teabag bed

At the ACCI gallery on Shattuck there was a window installation that I wanted to get a picture of. It consisted of stacks of books hanging by wires. There were five, I think, each stack about 3 feet tall. The wire passed through the center of the books and concluded in a rusted railroad spike. Beneath the dangling spike was an open book on a pedestal. All the hanging books were mass market paperbacks. The open books were large size hardcovers, art books, I believe, though none was open to a color illustration.

When I got there, however, I found that the installation had been taken down. The ACCI gallery website does not include a photo of the piece. However, there is another sculpture by Clayton Bain that did not appear at the gallery though it is similar in that it also consists of a stack of books. I find his artist statement annoying. "I use mostly found objects, so they inherently have their own meaning. It is your experience that is reflected in the meaning, not mine. I focus more on form and spatial qualities instead. The physical space is so important to any sculpture. Any connection to the content is prejudiced by your own viewpoint. You create the artwork from that point onward. You are the artist, not me."

The statement strikes me as passive aggressive. If you don't like it, it's because you're "prejudiced." Plus I've never been a fan of the observer-collaborates-in-the-meaning-of-the-art pose. Culture is a collaborative construction. Is this insight not banal?

The pierced books bothered me because they were ruined. There were perfectly good well-written books in solid readable condition in those strings. And perhaps it's aggression I see here, too. Someone else's art was destroyed in order to make this person's art. The books were the sort of thing you see in yard sales and over & over on the used book clearance shelves. These weren't limited editions. These weren't unique items. These items were mass produced and many a book is destroyed by its own publisher when it becomes uneconomic. Maybe these were "saved" from the recycle bin, in any case. The piece intrigued me. I can't say as I liked it or that I carried away from it a meaning. The books in the strings interested me more than the presentation they made, rather like scanning the bookshelves in the house of a new acquaintance.



The show of which Bain's work was a part featured artists who link themselves as The Edge Group. Since the installation I'd come to photograph was no longer in the gallery window I stepped inside. Some of the Edge works were still on display, including a small bed covered with teabags. It's fun and clever and I liked looking at it. (Being an artist who can store all his work on a compact disc I always worry a bit about where bulky art lives.) Of her teabag textiles Ruth Trabancay writes, "The hand-stitched surfaces recall visions of vast epithelial sheets and cell cultures. [Trabancay used to be a biologist.] The teabags themselves represent the intimacy and ritual of sipping a cup of tea with family and friends and the finished sculpture, a gesture of warmth."



I don't like it when an artist claims that one thing "represents" another. (Can you say "objective correlative"?) But I do approve of Trabancay's description of her own associations: intimacy, ritual, family & friends, warmth.