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If every assumption about books were challenged, most readers would still assume that the way to engage a book is to read it. What then does the Conceptual writer Kenneth Goldsmith mean when he says that you don’t need to read his books to understand them, and that he would rather have a "thinkership" than a readership? How are book lovers to approach Goldmith’s recent trilogy, "The Weather," "Traffic," and "Sports," each installment of which comprises word-for-word dictation from a year’s worth of weather, traffic, and sports updates on his local radio station?

Goldsmith’s writings, which belong to the school of Conceptual poetics, are not literature to be placed alongside Hemingway or Pound. Instead they are textual artifacts, language culled from the world around us and organized with the objectivity of a scientific study. The aptly named British publisher Information as Material (IAM) is a prime outlet for Conceptual writers, including Goldsmith. Among IAM’s authors are its own editors, such as Simon Morris, whose "Re-Writing Freud," containing every word of "The Interpretation of Dreams" systematically randomized, and "Royal Road to the Unconscious," documenting Morris flinging the cut-up verbiage of Freud’s seminal text from a moving vehicle, the house has published. The resulting tomes contain glistening nuggets of nonsense, such as "das omit very strongly facts," but any meaningful phrases are merely accidental by-products. The Conceptual writer’s real role is impartial chronicler of the language. "Conceptual writing makes its references explicit rather than implicit," Morris says, "and refuses any claim to conventional originality. The idea is the writing, and the writing is the idea — a poetry of intellect rather than emotion."

In Germany, Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda helm another book-based project. It’s not a publishing venture, however, and focuses on visual, rather than textual, recombinations. "The Infinite Library," which takes its name from a Jorge Luis Borges story, features editions of one that stand alone and are exhibited, splayed open in vitrines, in galleries and museums. Like IAM’s artists, Cramer and Epaminonda employ existing volumes as raw material, mining them from used-book stores and auctions, specifically seeking never-read tomes with uncut pages. They envision these books as "spaces" to be rebuilt through new image juxtapositions. Occasionally, they transpose pages, replacing one of scientific illustrations with another of documentary photography or superimposing a colorful geometric form cut from an architectural drawing onto an unrelated image. While the flow of the altered book can resemble that of the original, the information has been disordered to produce new relationships and nonsensical associations.

"A text in a book has continuity, from left to right, top to bottom, one page to the other," Cramer says. "Images, on the other hand, function in themselves as entities with their own narratives."

In the 21st century, remix culture has become commonplace in art and music. Perhaps the book’s status as an irreplaceable object will likewise involve its going under the knife.

"Radical Surgery" originally appeared in the October 2010 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2010 Table of Contents.