126 intervened books, print ephemera.

 

Ana and Carl (and some other couples) (2014), a collaboration between Leigh Ledare and the artist Nicolás Guagnini (b. 1966), addresses issues of intimacy and estrangement entwined with the social. Ledare and Guagnini produced a sculptural set of 126 intervened books, appropriating classics from the contemporary Western canon — including texts on philosophy, psychology, theology, feminist and queer theory, among others. Arranged on the floor in an orderly “minimalist” grid, these books have been drilled out — with one, two, three and four inch holes — creating apertures which focus the viewer’s gaze on images culled from an archive of 1970s pornography. Montaged between the pages of the original volumes, the array of positions, orientations and power relations indexed within these erotic representations in turn deform the existing aesthetic vocabulary of the books’ covers, thereby caricaturing the gravity and authority of their content. Hovering over these allegorical objects — that invoke at once minimalism and the camera lens, as well as the ravenous public appetite for titillating content — are two names: Ana and Carl. These are, of course, the artists Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre.