Cut-Up

Paper, board, ink
9.5 x 9.5 x 7 in
24.1 x 24.1 x 17.8 cm
2012

Richard Humann • Cut-Up • Paper, board, ink • 9.5 x 9.5 x 7 in • 2012

In Cut-Up, Richard Humann transforms a book into both a sculptural object and a repository of infinite possibilities. Thousands of individual letters have been cut from a titleless book and placed inside a well carved into its pages. The letters fill the hollowed volume, reducing the original text to its smallest components while preserving the raw material from which language is constructed.

By separating letters from their original arrangement, Humann dismantles the structure through which a book communicates meaning. Words, sentences, and narratives disappear, leaving behind the individual characters that make all written language possible. Yet these fragments retain the potential to be reorganized into new combinations, suggesting that the destruction of one text can become the starting point for countless others.

The work proposes an intriguing paradox: although the original book has been dismantled, its letters theoretically contain the possibility of reconstructing any book ever written. Language becomes a finite collection of elements capable of generating an apparently limitless range of meanings. The well serves as both a physical container and a metaphorical reservoir of untold stories, knowledge, and ideas.

Cut-Up invites viewers to consider the relationship between language, authorship, and possibility. Meaning does not reside in individual letters alone, but emerges through their arrangement and interpretation. By reducing a book to its fundamental components, Humann reveals the extraordinary potential contained within the simplest building blocks of written communication. What appears to be the remains of a single book becomes an open field of possibilities, where countless narratives lie dormant, waiting to be assembled.

Photo credit: Richard Humann Studio