Hypnotic books of artist Cara Barer


After the superb books sculptures by Isaac Salazar and carved books by Brian Dettmer, here are the creations of the artist / photographer Cara Barer who uses old yearbooks, comic books, user manuals, maps or other books to make sculptures, like an hypnotic effect of a kaleidoscope.

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  • http://twitter.com/IntotheDeepEnd Xavier Lopez

    Sorry, but are we supposed to just ignore the linguistic meaning of the original source material?  These are pretty, but they are conceptually vapid.  The artist could have made rorschachs out of any material–so why choose books?  Are these about history or story-telling–no–the books are meant to be thought of as artists garbage, like paper, clay or plaster.  The problem is that they are not. This ignoring of such an important level of text–makes the artist out to be ignorant, ignoring or ignorable–essentially, if you are going to use books–then the tumescent meaning inherent in the books needs to be part of the finished product–anything else is just an embarrassing slap at the face of the viewer, conceptualism, books art history and is little more than decorative recycling.