lisa mark

reading an overview of the broad range of possibilities for "sequence" and "time" helps me figure out what is also possible for my book. it would've been much more helpful of the essay to provide visuals rather than lengthy written descriptions of the book examples - not just for the way my particular mind understands things but also just in general, it would've been nice to see them - but otherwise good. Below are some highlights from the essay I felt were particularly important and interesting.

In the broadest sense, sequencing in artists’ books is concerned with two kinds of time: the time of

the reader and the time of the book. The time of the reader is an implied continuous present distinct from the

time of the book; the book (the embodiment of the intentions of the artist) may concern itself with present,

past, and/or future—even suspending time—in myriad different ways.

But, of course, any discernable storyline is a testament to both the artist’s

and the reader’s tendency to make meaning from even the most random groupings—and perhaps to the

resilience of such clichés.

Using a process normally created to reproduce a “still” image, Polke instantiated the otherwise

unmarked seconds during which the original is scanned.

Jutta Koether’s incandescent book 20 Minuten: Aufzeichnung/Recording (1989) conveys a sense

of making explicit what might otherwise be suppressed or even forgotten[...]

You cannot just erase left-overs.

You cannot just erase painting.

Not, even with some radical operations, doing

them made leaving more left-covers. Action

and objects, which inform me now, make me saying I

know the idea of beauty still makes sense.20

Arden’s remarks point to a dual reality underlying Feldmann’s book: it tells two stories—that of an

individual and that of a certain social reality. As both album and archive, it creates a more nuanced “portrait”

than might be possible in a single image.

The book’s sequence—in terms of what comes at the beginning, middle, and end—was of less importance to

Roth than the cumulative effect of so much information in so many days. Sequencing in this instance becomes

an act of amplification.

In addition,

while practice of the I Ching appears intended to achieve randomness, the point of this method is not so

much that as the acceptance of the results it produces. In Not Wanting to Say Anything about Marcel,

“randomness” gives way to “radical presence.” Nothing would be gained from resequencing the panels; one

need only experience the work.