Untitled

The artist Ann Hamilton often works with books… and frequently renders them illegible. She has erased books, made walls of books, covered printed lines of text with EEG-machine printouts, and made art in which every line of a book is burnt once it is read. For this work, as one critic put it, she uses “the materiality of tiny stones as a tangible sculptural, if silent, voice on the surface of a printed book’s pages.” The artwork is one of an edition of 20 that modifies different books—the Library’s piece uses Robert’s Rules of Order. Hamilton made all 20 to benefit the New Museum for Contemporary Art in lower Manhattan, adhering to a self-imposed requirement that the books be palm-sized, without running titles.