Art Metropole

#12176

Breaking the Codex

Doug Beube

Price

$58.00

Date

2011

Publisher

Doug Beube

Format

Monographs

Size

9 × 12 × 1 in

Genre

Essays

Description

Breaking the Codex is a monograph about the artist’s work, with several essays by critics, curators and writers.

“Through altered bookwork, collage, mixed media, paper, photography, and sculpture, my work explores the book itself, a seemingly antiquated technology that is still purposeful in a digital age. The codex, which literally means a block of wood in Latin, is undeviating in its essential form; its fixity is antithetical to the capabilities of the computer to function on a synergetic and simultaneous plane. Although the codex, compared with computers, is undeniably limited in its capacity to store, perpetuate, generate and recreate information, I accept these boundaries. I apply quasi-software functions such as cutting, pasting and hidden text onto an analog system; it does not work it cannot. The codex is intractable as a technology; restricted from interacting with it by not altering its inevitable course, you read linearly from beginning to end. It is essentially inflexible. That is its built-in personality flaw; that is its elegance.”

On the dust jacket is a perforation around the eyes of the collage. If you peel away that section it becomes a bookmark.

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