The Blind Heart: a book fan

Artist/Creator: Laiwan (Artist)
Date: 1984
ID #: BG1583

Physical Description

Medium

fan, wooden stand, book

Support

–

Dimensions

21.3 cm 9.5 cm 2.5 cm (Component)

Book)

21.5 cm 6 cm 1.7 cm (Component)

Approximate dimensions of fans (closed))

20.2 cm 10.8 cm 2.1 cm (Component)

Approximate dimensions of stands (closed))

Object Description

2 fans made from the trimmed edge of the book and 2 wooden stands Book: Storm Jameson, "The Blind Heart" (Harper & Row: New York, 1964).

The Blind Heart: a book fan takes as its material a 1964 novel by the feminist novelist and journalist Storm Jameson, which is described as “a wry comedy in which a good man, a vain woman and a young rogue play out a telling commentary on life's absurd pitfalls.” Playing with “fan” as both noun and verb, Laiwan slices the margins of the book and adheres these newly cut edges to form two fans that are displayed on wooden stands alongside the book’s reduced centre. Her intervention – a kind of rebinding – creates three books from one. The viewer can imagine reading in this different way: the texts re-formed from narrative prose to poetry, are held in front of readers’ faces, blinding them to their environment, but at the same time shielding them from the gaze of others. Jameson’s blind heart suggests Western culture’s seat of love and the literary tradition of the novel (roman), while the fans evoke an exchange of looks.

History

Collection: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Permanent Collection
Credit Line: Gift of the artist
Related Exhibitions: Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists
Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT

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