Author: Abigail Cain / Source: Atlas Obscura
What would a book look like if it were a work of art? The artists’ books collection at the University of Michigan offers almost a thousand answers: It could be a brown paper chrysalis than unfolds to reveal a small, circular book within, or eight wedge-shaped booklets printed to look like cherry pie and stored together in a clear plastic takeout container.
It could even be made of American cheese.
Last summer, University of Michigan art and design librarian Jamie Lausch Vander Broek acquired 20 Slices—a squat, square volume composed of 20 plastic-wrapped Kraft singles sandwiched between bright yellow covers. “For me, a lot of the purpose of the collection is engaging with people who usually have never seen an artist’s book before,” she explains. “So I have tailored my selections away from subtlety. It’s really important to me that people get excited about the work that I buy, and that it happens quickly.”
On that front, 20 Slices—the work of New York-based artist (and book cover designer) Ben Denzer—has been a home run. According to Vander Broek, it’s sparked more discussion than any other book she’s acquired. It even riled up librarians and cataloguers, she says, who reacted to the purchase on Twitter with comments ranging from “That’s an insult to books” to “I could do that!”
“It engaged this part of people that has a really developed, but probably not conscious, sense of what a book is and should be,” Vander Broek says.
“There’s almost a morality associated with the physical nature of a book, and this was an aberration. And I thought, ‘Wow, if it can make people who talk about books every day feel like that, then this is perfect.’”Some of her pupils have been more open-minded. “One student was like, ‘Well, you know, I think the cheese was already a book,’ and I thought that was a really astute observation,” Vander Broek says. “I think that what [Denzer] is doing is elevating things that already want to be books because they formally exhibit the characteristics of a book. There’s so much there to talk about that really gets at the nuance of ‘What is a book, exactly?’”
It’s a question Denzer has been considering since college. At Princeton, he became fascinated by books and the way their content tends to overshadow the fact that they are also objects. His senior art show featured books with wheels, books…
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