Blank Sign Book

by Anne Lesley Selcer

Blank Sign Book is a collection of essays on (mostly) art that grapple with art's relation to politics. The author writes about representation from image to the agora in eleven essays on Juliana Huxtable, Janet Cardiff, Ragnar Kajartansson, Ana Mendieta, Anais Nin and others. The essays are full of literary pleasure, formal risk and cultural theory on beauty, protest, gentrification, trauma, gender and literary pleasure. Selcer is a poet and writes as a fellow artist.

104 pages, Paperback

First published April 11, 2019

About the author

Anne Lesley Selcer is author of Sun Cycle, Blank Sign Book, and From a Book of Poems on Beauty. They write widely for museums, galleries, and art publications, and create art in collaboration with artists and individually. Limited edition publications Banlieusard and Untitled (a Treatise on Form) were commissioned for art spaces. Recently off page works include Girl is Presence, The Mouth is Still a Wild Door and The Dread Path of Fire. Their works have screened in festivals and museums in Russia, Germany, Brazil, the UK and the US.

Reviews

[b · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really strong collection of art writing that does that rare and elusive thing where it roams freely, pulls from a variety of registers of philosophy and institutional history, and does all of this in an eminently readable prose. Sometimes the essays are simply meditations that culminate in the discovery of a title or line of poetry, and other times they’re canny clarifications, pathways to better interfacing with art on its own terms. Really incredible book.

[Colin Rapp-Ellis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found myself out of my depth when reading Blank Sign Book. I don’t think I’m smart or intellectual enough to fully understand these essays. Many of them are companion pieces of some sort, written to accompany and/or analyze an art exhibit or performance.

Anne Lesley Selcer’s prose is beautiful and unlike anything I’ve read before. It feels poetic in its flow and construction.

My favorite essays:

The Plaza

Trauma is a Memory Palace with the Roof Blown Off

What Imaginary thing is a Museum?

The Communicative Community

We Cover Our Girlish Faces. We are the War - This convinced me to buy Style by Dolores Dorantes, which i’m excited to read.

The only essay I didn’t like (read as: understand or comprehend) was Love.