Useless Books

by Karen Meetz, Dorothea Reese-Heim (Illustrator)

Many have a deep passion for books, cherishing their form and content equally. Even the electronic book has not been able to change this. For books are more than a medium offering a container for words. This is the starting point for the German artist Dorothea Reese-Heim, who in 1983 discovered paper and later the book for her own art. The poetic forms Dorothea Reese-Heim finds to bring the book’s aesthetic peculiarities to expression are of great beauty. Itself a book about books, this publication therefore exploits to the fullest the entire potential of its possibilities of representation, thus permitting the rich spectrum of Dorothea Reese-Heim’s subtle and sensitive works to pass in lively review before our eyes. To this end, the essay by Karen Meetz literally grasps the body of the book. On the one hand, an aesthetic analysis clearly illuminates the effects of these remarkable book objects, while, on the other hand, the text plumbs the topic’s manifold art-historical and cultural-historical ramifications.

120 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2003