Books & Covers
A book is born with a cover, yet no author thinks 'what should the cover look like?' as they write. Instead the words pour forth, the words are the art, a cover should be immaterial, it is merely a fetish object, the bizzarre attachment of emotion to a content as yet undiscovered by the prospective reader. We can fall in love with a cover, prize it, give it pride of place on our coffee table - 'this is who we are', we declare. We are these books. You need not have read them. Simply contemplate the covers - they declare my learning, my wisdom, my humour, my hidden depths.
And as with the cover of books, so people. These clothes we wear, they show, for ease and comfort's sake, who we are - make it easy for folk to get to know us. Our clothes are the zip file, the crunched code of us, hint at our learning, our hunour, our hidden depths.
And what if one day we come home and that book has come out in another cover, the clothes we adored, that were so 'you' have been abandoned for some new style. There is shock, delight, revelation, a frisson. We enter the text just that little bit out of kilter, read it differently. And so with you. In new clothes. The cover does alter our reading of the text.
Written 16 June 2011 in response to Untitled Gallery's 'Recovering' exhibition launch, Manchester UK