papermaking but is also used for textiles, food, pharmaceutical and many other industries as well. Paper, made of pulp, is a versatile material with many uses. Whilst the most common is for writing and printing upon, it is also widely used as a packaging material. In these series of works, various pulp and cardboard structures are placed along side-sawed cuttings of books to reveal their fibrous elements and to show the beauty of variation from pulp to paper…
Description
Varied sawed section of select books, cardboard packing materials of variations depth, height and width.
Editions of 3
$1500
The Book of Columns
The first books where codices and scrolls and in time such scrolls inspired large marble stone columns. Such towering columns were often made of marble drums and had writings and drawings of great conquests such as Hadrian's column found in Trajan forum in Rome. They were made to commemorate and remind cities of past glories - to give to light to the future by illuminating the past Here a simple paper lampshade is used to house columns of paper to give figure to the ‘book’ in an early format.
Description:
IKEA Varmluft 46, Light Shade Square Shape
Paper: off-white
Frame: Steel, Powder coating
Object Size: Length: 26 ", Height: 10 " (Length: 66 cm Height: 25.5 cm)
Edition of 3
$2500
At the Cross Roads
One book, Zionism in Germany, 1897-1933, has its binding sawed off and then separated to form a cross, a crucible, materially suggesting the conflagration of the Jews and Germans that lead to the holocaust. A multi-color digital cross band holds the two half’s together.
*‘Zionism in Germany 1897-1933: The Shaping of a Jewish Identity by Stephen Poppel (1977) challenged the mainstream of Jewish history written from a triumphalist Zionist perspective. Seen through this optic, the history of diaspora communities was a chronicle of assimilation and demographic decline culminating in the Holocaust, a catastrophe redeemed only by the far-sighted minority who built the Jewish state.
In a startling departure from Zionist historiography Poppel announced "I have concentrated on the effects of Zionism on the German Zionists themselves, rather than on their efforts on behalf of Zion." He began with a succinct account of how the Enlightenment and emancipation affected European Jews entering "the modern world, which was partly secular but ultimately Christian in its outlook". Spurred by the recrudescence of anti-Semitism in the 1880s, Zionism was a reaction to the chimera of assimilation.
Yet however vehemently German Zionists attacked the "assimilationists" they showed little enthusiasm for migration to Palestine. Rather, they articulated minority nationalism and mentally reconstructed Germany as a pluralistic state in which Jewish and German nationalism would co-exist. This proved to be a delusion but in the 1900s it was not so demented. ‘https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/160150.article
Edition of 1
Not for sale
Repertoire
The book, not quite a book, but something that folds into a book, is a kind of puzzle of space and action, suggesting that seeing is a repertoire, as is space, action and perception. To repeat is never quite to repeat. To intervene is both to repeat and to try to break repetition. In the digital and in nature, buildings, assassins, viruses continually replicate and disperse, well outside our perceptual field.
Description:
Single sheet, folds from a 4 panel accordion book to a poster with two inch cut in center.
Size; 3.5 x 2.5 inches
Paper: Epson Ultra premium presentation paper, matte, 8.5 x 11” (216x279 mm) 51grams
Edition; Unlimited
Price: $25
Tree Index
Photography is a way of seeing, mechanical seeing, arresting time, constructing its own event, an event whose result the photograph is often taken for the thing seen. The index maps, registers, invents, atomizes, and puts in relief. In this book, the book, it, a house, architecture, a single tree is photographed and then re-photographed into sections. The photograph is indexed and so presented, presents 'treeness' perhaps. The work uses the index card as a way to read photography and to read the book.
Description:
29 3x5 oxford unruled index cards
Hand made linen folio case with magnetic closure
Edition; 10
Price: $1500
Void 1 and 2
2013
In 1960, French avant-garde artist Yves Klein created a photo montage of himself leaping from a wall over a quiet Paris street. The black and white photograph, called the Leap Into the Void, was Klein’s way of embracing the irrational and celebrating groundlessness in an increasingly industrial era bound by convention. The photograph captures both the eye and the imagination because it does not conform to expectations. It captures an act of defiance both against what any sensible person would do and against gravity itself.
The void is full of meaning and information. But still, it’s hard to map it with our logic or to experience it with our body.
What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us, which tempts and lures us; it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
When someone leaps into the void he “goes aerial” and becomes one with air and dematerialize. It is not the landing, but the fall. One doest passively succumb to the forces of gravity; they run like an athlete to dive into the void and open their arms as if they could fly. The void isn’t empty, but full of information.
V1
In 1960, French avant-garde artist Yves Klein created a photo montage of himself leaping from a wall over a quiet Paris street. The black and white photograph, called the Leap Into the Void, was Klein’s way of embracing the irrational and celebrating groundlessness. The book creates a spatial zone that brings together Yves Klein's notion of the Zone of immaterial pictorial Sensibility with Bas Jan Ader's, work All is Falling.
These are passed through a reading of Tacita Dean's work, Disappearance at Sea, which brings together, In search of the Miraculous, Ader's fatal attempt to sail across the Atlantic, in a 13 foot pocket cruiser called 'ocean wave' and Donald Crowhurst, an inexperienced sailor entering the Golden Globe Single-Handed Round-the-World Yacht Race, and who like Ader never returned home. All three are leaps into the depths of the unconscious, the great terra incognita—the unknown land.
V2
In this companion book, the historical influences of the one book are rendered immaterial and voided. Here are the elements of the sea, fire, gold the void.
Description:
Book: Companion Vols1 and Vols 2
Pages, 8 pages
Dimension:
Paper: Epson Ultra premium presentation paper, matte, 8.5 x 11” ( 216x279 mm) 51grams
Hand assembled with cut
Edition; 50
Price: $35
Clouds
2013
Using the bindings of classic book, 2 pictures of clouds sit upon thin wire armatures set into cork that sit inside the binding of the book. Here the book finds an entirely new purpose, to be the armature of a reverie.
Description:
Hardback book cover and binding sawed to 1" (2.54centimeters), corks .25in x .5in (0.635cm x 1.27cm), music wire variable lengths 6-9 inches, .032 diameter, glossy paper, and printed clouds
Edition; 25
Price: $200
Instascapes
2012-13
Books are views, opening up the metaphors of landscapes and vistas
Instascapes are lightweight ambient sculptural transparencies mimicking camera filters. They are designed to be social and playful, or small and personable. They are made to alter one’s environment and produced at varying scales from index card size to billboard size. They come in a variety of colors and each book version with 2 inter-changeable filters
Here the books spine becomes an armature for light, ballast through which to see space.
Description:
Hardback book cover and binding sawed to 1 5/8” (4.04centimeters), plastic dowels 3/8’ diameter, sewn to plastic, 3x5 inches, packaged in an envelop of hand sewn zig zag sticking.
Edition; 25
Price: $200
Book of Territories
Using select found books and cutting them 1.5/8 inches from their spine - a new book is created becoming an object, a space, a territory. The flags placed on the surface of ridged pages, on and around words, denote it as a new space, a space of conquest, and a space of signs naming overtaking other signs. Somewhere between Mallarme and Broodthaers, the space of words and their figures become sites in geometry of space.
Description:
Hardback book cover and binding sawed to 2 5/8” (6.04centimeters) set of Moore Push Pin Map Flags, 1 in. x 5/8 in. and come with 1 1/8 in. long pins.
Edition; 25
Price: $200
Word Paint / Tube /
Writers having always wanted to paint with language, to transpose the very medium of words into the medium of paint.
Description:
5oz Aluminum paint tube, sheets of paper.
Zionism in Germany, 1897-1933 Stephen M Poppel 197, inside, Chapter 8, The Power of Context
Edition; 20
Price: $50
Book Bag
A book bag is a durable bag, satchel or backpack that is used to carry books and sometimes other supplies such as notebooks, ring binders and file folders, particularly by students. The bag and the book are not so far apart. Both are made of paper and both are made to carry things, one, words and ideas, and the other, whatever can fit or be carried in the bag. This ‘book bag’ brings together both the armature and straps of a paper bag and a book whose binding has been sewed off. The bag literally carries the book.
Description:
4’x9’x 2.85’
Hardback book cover and pages sawed to 4 5/8” wrapped at the top by a brown paper bag and string handles.
Edition; 20
Price: $150
Sail, without Binding, Words on the Wind
Loose sheets of select books, unbound, unmoored, wandering, without binding find themselves in the shape of boat, set sail.
Here sections of pages cut out from books become unmoored words, pages outside linearity, back to words themselves… set sail into the unknown.
Description
Hardback book cover and binding sawed to 2 5/8”, Balsa wood dowel, and sheets of paper.
Edition; 10
Price: $250
Pear
2013
What is the pearness of the pear, its familiar shape, its taste, it's color, its same but unique dimensions… here the book binding is used like the core of pear --- and each page unique. Tapering towards the top (botanically this is the bottom, the stem end) and rounded at the bottom (botanically this is the apex).
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Description:
Pigment print on 100% cotton rag Moab Lasel paper
Coptic stitched with linen thread, linen spine, PVA
Edition of 3 (each a pair of books)
$1500
Magician, Garden, Cinema
2008-2013
Designed as a Jacob’s ladder, this book plays with cinema as an apparatus of perspective magic and the automaton Almost a century ago, Jacob's ladder was a novel toy parents bought to amuse their children. The toy is made of wooden blocks and cotton tape in such a way it gives the illusion of the wood blocks tumbling over each other and down the "ladder." The toy is also known as "clacker blocks" because of the rhythmic slapping sound the blocks makes while falling. The original name comes from the Bible where Jacob dreams of a ladder stretching down from heaven to Earth on which angels make their way up or down. Actually the design of Jacob's ladder takes into account friction and gravity. Without the exact placement of the cloth and without gravity pulling it down to earth, it would not work.
Edition of 11
Eros through the ages (west end boys and eastern girls)
Beauty for much of human history has been connected to fertility. No matter how we consider female beauty – and in that conception put away the idea of conception – female beauty has always turned on fertility. But in fact not at all always, soon enough in man’s history, sex became not about procreation, but pleasure, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Well that depended on what your philosophy of life was. For the ancients, the cultivation of pleasure and appetite suffused life and its fulfillment was simply a natural appetite to be appeased or cultivated. With the Christian era, focus was on the afterlife, this life was but a short one compared to eternal life and the body was a corruption, strange and alien to the aspiring spirit. Never the less, artists and their patrons in the staging of religious or mythic scenarios wanted to visually enjoy such pleasures. (One need only look at the French Rococo painters, Boucher and Poussin to see this.) But just turn the globe around, and on the other side of the world, the earthly pleasures of sex during the same time, the 16th to 18th century, are depicted in Japan during the Edo period in Shunga prints using the wood cut or Ukiyo-e technique. Sets of such depictions were enjoyed by all social groups and were often given as wedding gifts and such art integrated into the fabric of everyday life. But things of the body were not all shunned in the western world and found their way into pictures through scenes of mythologies, even religious pictures and then pictures made for the aristo. Wanting to see both east and west simultaneously I made the following works both as an accordion book based on the Japanese screen and as prints on rice paper mounted and superimposed on each other on wood.
Set 1
Artist Unknown, Pan copulating with a she-goat, Carrara marble, from The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, 2nd Century AD
Shunga, Untitled, (c 1850)
Set 2
Nicolas Poussin, Sleeping nymph surprised by satyrs or Venus surprised by satyrs, 1627
Yanagawa Shigenobu, Two Lovers, 1800
Set 3
Francisco de Goya, Clothed Maja, 1798-1805
Katsushika Hokusai School, Untitled’ Circa 1800
Set 4
François Boucher, L’Odalisque, circa 1745
Yanagawa Shigenobu, Untitled, circa 1800
Set 5
El Greco, The Holy Family, 1585
Yanagawa Shigenobu, Family 1820
Set 6
Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1486
Shunga, Untitled (c 1850)
Set 7
Satyr Nymph, Musei Capitolini, Rome, Roman copy after Hellenistic original of the Pergamene school, (circa 150bc)
Kiyokata, Love Games, (Series, Ways of Making Love), 1910
Set 8
Édouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 1863 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
Unknown Artist, Woman pleasuring herself with a dildo while Man watches,
Set 9
Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Portrait of a Lady as St Lucy, circa 1500
Portrait, (circa 1800)
Set 10
Utamaro 1, Kitagawa (1753-1806) Untitled", late 18th Cent
Max Beckman, Adam and Eve, 1917
Description
Presentation Matte Paper 121 lbs
Linen binding tape
Accordion Shape
Edition of 10
$1500
X and O and X and Y and Z
X and 0 are the coordinates of Tic-Tac-Toe and x, y and z the coordinates of planar space. In this book, a set of process drawing are presented with a series of open white pages to take on tic-tac-toe as a different kind of game, one where the board is continually drawn, to become spontaneous and emergent. Where in Tic-Tac-Toe two players, X and O, take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 grid to outmaneuver the other, here line becomes force and play.
Description:
Photo of process drawing
Hand drawn tic-tac toe pad
Edition 100
$20
Well Done Kids, What’s Next?
2013
This is a transcription of the twitter accounting of the London riots of 2011 as tweeted by penny red (Laurie penny) a young journalist, who as she describes herself, 'lives in a little hovel room somewhere in London, mainly eating toast and trying to set the world to rights as every human heart is a revolutionary cell.' 'It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realize that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.'
Description:
Single sheet,
Size; 88-inch accordion book, 19 folds
Paper: Moab Lasal Photo Matte, Double Sided, Bright White Archival Inkjet Paper, 230gsm, cur from 17"x100' Roll
Edition of 12
$500
Say farewell to the Revolution or Post Cards from the fronts of Perception Management
From: public relations hugs and kisses
2010-2013
Both a book and object of one statement wrapped in plastic, hugs and kisses presents 70 color field prints with statements about the engineering, management and shaping of individual and social desire. The fear of the irrational mind and the mass propelled corporate interests with the propaganda tools (euphemistically known as “public relations”) to appeal to and assuage people’s selfish desires. The commodifying of the self would prepare the soil for the politics of the triumph of the self as the ultimate expression of democracy. The seductive print works of color fields and elegant text give consistency of form and rhetorical argument to the idea that people can be made better, they can be engineered.
Here the topology of the book is pleated with out neither beginning nor end, putting forward the complexity of the multiple trajectories of the social
Description:
Edition of 12
$50
Everyone is Here
2010-2103
Each pages an instruction for possibility of varied collective actions to put into practice and amplify the social, conversational and distributed aspects of the network.
Only by gathering together to know ourselves in each other, to be part of a larger inquiry which is to live concurrent to others, to be in a larger embrace of time, a politic of being, an island in the net can we see ourselves.
The book is a set of instructions, part performance, part research, to create on the go performative troupes that self-select themelves. It outlines a series of exercises; games and situations that heighten participant’s sense of being, space and place. There are no spectators, no specialists and open to all.