It's beautiful art... but it's made out of books.
It's like seeing a sculpture made from human bones. But it's such a pretty and exquisite sculpture!
I'm going to pretend that the books all lived long and fulfilling lives and died natural deaths surrounded by their loved ones and voluntarily left their mortal bindings to the artist in their wills.
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32 comments:
At least it's not a small white chair.
Those are great pieces of art, but yeah, I too will believe they loved long and great lives and wanted to be further immortalized as these great art pieces.
Beats the heck of seeing them tossed out the back of the library into big bins being sent to the dump :(
So long as the books aren't "rare" they may serve to bring someone interested in visual arts into the literary arts.
I say that is a win.
Books don't matter.
The information in them does.
Perhaps they were really crappy books and the artist is turning them into something beautiful.
Or at least pulled from the dumpster ahead of a storm, a cull from the salable books at a library fundraiser.
After all, even at 10 cents each, how many harlequin romance paperbacks can you digest in a lifetime?
WV: sinewl = the special low acid string used to bind signatures into meaty, leather-bound hardcovers books.
There is a great quantity of books which were never worth the pulp necessary to create paper to publish them.
So long as they were copies of "Silent Spring" or "dreams of my father" who cares?
I'm going to pretend they were sculpted from copies of Twilight and John Norman "Gor" novels.
Saaaaaay, didn't I read that you had one of those new fangled ebooks the other day? The ones that are making book stores and libraries obsolete, hence books themselves?
What was the first song MTV played again?
"Video Killed The Radio Star", by the Buggles.
Yep, I saw it.
Now if you don't mind, I'm going to take my walker and toddle back for a nap now.
It reminds me of the guy who showed up on Antiques Roadshow with a very very old book, an early 16ty Century text on plant biology, it was a schoolbook or something - and the Antiques Roadshow said hey lookie here: and peeled back some of the sheepskin frontispiece and it turned out to be made from an early English Psalter or something, that had been washed clean and ere-used.
Would you grieve if you discovered that these were made from copies of Al Gore's "Earth in the Balance"?
They are beautiful, and T'm conflicted about the use of books to create them; newspapers, on the other hand, have at it :-)
Those objets d'art are absolutely wonderful, in the most literal sense of the word.
I was at my old university library yesterday.
A maintenance man was building a "tree" out of bound volumes of academic journals, all in green buckram.
Christmas lights were waiting on the floor to be draped over the "tree."
Not as elegant as what you showed, but still a bit of a cognitive jolt.
Rabbit:
Someone has to be the Chairmaker.
I saw what you did there, Rabbit. Banks can be a creepy bastard.
As a chronic, severe, hopelessly addicted booky since the age of 5 or 6, I utterly deplore this kind of thing.
Hell, I no longer load Breda's page because she mentioned the "w" word, that is, weeding.
The whole subject is painful to me. I used to go to library sales of "weeded" books and get some really wonderful ones, thinking I had saved them. Then my inheritance went away and I could no longer pay the storage fees. I hope my books went to good homes, but suspect a lot of them just went right into dumpsters.
P.s. The local library tends to save the bodice-rippers and toss the technical, mathematical, and scientific books. Silly old women!
Maybe it was made from copies of Earth in the Balance and An Inconvenient Truth....
"Maybe it was made from copies of Earth in the Balance and An Inconvenient Truth...."
Seeing the same joke made for like 3rd or 4th time in a mere 20 comments is annoying. Does anyone read the comments before they post?
/nitpick
On-topic, that art is amazing. The bird feathers look like they were an absolute bitch to do. Painstaking detail.
Tam, thank you so much. You help find some of the coolest stuff. Even made from books these are awesome.
Good grief, those're gorgeous...
And it's not like they're first editions or anything.
All these romance novel haters! Geez, "bodice-ripper"? That's so 1980's. Have any of you ever even read a romance novel? Try something by Eloisa James.
And thank you for sharing this, Tam! Amazing art, made anonymously with heart. Beautiful.
I only wish I were that creative!
Those are made from unsold copies of Jimmy Carter's Presidential Memoir, so fear not, no actual books were harmed in the making of those sculptures.
Look at it like a DVD, unless it is the last copy, destroying does not destroy the movie, only that copy of the movie.
I admit it is hard to think that way, but I am trying to now. Cheap digital storage has changed so many areas of life, it is interesting.
NukemJim
Apparently, justthisguy has no realistic concept of how a library actually works. What a lovely fantasy land - full of unicorns and rainbows and musty, outdated scientific material.
p.s. justthisguy, I don't miss you. Also? There's bins just BRIMMING with books in the library storage room, waiting for the dumpster. I'll smile evilly as they're destroyed.
Every time someone watches Jersey Shore a book commits suicide.
Breda,
Justthisguy could put his money where his mouth is, in that I'm sure that he could save all the books from the dumpster he cared to.
(And of course I know that books die, just like people do. And, also like people, there are a lot of 'em better off that way. ;) )
They'll arrest you around here for going into the library dumpster. Math books are never out of date. Older history books (pre-1940) are generally more accurate. Old enginreering books, and old how-to-do-it books preserve useful skills which are dying out. Older, non-PC books on politics and anthropology need to be preserved. I'll concede Breda's point in things like biology and modern physics, but even in SF the new stuff generally sucks, compared to the old.
Oh, Breda? I know enough about how public libraries work to dislike a lot about them. Why do you think I call my blog "Enemies of the Library"?
Sorry. I should have written, "the URl of my blog is enemiesofthelibrary.blogspot.com."
via Guns & Coffee ("Guns Hidden Inside Books. Not quite what you're thinking."):
Book Guns , "New York based artist Robert The carves guns out of old books found in dumpsters and thrift store bins. Books are lovingly vandalized back to life so they can assert themselves against the culture which turned them into debris."
Check out the pictures at www.toxel.com/inspiration/2011/11/27/book-guns/
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