The dictionary. The ubiquitous high-gloss fashion ad. The fraught
relationship between artist and critic. Sleeping Beauty ties these
disparate strands of our everyday lives together only to strip away
everything we thought we knew about each of them. A collaborative work
by the artist John Sparagana and the critic Mieke Bal, this truly
cutting-edge work takes the shape of a conversation between his
creations--distressed, or "fatigued," magazine pages--and her words,
imagining anew the relationships of image to text and of art to those
who write about it.
Bal contributes twenty-six essays, one for each letter of the alphabet,
which borrow their organizing principle from the dictionary but reach
far beyond the utilitarian purpose of a reference volume. Each one
enters deeply into Sparagana's work, illuminating concepts from Abstract
to Zestful that inform, underlie, and lend meaning to the exquisitely
ruined images he creates by crinkling glossy images from fashion
magazines until their sheen disappears and they become soft and elastic.
Unmooring the magazine page from its familiar context, these beautiful
rags are rendered poetic by Sparagana's unique art of subtraction, which
physically rubs away not only ink and material, but also transience and
commercial usefulness.
Just as Sparagana's work intervenes in existing images, so, too, do
Bal's explorations qualify existing concepts. But together, in this
inaugural volume in the new series Project Tango: Artists and Writers
Together, they have given rise to something wholly new: a prophetic
one-artist dictionary that simultaneously reenvisions the untapped
interactions of images with words and the potential forms of the book
itself.
