Michael Mandiberg has just finished assembling a handsome installation of his work at Eyebeam.
Mandiberg’s one dozen separate pieces consist primarily of old, found books cut with a laser, handsomely shown individually or assembled in groups of two or more and placed on the artist’s own constructions.
Mandiberg goes where no laser cutter has ever gone before. Some of the work physically and dramatically distinguishes important newly-established contemporary technologies from their aging or defunct antecedents (many of which could once have been described as cutting edge themselves), The result is a visual dialogue charged with the passage of time and composed in the empty spaces we see “written” in and on various kinds of reference books.
One piece, a work in progress (surprisingly, lasers take their time), is titled “We have never had a year of peace”. When finished it will comprise the three volumes of the “Encyclopedia of the Third World”, lying on their spines next to each other, open at a random page in the middle where the artist has deeply burned the name and year of every war fought by this peace-loving republic since 1890.
Another body of work consists of a wall display of cast-off volumes describing how to make money. Mandiberg has “whittled” with a laser into their hard front covers to describe the logos of, according to the artist, “all of the failed banks of the Great Recession” (…)
via James Wagner
r3ckon 