Buzz Spector: Shelf Life by Bruno David Gallery

BUZZ SPECTOR SHELF LIFE: SELECTED WORK

bruno david gallery

BUZZ SPECTOR SHELF LIFE: SELECTED WORK

January 22 - March 6, 2010 Bruno David Gallery 3721 Washington Boulevard Saint Louis, 63108 Missouri, U.S.A. info@brunodavidgallery.com www.brunodavidgallery.com Director: Bruno L. David This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition Buzz Spector: Shelf Life: selected work Editor: Bruno L. David Catalog Designer: Yoko Kiyoi Design Assistant: Claudia R. David Printed in USA All works courtesy of Bruno David Gallery and Buzz Spector Cover image: Chapman’s Homer, 2005 (detail) Linen over yard on cotton on museum board in wood frame 51-1/2 x 39 inches. Made at Dieu Donné Papermill, New York Copyright © 2010 Bruno David Gallery, Inc. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of Bruno David Gallery, Inc.

CONTENTS

I Stack Things. I Tear Stuff Up. by Buzz Spector

Bibliography: Memory Effects by Dora Apel Lector / Spector: Borges and the Bibliobjet by Garrett Stewart Afterword by Bruno L. David Checklist of the Exhibition Biography

I Stack Things. I Tear Stuff Up. by Buzz Spector

1. By way of introduction I offer as my own an explanation of my working methods provided by a student attending a lecture I’d just given about my work. “So,” he paused before asking his question, “your art is tearing stuff up or stacking things?” I paused myself before replying, “well . . . basically . . . yes.” I tear stuff up; always paper, mostly pages. I stack things; mostly books, but sometimes more organic materials. On occasion I cut printed papers up and paste some pieces down. From time to time I stack things up (again, mostly books) in front of a camera and make photographs. In recent years I’ve sloshed paper pulp around in vats, lifted masses of it up in screens, deposited the wet sheets on tables and festooned them with strands of string or yarn before pressing and drying them. On other occasions I’ve painted on paper or pages (not, so far, on canvas). Before, during, and after all of this, I’ve made drawings, or else written words that sometimes can be read as art.

2. I tear pages. I stack books. On given days these processes, or others that seem similarly inane in summary, occupy me in the studio. I assert that I am an excellent tearer of pages or stacker of books, but what then constitutes my virtuosity? Look at one of my altered books and you can see the torn edges of every sewn or perfect-bound sheet that formerly comprised its text block. My systematic excising of pages leaves a form whose organization in itself challenges the suggestion of random harm within the word, “tear,” commonly used to describe what I’ve done. As for my stacking, it’s the ordinary work of aggregation, whose oddness arises from what it is I’m building up with. Books in a row could be on anybody’s shelf, but books in a stack raise some interesting questions.

3. As an art student I acquitted myself well enough in the sculpture, printmaking, and painting studios. I could do a very good job of drawing the elements of a still-life. I enjoyed sketching the figure or a landscape. Indeed, the first ten years of my exhibiting career consisted almost entirely of drawings, although of a more process-oriented kind. In a sense I became the artist I am now through an act intended as a negation. Let me explain: In 1972 I read about the work of Robert Ryman in an essay, by Robert Pincus-Witten, in the June issue of Artforum. Looking at the black and white reproductions of Ryman’s white paintings, my thoughts ran something like, “This is not art. This is just

white paint. It’s not even white in these pictures. They’re white paintings that look gray in reproduction because halftone images can’t ever be completely white.” Irritated and fascinated, I decided that if a white painting was art, then a pencil drawing which was merely shades of gray was also art, and I set to work straightaway. This exercise in shading was easier said than done. Wherever my crosshatching overlapped, a darker band emerged in the graphite, and after many hours of working and reworking the paper, my field of gray was visibly traversed by many horizontal bands. It was beautiful, at least to me, and also a way to understand something of what Ryman was doing with that white paint.

4. When you tear pages out of books, you accumulate a great many torn pages. Now and then I would make collages out of this material, at first by carefully cutting away the text on one or several pages, but saving the strips of the spaces between lines of type. Since I had cut the words out at what type designers call “x height,” the tops and bottoms of some letters were left behind. The bowl beneath a lowercase “g” made for an especially evocative graphic residue. Little fragments of letters, still almost readable, peppered my otherwise blank Page collages, and thinking of my cutting away process as a form of erasure led me to think about erasing images. The exemplary object for such erasure is the postcard. Souvenir par excellence, the postcard is writing for one to another, and putting one into the mail validates both the experience of the place pictured on the front and the bonds of whatever nature joining the sender to the recipient. I make grids of old postcards, whose images I have partly or almost completely sanded away, into arrays of ghost images - windmills, bridges, castles, and flowers are among my assortments - over which I sometimes paint the silhouettes of stacked books.

5. In 1999 I was invited to spend a free day in the studio with a Polaroid 20 x 24 camera. One of the small numbers of these special large-format cameras was then on loan to Columbia College Chicago’s photography program, and invitations were being made to artists unfamiliar with the machine and its capabilities. I’d previously used film cameras mainly to document my work, but was familiar with the exceptional physical and chemical attributes of large format Polaroids from seeing the 1979 installation, at the David and Alfred Smart Gallery (now Museum), of a life-sized Polaroid photographic reproduction of Raphael’s The Transfiguration of Christ, from the original oil on wood

painting in the Vatican Museum. I decided to make my own version of a transfiguration by photographing all of the books in my library by or about Dieter Roth, whose extraordinary work with artists’ books had greatly influenced my thinking about the book as art. I loaded a cardboard box of Roth books into my car and drove to Chicago. Once in the studio I realized that the accidental arrangement of the books in that carton was at least as visually appropriate to the image I had in mind as any of the sketches I’d made, so the finished work includes that box, upended and still filled with books, plus a few more stacked on top or leaning against its sides. All of the books are placed with spines turned away from the camera. The titles are unreadable, but slightly open pages can be seen here and there.

6. “So how might things proceed from here; how to stall a sentence so that it lingers over a nothing-in-particular in order to make the duration of its reading stand in for a silence of some sort.” This sentence, writ large, is the text of Sentence, a pencil drawing of mine from 2003. Here’s another, from an ink wash drawing, Life Sentence, I made the same year: “A BRIEF MORNING – THOSE SCREAMS OF RAGE OR JOY – THEN THE LONG BECOMING OF BODY AND SELF– CONSCIOUSNESS OF POWER AND REGRET IN THE WANING DAY– BREATHE IN AND OUT.”

7. Another invitation, in 2002, brought me to papermaking. In January of that year I was invited by the College Art Association to contribute an editioned work to their ongoing series of commissioned artists’ prints, benefitting CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship Program. The edition was to be produced at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (now the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions) in the Mason Gross School of Art on the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Most of my work as an artist has been on, or of, paper, yet I’d never made paper until my visit to the Brodsky Center. My initial impression of the paper studio was of rank, fecund aromas. Anne Q. McKeown, a master papermaker with the MFA from Yale, presided over this area. My first thought was of making a little book

with handmade paper pages, but I was enthralled by a small paper piece Anne had made to show me, consisting of strips of abaca fiber and linen over cotton, in which lengths of string had been embedded. Pulling the strings out created torn edges in the paper strips that resembled the torn pages in my altered books. I tugged at one string and then another, enjoying the process but not especially liking the look of the tears. It wasn’t until that evening, over dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, that it occurred to me to use lengths of string to form words in script. But what was there to say? I thought about recycling the last sentence from some writing of mine, “only the text is total,” but that line, which so neatly closed my essay, seemed pretentious just by itself. I dropped the vernacular “as if ” into the dinner conversation at some point and immediately realized I’d found my phrase: “as” to be torn out from the sheet; “if ” to remain as a string capable of being pulled. The next day Anne and I quickly worked out a procedure for making the edition: first a layer of black cotton, then white string spelling out “as,” in cursive, then a layer of overbeaten abaca, then a red string cursive “if ” (except for the dot over “i,” made from pigmented overbeaten linen), and a topmost layer of white overbeaten hemp. I let the ends of the strings emerge from the left margin of the sheet. Once the proofs had dried, I tore the white string away, revealing the sheet’s black interior. The red string remained, dangling from the side of the work, inviting viewers to give it a little tug.

8. Much of my art consists in removal (all those torn pages), occlusion (all the books inside those stacks), or excision (the rest of the images in those collages of photographic details). What I’ve taken away from view could be seen as metaphors of forgetfulness, but I am more interested in acts of taking away that are also transmogrifications of the object. I remove such stuff as could make visible the remainder as the armature of a different value.

Bibliography: Memory Effects by Dora Apel

n the early 1980s I was working on a body of poems when a friend suggested different images as a way of conceptualizing the series,

including “a photograph with burning edges.” Yes, I thought, that’s exactly it—a photograph with burning edges. Much later I wrote Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing, an art historical analysis, personal exorcism, obsessive meditation, and poetic exploration. It moves backwards toward the catastrophe of the genocide and the archive of images that have shaped public memory, and forwards to the contemporary efforts by artists born later who continue the archive into the future. The continuation of the archive resists historicizing the Holocaust safely in the past, refusing finality and closure. Still traumatized by those distant events, those born later imagine new possibilities that include the effects of the past on the present, on us. Buzz Spector was a reader for the book manuscript and understood this. When Buzz invited me to send him the books I had used to write Memory Effects so that he could photograph them with the large format (20 x 24-inch) Polaroid camera he had been using since 1999, I was delighted to be part of the project that included Conaway’s Shakespeare and Upshaw’s Auden, other photographic landscapes from the libraries of his friends. I packed up my books in four large boxes and shipped them off to Ithaca. It was not easy to part with them. These were all the histories, art histories, philosophies, novels, short stories, poems and essays that had helped me think about the secondary witness, about the ways in which the telling of the story, or the impossibility of telling the story, was important. Buzz’s work would serve this project in an entirely new and unpredictable way. His project would become part of the continuing post-Holocaust archive and constitute Buzz’s own testimony as a secondary witness on how the disaster has come to signify for us now. We are the generation that learns only through books and other forms of representation. Buzz’s project would be a kind of meta-commentary on my project, on the predicament of the secondary witness. When it was finished and he sent me the diptych Bibliography: Memory Effects, I saw what it was and felt astonished: a photograph with burning edges. It was a photographic accident, but when he saw it and decided it was good, it was transformed from accident to choice. For me, this was unexpected fulfillment of a long buried aspiration. Memory Effects had its roots in those forgotten poems. Now I understood the deeper nature of our collaborative project, unfolding itself intuitively, surprisingly, exactly. Sometimes we are revealed to ourselves through the eyes of another.

What book titles did he choose to make visible in Bibliography: Memory Effects? There is Indelible Shadows, The Non-Jewish Jew, Ideology of Death. He has not forgotten Trotsky nor Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces; also The Jew’s Body and George Perec’s W. Which book is at the apex? Ah, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles. It floats almost carelessly above the rest but I know it has been placed there deliberately, this slight yet amazingly beautiful volume by a Polish Jew murdered by a Nazi in the ghetto. Edmond Jabes’ The Book of Questions stands like a question mark near the bottom and intersects, high above it, Cynthia Ozick’s inquiring Quarrel and Quandary. To contemplate Bibliography: Memory Effects is to appreciate its formal symmetries combined with a messy literary voluptuousness, to be drawn into its dark central recess, while noticing how its vertical still points interrupt the horizontality of the books and echo the verticality of the stacks curving inward as they ascend. The sculptural composition and its representation, a diptych that registers a slight shift, like the shift between generations, creates an ultimate order that takes one upward through the center, both a cave and a fount, a meshing of knowledge and the unknowable, of sorrow, desire, and the pleasure of the text.

Dora Apel is the author of Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002) and several other books. She holds the W. Hawkins Ferry Chair in Modern & Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI.

Lector / Spector: Borges and the Bibliobjet by Garrett Stewart

he time of the book is inner and outer both, cognitively inhabited and implacably historical. That inner or textual time, of literary

writing especially, is a process of variable tempo, of starts and stops, leaps and repeats, shifting intensities and continually readjusted levels of affect. By contrast, outer time may simply pass, the book as cultural object with it--as other arts besides literary writing have increasingly foreseen. The force of time--as both an inherent medium and an extrinsic nemesis of the book–tends, even when addressed outside of literature by conceptual book art, to be decidedly Borgesian in the flavor of its anxiety or its nostalgia, or both. Such concerted exceptions as we find inspired by Borges’s anomalous plots--and their reflexive plotting (often by parable) of the reading experience--only prove the normative rule of reading. For one thing, books by convention serve to distribute time, materializing it according to cultural norms of consumption. They do more than what Einstein saw as the essential work of time: to keep everything from happening all at once. Books also make their time “searchable”--and with or without an index Such is their special--pronounced for book artists (as well as book users) “spatial”--advantage: the alphabetic dispensation of spaced time, facilitating legibility’s own spacetime ratios. That’s, so to say, the whole idea of the book. But it is an idea awaiting local (before final) violation--aesthetic intercession before historical supersession--by the purposeful estrangement of biblio-graphic reinvention. For when the basic idea of the bound text is intercepted by the “concept” of another medium--graphic, plastic, sculptural--the comfortably accepted manner of reading is complicated by the rethought spatial matter of, for want of a better word, booking. That’s what Buzz Spector’s work has always made us do too, whether or not directly alluding (as often it is) to Borges: think again. His book objects comprise a textual practice where in fact “text” can refer either to worded matter or to its material form, usually in the bound format of a codex-style volume. The gamut runs from the typographic or scriptive texture of conceptual wordworks through so-called artists’ books to explicit book art--or what one can distinguish, respectively, as words alongside (or entirely comprising) artworks on the museum wall, versus bound artifactual pages, versus the book itself as altered artifact--or bookwork. The Borges effect is most prominent at the poles of this spectrum, his complementary fantasies offering, so to speak, its bookends. Nothing anticipates what I have elsewhere called the “lexigraph” of conceptual art, the scriptive increment as graphic cipher on the former picture plane, more clearly than Borges’s numbering among the 25 letters of the universal alphabet in “The Library of Babel” the strictly graphic

rather than morphophonemic codes of adjacency and juncture: that is, the comma, the period, and the blank. Writing is differential and inscriptive even before it is alphabetic, paced by spacing before meaning. We investigate the proposition that a book is a spatial thing even before it is a linguistic instrument of scriptive seriality. To stress this priority, this primacy, is to denature the social function of the book into its material condition as what I am calling a bibliobjet, though by no means robbing it thereby of its cultural aura. Quite the contrary. This denaturalization of the book is part of a broader aesthetic process we might designate, over against the remediation and hypermediation of communications theory, as a case of demediation. It happens everywhere, as I’ll try economically to suggest. As so often in his own bookwork, Buzz Spector certainly gets Borges right in recognizing that every first draft–like, say, every burst daffodil--is one more thing added to the world. One might add in turn to this thought that art is precisely an adding to the world of things the world doesn’t need, and thus must wonder at. Or things whose use is in the very process of being overthrown by the worldly wise–attached instead to a new format, a new medium. Not always avant-garde, art can find itself churned up in the wake and backwash of the emergent. Apart from its own efforts at radical invention, that is, art can also remake the vestigial as the newly urgent. In any event, and whether assumed as inevitable or merely speculative, books as objects must be denuded of immediate use to become objets d’art. Just as words had to be stripped of message in the early phase of conceptual art to become wall-worthy units of image, books are now depurposed, their allure no longer functional but mysteriously seductive in its clefts and curves, even voyeuristic in its primal appeal to the eye, more as palpable form than as appliance: more the beast with two backs than a storehouse of information between covers. Conceptual book artists add to the objecthood of the world by making the book over into one more thing to think about as thing. A book is a book is a book. Its cultural objecthood has indeed plowed deep furrows in our consciousness. Bookworks would retill that cognitive soil entirely, uproot assumptions, plant new associations concerning exactly the bipartite object we know all too well as an accessible volume. But the lesson of Borges, one of them at least, is that the circumscription of the book as object is only a synecdoche for the circumnavigations of the world it facilitates, each bound sheet a potential magic carpet of transport. Part of what results as premise of the text--in all its spatial premises--is an abiding fractal logic to Borges’s work that seems inherited by much book sculpture, where the event of the increment replicates the whole, each book an inscape of its own, even as it collects by multiplication into larger architectonic or even mega-alphabetic forms. Think of the giant “C” that Buzz Spector has built at Cornell out of books lent or written by Cornell authors, with the tacit suggestion (one supposes) that “books only begin to spell the Cornell experience”–which will involve many a private venture in

such a vast and punning C-scape of reading. In any case, fractal logic, inevitable visual puns and rebus-like associations: these are the stuff, and sometimes the gutted stuffing, of bookworks in their suddenly fetishized illegibility. Such a C-scape of the closed book, sans the ABCs of reading, is under ongoing execution by the same Buzz Spector who, as long as twenty years ago, flashed his Borgesian credentials by piling up books in a vaguely ziggurat-like shape against the wall of Chicago’s Art Institute under the title “The Library of Babel,” invoking also (at a scale of fractal enlargement again, with books where before there were only words extricated from them) the similar mounded shape of Robert Smithson’s 1966 conceptual work A Heap of Language, with the idiomatic spin of its own title. This was Smithson’s word-art before his dirt-art phase: a dense triangular form made of lexemes scribbled or dumped over each other on graph paper--and thus admitting the common graphic basis of word and image. Put the words back into books, and heap up the books in a comparable shape, as Buzz did, and your homage to Borges has roped in one of his own conceptualist inheritors as well. Experimental French novelist Michel Butor long ago, in his materialist thinking about the book form, proposed that the one thing all books had in common with visual art is that all books, illustrated or not, are (as alluded to above) “diptychs,” two-paneled displays. One of the most rigorously immediate realizations of this insight I know comes from Buzz Spector’s work. In the photo diptych called Art History (spine), the artist, having mildly mistreated a dozen or more art history books by piling them, open wide, one on top of the other, then further builds–or leans, or presses--on the art-historical tradition by dividing his actual-size photograph of them along their vertically aligned gullies and spines. The split photo offers a two-paneled spread of its own, tilted ninety-degrees toward us into the canonic plane of legibility, but bringing no words or annotated pictures with it–only, if you will, and yet again, the intermedial discourse of the book as object. Another Tower (or at least stack) of Babel, by any other name. In this selective and inaccessible sample, the very Library of the visual, when reproduced as visual precis, is then ripped right down the middle, cloven open. Even with the quasi-organic evocation of bilateral balance around a central spinal column, symmetry translates to the eye as chiasm. Books of images become the codex-like image of books. In the discourse of the visual as textual, and vice versa, Spector has produced a Babel of iconicity itself–or at least its graphic echo chamber. But then there is, in Borges’s own “Library” thereof, the most remarkable of all his Babelian imaginings–even though it too is given, as is the writer’s wont, in an equally lucid if ludic exposition. I have in impossible mind’s-eye-view that rumored central chamber in “The Library

of Babel,” circular rather than hexagonal, that has been long dreamed by the mystics--even though “their evidence was suspect, their words obscure.” This is the circular room that is all one book. In the library’s volume of volumes, the circumferential replaces the cubicular. This magic book’s paradoxical spine wraps entirely around the space that houses it, encircling it, coterminous with it. By a fractal logic once more--in this infinite archive whose farthest imagined reaches share in all directions the same radial distance from an unknown center--the ultimate inner sanctum amounts to a single synecdochic volume bound not just on three sides, as is the norm, but on all sides, closed wholly to access by its own ektoskeleton, impenetrable, hence ineffable. Think about it. That’s what the passage is there for, what is “conceptual” about it. Each page would be touching every other at their central edge, intolerably compressed at that unleafable pressure point, bursting not just the seams of their of their own binding but the very space of their coexistence, like a mad inside-out rolodex with no possible room, no legible space whatever, for consultation. Even the longtime Borgesian Buzz Spector would have a hard time building that. Yet his own altered volumes and photographic diptychs encourage us to think this inconceivable space of text--and think again, following out Borges’s own lambent wording to its flamboyant architextural ends. Spector’s career-long venture in the intermedial valence of the book helps us not just bear in mind but submit to tangible iconic measure the weft and density, the heft and lift, the fiber and pliability of the sewn page. Such work installs, yet again, an iconometrics of the booked word in its status not as cultural prescript but as materialized bibliobjet. i. See “The Library of Babel” in Borges, Labyrinths (from which all his stories are hereafter cited), 53. The “lexigraph” is my term in The Look of Reading (chapter 7, 329-74) for the scrawled or geometric iteration in conceptual art that caps a dual line of descent from the “imaginary alphabets” of Picasso through the faux script of Saul Steinberg, the quasi-calligraphic gestural drips of certain early works by Jackson Pollock down through the scriptive simulacra of Cy Twombly (and many artists thereafter)--in any and all cases bringing the material brushwork of painting into graphic and conceptual alignment with the strokes of script.

Garrett Stewart is James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), among many other books. “Lector / Spector: Borges and the Bibliobjet” is excerpted from a longer essay that appeared in Variaciones Borges 24, University of Iowa, 2007.

Afterword by Bruno L. David

am pleased to present an introductory exhibit of the art of Buzz Spector at the Bruno David Gallery. “SHELF LIFE: selected work” in-

cludes photographs, drawings, collages, and bookworks created over the past ten years. Support for the creation of significant new works of art has been the core to the mission and program of the Bruno David Gallery since its founding. Buzz Spector’s remarkable and compelling work makes him one of the most impressive artists in the gallery. Buzz Spector is best-known as an artist for his work with books, but his studio practice also includes photography, collage, installation, and drawing. This introductory exhibit covers the past eleven years of Spector’s work. The selection reveals the material diversity and intellectual coherence of an artist concerned with memory, perception, and desire. It is no coincidence that Spector is also a writer; he is constantly crafting a poetry of things.

Checklist & Images of the Exhibition

Dipsomania (After Man Ray), 1994 Postcards on paper 17 1/2 x 12 inches (44.45 x 30.48 cm) 22

Histories II, 2000

Ink and watercolor on postcards on paper 19 x 27 inches (48.26 x 68.58 cm) 24

Romance, 2000

Ink and watercolor on postcards on paper 16 x 10 inches (40.64 x 25.40 cm) 26

Histories I, 2000

Ink and watercolor on postcards on paper 19 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches (48.895 x 53.975 cm) 28

Gardens, 2000

Ink and watercolor on postcards on paper 16 x 10 inches (40.64 x 25.40 cm) 30

Histories III, 2000

Ink and watercolor on postcards on paper 19 x 27 inches (48.26 x 68.58 cm) 32

(All the books in my library) By or about Ann Hamilton, 2001 Interior dye diffusion print (Polaroid) 30 x 22 inches (76.20 x 55.88 cm) Edition 5/5 34

Upshawâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Auden, 2001

Interior dye diffusion print (Polaroid) 31 x 23 1/2 inches (78.74 x 59.69 cm) Edition 10/10 36

My Fiction, 2000

Interior dye diffusion prints (Polaroid) 66 x 72 inches (167.64 x 182.88 cm): overall size 38

Bibliography: Memory Effects, 2002 Interior dye diffusion prints (polaroid) 31 x 44 1/2 inches (78.74 x 113.03 cm) diptych 40

Expletive #1 (@#0*), 2008

Linen over yarn over cotton 40 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches (102.87 x 100.33 cm) 42

Expletive #1 (@#0*), 2008 (detail)

Linen over yarn over cotton 40 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches (102.87 x 100.33 cm) 44

...bursts of memory, 2003

Handmade paper (abaca over yarn over cotton) 37 x 56 inches (93.98 x 142.24 cm) Made at Brodsky Center, New Brunswick, New Jersey 46

...a fragment, 2003

Handmade paper (abaca over yarn over cotton) 37 x 56 inches (93.98 x 142.24 cm) Made at Brodsky Center, New Brunswick, New Jersey 48

Fade to Blanc, 2005

Linen over yarn with black cotton on cotton - on museum board 24 x 18 inches (60.96 x 45.72 cm) edition 2/20 Made at Dieu DonnĂŠ Papermill, New York 50

Chapmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Homer, 2005

Linen over yarn on cotton on museum board in wood frame 51 1/2 x 39 inches (130.81 x 99.6 cm) Made at Dieu DonnĂŠ Papermill, New York 52

Chapmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Homer, 2005 (detail)

Linen over yarn on cotton on museum board in wood frame 51 1/2 x 39 inches (130.81 x 99.6 cm) Made at Dieu DonnĂŠ Papermill, New York 54

Big Red C, 2007

Interior dye diffusion print (Polaroid) 22 x 35 inches (55.88 x 88.90 cm) Edition 5/10 56

Creeleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Creeleys, 2007

Interior dye diffusion print (Polaroid) 34 x 22 inches (86.36 x 55.88 cm) Edition of 10 - A/P 58

Creeleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Olson, 2008

Interior dye diffusion print (Polaroid) 34 x 22 inches (86.36 x 55.88 cm) Edition of 10 - A/P 60

Poiesis, 2008

Interior dye diffusion print (Polaroid) 33 x 22 inches (83.82 x 55.88 cm) Edition of 10 - A/P 62

White Insistence, 2009 Altered Book 7 x 9 1/2 x 1 inches Edition of 6 64

White Insistence, 2009 Altered Book 7 x 9 1/2 x 1 inches Edition of 6

(photograph by Patrick Renschen)

Buzz Spector: Shelf Life: Selected Work at Bruno David Gallery, 2010 (installation view - detail) 68

Buzz Spector: Shelf Life: Selected Work at Bruno David Gallery, 2010 (installation view - detail) 70

Buzz Spector: Shelf Life: Selected Work at Bruno David Gallery, 2010 (installation view - detail) 72

Buzz Spector: Shelf Life: Selected Work at Bruno David Gallery, 2010 (installation view - detail) 74

Buzz Spector: Shelf Life: Selected Work at Bruno David Gallery, 2010 (installation view - detail) 76

Buzz Spector: Shelf Life: Selected Work at Bruno David Gallery, 2010 (installation view - detail) 78

Buzz Spector Lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.

EDUCATION 1978 1972

University of Chicago, M.F.A., Committee on Art and Design Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, B.A., Art

SELECTED ONE PERSON EXHIBITIONS 2010 “Shelf Life: selected work,” Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO (catalogue) 2009 “Buzz Spector: Cards and Letters: Postcard works 1973-2000,” Gahlberg Gallery, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL (catalogue) Libreria al ferro di cavallo, Rome, Italy 2008 Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL 2005 “Panorama (Forest of Signs),” one of five public art projects, Contemporary & Classic Art Fair, Navy Pier, Chicago, IL (installation) Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL 2004 Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington, DC 2003 Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL 2001 Cristinerose | Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York “Public/Private Peace,” List Art Gallery, Swarthmore College, PA (installation with catalogue) 2000 Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington, DC 1999 Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL 1998 “Beautiful Scenes: Selections from the Cranbrook Archives by Buzz Spector,” Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI (installation with catalogue) Cristinerose | Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (catalogue) Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington, DC 1997 Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland 1996 Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL

1996 Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington, DC 1995 Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Roy Boyd Gallery, Chicago 1994 “Unpacking my Library,” inSITE’94, San Diego State University Art Gallery, CA “Unpacking my Library,” Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH 1992 fiction/nonfiction, New York Laurence Miller Gallery, New York “Bibliography,” Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA (installation) Roy Boyd Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 1991 “Cold Fashioned Room,” Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA (installation) 1990 “Buzz Spector: New California Artist XVII,” Newport Harbor Art Museum (now Orange County Museum of Art), Newport Beach, CA (installation with catalogue) 1988 “The Library of Babel,” The Art Institute of Chicago, IL (installation with catalogue) SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2010 “Something Geographical: Vernon Fisher, Xiaoze Xie, Buzz Spector,” Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, Chicago (Traveled to South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN) 2009 “Text/Messages: books by artists,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN 2008 “ARAC@AAM,” Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (catalogue) 2007 “. . . one more thing added to the world: the Borges Effect in contemporary artists’ books,” Old Capitol Museum, Iowa City, IA 2006 “Why Lee Shot C: Buzz, she left’em Vernon!” Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL 2005 “Library,” Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 2002 “Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (catalogue) 1998 “Testo e Contesto: il libro-ambiente (Text and Context: the book as attitude),” Accademia d’Ungheria, Palazzo Falconieri, Rome, Italy (installation with catalogue) “Chicago Hip,” Rocket Gallery, London, UK 1996 “Art in Chicago: 1945-1995,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (catalogue) 1992 “Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art,” University Art Museum, University of California-Santa Barbara, CA (traveling exhibit with catalogue) 1990 “Transgressions: Donald Lipski and Buzz Spector,” Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (catalogue)

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS BY THE ARTIST 2008 “Shard Experience,” essay in New Glass Review 29, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY: 70-72, 87-90. 2006 “Moremoremore and more so,” essay in Sang-ah Choi: moremoremore (exh. cat.), University Galleries, Illinois State University: n.p. 2001 Between the Sheets, artists’ book of text/images, edition 40 plus 12 letter copies, published by the artist and The Ink Shop/Olive Branch Press, Ithaca, NY 2002 “Conrad Bakker’s Vernacular Simulation,” essay in Untitled: Mail Order Catalogue, Conrad Bakker and Creative Capital, Inc., New York 2001 Details: closed to open, photographic artists’ book of details from images in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, edition 3,000, published by Swarthmore College and Buzz Spector “Installing at the Mattress Factory: a reminiscence,”essay in Giannini, Claudia, Ed., Mattress Factory 1990-1999, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001: 10-14. 1998 Beautiful Scenes: selections from the Cranbrook Archives, artist-designed exhibition catalogue, edition 600, plus 24 deluxe, published by Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI 1995 The Book Maker’s Desire: writings on the art of the book, Santa Monica, CA: Umbrella Editions: 84 pp. 1994 A Passage, artists’ book, hand-altered text block in cloth over boards, edition 48, published by Granary Books, New York 1990 “Ann Hamilton’s Situations of Desire,” essay in Ann Hamilton:Sao Paulo – Seattle, (exh. cat.) Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington “In Flux,” artist’s statement for Connections:Explorations in the Getty Center Collections by Raymond Pettibon, Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith, and Buzz Spector, (exh. cat.), Santa Monica, CA: Getty Research Center 1978-87 Editor, WhiteWalls: a magazine of writings by artists, Chicago CURATORIAL PROJECTS 2003-present “Pages,” ongoing series of exhibitions of artworks in non-book form using the page as a conceptual armature. Venues include: I space, Chicago (2005) and Cristinerose | Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2003) 2007 “…one more thing added to the World: the Borges Effect in contemporary artists’ books,” Old Capitol Museum, University of Iowa, IA 2001 “Apocalypse Next Week: Scott Anderson, Brent Coles, Eric Huebsch, and Hannah Israel,” (co-curator with Linda Robbenolt) I space, Chicago, IL 1999 “The Plethora Effect: Todd Allison, Jill Daves, Anne Howard, Kevin Kaempf, and Andrew Shirk,” I space, Chicago, IL “MAXX’99,” Memphis-area biennial exhibition, University of Memphis Museum of Art 1992 “Fluid Measure,” group exhibition sponsored by Nomadic Site Project, Hollywood Branch, Los Angeles Public Library, CA

1992 “In Flux,” in Connections: Explorations in the Getty Center Collections by Raymond Pettibon, Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith, and Buzz Spector, Getty Research Institute, Santa Monica, CA 1981 “Words as Images,” (co-curator with Reagan Upshaw) The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, IL 1980 “Objects and Logotypes: relationships between minimalist art and corporate design,” The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, IL AWARDS & FELLOWSHIPS 2005 2004 1991 1988 1985 1982

Artist’s Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Von Hess Visiting Artist, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award Fellowship Award, National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist’s Fellowship, Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Award, National Endowment for the Arts

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

SINCE 2001

2010 Pierno, Rosa. “Buzz Spector,” in La dimora del tempo sospeso [The dwelling of suspended time]. http://rebstein.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/buzz-spector/ Moynihan, Miriam. “Artist’s books speak volumes,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 17, (illus.). Russell, Stefene. “The Breath at the Bottom of the Page,” St. Louis Magazine, Vol. 16, issue 1 ( January 2010): 176-77 (illus.). Baran, Jessica. “Buzz Spector: Shelf Life,” Riverfront Times, February 11: 29. 2009 Carroll-Hackett, Mary, Kushman, Kerri, Parnell, Catherine, eds. The Poet & the Artist’s Book (exh. cat.), Longwood University, Farmville, VA, and Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, MA, “Michael Burkard/Buzz Spector,” 47-52 (illus.). Lyons, Joan, ed. Artists’ Books: Visual Studies Workshop Press 1971-2008, Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 108 (illus.). Rusworth, Katherine. “Bonanza of Books: Schweinfurth explores books as media, subject and object,” Syracuse Post-Standard, May 10, Stars 11. Kuhl, Nancy. “Day by Day: Phylum Press, Poetry, & Ephemera,” essay in American Letters & Commentary, Issue 20: 124-134 (illus.). 2008 Kimelman, Molly. “New exhibits adorn UICA,” Grand Rapids Press, December 21 (illus.). Schwartz, Wylie. “Revisioning Art,” Ithaca Times, September 10-16: 21 (illus.). Stewart, Garrett. “Mere Beauty,” essay in Fischer, Mirjam, ed., The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2007 (exh. cat.), Swiss Federal Office of Culture, Bern, Switzerland, 126-127 (illus.). 84

2008 Smith, Champe, editor and curator, Mapping Correspondence: Mail Art in the 21st Century (exh. cat.), Center for Book Arts, 15, 31 (illus.). Whitman, Arthur. “Visiting old favorites,” Ithaca Times, March 19: 21. Foumberg, Jason with Larson-Walker, Lisa. “The Bookish Type,” New City Chicago, January 8: http://www.newcitychicago.com/chicago/7317.html 2007 Stewart, Garrett. “Lector/Spector: Borges and the Bibliobjet,” Variaciones Borges 24, 2007, University of Iowa: 173-196. Pickowicz, Natasha Li. “Practicing the Art of Integration: Buzz Spector wants to bring Cornell, Ithaca art appreciation together,” Ithaca Times, April 11-17: cover, 8-9 (illus.). Hubert, Judd D. and Sahak, Judy Harvey. “A Poetic Coup d’Etat: Mallarmé’s Influence On Artists’ Books,” in Mallarmé’s Coup d’Etat (exh. cat.), Clark Humanities Museum and Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA: 43. 2006 David, Elliott. “Finally, Buzz Spector,” Bookslut.com, Art Slut Column, December 2006: http://www.bookslut.com/art_slut/2006_12_010340.php Hawkins, Margaret. “Clever pieces show that by the word, it’s still art,” Chicago Sun Times, April 28, 2006: NC45. 2005 Brollo, Deirdre. “An Open Book: The Artist’s Book and Palimpsestic Space,” essay in Gerbaz, Alex and Mayes, Roby, eds., Palimpsests: Transforming Communities, Perth, Australia: Division of Humanities, Curtin University, 9, 13, 15 (illus.). Hiebert, Helen. “New Paperworks by Buzz Spector,” Hand Papermaking, Vol. 20, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 42-43 (illus.). Bright, Betty. No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America, 1960-1980, New York: Granary Books, 2005: 10-11, 42, 227, 253 (illus.). Camper, Fred. “Brute Materiality,” Chicago Reader, September 9, 2005: Section 2, 26 (illus.). 2004 “First Impression: Buzz Spector, Between the Sheets, 2003,” Art on Paper, Vol. 8, no. 5 (May/June 2004): 42 (illus.). Bury, Stephen. “On the Royal Road,” Art Monthly (UK), No. 274 (March 2004): 39. Church, Amanda. “Pages at Cristinerose / Josée Bienvenu Gallery,” Art on Paper, Vol. 8, no. 4 (March/April 2004): 84 (illus.). Dawson, Jessica. “Picture Books,” Washington Post, February 19, 2004: C05 (illus.). 2003 Sholis, Brian. “Pages,” Artforum.com, Picks, 12-18-03: http://www.artforum.com/archive/id=6057&search=Pages Cutajar, Mario. “Paintings by Letters,” ArtScene, Los Angeles. Geyer, Nancy. “Booked Solid: artist Buzz Spector Turns Books into sculptural objects,” Ithaca Times, September 24-30: 17 (illus.). 2002 Hirsch, Faye. “Working Proof: Buzz Spector, as if,” Art on Paper, Vol. 7, no. 2 (November 2002): 83-84 (illus.). Packard, Andrea, “Framing Space for Peace,” and Fineberg, Jonathan, “Buzz Spector’s Lists,” essays in Buzz Spector: Public/Private Peace: Selections from the Swarthmore College Peace Collection (exh. cat.), List Art Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA: 40 pp (illus.). Roots, Garrison. Designing the World’s Best Public Art, Mulgrave, Victoria, Australia: The Images Publishing Group Pty Ltd, 148-149 (illus.). 2002 JRW [ Julie Rodrigues Widholm]. “Buzz Spector,” in Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain: Selected Works from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Collection (exh. cat.), Chicago: 234-35 (illus.). Hyde, James. “Buzz Spector at Cristinerose,” Art in America, April 2002: 148-49 (illus.).

2002 Princenthal, Nancy. “Artists’ Book Beat,” Art on Paper, Vol. 6, no. 4 (March/April 2002): 99. Cohen, Keri Guten. “Polaroids capture book still lifes,” Detroit Free Press, February 3, 2002: 6E (illus.). 2001 Westbrook, Adele, ed. A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists’ Fellowship Program, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001: 200 (illus.). Mendelson, Jordana. “Introduction: Postcards from Albums to the Academy?” Visual Resources, Vol. XVII: 373-382 (illus.). Donohoe, Victoria. “Photography exhibit focuses on images of peace in history,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 18, 2001: H (illus.). Johnson, Ken. “Buzz Spector,” New York Times, October 5, 2001: E32. Latter, Ruth. “Pictorial Vocabulary spells out one of best shows in town,” Daily Progress, Charlottesville, VA, March 15, 2001: D2.

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Albright-Knox Art Museum, Buffalo, NY The Art Institute of Chicago The British Library, London, England Brooklyn Museum of Art Library Chicago Public Library Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI Getty Research Institute Library, Santa Monica, CA Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Illinois State Museum, Springfield Jersey City Museum Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois,Champaign, IL Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany The Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles Los Angeles County Museum of Art Milwaukee Art Museum Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago Museum of Modern Art/Franklin Furnace, Archive Collection, New York Orange County Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art, Prato, Italy Rhode Island School of Design Library, Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Books Collection Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Miami Beach, FL Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University Tate Library, Tate Britain, London, England Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Washington University in St. Louis, Special Collections, Olin Library Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Yale University Library, New Haven, CT Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University

ARTISTS Margaret Adams Dickson Beall Laura Beard Elaine Blatt Martin Brief Lisa K. Blatt Shawn Burkard Bunny Burson Carmon Colangelo Alex Couwenberg

Damon Freed William Griffin Joan Hall Takashi Horisaki Kim Humphries Kelley Johnson Howard Jones (Estate) Chris Kahler Bill Kohn (Estate) Leslie Laskey

Patricia Olynyk Robert Pettus Daniel Raedeke Chris Rubin de la Borbolla Frank Schwaiger Charles Schwall Christina Shmigel Thomas Sleet Buzz Spector Lindsey Stouffer

Jill Downen Yvette Drury Dubinsky Corey Escoto Beverly Fishman

Sandra Marchewa Peter Marcus Genell Miller

Cindy Tower Mario Trejo Ken Worley

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