Reports from the Gutenberg Galaxy (Blaker)
The Gutenberg Galaxy at Blaker (2013–2015) was a series of three exhibitions curated by Ellef Prestsæter. Each exhibition produced its own Report, with commissioned texts and archival documentation. `
Series Titles
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FIRST REPORT This Report from the Gutenberg Galaxy is the first in a series of publications to be released in connection with the exhibition project The Gutenberg Galaxy at Blaker (2013–2015). The report is based on the project’s pilot show z(oo)m + – books in motion (Blaker gml. meieri, June 1–16 2013). The Gutenberg Galaxy at Blaker takes as its point of departure the so-called archive of the artist Guttorm Guttormsgaard, a collection of tens of thousands of objects he has collected with the intention of “documenting necessary impulses to keep one’s spirits up.” The archive is located in a former dairy ... -
SECOND REPORT … but books have always been in motion. It has been argued that it was the portability of scrolls that made two nomadic tribes—Jews and Arabs—turn away from worshipping heavy images of God and instead devoted themselves to a book. Today, curiously, we tend to picture books as something heavy, something to worship in a nostalgic mode, or simply leave behind. Can we picture books differently? Exhibiting books is tricky. They tend to reduce to flat images of themselves when put inside display cases, and would rather be handled, entered, held open, paged through. In the archive kept in the ... -
THIRD REPORT Two of the protagonists of the final iteration of the exhibition project The Gutenberg Galaxy at Blaker were makers of books who have had a profound influence on the archival practice of Guttorm Guttormsgaard. They were also experts in the destruction of books. A friend of Asger Jorn (1914– 1973) once noted how the Danish artist “presented a danger to any book collection” as he used to tear out pages from books belonging to others in order to create his own. Jorn’s compatriot Rudolf Broby-Johansen (1900–1987) was also a notorious book slaughterer, leaving behind a trail of books full ...
