Charles Gute

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Revisions And Queries

Lawrence Weiner Interview, 2006
archival piezo print on Hahnemühle rag, 33" x 46"

For several years I've worked with text as a primary material in both my visual art and freelance work as an editor of art books. More recently, these separate practices have begun to overlap: in new works on paper I've begun to reframe the act of editing the written word in terms of drawing.

Typically I'll receive from publishers uncorrected page proofs in the form of PDF files sent via e-mail. One of my jobs as an editor is to find and correct errors, a process of marking up the manuscript on the computer screen. After the corrected proof has been e-mailed back to the publisher and the book has gone to print, I'll sometimes go back to the computer file and strip out all the content except for my own revisions, queries and copyediting symbols. These notations are not moved or altered. I'll then take a sequential grouping of such pages and layer them — as if bound into a book. Although rescaled, the resulting constellation of marks remains true to the original manuscript's layout and registration, and the overall trim size is proportionally the same. Though the editorial process becomes in some ways more transparent, the traditional goal of this process — to maximize the clarity of a given text — is displaced by a purely visual agenda. The end result is an abstract line drawing that maintains a specific yet oblique relationship to its original source material. (more at Charles Gute)