inscription:

“Good sense urges one to approach with suspicion anything that enters the world as a ‘collector’s item’. Rarity, even the calculated kind, cannot be guaranteed, nor can the desirability of anything so self-consciously precious. Yet this truism is among many bits of wisdom that a collector might find disproven by Inscription, a new publication that examines material manifestations of texts and exemplifies textual possibilities through experiments with material manifestation. This publication is orchestrated—‘edited’ being too loose a term—by Adam Smyth, Gill Partington, and Simon Morris, a trio who in different proportions are both academics and book artists. It fills a void by presenting scholarly essays on the theory, practice, and history of textual inscription (subjects include provenance, epitaphs, typographic composition, and parchment) as well as multimedia works of art that engage with the conceptual underpinnings of reading material. Inscription’s own design disrupts expectations in ways that liberate readers from forgetting the physical nature of reading, taking them in edifying circles past complacency and even physical comfort. In short, the journal offers a challenge to the conventional understanding of writing’s relationship to physical objects. 

  
Inscription’s inaugural issue, released in September 2020, presents itself as an artist’s book in which a text and the object that contains it are designed with thought-provoking incongruities. It has a strange shape: square, with a hole drilled through it that conceptually organizes the whole, pulling together on an invisible spindle both its own text and its accompanying artworks. It has a strange size: 31.4 × 31.4 cm, the precise dimensions of the sleeve for an LP, one of which is included, not least to supply the literal hole that serves as the issue’s conceit. Its text has a strange orientation: it rotates clockwise by roughly three degrees each page, leaving footnotes spun out at both the top and bottom of the text as if by centrifugal force. Finally, it has a strange format: printed dos-à-dos such that, arriving at page 64 from either side, we find an image of la Gidouille, the spiral extending from the navel of Alfred Jarry’s character Ubu Roi in his eponymous play. With no page 65 to stop us, this spiral image mirrors the journal’s colophon, the text of which spirals into the center, ending with the word ‘merdre’, just as Ubu Roi began, at the fundamental boundary between outside and inside. A reader is thus pulled to the center from one end before reapproaching from the other, experiencing, as page numbers get both higher and typographically smaller, a different introduction and articles before arriving again at the same central hole.  
  
What gives Inscription insurance against the oblivion suffered by most scholarship is its status as a sort of exhibition space for new creative work in what has come to be known as conceptual writing. This gallery effect is reinforced by the journal’s being a work of book art in itself that pulls into its orbit several separate works. Though not boxed, Inscription evinces the coherent disparateness found in Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte verte (1934) or, more recently and directly, Phyllis Johnson’s Aspen, a magazine in parts that ran from 1965 to 1971. It includes an LP recording by writer Sean Ashton, a fold-out poster edition by artist Jérémie Bennequin of Edgar Allan Poe’s thematically relevant ‘Descent into the Maelström’, and a booklet disguised in a 45-RPM record sleeve that offers poet Craig Dworkin’s Clock, an investigation of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty approached in the manner of Jarry’s ‘pataphysics. What gets swept up in the widening gyreset in motion by Inscription are works drawn to oblivion’s void but too eccentric to slip into it.” 

A review of Inscription by Professor Nicholas D. Nace for the journal, The Book Collector (est. 1952 by Ian Fleming, the very same year he started writing the James Bond novels)