Reading the Remove of Literature (2006)
288pp
“ Reading the Remove of Literature is an edition of Maurice Blanchot's L'Espace littéraire , although not a word of Blanchot's text remains. Every page of his book has been assiduously erased by Nick Thurston . At the same time, Thurston has preserved his own marginalia, reset in the face and fonts of the original text…By removing Blanchot's text, Thurston paradoxically gives us Blanchot's work; he presents rather than absents language. Reading the Remove of Literature takes its place in a small but remarkable group of artists' books that purport to present footnotes to absent texts, offering largely blank pages and notes keyed to em0ty space. But the central texts which those books claim to annotate are almost always fictional; Reading the Remove of Literature distinguishes itself — point de source — by removing an actual text. In this respect, the closest analogue to Thurston's book may be Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing .” – Craig Dworkin, editor
Nicholas Thurston , Historia Abscondita: An Index of Joy , 24 pages ISBN 978-0-9553092-6-7, £7.50
175mm x 105mm
“These word lists stand as signposts to an intellectual terrain recoverable only speculatively, through indexical trace. Nietzsche the author is long vanished from this text, which is based upon a posthumous translation of The Gay Science , and the loss of history that is a central theme of that book becomes enacted in this Index of Joy . All we have here is what is left behind…A conceptual work that enacts its polemical operations through a deceptively simple device, Nicholas Thurston's Historia Abscondita uses visual and material references to call forth the associative process through which the impossible task of recovery is provoked.” – Johanna Drucker, University of Virginia
