Breaking the Codex: Bookwork, Collage, and Mixed Media

Doug Beube calls himself a biblioclast, an artist who takes the book apart to see what it is still capable of, and this 2011 monograph surveys three decades of that work in bookwork, collage, and mixed media.

Published by Etc. Etc. The Iconoclastic Museum Press in Brooklyn and edited by Marian Cohn, the 220-page hardcover reproduces more than 275 illustrations across Beube's altered books, carved volumes, map pieces, and organic-material sculptures. An introduction by curator David Revere McFadden opens essays by Betty Bright, Allan Chasanoff, Buzz Spector, and others, each taking up a different strand of the work: the book as an art medium, the mechanics of cutting and rebinding, the specific bodies of work built from carved pages and found maps.

Beube treats the codex, an old technology still doing real work in a digital age, as a fixed structure to cut against, pasting and rerouting its pages the way a programmer might route around a hardwired constraint. Breaking the Codex traces that method from his early altered books through the sculptural and photographic pieces that followed, and stands as the fullest account in print of a practice built on taking books apart.