Repurposing publication

When Tan Lin’s terrific Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking came out earlier this year, he and editor Danny Snelson organized a sort of happening in which various translations and variations were produced on-site by the participants. Afterward they were edited and published on lulu.com, and are downloadable for free at aphasic-letters.com. These texts multiply and complicate an already multiple and complicated book, as well as call into question the form and intent of such experiments in collective artistic production: is it truly collective, or, like Warhol’s factory, or like James Frey’s young-adult novel factory, merely the semblance of collectivity in the name of an author? In an interview with Art in America, Lin says about the original book:

In a sense, SCV is a book as generic data object: at times it's like a painting and at others it's vaguely cinematic. It has a narrative structure, but it's loose like a tourist itinerary or inventory. I like it when I don't know what I am reading. Reading in this sense is just a theory on what T.S. Eliot called "the use of materials." When it came time to publish the book it was hard to figure out how Wesleyan, the publisher, should catalog it. Was it fiction? Literary criticism? Poetry? An artist's book in a poetry series? Fundamentally, I'd say the book is about generic reading practices, where reading is not just a linear textual experience, but an architectural container for impersonal texts and loosely correlated or near-random, unsearchable images.

And about the event:

I aimed to use the event as an index of publishing. I didn't want a book to end with its publication but to begin there, be repurposed and remediated, transitioned from one published form to another. We don't have to accept a book anymore as something an author did but rather as something specific, personal and customizable to the reader. I really like Cliff's notes, indexes, PostIt notes, appendixes, critical readers—they enhance the book. It might be possible that these aids to reading will be more interesting than the book itself. Certainly editing a book is not a minor or dull practice: it's on a par with authoring. Why not customize a book in the same way that one customizes any number of design objects or sneakers?