Conjuring the Future, Tempting Fate
By Cate McQuiad
March 30, 2011
Some artists created books as boxes, treasure troves of mystery and history, such as Steven Daiber’s “Saw Box,’’ an old wooden toolbox filled with pine cones wrapped in 19th-century natural history text. Richard Humann appears to have sliced all the text out of a hardbound book for “Cut-Up,’’ creating a kind of box into which he poured a confetti of letters. Larry Miller’s “Grass Book (The Shape of Things)’’ stands in accordion folds, with brief, calligraphic gestures on each page drawn with blades of dry grass, nodding back to the plant material that makes up the pages.