Collagebuch eins
Obviously, after ten years of working with the relatively small encyclopedia format, I needed to move on to other formats.
Collagebuch eins marked a change in more than just that regard. After a long period of conceptual, project-based work for the
"Zweite Enzklopädie von Tlön", this spontaneous, immediate collage work was certainly a way of going back to my pre-encyclopedic work (e. g. Frankfurter Postzeitung) and breaking new ground, necessarily still influenced by my work on the encyclopedia.
Collagebuch eins was not just meant to be a book with 14 collages glued into it; it was an attempt (at least, it was my – probably still typically encyclopedic – goal) to exemplify and call into question the architecture of a book that is supposed to combine “texts” and images. The “textual message” is conveyed by rectangular shapes printed in red using brass rules. Starting with a simple rectangle on the first page, the shapes are increasingly sub-divided on each page in the course of the book. The succinct message in these “dummy text blocks” on the first page is: a rectangle. On the next page, the rectangle is divided horizontally by a line through the middle, so the message is: two rectangles on top of each other. On the following page, the shape is divided vertically in the middle, producing two rectangles next to each other. A slightly more complicated division of the rectangle produces 12 small rectangles surrounding a large rectangle. All of these red “text blocks” are on the left side of the double-page spread. On the right side, the collage images come into play. A green rectangle serves as their frame or “connection point.” To me, their unpredictable, spontaneous forms create an intriguing contrast with the strict blocks of lines. For the collages, I used pages from old books as well as red mould-made paper and red-and-white proofing stickers from the 19th century. The printed paper from these old books, some of them printed more than 200 years ago, and the brass rule printing on the green paper bring these two levels together. The book paper contributes “real” legible text to the image pages, even if only in a fragmentary way, while the intended “text pages” are seen more as graphic images.
36 pages, green mould-made paper, letterpress printing and original collages,
cloth-over-board with title label, 20 x 28,4 cm, 20 numbered and signed copies. Flörsheim 2008.