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| Title: Storke Tower - The Book In Flight, Spring 2005 |
Artists: Matt Cohen and Sher Zabaszkiewicz
Media: 175 foot true accordion fold, digital print, performance piece.
Date: Spring 2005
It was our intent to utilize Storke Tower as a site for an artist book performance. In our last quarter of study at UCSB, we felt it was necessary to sum up our scholastic work as book artists with a book project that was unique to the UCSB campus and our university experience. We folded and bound 175 feet of white butcher paper in the form of a true accordion artist’s book. We cast the front cover of the book out of the middle window at the top of the tower. Simultaneously, one of us held onto the back cover, preventing the book from falling all at once. Considering the height of the tower, the idea was that the pages would fall just to the ground. Due to 20-30 mph winds, things turned out a bit differently than we expected. When the wind forced the book into a cypress tree, we held onto the back cover of the book from atop the tower for several minutes to get photo and film documentation. The final step of the performance was to drop the remaining pages and cover, only to be further entangled in the tree’s limbs. And there it remained, until we were able to retrieve it 24 hours later.
A book is one of the most universal and familiar objects to human beings. Yet, when you have a book that is created by hand, it takes on a new and distinctive set of qualities. The book becomes even further subverted when it becomes the subject of an artistic performance. Since both performance art and book art take place within the context of time and sequence, the ideas seem to complement each other well. When this book was cast from the tower, the pages bent, folded, creased, tore, and were dirtied according to the specific path the book took during it’s descent to the ground. Thus, the book acquired the aesthetic marks unique to the moment of performance, capturing the performance through a kind of chance-based imagery. In this light, this event is retold again and again long after the actual performance. In total, this project addresses issues of minimalism, chance, sculpture, time-based performance, collaboration, and experimentation, all within the book form.
This book is site specific to Storke Tower both because the tower is such a hallmark icon of UCSB, and also because of the visual command the tower imposes over the campus landscape. “The Book in Flight” took place on May 9th, 2005 between the hours of 11:00-1:30PM.
Photography by Vicki Gibbons |
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