As in great literature, book art has a self contained logic, one that is personal to the world of the book and the person that creates or inhabits such a world. An "art" book is part recycled fantasy and outsider logics, the resultant landscape imbued with Cornell-esque mysteries ripe for dramatic unlocking. While a certain level of escapism is undeniable, the lo-fi charm and familiarity of a cannibalized book is essentially confrontational when dealing with the acts of interpretation and meaning through the canonical. Artists transform books from one physical state to another, dissolving readable text into new narratives of objectification, content, authorship, etc, that refer to a whole body of literary theory a la Barthe, et al.

Below are literal takes and deconstructed fantasies of books by very different artists.

Literary art remains demurely contained within the spaces of the book bindings. The reveal of pages and their edges is a query of that boundary but also a question about how boundaries themselves can be reinterpreted.

curved book. Nicolas Jones

Below, Elliasson questions the fixedness of content, portraying interiority as a perceptibly malleable space, one where the personal space is all void and no wall. A kismet of architecture and english interdisciplinary studies that was my college miseducation.

your house. Olafur Elliasson

evolution. Brian Dettmer

Imagination leaps to escape the constraints of the form, bringing the literal page to life.

alice. Su Blackwell

birds. Su Blackwell

As curio and dissection piece, the physicality of the object and its content transcends the temporal life of the book, the reclaimed study of the reclaimed artifact being an act of entropy that also one that insists upon reincarnation as well.

de baudelaire au surrealisme. Georgia Russell

Here, the physical object is completely obliterated, and the new object is also in the process of being likewise obliterated. Fragmented and scattered, a butterfly effect of knowledge.

installation. Su Blackwell