Monday, October 28, 2019
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Century Pictures
(link)
Reading a book in a commercial art gallery was a torture device invented for the late Medieval Era. A sort of mental flog, a public humiliation. The point being, you're not supposed to read the books. It is a show library. Like, you can call Strand bookstore and order a library by the foot, you can specify "classics," "law library," or spine color. You can reverse engineer this. What do the collected titles reveal about the impetus catalyzing it. You peruse a person's library to triangulate a subject, denote their reader, here an artist, an ostensible brandishing of an intellectual pedigree. A lot of people fake it; it's a form itself.