Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex is a monograph about the artist's work, with several essays by critics, curators and writers. To purchase, CLICK HERE.
The Biblioclast: Introduction
Through altered bookwork, collage, mixed media, paper 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’m not referring to the paginated works of artists’ books; that is an entirely different category that has flourished with various software programs; artists' books remain an open-ended medium.) Using the term 'bookart', 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.
The Biblioclast: Introduction
Through altered bookwork, collage, mixed media, paper 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’m not referring to the paginated works of artists’ books; that is an entirely different category that has flourished with various software programs; artists' books remain an open-ended medium.) Using the term 'bookart', 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.
