Artist Response 3: Douglas Beube

Douglas Beube, of the Center for Book Arts, cuts and carves the pages of books to make them into entirely different creations.  He takes average looking books, and transforms them in a way that opens many windows of interpretation.  In the first picture below, he has cut and crisscrossed the pages of a map book.  He achieves a very interesting contrast in this piece, as the pages seem to be both perfectly organized, as well as tangled together at the same time.  I think one of the themes he was going for in this piece is his world view.  By making this kind of "organized mess" with the map, he has led me to interpret it as a portrayal of the world as a place that is very interconnected and organized, while at the same time very complicated.  The bottom picture is of a piece titled City.  In my opinion, the books are all shaped the same to represent the very similar looking buildings found in cities. They are generally different in shape but other than that all very similar.  As they are books however, each “building” contains entirely different writing on it.  It is impossible to know what the book contains unless you get up close to it and read.  Though cities, buildings, and even people tend to look similar, there is really no way of knowing what they contain unless you get up close, engage them and investigate.  I found this piece to be the artist’s take on “don’t read a book by its cover.”  Beube’s work doesn't just please the eye, but it makes one look at situations differently, and engages the viewer.  The simplicity with which he does it in the above pieces is quite amazing.  Many of his other pieces are much more in depth in terms of how he created them, but they have that same engaging affect.

http://www.centerforbookarts.org/artistmember/bio.asp?artistID=132