Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

Book 2: The Legacy continues onward from the
meeting (of the books and the pact of TNWK)
in The Gathering, and moves on to their first
appearance in the classroom in Utrecht,
covering the aforepromised: “Anyway there’s a
nasty surprise coming, followed by a reversal of
fortune.” The nasty suprise of an unproven
“suicide” verdict of the shredded books in the
empty classroom is duly investigated.
Nurse Trash’s private diary entry from Book 2: The Legacy
TNWK, 2002
The narrator, Nurse Trash tries to solve the
suicide riddle only to realise, as she tracks the
shredded texts down, breathlessly searching for
pages 99-102, that they have already been
packaged up and posted back to England for
their reversal of fortune, a rebirth in another
guise. At the end of The Legacy the text reads:
“Writing in the words of Lord Byron, ‘when
shall we three meet again?’ We leave until the
next chapter the question of control (led
experiment). The show as they say has to go
on.”
We three: is it (the two of) TNWK and The
Books or is it TNWK, The Books and the reader?
I am inclined towards the former, and would
like to imagine that it is The Books that are
asking TNWK this question.
Book 3: The Double Binding the two siblings arise,
these two are the new books 99 - 100 and 101 -
102, each made from the correspondingly
numbered pages of the 101 abandoned books.
The “shre(a)d(d)ing” title appears once more on
page 9, this time in the guise of an ancient
30
codex or manuscript that has lain dormant,
waiting for centuries and now appears, out of
the darkest void, ready for its moment of
glorious recognition. This book is the visual tale
of the books’ transformation and resurrection
as everything goes in, like the Ark, two by two.
The Books are only a third of the way through
their odyssey, as TNWK have written in Book 3;
“The Books are critical, borne away by waves
and wind, lost in darkness and distance, they
shape us by the resistance they offer when we
try to impose our form on them.”
Each page merges visual and written references
to ideas and places mentioned within the
original shredded texts, The Books are retelling
(or reinventing now that they have a new lease
of life) their own history as the monolith
shapes itself from the shreds of the discarded.
The will of The Books versus the will of TNWK,
which of the two will triumph in the battle to
impose their will upon the other is hard to
predict, all we can do is be ready and waiting by
the letterbox to find out what happens in the
next instalment.
TNWK have an extensive website with detailed
documentation of their work in relation to
The Books and other ongoing projects at:
www.tnwk.net
For further information, or to subscribe to
The Books (including back issues) email:
thebooks@tnwk.net
The Millennium Collection, Scrap Books One
Hundred and The Enduring Freedoms Mystik
Writing Pad are all available to order, see the
listings section for contact details.