The Medium Is the Message In Sculptures Made of Books

What happens when one art form becomes the infrastructure on which you create another art form? No, the answer is not Web 2.0. Instead, you get something like Mike Stilkey's incredible sculptures that are both paintings and books.

Dave Kinsey interviewed Stilkey for Fecal Face, and asked him why he decided to use books in his sculptures. Stilkey said:

I was painting on book pages for forever, and actually published a book in 2005 titled "100 Portraits" in which I drew one hundred portraits on old book pages. At the time, I was drawing on books, records or anything else I could find at a thrift store. Eventually, I started drawing on the books themselves. I was going to do a project where I just drew on the covers of the books, and as I finished them I would stack them against the wall. It dawned on me that it might be a good idea to paint down the spines of the books instead of just on the covers . . . As I did the smaller book sculptures, I would choose books based solely on the title. I wouldn't read the entire book, but I would read random sentences in them. I'm always interested in the notes or messages left in the books by people who used to own them. I would look for discarded or forgotten items left in the books. One time I found two unused plane tickets to New York from 1967.

via Fecal Face