I, Tony Jones, will read a text of my choosing. As I am reading the text,
I will remove the pages that have potential to inspire future works of art.
Upon completion of the book, I will place the inspirational pages in waterproof containers.
I will bury the containers at random areas throughout my current location.
In order to share this work with an audience, I will make a map of the page locations.
In order to view the work, the spectator must follow the directions listed on the map.
If the container is found, the finder may use the discovered text as inspiration for a new work of art.
After one year, I will return to the mapped sites and unearth the containers.
If the container has not been discovered, I will use the unburied text to inspire my own works of art.
My career as an artist began in the months leading up to the year 2000. Upon reflection, there were two distinct stimuli that ignited my art praxis. The excitement of the period, commonly known as the Y2K era, was heightened by the arrival of the nascent millennium. For those who require a refresher, the Y2K era was responsible for an unprecedented surge of speculation and hysteria. “Experts”, in addition to the mass media, were predicting that computers would lack the ability to interpret the sequential transference of dates. As a consequence, the transition from xx99 to xx00 would cause the catastrophic collapse of the computerized global network. Pundits predicted that airplanes would fall out of the sky, bank accounts would become valueless, and historical record would vanish. The world helplessly awaited the arrival of the digital apocalypse.
During this time, I was inspired by a text titled Does Writing Have a Future?, written by Vilém Flusser. At the time, the text was only available in a German language version titled Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? Admittedly, my German was a little rusty, but I managed to successfully navigate the text and extract multiple points of meaning. In this text, Flusser boldly predicts the end of writing as a function of language. He refers to letters as vampires that suck the meaning of language into themselves. In the future, Flusser predicts that the emergence of technical images would eventually replace our text-based society. Looking back, there was an odd similarity between Y2K and Flusser. They both presaged the radical dissolution of textual language. In retrospect, it is fair to say that my career as an art maker was born within the tender bosom of Y2K’s mass hysteria and Flusser’s universe of technical images.
I’m an avid reader. In my opinion, reading produces a therapeutic effect similar to good art. Many of my ideas derive from books and vernacular text. The more I read, the more I’m able to formulate an ongoing body of interesting work. In order to enhance the creative process, I often highlight or underline sections within the text. In fact, I take pleasure in jotting notes and compressed sketches across the pages of my books. My note keeping is precise. It acts as a form of pseudo-memory for the preservation of multiple ideas.
With this in mind, I began to contemplate a world without letters, text, pages, or books. With obvious sentimentality, I wondered how human expression would change due to the onset of digital technology. I also recognized the year 2000 as a convenient symbol of this transformation. Would Y2K bring about the downfall of our hyper-accelerated society? Would the arrival of the technical image expose writing as increasingly irrelevant? Based on these questions, I decided to create a work of art that would both obscure and reveal text as a function of meaning.
Planting Text for Future Inspiration is a work that magnifies the push/pull between text and technology. As described in my statement of actions, I would remove the inspirational pages from books. Next, I would bury the pages and create a rudimentary map to this random location. At this point, any interested spectators could access the work and put the text into action. If the page remained buried after a year, I would exhume the container and develop a new work of art inspired by the text. By returning to the text after the entirety of a year, the piece would underscore the affiliation between the passage of time and the fragility (or inconsistency) of memory.
This work was influential for many reasons. First, I was enthralled by the idea of text as buried treasure. As humans evolved, we developed a tendency to bury physical objects – treasure, crops, the deceased. In this instance, it was primarily the idea within the text that was being concealed. Eventually, most of these ideas were unearthed and became part of my art making praxis. Second, the work necessitated the dismantling of the book object in order to manifest a renewed textual meaning. Similar to Y2K and Flusser, the work applies destruction in order to reveal a transformation of information. Lastly, the work speculates on future iterations of memory and appropriation. If I were able to recall all of the ideas that I have read in my lifetime, my art making would be much more advanced. Unfortunately, limited by the capacity of my memory, most of these ideas remain buried within the margins of my books. The limits of memory often frustrate me. However, by burying these textual ideas for future use, I applied this frustration as the focal point for numerous future works.
For the first iteration of this work, I used Flusser’s Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? as the first instance of textual casualty and rebirth.
To date, I have buried pages from over 100 books.
I will now narrate some examples of buried text. These passages were taken from Flusser's Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft?. As mentioned previously, my German is a little rusty, but it should provide you with a general idea of Flusser's concepts. Enjoy!