“Pages”

Not “The Page” but “Pages”: This exhibition’s title invokes the seriality of the printed page, which we expect to precede and follow others. Likewise, many of the artworks here reference predecessors on the continuum of art history: Laurie Anderson’s collage It’s Not the Bullet, 1977, includes the lyrics to a reggae tune she wrote for Chris Burden, while in Rodney Graham’s Study for Casino Royale, 1989, two pages from a James Bond novel are set inside what could be a unit of a Donald Judd stack sculpture. (The pages in question narrate a torture scene, in a mischevious comment on the “difficulty” of Minimalist sculpture.) Other references are less direct. Matthew Higgs’s From the Center: a framed bookpage to be hung centrally on any given wall, 2000, is an excised page from a secondhand book—and a sly reference to Robert Barry’s placement-specific paintings. The constructivist undertones of Marco Maggi’s Pages, 2003, chime with Alastair Noble’s aluminum sculpture inspired by the typographical layout of a Mayakovsky poem. Fellow bibliophiles take note: This show (curated by Buzz Spector) resonates with the sensibilities that lead us to fetishize the book as object.