Poetical Minutes
El Sobrante, CA: Lisa Kokin, 1999. Hardcover. This is a unique altered book by Lisa Kokin,and signed by her. She is a noted book artist who also creates art with sewing and alterations, as well as with button work and assemblage. She also is known for acting as a mentor and coach to people in the arts.
With this work, Kokin has altered a somewhat mysterious Russian book. Although the endpapers have small illustrations of traffic signs, the text is a scientific study of various creatures such as mites, small marine animals, and worms. There are line drawings throughout of the many creatures and their anatomy. Kokin has used stitching and gold foil scraps with text from doctoral dissertations to create designs in thread on many of the pages, and to put together words cut from the dissertations to create enigmatic text, e.g. "Simple Social Skills and a History of Interpersonal Guilt," or "The Relationship between gender traits and egalitarian attitudes is a crystal encyclopedia of Behavioral wildfires." She has also added four black paper pages with gilt designs.
Kokin says about her altered books: "I alter, appropriate, and combine text from books about religion, history, self-help, business and sociopolitical ideology. I am fascinated by the random juxtapositions of words that occur when parts of text are removed to create other stories, or when texts from two sources such as business and religion are combined. It gives me great pleasure to subvert the original meanings of books which were written to keep people in their place, and to do it with humor and levity."
Bound in stiff paper boards with the Russian title in black and her title in gilt. Binding is bumped and rubbed. An interesting structure and a nice demonstration of the art of altering books. Very good condition. Measures 10 x 7 x 1 inches. Unpaginated. ARTB/012224. Very Good.
Item #37053
Price: $4,800.00