Enfolding the Hand, Entrancing the Eye: Erica Baum’s Dog Ear

Abstract

This essay will situate Erica Baum’s Dog Ear within broader discussions of appropriation, remediation, and queer phenomenology.  In her ongoing series, begun over a decade ago, Baum makes the quotidian act of folding the corner of a book’s page into a sculptural intervention, allowing her to “reauthor” the newly concealed and revealed juxtaposition of text.  These digital photographs, initially displayed in art galleries, were selectively sequenced by Baum to become Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011, reprinted 2016).  Both the accompanying critical writings and subsequent reviews of the book emphasized continuities between Baum’s project and traditions of found and concrete poetry, alongside modernist precursors like Malevich and Albers who informed her visual lexicon.  While acknowledging these legacies, my essay focuses on the evident limitations of attempts to render Baum’s works using standard and modified modes of lineation (offered by Kenneth Goldsmith and Amaranth Borsuk, respectively) which consistently evacuate what is most compelling about them.  Instead, I propose and demonstrate a method of gestalt poetics, one which lets their circuitous, open-ended dimensions register more fully by emphasizing evocative recombination, adjacency, and the interrelation of these remediated pages as they return back to and contort the codex.  Textual figures get produced, as Sara Ahmed has argued “by acts of relegation” and their queerness, in Baum’s work, depends on perpetually destabilizing the bifurcation between reading and looking in order to shift our sense of foreground and background into an extended matrix of partial legibilities.