Jigsaw Book (Skoob)
np: The Artist, 1965. Altered (sawn) book, with shape of a telephone neatly sawn through the volume. Inscribed by the artist at the title page; "From Series Jigsaw Books (skoob) 1965. JL."
Provenance: from the collection of Tjeerd Deelstra, who acquired the volume directly from the artist in London in the 1970's.
The original source book is a copy of the 1897 Engelhorn edition of the novel Die Heimkehr, written by Ossip Schubin - the pseudonym of the Austrian Aloisia Kirschner. The shape of a telephone has been sawn directly through the entire book, and the telephone shaped part then glued shut, having the appearance of a jigsaw puzzle on the cover. When opened, the negative space of the shape of the teleophone becomes the reversed image of the block, joined at lower margin by the track left by the saw to reach the center of the book, so that the two shapes - negative and positive - are joined by negative space liking the two images much like a telephone wire, linking the technological aspects of both the codex and the telephone. Item #29584