Reading as Art

Ed. Simon Morris

Price £15.95 (ex.VAT) +pp
ISBN  978-1-907468-26-1
Year 2016
Edition 1,000
Pages 112
Binding softback
Illustration Colour images throughout
Dimensions 210 x 297 mm

Buy (coming in October)

This extensively illustrated catalogue documents an eponymous group exhibition curated by Simon Morris at Bury Museum & Sculpture Centre, England, from August-November 2016, featuring work by:

Jérémie Bennequin, Pavel Büchler, Kate Briggs, Martin Creed, Craig Dworkin, Robert Fitterman, Tom Friedman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Eugen Gomringer, Jo Hamill, Carol Sommer, Nick Thurston, and Ian Truelove.

Both the show and book are focussed explorations of the possibilities of reading as an artistic act. The works displayed and under discussion find different means to foreground and to investigate the activity of reading: the forms it can take (silent reading, reading aloud, spontaneous reading, purposeful reading, and so on), the matter of reading (the book, the screen, the space of the page), the bodies that engage in it and the contexts in which it occurs. All of the works make reading manifest in some way; in so doing, they each show – differently – how reading is its own form of making.

The catalogue also includes newly commissioned essays by Thomas Campbell, Kaja Marczewska, Simon Morris, and Nick Thurston, alongside texts relating to work in the show by Jérémie Bennequin and Kate Briggs, as well as a suggestive bibliography of further reading on the specific topic of the whole project.