DITTE EJLERSKOV & EVAMARIE LINDAHL
Does Art History Make Books or Do Books Make Art History?
Ditte Ejlerskov and EvaMarie Lindahl, The Blank Pages, installation view, 2014/2020, mdf shelves, Taschen Basic Art Series, 100 empty books, 4 shelves, each 240 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artists and SPECTA.
BY DAVID RISLEY Growing up in a home without art books, my first introduction to 20th-century art was, weirdly, finding Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction catalogues in a box at my local charity shop in a post-industrial working-class town near Birmingham. These books were my entry to the recent greats. I had no idea who they were beyond a name, a title, a price, and an image. If I was lucky there would be a short text on the provenance of the paintings, which read to me like magic spells into a mystical other world. I was shocked years later to discover that Joan Miró and Jules Olitski were men. I had no idea that women weren’t included in the canon. Throughout art school, I used the library daily. When I moved to London in 1997, I worked at Zwemmer Books, a legendary art book store on Charing Cross Road, opened in 1929. The store got sold and was taken over by new management. They talked about books ‘renting’ their space on the shelves. They asked questions
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