THE VOLUME

A conceptual exploration of the building blocks of art and writing.

The book opens with the Big Bang, depicted as a jumbled, jagged mess of colorful lines. That big scribble makes way for a small dot that “[flies] off by itself.” This dot lands on a square, described as a page; splits itself in two; and then multiplies exponentially. A double gatefold reveals that the dot learns to create infinite versions of itself. After the dots learn how to become a line, they create a series of lines that become a “surface,” the pages of a book, visual art (drawings described as “close to magic”), writing, and—after putting writing on the top of the series of pages the dot created—a book, or “the volume” now in readers’ hands. Though the story briefly flirts with cosmology and biology (one spread defines mitosis), it is primarily a deconstruction of visual art and writing (the latter given curt treatment and described merely as how “the drawing could make pictures of words”) and how those two constructs can build a book. The lengthy text, fond of whimsy, is paired with simple line drawings and is often dry in tone, reducing complicated events to their essentials: About the Big Bang, Camnitzer writes, “It was very messy.”

An abstract conversation starter for readers of all ages who like thinking deeply about artistic and conceptual expression.