© Adam Reich 2009

Judith Braun, "The Line Between Fiction and Reality" (2009). Installation view, "Paper Exhibition," Artists Space, New York.

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"The Paper Exhibition" at New York’s Artists Space used paper, as both material and metaphor, to make a point about art, inspiration, and lasting value. From 37 artists, curator Raimundas Malasauskas gathered a diverse body of work that was united in being high concept and low mass. Mark Geffriaud’s Small World Hobbies (2007) juxtaposed two pieces of crumpled paper, an original by the artist and a re-creation by an origami master. Trong Gia Nguyen etched the final chapter of Madame Bovary on rice kernels and gathered them in a library card-size plastic bag (Flaubert: Madame Bovary [Last Chapter-3062 words]; 2009). In a performance, Marcos Lutyens implanted an alternative exhibition in visitors’ minds through hypnosis (Hypnotic Show; 2009). Mario Garcia Torres’s sound installation An Undisclosed Month in 1953 (2007) captured the grating of Rauschenberg defacing a de Kooning, in the former’s groundbreaking work. Joe Scanlan mounted an external hard drive on the wall; visitors were free to download images of snowflakes (Snowflake Server; 2009). And Judith Braun rendered The Line Between Fiction and Reality (2009) as a series of pulsating waves made with charcoal-stained fingers. If paper was not always strictly a medium here, it was an ever-pliant concept that was able to represent every stage of an artwork’s creation — the literary source, the preparatory sketch, the conceptual underpinning, the critical reception, the completed work. Ephemeral, flimsy, insubstantial as it may be, paper emerged as an object that, through its many guises and insistent power, is rather akin to art itself.

"The Paper Exhibition" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2009 Table of Contents.