Rubber Pencil Devil

"Rubber Pencil Devil" is the third in an ongoing series of flipbooks cataloguing Alex Da Corte's fifty-seven-part video installation of the same name (2018). American Art Catalogues published it in a limited edition of 300.

The underlying video is a two-hour, forty-minute looping work. It draws on old television footage, twentieth-century animation, queer iconography, and eccentric strains of American culture. Familiar characters move through it in slow, hypnotic gestures, with Da Corte himself performing as food-shaped puppets, Pink Panther, Sylvester the Cat, Fred Rogers, and the Devil. The artist has described the project as a Gesamtkunstwerk, combining video, music, and architecture into one immersive environment. This flipbook edition also includes a conversation on Marcel Duchamp between Da Corte and Hirshhorn Museum chief curator Stéphane Aquin, recorded at the museum on January 20, 2020. Softcover, 92 pages.

Sylvester the Cat, one of the recurring characters here, also turns up in "C-A-T Spells Murder," the anthology on cats in art Da Corte co-edited with Sam McKinniss. That book is also in the library's collection.