Jack Ginsberg Centre for the Book Arts


Home \| Marketing Booknesses \| Branding Booknesses \| Booknesses Colloquium \| Exhibitions & Catalogues Ginsberg & Kentridge Conversation \| Images

Steven Sack

Johannesburg

ALLOWED (2016)

Type of book work: Unique / sculptural book-object (one-of-a-kind)
Dimensions: 270 x 210.5
Media: Paper, pigment, glue

Artist's / designer's statements

This is a transformed Auction Catalogue. The original method of manufacture has been exposed. Pages are glued together and altered to make a three dimensional, structural object which has evolved.

'Accepted' is a unique book made through a process of breaking, cutting and deleting. It began its life as an Auction Catalogue and is now somewhat transformed. Its construction arises out of a process of discovery, page by page, texts and images changed, erased, deleted and remade as each page is unfolded and as each page sets up a set of associations with other pages and images. Out of this process a new narrative was constructed.

The final text, on the back page, is a reduction and an extraction of the legal prescripts associated with auctions and is used, tongue in cheek, to 'validate' and pronounce on the authenticity, as an object of Fine Art of 'Accepted' for anyone who chooses to acquire it. The title 'Accepted' is in recognition of the fact that the object has been accepted onto an official art exhibition and thereby becomes an artwork.

Artist / Academic / Curator / Cultural Activist

Steven Sack has lived his entire life in Johannesburg and over a period of more than 40 years worked in many areas within the Heritage, Museums, Culture and Arts Public Sector and Economy. He has worked as a teacher, a lecturer, an artist, a civil servant and a museum director and is currently the Director of the Origins Centre at Wits University. His undying passion is in the arts and increasingly in archaeology.