Writing with Spines: Bookshelf Art, Found Poetry, and the Practice of Assemblage

Abstract

The practice of arranging books is a long-debated and somewhat contentious subject among bibliophiles. In this chapter, I explore subversive, playful, and deliberately artistic arrangements of books that take the bookshelf and transform it into a site for poetry, humor, and sculptural artistic practice. Looking particularly at the interdisciplinary works of Nina Katchadourian and the digital prints of Phil Shaw and situating them within a historical tradition of artistic and poetic assemblage, I ask how the deliberate arrangement of books in ways that privilege aesthetic and artistic imperatives can complicate a straightforward association of bookcases with empty performances of intellectual prestige. Instead of associating particular books as stand-ins for cultural capital, as in the discourse of the COVID-19 “credibility bookcase,” works of so-called spine poetry ask the reader to consider the books themselves as manufactured textual objects with specific histories and materialities. It is in the context of assemblage, the cento, the readymade, the cut-up, the found poem, and the collage that bookshelf-focused contemporary art pieces can fruitfully be read. This chapter therefore asks what it means specifically to use books and bookshelves as art materials, and what books as objects mean as items in a “readymade” aesthetic.