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Mirror Box

Item date(s): n.d. (see item 23 of AB/3711)

Ulises Carrión

Pages: unpaged
Size: 185mm

Place publication: Geneva
Publisher: Artists Book [n.p.] but see item 23 of AB/3711

Additional notes:
Boxing figures printed onto 'felt' stapled pages. Glassine wrapper. See Moeglin-Delcroix p33.

Illustrated in Artists' Books (Japanese), 1983 (unpaged).

Illustrated on page 62 of Books by Artists by Tim Guest, 1981.

Illustrated on page 126 of Küunstlerbücher, Artists' Books, Book as Art, 1986.

Quote from Catalogue 234. Jonathan A. Hill:

23. CARRIÓN, Ulises. [From first sheet]: mirror Box. 20 blue & red stamped images of boxers. 12 synthetic felt sheets. small 4to (188 x 190 mm.), staple-bound. [From slip laid-in]: Geneva: Héros-Limite, 1995.

The rare second edition of a famous bookwork by the artist, illustrated with the original rubber stamps used for the 1979 first edition. Carrión was a life-long devotee of boxing and several of his performances and art pieces concerned the sport.

“Mirror Box is printed on synthetic felt with rubber stamps of two boxers facing each other in sequential sparring positions. the soft touch of the page, in contrast to the strong punch of the imagery, makes for a potent allusion to the exchange and repression of male sexuality.”–T. Guest & G. Celant, Books by Artists (1981), p. 62 (describing the first edition).

The original edition (100 copies) is now extremely rare, and we locate only four copies in North America. From a numbered edition of 200, the present work is also scarce, and we do not find any copy in the United States.

✳ U. Carrión, Quant aux livres (2008), p. 200.

Stefan Klima, Artists Books: A Critical survey of the literature (1998), pp. 35-36–

“As a poet and maker of books, his [Carrión’s] interest embodied all aspects of the codex form: the writing of a text, the production of books, how books influence reading, and how he felt books ought to be read. Throughout his writing Carrión aimed for a new aesthetic; always making comparisons between old books, i.e., traditionally-made books, trade publications, or even limited edition fine books, and new books, i.e., the books he was interested in devising, wanting to spread, talking about and lecturing upon . . . Carrión always preferred the term bookworks to describe the objects he was writing about. His original definition of bookworks was ‘books that are conceived as an expressive unity . . . where the message is the sum of all the material and formal elements.’ He expanded this to include ‘books that use other, non-formal aspects: books as document, as object, as idea.’”

Ref: GB/1040