One-Way Street: An Index in Thirteen Parts
An collection of 13 indexes to Walter Benjamin's 1928 writing One-Way Street. The indexes play on Wallace Stevens’ famous poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” each one approaching One-Way Street from a different angle. They catalogue recurring topical, sensory, and poetic elements of Benjamin’s text making imagistic lists which illuminate the variety of ways a reader might navigate a text according to her own preoccupations. The publication is displayed here along with Benjamin's original text and a few accompanying hand-drawn quotations pulled from various works by Benjamin.
Thus, the Index of Edibles speaks to the needs of the reader who is indecisive about dinner. The Index of Metaphors could help an unproductive poet or artist, while the Index of Numbers plays to the obsessions of an accountant or collector. The Index of Colors is for the reader in wintertime; the Index of Places, for the traveler who stays at home, and the Index of Names might inspire expectant parents, set on giving birth to the next great mystery writer or cosmologist. The Index of Sounds reassures a lonely reader with its aural traces, and the Index of Quotations offers the person who is perpetually speechless at parties something grand to say. Often, we see in things exactly what we are looking for. A search is always for what one finds.
Graphite, wood, self-published books
Dimensions variable
2008
