Forget about reading while it's snowing out, now we can actually read the snow thanks to Sarah Cohen. Cohen has created a series of snow books that adorn the streets of Boston.About the snow books Cohen says: My books are usually made from ice and melt, referring to the melting icecaps, global warming, and the loss of books through newer technologies like the ereader. It's all related. And just like ice, the snow books will also disappear over time- representing that permanence is always fleeting and that books may also disappear from contemporary culture.Amen.More bookworks at Cohen's websiteBlizzard Brings Contemporary Art...
The Feverish Library at Friedrich Petzel
Burgess Meredith in the book-drenched Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough At Last"They speak (I know) of the “feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.” - Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of BabelFront: Richard Artschwager. From left to right: John Stezaker, Richard Prince, Stephen Prina The exhibit is organized in cooperation with noted curator and director of the non-profit alternative art space White Columns, Matthew Higgs.“The Feverish Library” brings together a number of artworks whose premises are predicated on the book as a conceptual, psychological, and cultural form. In...
When in need: Dial-a-Poem
The Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language exhibit at MoMA "brings together historical and contemporary works of art that treat language not merely as a system of communication governed by grammatical rules and assigned meanings, but as a material that can be manipulated with creative freedom"One of the cooler components of the exhibit is Dial-a-Poem; four rotary phones on display that when picked up will treat you to an original recording of a poet reading one of their works. And what if you can't make it to New York in the next few months? You can still partake by calling the local...
Illuminating Poetry
The folks at the amazing Spanish art collective Luzinterruptus, who are known for their illuminated installations in public places, are at it again. Back in March we covered their "literature vs. traffic" piece, where they covered a street in lower Manhattan with 800 lighted books. Now they have landed in Madrid.This past October, to celebrate a poetry festival, Luzinterruptus filled 1000 envelopes with poems by some of the participants, added some tiny lights, and proceeded to hang the envelopes in the garden outside the building where the festival took place. At the conclusion of the festival 100 of these envelopes...
Yoko Ono Collects Rare Books: The Book Patrol Interview
I had lunch with Yoko Ono during the 2010 New York Antiquarian Book Fair.That’s a sentence I figured I’d have about as much chance of writing as, “I accept the nomination of my party for President of the United States,” but with less probability of actual realization.At the Fair on Saturday, I noticed Yoko Ono quietly walking the aisles. I thought, I must talk to her about rare books. And immediately I thought, Gertz, you do not have the nuts to approach her. And I was right.Forty minutes later I was starving and, anxious to have my wallet gutted, walked...