Thoughts on Bookshrines

Ideas formed the artworld-century, they are language-words without, but about surfaces/forms, about expression, about Works-of-the-mind that arrest time/space/place, challenging descriptions with beginnings.

Thinking about arthistory and aesthetics, about how artworld views/reviews, what it holds important, what it discards, about the creation of the modern reality (in all its ramifications), what sprung to mental was sacrament (as opposed to entropy), salvation/save (as opposed to decay/de-cadence); therefore Bookshrines, Reliquaries, Cumdachs, making a sort of homage to art-concepts, specifically to the authors and their philosophical structures which generated ideas; becoming the images enfolding into nowtime.

So these objects. Each holds, what to me seems critical, revolutionary, disturbing and thought provoking, --certainly they were when first presented/published-- and even today they ring as statements (qua prescient) regarding taste/values. The first bookshrines hold my personal copies, complete with marginalia; the later ones contain first editions. Encased in silk wrappings (as many holy texts are) each book is a secret monument, a hidden/protected document, becoming votive vessels holding content, Objects commemorating the ideas in-cased.

In this time of re/placement, of re/production, architectural archives encapsulating/insulating concepts, made of a highly durable yet extremely fragile material, containing question-ideas about something as poignant as meaningfulness is succinctly sufficient, possibly even necessary.

Material: Terra Cotta 03 fired, multiple glazings, 06 to 019



The actual books enshrined : Titles, Authors and Publishers

Against Interpretation
Susan Sontag
Noonday Press
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
First Edition, Published: 1966
Library of Congress catalog: 65-20916

Philosophy In A New Key
Chapters: VIII. On Significance in Music
X. The Fabric of Meaning
Susanne K. Langer
Harvard University Printing Office
First Edition, Published: 1942

Illuminations
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin
Schocken Books
First Paperback Edition, Published 1969
ISBN: 0-8052-0241-2
Personal Copy with marginalia

What Are Masterpieces
What Are Masterpieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them
Composition As Explanation
Gertrude Stein
The Conference Press
First Edition Published: 1940

The Portable Hannah Arendt
Part IV: The Vita Activa
homo faber and the duration of works. pp173
Hannah Arendt
The Viking Portable Library
Penguin Putnam Books
Paperback Edition Published: 2000
ISBN: 0 14 02.6974 6
Personal Copy with marginalia

Three Essays on Style
II. Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures
Erwin Panofsky
The MIT Press
First Edtion, Published in 1995
ISBN: 0-262-16151-6

AESTHETICS: Problems in the philosophy of criticism
I: Aesthetic Objects
XII: The Arts in the Life of Man
Monroe Beardsley
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc
First Edition, Published: 1958
Library of Congress Catalog: 58-5919