Conceptual art

Title: Overread.

Dimensions: 11' x 13'; height variable.

Materials: Paper, wood, ink.

Analysis: In Overread, the artist deconstructs normative conceptions of canonicity, gender, genre, race, class, aesthetics, discourse, periodization, nationality, sexuality, and rationality.  Canonical and non-canonical texts in multiple genres are organized in piles, thereby demonstrating the effect of post-globalized capitalist marketing systems on current structures of academic critical practice.  Practitioners of neo-formalist poetry find themselves in close contact with anonymous evangelical novelists, suggesting the ease with which the market collapses any attempt to erect a thoroughly objective system of aesthetic demarcations.  Moreover, the sheer excessive materiality of the piles themselves illustrates the fantasy of total consumption embodied in the nature of the ardent bibliophile.  While the artist organizes texts according to the first letter of the author's name, they are as yet unalphabetized, thereby breaking down the artificial constraints of categorization imposed by the hegemonic demands of both bookstores and libraries alike.  (On the systems of oppression promulgated by librarians, see Minnie A. Chur-Professor, "Of Decimals and Decimation: Countering the Colonialist Narratives of the Dewey Decimal System," Journal of Thoroughly Unnecessary Scholarship 66.6 (2007): 1-1.5.)  Finally, the spatial and temporal instability of this art installation, which is destined to give way to a rationalized system of shelving, indicates the fearsome power of Western demands for clarity.  See also the artist's earlier installation.