More is More is a photo collection of installation art by Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann (who go by Lang/Baumann or L/B). In beautifully detailed photographs, More is More features a number of everyday scenes that have been irreversibly altered by L/B’s fantastical concepts; bright bars of color weave their way along the worn pavement of an old-fashioned village, the underbelly of a simple park bridge is transformed into an abstract scene, twisting white stairs to nowhere climb out of a green lawn in front of wild-looking coastal trees.

The book also features many of their gallery displays. The average artist’s approach to a gallery show is to decorate the walls, but L/B’s approach is to visually reconstruct the entire interior of the building; decorating the walls has been done, they seek to alter the space. Such displays include rooms painted in ways that make the walls seem to warp in odd directions, rooms filled with geometrically intertwined inflatable white tubes on a goliath scale, and half straight, half spiral stairs that seem to hover in the air of their own volition.

But it is not just the art in More is More that makes the book such a fascinating perceptual experience; the photographs and their arrangements on the page are artistic feats of their own. The photos are taken at off angles and each one is juxtaposed against a reflection of itself on the opposite page. The resulting effect is the illusion of one, symmetrical image. In some instances, the effect is downright disconcerting. When viewing the mirror images of Beautiful Wall #3, I turned my head and leaned so far to the left that I nearly toppled over, and still the image seemed to be spinning away from me. I can only imagine what it must have been like to stand in that room.

A further enhancement of the book experience is the collection of artist’s drawings and notes in the back of the book. These drawings allow for a rare insight into the artists’ planning and creative process in the pre-production stages. The notes include details about the actual construction, as well as the reactions of the locals to having the installations in their towns. In Spiral #3, a boxy white structure that temporarily climbed the tracks of a shutdown cliff railway, the residents of the neighborhood were noted to have “embraced the work as a welcome symbol of their efforts to reinstate the funicular.”

The photographic angles and the back-of-the-book insights can only add to the phenomenal experience that is L/B art installations. Between the golden covers of More is More, L/B have compressed goliath-scale structures and psychedelically bright-colored expanses into a one heck of a coffee table conversation starter.

Reviewed by Jaidree Braddix

More is More was published by Gestalten

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By stripping away the actual contents of the books, MacKillop leaves only the stories of how the books were used by the patrons of the library, by ordinary people. These stories are told in checkout slips, in hand-scrawled notes, in “DISCARDED” stamps, and in warning notices and book inserts.

The artist introduces the story of Ex Library Book with a short paragraph on the back cover, which explains that ex-library books are the least desirable books for collectors because they are battered, stamped, taped, glued, and otherwise unattractive. By casting the subject matter in this light, MacKillop gives the viewer the pleasure of appreciating something that has up until now been tossed aside as worthless.

Because of MacKillop’s dramatic use of white space, the subject of each page stands out in sharp relief, in its truest form. It shows the confidence of the artist in her subject matter, to let it stand so on its own, without any visual aids. It is a high risk, high reward move, and MacKillop has reaped the “high reward.” Whether the subject is a half-faded “WITHDRAWN” stamp, a photo of a return slip, or a warning from the institution (such as, “In the event of infectious disease occurring, books should be returned to the Public Health Department for disinfection, and NOT to the Library”), each one demands the viewer’s full attention and appreciation.

If on the first occasion of opening this “Ex Library Book,” you find that you do not have enough time to devote the necessary attention to each page to appreciate it in full, I recommend that you pick it up again and again, several times over. It is a project that lends itself to multiple viewings. Like any well-done works of art, whenever you return to this project, you will find something you missed before. It was not until my third reading of Ex Library Book that I discovered my favorite page: a hand-scrawled note that reads, “Whoever nicked this, would they please return it. (It’s very selfish.)” That page is juxtaposed against my second favorite page, a checkout slip with the typewritten words, “Shetland Ponies,” under which, “SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY” has been inexplicably stamped.

But those are just my favorite pages, the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Ex Library Book lends itself to many interpretations, in the same way that a library itself lends itself to many uses. According to the International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science, libraries are designed “according to our image of the receivers,” i.e., a university library is designed with the interests of students and scholars in mind, while a public library caters to a more general fare. By including bits and pieces of books from university libraries, public libraries, research libraries, and more, all over the UK and the US, MacKillop has effectively dissolved the originally intended audiences and opened up the contents of her project to a much wider group.

The International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science also had this to say about libraries: “There is good reason to believe that the root concept of the ‘library’ is deeply embedded in our way of thinking about the world and coping with its problems.” Perhaps that is why, even as more and more people choose read an e-book on their Kindle or iPad, rather than flip through the dusty pages of a worn-out library copy, there is still something innately relatable and valuable in the scraps from libraries past.

Whether it is an effect of our “deeply embedded” connection to libraries or the striking images against stark white backgrounds, Ex Library Book is an evocative piece. A library may be home to billions of words, but MacKillop encapsulates the soul of the institution in less than one hundred.

Reviewed by Jaidree Braddix

porksaladpress.org

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