At the very base level my design process is one centred around
reconstruction — a process of making and breaking. I build rigid
formal structures only to go back to dismantle and reconstitute them, in doing so essentially exposing the framework itself.
In this way I align my work with historical and archaeological
models — examination by a means of destruction and subsequent restoration. To quote Hito Steyerl, “things often have to
be destroyed, dissolved in acid, cut apart, or dismantled in order
to tell their full story” and Leonard Woolley, “all excavation is
destruction”. By way of this reductive process residual elements
remain in juxtaposition, the work almost bears the scars of its
journey, the seams of assembly exposed, revealing gestures often hidden from the viewer.
Historical and archaeological models are evident in the rational
response to content I favour. An approach very much in line
with Alison and Peter Smithson’s “as found” mentality — “where
the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting-with”. The
transposition of preexisting elements butted up against the new,
working with and around antecedent forms. Historical reverence without rose-tinted nostalgia — I seek to incorporate and
sometimes reconstitute the remains of preexisting formats into
new work, the past as a foundation. A sometimes unstable foundation, one must remain aware of the fallibility of history itself,
the delicate process of reconstruction and reenactment “akin to
turning an omelette back into an egg”.
Moreover, the outwardly referential nature of my work is
something I consider valuable. Here, a visit to John Morgan’s
studio in Paddington Station shortly before leaving the UK still
greatly informs my work. The manner in which references are
boiled down to subtle design moves that allude to archival material without the need for heavy-handed gestures is something
I continually strive for. The same is true with the way Simon
AUGUST LETTER
01/13
Starling, for example, is able to string together seemingly disparate elements into cohesive projects and narratives. A consistency in materiality runs throughout, weaving together historical, social and associative threads.
These associative connections are something I also find present
in my own work — constant parallels drawn between elements,
but not overtly stated. Analogous to W.G. Sebald’s use of sometimes indecipherable images devoid of labels or descriptions,
along with the continual jumps he makes between past and present, and from descriptive text to historical recollection, room
is left for the viewer, space for these disconnects to be deciphered. This also stems from an interest in the backstory, marginalia and liner notes — the commonly overlooked small-print
that rationalises and supplements the primary content.
AUGUST LETTER
02/13
Woolley, C. Leonard Digging up the Past, 1930, Ernst
Benn Ltd, London
Starling, Simon Cuttings [Supplement], 2008, The
Power Plant, Toronto
Wooley’s primer on the field of archaeology and excavation based on a series of six talks broadcast for the
BBC. Outlines fieldwork and methodology, the process
of discovery through destruction—“all excavation is
destruction… all that remains is a hole in the ground
and a group of objects in a museum”. p39
Starling, Simon Never The Same River (Possible Futures,
Probable Pasts), 2010, Camden Art Centre File Notes,
Camden Art Centre, London
-------------------Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn, 1998, Translated
from the German by Michael Hulse, Harvill Press,
London
The Rings of Saturn chronicles Sebald’s walking tour
of the area in which I grew up, East Anglia. His delineated narrative frequently jumps between past and
present, from descriptive text to historical recounting.
Sebald’s text is often punctuated by obscure images,
some found, some taken by him, devoid of captions or
clear reference. Sebald knowingly made slight adjustments to historical truth in an attempt to find, as he put
it to Gugging psychiatric patient Ernst Herbeck, “true
insights via false paths”.
-------------------Borges, Jorge Luis ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don
Quixote’, from Ficciones, 1962, Grove Press Inc.,
New York
A fictional essay in which Borges outlines an author,
named Pierre Menard, who rewrites, word for word,
sections of Don Quixote and in doing so is “able to
enrich the piece by means of a new technique”. Borges
exalts his fictive author, declaring his account to be
infinitely richer than the original. Generating new work
via the repetition of existing forms.
-------------------Steyerl, Hito A Thing Like You and Me, e-flux Journal
#15, April 2010, available online at:http://www.e-flux.
com/journal/view/134
Written for a solo show in Oslo, Steyerl speaks of the
material base of a digital image, an image as a ‘thing’.
Of particular note is her remark that “things often have
to be destroyed, dissolved in acid, cut apart, or dismantled in order to tell their full story. To affirm the thing
also means participating in its collision with history”. A
link to Woolley’s Digging up the Past and Steyerl’s own
triptych project In Free Fall (see Images).
-------------------Starling, Simon Cuttings, 2005, Kunstmuseum Basel,
Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel & Hatje Cantz,
Ostfildern, Germany
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collections of Starlings works from 1993–2005 and
2005–2008 and accompanying text to show at Camden
Art Centre. Starling’s rigorous research methodology,
interest in histories of objects and places, and reactivation of outmoded technologies and are of importance.
His work is generally reductive in its final outcome, but
accompanied by complex narratives and process.
-------------------Asher, Michael Situation Aesthetics : The Work of Michael Asher, 2010, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass
Moeller, Whitney & Rorimer, Anne Michael Asher:
George Washington at The Art Institue of Chicago, 1979
and 2005, 2006, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago,
Illnois
Situation Aesthetics is a collection of Asher’s site specific
works that engage directly with a space and its history,
temporality and the structures of institutions. While,
George Washington... focuses directly on Asher’s relocations of a single object—a twentieth century bronze
cast of Antoine Houdon’s famous marble statue of
Washington. Of note is Asher’s in depth archival research and ability to allude to a place’s past with subtle,
elegant, often structural interventions.
-------------------Fast, Omer The Casting, 2008, Museum Moderner
Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Walther Konig, Koln
Publication to accompany Omer Fast’s video piece The
Casting, designed in collaboration with Manuel Raeder.
The piece consists of two hanging screens on which
still footage of constructed narrative scenes are projected on to one side. On the reverse is a fragmentary
interview between Fast and a US army sergeant. Fast
takes the sergeant’s two stories, one set on a road in
Iraq and one in a road in Germany, cuts them up and
reconstitutes them forming a new account. The reverse
of the video clearly shows these cuts, the underlying
structure of Fast’s reconstructed narrative revealed.
-------------------Lütticken, Sven Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary
Art, 2005, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam
Lütticken, Sven Viewing Copies: On the Mobility of Moving Images, e-flux Journal, #8, September 2009, available online at: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/75
In Secret Publicity the essays ‘Planet of the Remakes’
03/13
(p.119), ‘Appropriation Mythology’ (p.83) and ‘Bik Van
der Pol’s Repetitions’ (p.155) are of particular note.
Lutticken’s writings are often concerned with the
reactivation of forms and strategies from the history of
the avant-garde. ‘Planet of the Remakes’ for example,
makes reference to serials and the culture of Hollywood remakes, in relation to discussion of artists such
as Stan Douglas and Pierre Huyghe.
Text emailed to me by Inke Arns in response to some
questions about the “Walter Benjamin” lecture Mondrian ‘63-’96 given from ‘beyond the grave’. (see Images) An accompanying essay to the exhibition What
is Modern Art? (Group Show), which brought together
projects with roots in the South-Eastern European art
scene of the 1970s and 80s based on the practise of
anonymity and copying.
--------------------
--------------------
Lütticken, Sven (ed) Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, 2005, Witte de With, Rotterdam
Herzog, Werner Minnesota Declaration: Truth and
Fact in Documentary Cinema, April 30, 1999 at
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, available online at: http://filmvideo.walkerart.org/detail.
wac?id=3286&title=articles
Publication to accompany Witte de With exhibition
curated by the aforementioned Sven Lütticken, including an essay entitled ‘An Arena in Which to Reenact’ by
Lütticken and texts by participating artists. Useful collection of artists working in the field of re-enactment
/ reconstruction discussing their own work and intentions behind it.
-------------------Blackson, Robert Once More… With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture, Art Journal,
Spring 2007
Written whilst Robert Blackson was curator at the Reg
Vardy Gallery, Once More… With Feeling identifies current artistic practises which make use of reenactment
and reconstruction. Of note is Jeremy Deller’s The
Battle of Orgreave, a reconstruction of a 1980s miners’
strike that does more than retell the event. In basing the work on personal accounts of the strike rather
than newspaper articles or archival material, Deller’s
reconstruction was warped by memory. As Tom Morton notes in his Frieze article on Deller, The Battle of
Orgreave became more than simply a piece about the
strike, but “a part of its history, an epilogue to an experience.”
-------------------Jenkins, Keith Re-thinking History, 1991, Routledge,
London
Jenkins on historiography and the impact of a historians own personal world view on their reading of history. He identifies a separation between the ‘past’ and
history, recognising the past as a “construction site” of
facts on which history is built.
-------------------Arns, Inke Tripping into Art (Hi)Stories: Genealogy and
/ as Fiction. On the Exhibition “What is Modern Art?
(Group Show)”, from What is Modern Art (Group Show),
2006, edited by Inke Arns and Walter Benjamin
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
In relation to Sebald’s “true insights via false paths”,
Herzog’s lecture at the Walker Art Center denounces
Cinema Verité as being “devoid of verité. It reaches a
merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.” And
speaks of an “ecstatic truth” in cinema, in relation to
sometimes staged scenes in his documentaries used in
order to go beyond what is at hand. A slight distortion
of the ‘factual’ format in an attempt to reach what he
terms the “deeper strata of truth in cinema”.
-------------------Lee, Stewart ‘Joe Pasquale’, Sunday Times, December 1995, available online at: http://www.stewartlee.
co.uk/press/writtenformoney/1995-dec-joe_pasquale-sundaytimes.htm & http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=0YE9Kthyaco
English comedian’s Sunday Times article on material
theft in stand-up comedy and specifically Joe Pasquale’s
re-use of a Michael Redmond joke. Lee later performed
a routine at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2006
which included a joke which Joe Pasquale wouldn’t be
able to steal.
-------------------Roberts, Jennifer L. Mirrored Travels: Robert Smithson
and History, 2000, Yale University Philosophy PhD
Thesis
A PhD thesis on the “an entire complex of historical
reference and reflection in Smithson’s work.” With
particular discussion of the relationship between Spiral
Jetty and the Golden Spike pageant to celebrate the
centennial of the first transcontinental railroad held a
year before Spiral Jetty was built. Roberts considers the
two monuments “connected by more than merely an
accident of geographical continuity.”
-------------------Roelstraete, Dieter, The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art, e-flux Journal #4, March
04/13
2009, available online at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/51#_ftn6
at: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3izfb_the-thirdmemory-huyghe_shortfilms
On the use of archaeological methodology in contemporary art—“methodological complex that includes the
historical account, the archive, the document, the act
of excavating and unearthing, the memorial, the art of
reconstruction and reenactment, the testimony”. Useful connection between texts such as Woolley’s Digging
up the Past and contemporary practise.
A reenactment of the 1972 bank robbery by John Wojtowicz famously depicted in Dog Day Afternoon (1975).
Huyghe intersperses footage from the film with that of
Wojtowicz himself recounting the robbery in a reconstructed set of the bank. The Third Memory presents a
somewhat distorted account of events with Wojtowicz’s
memory evidently influenced by the film and Pacino’s
portrayal of him. Wojtowicz even mentions how he had
watched Pacino in The Godfather prior to the robbery
as inspiration—a circularity between popular culture
and reality.
-------------------Freud, Sigmund The “Uncanny”, 1919, first published
in Imago, Bd. V., 1919; reprinted in Sammlung, Fünfte
Folge, Translated by Alix Strachey
Freud on the ability of something to seem both familiar yet distance at once, and the sense of unease that
it creates. Useful in its discussion of viewing duplicates, copies, reconstructions and in relation to Sven
Lütticken’s discourse on the film Solaris in ‘Planet of
the Remakes’. Also, to Stan Douglas’ video piece Der
Sandmann which takes E.T.A. Hoffmann’s folk tale and
Freud’s discussion of it, as a starting point.
-------------------White, Hayden ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’ from The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 1987, John
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland
On the issues of narrative form in historical representation, the problems encountered in the retelling of
historical events and the balance to be struck between
analysis and narrative—“Historical narration without
analysis is trivial, historical analysis without narration is
incomplete.” The obstacles that must be overcome in
a successful reconstruction / reenactment of previous
events.
-------------------FILMS
Kon Tiki dir. Thor Heyerdahl, 1951, Camrose Media
Documentary of Thor Heyerdahl’s famous 4,300 mile
voyage from Peru to Tahiti. The crew built and travelled in a rudimentary balsa wood raft constructed from
native materials according indigenous plans in an attempt to prove Heyerdahl’s theory that pre-Columbian
Polynesian natives made trips across the ocean. A key
example of experimental archaeology, putting theory
into practise as a means of evidence.
-------------------The Third Memory dir, Pierre Huyghe, 2000, Twochannel video projection, 9min 32sec, available online
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
-------------------Vertical Feature Remake, dir. Peter Greenaway, 1978
A somewhat satirical account of the fictional Institute
of Reclamation and Restoration and their attempts to
reconstruct a proposed, but never made, film by Tulse
Luper, a fictional ornithologist regularly mentioned by
Greenaway. The film presents 4 remakes from footage of vertical objects, each using different structural
film methods to count to the 121 (11x11) objects. As
Greenaway puts it “Vertical Features Remake is a lovehate, or more appropriately, celebration-criticism, of
structural method, unthinkingly and stupidly dominant
in film circles at that time”.
-------------------Little Dieter Needs to Fly dir. Werner Herzog, 1998,
Anchor Bay Entertainment
Documentary film on Dieter Dengler and his capture
in Vietnam. Herzog takes Dengler back to the place of
his capture and, with locals cast as his captures, recreates the ordeal as Dengler narrates events. Rather than
a simple retelling of Dengler’s experience set to footage, Herzog physically retraces Dengler’s steps through
reconstructed scenes. An example of Herzog’s staged
factual method alluded to in the Minnesota Declaration.
-------------------Standard Gauge dir. Morgan Fisher, 1984
Production Stills dir. Morgan Fisher, 1970
Two films I have actually yet to see but have arranged
to view at The Film-Makers’ Co-operative in New
York. Standard Gauge is a film of fragments—fragments
of narration, of autobiography, of film history—woven
together in one contentious shot. A reconstituting of
disparate elements into one cohesive piece. Production
Stills is a document of its own process. A film that came
into existence through its production and ended when
the production ended.
05/13
Still from In Free Fall by Hito Steyerl, 2010
A piece consisting of 3 short films—‘After the Crash’,
‘Before the Crash’ and ‘Crash’—In Free Fall charts the
biography of a plane that began as a part of Howard
Hughes’ TWA fleet, was sold to the Israel military and
housed in an aeroplane graveyard in the Mojave Desert,
where it met its end as a prop in the film Speed. Of real
interest is Steyerl’s initial plan for the project. To take
a plane stored in the graveyard, blow it up in a Hollywood film and to ship its debris to China to be converted into recycled aluminium which would become
DVDs on which a pirated version of the film would be
printed. The plane’s destruction printed on its own
remnants. A circularity of de and re-construction that
charts the specific history of an object.
IMAGE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Still from Series 3, Episode 6 of The Chief, 1993,
Granada Television, original transmission on ITV,
21 May 1993
The Chief was an ITV television series set in East Anglia which ran from 1990–1995. It starred Tim PigottSmith and later Martin Shaw as Chief Constable of
the Eastland police constabulary. Much of the series
was filmed on location in East Anglia and episode 6, of
series 3 was filmed, in part, in my childhood home. In
the episode a sub-story of a man caught curb-crawling
plays out in various scenes shot around the house. In
order to film the episode photographs of the rooms
were taken before they were dismantled and everything
put back in its exact place. Of note is the reshuffling of
rooms by the crew (moving the man’s room to where
my sister’s room is), the use of real location rather than
sets and the odd sense of seeing my home as the backdrop for a fictional narrative.
06/13
Upper Lawn Pavilion Alison & Peter Smithson, 1961,
Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshere, England
The Smithson’s weekend home in Wiltshire represents
a prime example of their “as found” approach, by which
a site is treated almost as a found object—“Where the
art is in the picking up, turning over and putting-with”.
Responsive to their own specific needs and the site
itself, Upper Lawn Pavilion incorporates a preexisting
wall, foundations, chimney and windows on the site,
blending old and new into a cohesive structure. A combination of somewhat disparate elements held together
by a consistency in materiality and rhythm.
Invitation for The Work shown in this space is a response
to the existing conditions and/or work previously shown
within the space. Christopher D’Arcangelo & Peter Nadin, 1978–79, 84 West Broadway, New York
A series of successive shows initiated by D’Arcangel
and Nadin’s, in which each contributor was invited to
respond contiguously to the existing structure and
work in the space. It opened with an empty gallery,
entitled 30 Days Work a reference to the time put into
refurbishing the space, and was subsequently added
to until D’Arcangelo’s death in 1979. The invite listed
the shows sequentially with the opening text: “We
have joined together to execute functional constructions and to alter or refurbish existing structures as a
means of surviving in a capitalist economy”. Parallels
can be drawn to the Smithon’s “as found” mentality and
notions of continual reconstruction—which each show
the space is reevaluated and added to, accumulating a
growing body of work.
IMAGE BIBLIOGRAPHY
07/13
Stills from Actualité, 2001 & Western Recording, 2003,
Mathais Poledna
Taking cues from the Lumiere brothers and Godard’s
One Plus One / Sympathy for the Devil, Actualité depicts a band played by actors (some from the actual
band Rilo Kiley) dressed in recognisably 1980s post
punk ‘uniform’ as they rehearse, never getting going,
stuck in a stop-start loop. Western Recording is a 16mm
film installation of a man rehearsing Harry Nilsson’s
1969 song ‘City Life’ in the famous LA studio Western
Recording, where the Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds.
In both the pieces we see the rehearsal process, flaws,
repetitions and all, without the polished end product.
Western Recording is particularly interesting given the
fact that Nilsson never toured or played live. Both
make explicit historical references to popular music
without nostalgic reverence, sitting in some transitional
space in time, the tropes of a specific moment evoked
but not repeated.
IMAGE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006 & Inverted
Retrograde Theme, USA (House for a Songbird),
2002, Simon Starling
Autoxylopyrocycloboros is a four-hour long entropic voyage across Loch Long on a small wooden steamboat
fuelled by wood cut piece-by-piece from its own hull.
The boat itself, having been reclaimed from the bottom
of Lake Windermere, in a cyclical sense of origin and
return, sinks to the bottom of Loch Long. Inverted Retrograde Theme… consists of two 1:5 scale models based
on housing projects in Puerto Rico designed by Simon
Schmiderer in the early 1960s, installed up-side down
to act as cages for song birds. Starling’s ability to trace
histories, connections and narratives, and to weave
together disparate elements into cohesive works, themselves often journeys is of particular note. A meshing of
craft, material, social history, association, memory and
in depth yet divergent research.
08/13
Before and after image of the recolouring process
used on a episode of Dad’s Army by the Colour
Recovery Working Group from the Guardian article
‘Unscrambling an Army of Colours’, Thursday 11
December 2008
Due to archival purges and wiping, many television
programmes made by the BBC and ITV in the 1960s
and early ‘70s were deleted. In a number of cases the
only surviving copies of the broadcasts are black and
white film recordings made for countries that didn’t yet
have colour television capabilities. The result is a collection of TV programmes originally broadcast in colour, existing only in black and white. Through the work
of James Insell, the Colour Recovery Working Group
have been able to identify colour information in chroma
dots accidentally recorded in the black and white film
and in some cases restore the film back to its original
colour. A restorative process that is able to essentially
fill voids in the archives. A process which the Guardian
article describes as “akin to turning an omelette back
into an egg”.
IMAGE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Michael Asher Santa Monica Museum of Modern Art,
2008, January 26–April 12. Scan of spread from Support
Structures edited by Céline Condorelli, 2009, Sternberg
Press, Berlin, New York
A reconstruction of all the stud walls in precisely the
same positions as they were in each of the 44 previous
exhibitions in the space since 1998, exactly according
to the floor plans of each show. In physically manifesting the spatial changes within the building all at the
same time Asher creates juxtapositions of skeletal walls
overlapping and creating new spaces that never before
existed. In making a work for a gallery with no permanent collections, a space constantly changing with each
successive show, Asher manages to archive every single
show in the institution’s history without showing any
of the actual work. Here history reveals nothing other
than its own structural process.
09/13
Photograph of London Bridge relocated from the
Thames River, London to Lake Havasu, Arizona,
1968–71, from Historic American Engineering Record
In 1967 London Bridge was dismantled and, after being
bought by Robert P. McCulloch, shipped to a planned
community in Lake Havasu, Arizona. The granite from
the original structure, which dated back to 1831, was
used to clad the new bridge in Arizona. The relocation
later became the subject of a 1985 TV movie, Bridge
Across Time, starring David Hasselhoff, in which the
bridge was said to have brought with it the soul of Jack
the Ripper. A reconstitution of a structure in a totally
different place and time. (It was also part of an urban
myth that McCulloch had purchased London Bridge
thinking it was the more impressive Tower Bridge.)
IMAGE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Photograph of Mondrian ‘63 - ‘96 a lecture presented
by the long dead Walter Benjamin, 1986, Cankarjev
Dom, Ljubljana organised by Gallery ŠKUC, Ljubljana.
Photographed credited to “László Moholy-Nagy”
A lecture by Benjamin, dead for almost half a century
at the time, on works by Piet Mondrian produced after
his death in 1944. The lecture deals with repetition as a
generation of the new. Links to Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard’ and notions of the validity of the copy and repetition / reconstruction.
10/13
Still from Message from Andrée, by Joachim Koester,
2005, Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Taking S. A. Andrée’s failed arctic balloon expedition of 1897 as its starting point, Koester’s 16mm film
installation focuses not on deciphering the salvaged
photographs of the expedition found persevered in ice,
but on the undecipherable, the ruined images of visual
noise. The result is a video piece that points to the lack
of clarity in historical events, the holes in the archive,
“the twilight zone of what can be told and what cannot be told, narrative and non-narrative, document and
mistake.”
IMAGE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stills from File Under Sacred Music by Iain Forsyth and
Jane Pollard, 2003, ICA London
A re-staging of an infamous bootleg video documenting
a live performance by The Cramps to patients at the
Napa State Mental Institute on the 13th June, 1978.
The new lineup formed from a mixture of current
musicians and the audience from Core Arts, a mental
health charity in East London. The video quality is
manually degraded from broadcast quality to that of
the VCR of the original, purchased from eBay. The
piece attempts to examine the notion of ‘liveness’ and
in doing so it moves beyond simple re-representation
creating an almost alternate reality.
11/13
Norman Bel Geddes, ‘Coral Sea: Norman Bel Geddes’
re-enact naval battle’ Life Magazine, May 25, 1942,
seen at CCA Montreal in Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, 2011
American theatrical and industrial designer, Norman
Bel Geddes’ reenacted didactic dioramas for Life Magazine. Geddes’s models provide the reader with simulated depictions of battles in real-time, with as much
detail as possible at the time. In recreating scenes so
close to them actually happening a degree of guesswork
and approximation is naturally required. Reconstruction without the benefit of historical hindsight, reconstruction as almost direct response.
IMAGE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio, Fraser Muggeridge, 2010, Kaleid Editions, London
A collection of 48 books designed by Fraser Muggeridge literally taken part and rebound as an edition of
48 new books, forming more than merely a compilation
of the studios work but a work in itself. The rebinding
however is not simply arbitrary. Like the Asher piece,
a carefully considered underlying structure determines
the form of the book. The 48 previously existing books
are unbound and separated into sections which come
together forming odd juxtapositions and combinations.
As Eric Kindel notes, in an essay included in the book,
“a dis-binding of the past to examine its entrails; a rebinding to make whole again”. The result is “a sort of
history, but now”.
12/13
Four Corners Books Familiars Series, designed
by John Morgan Studio, 2007–
The Familiars series consisting of artist responses to
classic novels / short stories, is particulate noteworthy
for John Morgan’s meticulous design work. Each book
is peppered with referential design moves, each element founded in the given content with great attention
to materiality. More and than a mere re-design, devoid
of heavy-handed gestures or arbitrary decisions, by way
of understated aesthetics grounded in historical allusion, Morgan is able to create a series of beautiful and
considered book objects.
IMAGE BIBLIOGRAPHY
13/13