Artist Books
Stephanie Damoff
Eviscerated Reality (2021)
This accordion book is made of hardware cloth and handmade paper—hemp and pulped pages from a damaged copy of The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. The novel is an account of the two elusive leaders of the visceral realism school of poetry and tracks their adventures in Mexico City and Europe. The two seem to spend more time scoring marijuana to sell than writing poetry. One narrator, an aspiring young poet, who seeks to tell the story through journal notes spends his time stealing books and pursuing women. The pulped pages—the viscera of the text—are caught by the metal frame and reconstituted into a sculptural artist book. The surviving fragments of the original text form concrete poetry that can be read according to the choice of the reader or in an act of bibliomancy: “end/meant/something/in and ourselves/silent/and yet,/have/but/discovered that/would’ve/with my/multiplying/complete/resigned/possible” is one reading. "Eviscerated Reality" was included in Unbound, an online artist book exhibition presented by the Chico Art Center.
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