Navigate

Navigate: to find a way to get to a place, to plot the course, to travel over…

In the Book Arts 2014 exhibition guestbook at the San Francisco Public Library someone wrote, “looks like these people have too much time on their hands.”

I’ll say —  times when it’s all about the passage of time, the slipping of tape through with the fingers, the incremental movement listing of word after word, time after time, it’s all about time and maybe too much of it and certainly never enough.

But art is all about time — in the making of it, in the sharing of it, in the appreciating of it. This deconstructed book is not an art object in the traditional sense — rather it’s a record of a repetitive performance.

It’s the handiwork that keeps me awake well after a long day of exhausting work — trying to stay awake enjoying a movie or television program with Richard. I keep my hands busy so I don’t fall asleep. Richard announces when I take out my book and my roll of scotch tape, “Let the rustling begin.”

Page by page, word by word I deconstructed Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Languageusing transparent tape paper to carefully lift the printing.

For you dear reader, dear viewer, the narrative is a criss-cross of meaning written by your eyes that begins with A and ends with Z.  My dictionary is an edition from the early seventies  so “macrame,” “toke” and “zap” had just been added into the lexicon. no “selfies” or “Interent” here yet.

You navigate the narrative.

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