Buzz Spector

Selected Works     Biography     Press Release

“All the Books in My Library...”

September 6 - October 27, 2001

“All the Books in My Library...” continues Spector’s interest in the relationship of the book to individual memory and of the library to public history. Using the Polaroid Corporation’s 20 x 24 inch camera, Spector is documenting his personal library in the form of a suite of still-life arrangements off all the volumes concerned with a particular author (All the Books in My Library) By or About Ann Hamilton, 2000, is one example; subject, My Fiction, 2000, includes all the novels and short story anthologies in Spector’s collection; or method of publication. Sometimes Spector’s images take exotic form, as in Freeze Freud, 2001, in which the complete works of Sigmund Freud are inserted in twin blocks of ice. Spector is also concerned with ways of visually counterpointing the layering of metaphors in texts, and includes several of his most recent postcard works in which watercolor silhouettes of books are painted upon gridded arrangements of antique photographic postcards. These works, with titles such as Histories, Atlas, and Romance, suggest the corridors of old bookshops or libraries. Whether photographically or though powers of hand, Spector’s intention is to set up a critical symbolic matchup in which we read the image in the shadow of what we know of the subject. Between 1972-81, Spector’s work was primarily in the form of highly systematic and process-oriented graphite and charcoal drawings, usually done on paper but occasionally executed on gallery walls as part of site-specific installations. In 1981 he began working with books, at first through the production of bound suites of drawings, and subsequently through alterations of found printed books. It is with an altered book that his selection of images begins. The books he uses may be seen as symbols of public history and personal memory, and of the dialectical relationship between these categories of knowledge. His altered volumes are mostly variations on a procedural theme of removal - pages torn or cut out in sequentially decreasing increments - creating a cross-section of the text block. The rows of fragmented letterforms visible across the field of torn edges are still organized like a page, but this text is unreadable. In some earlier examples of this work he placed found objects on top of the torn pages. The residual nature of such objects correlates to the textual residue upon which they are positioned. Buzz Spector’s work has been extensively shown in museums and galleries including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Orange County Museum of Art in California; and The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. He has received several major awards for his art including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship and three NEA Individual Artist Fellowships. Spector has just become Professor and Chair of the Art Department at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.