Paul Cullen: R/P/M

In a time when there are plenty of attempts to highlight the ‘uniqueness’ of the book as an endangered object – to play-up its arty capabilities – to foster home-groups for the crafty book arts (which are not without their charms for anthropologists of the present) – here is a publication project which knows how to place the idea of the book-object precisely within the materialities of print history, while also letting it float on the currents and eddies of digital waterways. Shadowed by the virtual, and flecked by drifting data, r/p/m Paul Cullen enacts the knowledge that printed matter is all about organizational specifics, and particularities of effect. It relativizes the shuffle of text and image between the formats of magazine, catalogue, book, inventory, dossier.

Propelled as it is by hypotheses, models, tests, charts, cross-sections, circulation systems, and theatres of scientific research, Paul Cullen’s art is well served by this publication, which dissects the book as object and distributional event through its adoption of the exposed spine and interchangeable, differently coloured, gatefold covers.

Essays by Richard Dale, Melissa Laing, Tessa Laird, Ruth Watson

ISBN 978-0-473-16390-7
112 pages, b/w and colour ill., softcover with 5 multi-colour gatefold covers
Published by split/fountain, 2011
Design by Jayme Yen, Narrow Gauge