Untitled Book List
Christina Read >

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Untitled Book List involves a list of names of great authors that are recited through moving image fashioned in the style of film credits, all authors whom artist Christina Read would wish to read. As the credits play there accumulates a sense of the cultural mass of these artistic references, their weights combine and snowball together the longer it is watched.

A long list of names naturally evokes a memorial, and that in turn points towards the theoretical text of Roland Barthes' 1968 The Death of the Author. Barthes invited readers and viewers to relate to artistic works as participants in the work's interpretation. As a purely textual installation, this notion of openness in the reading of the work is then made implicit. We have been given the end of a piece to which we must decide what happened before, the suggestion being that the assumption of chronology need be the only determining factor in how we construct our literary and artistic histories.