Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Blink and it's over, 2006, lithographic offset print, edition of 25. This print later serves as the base for our work for Lexicon.
Perfect bound with 1255 numbered pages, printed in London, 1898, bought by a friend for $20 in a second hand bookstore is an edition that now has the aura of a unique object. Signs of use and accident — stains and tears, jottings and yellow-edged pages — mark the book as integral with its material history, suggesting a world in which the reference book is now an artifact of wisdom. A communal archive of shared knowledge, symbolic of the library and its holdings, the lexicon bears witness to old belief systems still functioning through language.
The intimate boundaries of its form — finitude and sequence, repetition and extension — provide the spatial gestalt for the exhibition. Dismantled and reconstrued, its integrative internal structure sits like a collaged landscape of language. A found poem — an arbitrary gesture in the rooms of a bibliotech — the 'absent text' of the dictionary is now playfully rendered in textual, visual and material manipulations of the original pages.
Artists respond to the codified formal elements of the page — margin, head, gutter, type, text block, illustration, running head... and to the binarism of black ink on white paper. But words seep through, along with their labyrinthine associations. There is a tension between the literal and conceptual page as artists play with the sonoric and visual aspects of language that form part of the substance of the dictionary substrate.