Hors Livre

Photo by Andrew Kornylak

Brian Dettmer in his studio, Atlanta, 2008

Jeff Koons Canova Giotto di Bondone Hogarth Tintoretto Turner Crazy for Koons Phillips de Pury Makes Its (Small) Mark

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To watch Dettmer transform the book into a carved sculpture click here.

The first two people to whom I showed Brian Dettmer’s Modern Painters—one woman in her thirties, the other in her late sixties— reacted with the identical cry: “How could he do that to a book?!” Dettmer’s Modern Painters appropriated the title and actual volumes of 19th-century Britain’s single most brilliant and influential work of practical criticism, polemic, and art theory. But that is where the similarities end, because to make his sculpture, Dettmer destroyed Ruskin’s opus, digging into and tearing apart an 1873 edition in order to make a three-dimensional form that, like all successful sculpture, presents us with something new as we circle it. From one angle, we find a face composed of lines of text partially covered by curvilinear cutouts taken from Ruskin’s drawings of vegetation. In contrast, the opposite side highlights linearity, with a three-dimensional collage of Ruskinian pronouncements. Dettmer also tackled a 1987 condensed version, creating a shadow box of images including Gothic windows, cathedrals, and various saints all set off by phrases such as “external nature is,” “speaking of the sublime,” “seeking,” and so on.

Above all else, Dettmer’s sculptures deconstruct the book— not only the volumes of Ruskin’s Modern Painters that provide the sculptor’s medium but also our very idea and experience of the book. I do not use deconstruct in its now-common meaning as little more than “destroy” or “analyze,” though, to be sure, Dettmer’s Modern Painters certainly does that. Jacques Derrida, who is best understood less as a philosopher than as a Zen master doing away with impediments to clear thinking and feeling, made an important point when he coined his trendy term. For Derrida, an act of deconstruction reveals the illusory nature of the binary oppositions that clutter our minds, such as male-female, red-green, Caucasian-black, and, of course, the book-as-object and the book-as-text, the latter existing separately from its physical instantiation.

Derrida attacked common binaries, such as presence and absence and inside and outside, particularly as we use them in reference to books. In Dissemination (1972; English translation 1981), he uses his characteristically teasing, in-your-face method to pick apart our foggy ideas about such terms. Everyone knows books often have forewords and prefaces, sometimes afterwords, too, but we all also know that such things are not really part of the book. “Really?” asks Derrida, who gives his preface multiple titles: “Hors Livre” (outside the book), “Outwork” (as in a fortification), “Facing” (facade, something, one might add, Ruskin thought might lead architects into fakery), and finally the familiar “Prefacing” (note: an action, not a textual category).

Derrida playfully reminds us of something we all too often forget or ignore: we don’t have very good words to explain how visual and verbal texts work. For instance, when Virgil, Dante, and Milton allude to the Iliad, we can’t explain in what sense Homer’s text is in or inside these works, nor can we explain in what sense Greek and Roman statues are in (or not in) Renaissance sculpture. As recent copyright lawsuits have shown, we have trouble explaining the relationship of postcards and other mass-culture images to the images that reappear in artworks, such as those by Jeff Koons.

Our reception of Dettmer’s work depends on our ability to see books the way Dettmer does: as material objects that promote specific cultural, economic, political, and philosophical agendas. Book lovers have long cherished their volumes as material objects, but it’s only since the rise of new, nonprint media—television and computers having the most powerful effect—that we have begun to see the book without the assumptions of a long-dominant print culture. In concert with our experience of other information technologies, we have denaturalized the book: we no longer misconceive spoken language, writing, and books as natural objects. Indeed, some decades ago Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change (1979) revealed that the book was a machine, a technology for preserving, disseminating, and accessing text and images—a machine, moreover, that changed the way we think. In other words, these authors decentered the book (Derrida again), explaining that the transformative power of the printed book derives from its combined qualities of fixity and multiplicity. That is, having many copies of the same book permits readers widely separated in time and space to read the same text and thereby become members of a virtual community.