黑料不打烊

Jonathan Monk likes to stockpile art books. He did this (kind of jokingly) with Ed Ruscha鈥檚 Crackers (1969) becoming perhaps the world鈥檚 largest collector (owning thirty-three copies) of Ruscha鈥檚 limited-edition book-work. Monk鈥檚 inventory of Crackers also became artistic material, leading for instance to the creation of his eponymous video, Crackers (2013) 鈥� a succession of filmed images of the front covers of all his copies of Crackers - shown in differing states of wear and tear. In Knowledge, (2017) Monk鈥檚 bibliophilia has followed a different direction. Here, he has taken twelve binder folders from a series called Discovering Art published in England in the early 1960s encasing each of them in transparent plexiglass boxes. Monk has removed from these binder folders their epistolary contents; the thin magazines were issued weekly to illustrate different centuries in the history of art. Monk鈥檚 copies of Discovering Art come from his mother鈥檚 home in Leicester, England. It was through the magazines contained inside their binders that Monk first saw images of art as a child when exploring his parents鈥� library. Monk鈥檚 Knowledge (2017) paradoxically, denies us access to the pages or knowledge inside these empty frames.