Preface (2012): A Found Object 

"It was in a job lot of old ‘literaria’ that I found The Curse of the Yellow Book.  

With a tidiness one could never invent, it was both a 'found object', and the story of a found object. 

The found object has an important place in the art of the 20th Century and, history may conclude, in the 21st. It represents a shift in emphasis from the physical making to the concept. 

The subtitle, A Personal Report from an Intermediate Functionary, suggested that this found object was not so interesting as to distract from the art made from it. The author, apparently believed there was untapped demand for what he called the ‘public service procedural’. Although, that does not appear to be what, in the end, he wrote. 

Curse might read as a ‘Roman a Clef’, a fictionalised account of real people and events, but there is little detail in the description of events, and indeed references to characters, real or fictitious are, for most of the book, limited.

All of this adds up to a challenge in visualising such a text.  Perhaps the deciding factor though, was the shoebox full of related papers, which offered the opportunity for different perspectives on the author and material.

There are precedents for the found text in comics. I would like to think that one of my own works may have been an influence. . .

More