Friday, March 19, 2010

Woody Golden's books

I saw these books at Hello Lucky, a store that sells clothes for people who are younger, skinnier, and cooler than me.

Woody Golden

They are by artist Woody Golden, one of the founding members of Box 13. He's a very interesting artist. And I love these books for the same reason I like Maurizio Cattelan's work.

Woody Golden

As you can see, the books have a compartment carved out of the pages. In the compartments are mysterious rounded objects. They look like stones, but also look like they may be carved from wood. If you look closely, they seem to have ghostly remnants of type on them. It turns out that Golden takes the carved out pages, glues them together into a solid block, then sands the block into these shapes.

Woody Golden

These stone-like shapes look like objects you would see in a surrealist painting by Magritte or Yves Tanguy. But what Golden has done is what Cattelan does--he has created an actual surreal object rather than a representation of one. It has a mysterious presence. They should be displayed on antique book stands in obscure corners of dark, rich, wood-paneled libraries where they can be found serendipitously. That way, their status as mysterious objects would be maximized.

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