Libellus, a monthly mail art publication produced by Ulises Carrión, 1981. Such a reading, however, would be incomplete, as is made clear by this fascinating retrospective curated by Guy Schraenen. (He died in 1989.) As in A Book, the arc of Carrión’s career traces a kind of reverse iconoclasm: a supplanting of word by object and image.
He abandoned literature in the early 1970s, however, and relocated to Amsterdam, where he developed an idiosyncratic, multifaceted artistic practice while establishing himself as a key figure in European conceptual art circles of the era. It is tempting to ‘read’ A Book in relation to Carrión’s biography: born 1941, he was a promising literary writer and academic in Mexico in the 1960s. Courtesy: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Ulises Carrión at Other Books and So, Amsterdam, 1975-79, black and white negative. The nearly eight-minute video closes with the second pair of hands re-encasing the pile of not-quite-smoothed pages between the book’s original covers. The harsh sound of paper being mangled provides the only soundtrack. The ripping and crumpling process is faster than the smoothing and piling, so that, for most of the video, the table-top is littered with paper. Meanwhile, the second pair of hands gathers the discarded folios, smoothing them out and reassembling them into a more-or-less neat pile.
One pair holds a book (titled, unsurprisingly, A Book), which it proceeds to methodically dismember, ripping out, crumpling and tossing away each page. Two pairs of disembodied hands are positioned on opposite sides of a table. A Book is a simple yet effective video created by Ulises Carrión in 1978.
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