Books as Rubbish
With the proliferation of digital information via the internet, ebooks and kindles, traditional books are arguably becoming or have become (to some degree) obsolete. There is strong support and advocacy to uphold a place for the traditional physical book object in our cultural and educational landscape, but the book is increasingly seen as an archaic receptacle of information. Another throwaway commodity, the value of many books is next to nothing. Artists often make use of this decline in value of a once revered subject matter through their work.
I recently met Laura-L Broad (@design_craft) on twitter and found out about her craft-based practice utilising old books to make functional objects such as floors http://laura-lbroad.blogspot.co.uk/
And yesterday I visited the paper exhibition First Cut at Manchester Art Gallery
http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=92 One of the artists featured in the show is Manchester based Nicola Dale who often uses books as material in her work as well as other paper materials such as wallpaper. http://www.nicoladale.com/
The piece presented in this show in Sequel (2012). “For Sequel Dale adorned the branches of a felled 12-foot oak tree with thousands of individual leaves cut from the pages of unwanted reference books rescued from library sales, charity shops and skips.”
The exhibition also has a room dedicated to the production processes of Dale’s and Westgate Studios’ Andy Singleton’s work. In here, a categorisation process is illustrated with photographs of the cut book-leaves in plastic tabs labelled with handwritten labels such as “dinosaurs.” Alongside the photographs is a text panel quoting Dvora Yanov in Interdisciplinary Introduction to Categorization, interview with Christine Baele:
“Categorization” means “making categories.” We all do it, every day, in everyday ways. Go into a supermarket: its produce and other goods are categorized. Have breakfast in the morning, lunch midday, dinner at night – you are engaging in categorization. Identify people you pass in the street as “infants,” “children,” “youth” or “teenagers,” “adults,” “elderly,” and you have categorized them. And so forth, from my perspective as an ethnographer. Because it is so common-place, there is no “most illustrative” example. The more important point to note is that because of its commonplace-ness, we do not attend to our category-making. That is the source both of its power and of its problematic character: category structures (“taxonomies”) entail tacit knowledge which is made explicit at times only with difficulty; and that knowledge is created from a point of view that also goes unattended – unless we make it a point to focus on this everyday, common sense, unspoken, unwritten knowledge…
Categories – all of them – do not exist in nature; they are human creations, made collectively (by a smaller group – e.g., an organization – or a larger entity – a society).
Full interview here: http://www.revue-emulations.net/archives/n8/categentretien
