Inscription Issue 2: Holes [electronic resource].

Information as Material Leeds Beckett University 2021

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– Waiter! I don’t like cheese with holes! – Don’t worry, Sir. Just eat the cheese and leave the holes at the side of the plate. American minimalist artist Carl Andre (b. 1935) has not publicly expressed his feelings about Emmental, but he did once make this statement: ‘A thing is a hole in the thing it is not’. It’s a dictum that seems to have as much to say about the nature of holes as it does about the nature of things. In other words, doesn’t the converse logic apply: If a thing is a hole, then surely a hole is also a thing? Not simply an absence or a void, a hole is a material fact. It’s this ‘thingness’ of holes that issue 2 of Inscription is concerned with. Scholars of the material text have been focused on the physical characteristics of the page, poring over the details of paper stock, parchment making and book construction. But in the process they are also confronted routinely with holes – needleholes made in order to stitch pages together; tunnels made by bookworms and other pests; large irregular gaps as a result of flaws in the animal hide; pinpricks used by medieval scribes to mark out the layout of a manuscript page. Historically, the text is riddled with holes. They are not aberrations or quirks so much as integral features.  The evolution of the book is unthinkable without them. We must have holes…
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Gill Partington
Adam Smyth
Simon Morris
Michael Marcinkowski
Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic
Fiona Banner
Dianna Frid
Carla Nappi
Ian Truelove
Aleksandra Kaminska
Juliette De Maeyer
Paul Reynolds
Louis Lüthi
James Misson
Heather Wolfe
Craig Robertson
Deidre Lynch
Erica Baum
Miranda July
Harold Offeh
Carolyn Thompson
Christian Bök
Ricky Adam
Zara Worth
Fraser Muggeridge studio