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

This essay situates Erica Baum’s Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011) within the history of the artist’s book. It does so by introducing her ongoing series, begun over a decade ago, in which Baum makes the quotidian act of folding the corner of a book’s page into a sculptural intervention, reorienting and “reauthoring” source texts into works of concrete poetry. While photographs from this series have found a wide reception within the art world, their movement away from the gallery wall and (back) into the codex has permitted them to take on new dimensions of meaning. For critics more intent on approaching these images as poems, the challenge of rendering Dog Ear’s lineation has been met with consistently unsatisfying results. In taking up a different framework – that of the artist’s book – this essay does not argue against Dog Ear as a work of poetry or, for that matter, photography. Instead, it attends to the relationships between word and image as they are reconfigured by the gesture of folding, which both repeats and crystalizes moments of exposure and concealment. Materiality and seriality intertwine to sustain the unsettled, self-renewing pages against the backdrop of the book as object.