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Imagining Poe
Philosophy of Furniture
Luton, Bedfordshire, United Kingdom: Keith Turner, 2011. Edition of 250.
6 x 8.5"; 55 pages. Offset lithography. Perfect bound.
This work by Keith Turner is based on Edgar Allen Poe's essay "Philosophy of Furniture." The work uses interior-design software to construct Poe's ideal room and the objects in it.
Paul Cordwell (Manchester based artist, writer, curator, and lecturer), publicity card: "In the May 1840 print of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Editor Edgar Allen Poe, placed an essay ostensibly about the ideal design and layout of a suitably refined and harmonious interior.
"Keith Turner has transcribed Poe's cultural critique and subversive humor into an equally peculiar and humorous catalogue of 'virtual' interiors and tastefully retro furnishings, punctuated by appropriated sentences from Poe's source article.
"Architectural components are conceived as stranded theatre 'flats' arranged in antiseptic and airless interiors, edited modular units, all surfaces glossily concrete affairs. Snippets of Poe's original text, its font varying within purloined sentences, wrestles with the visual, invade it and transform it, but in the process produce a sequence of images which are, in effect, mute analogies for a condensed literary paradigm; the feral and transmutable vagueness of literary description attempts to anchor itself in the prosaic stuff of the quotidian.
"Re-imagining the fantastical as blandly ornate, arabesque flourishes are kept in check by the limitation of the basic software – itself designed to articulate the dreams and desires of the users own ideal interior. The literary dream of domesticating the sublime anarchy of the imagination is constantly referenced; the dead white pages of textless books close into obstructive blocks, often piled in columns as though aspiring to the status of aestheticized sculptural object.
"The strength of this book is not simply its recognition that the 'lifestyle' catalogue is the perfect vehicle to show that human needs are rarely satiated by objects – let alone simplified representations stranded in the constraining virtuality of a simple computer programme – but the fact that the 'visual' itself is inadequate.
"The space between text and image, the literary and the technologically innovative, may be a different thing altogether."
$24 in brown letterfold wrapper
$40 in white letterfold wrapper and matching paper slipcase |
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