Author Description

"Inspired by Georges Perec's musings on reading, which he likens to "a pigeon pecking at the ground in search of breadcrumbs", Simon Morris' latest book sets exactly those feral avians to work on the very surface of Perec's celebrated text, 'Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline'. Morris' intervention produces a kind of "huh?" effect. This onomatopoeic question stands for "what is it?", "why?", "what does it mean?"; questions that seem to express incomprehension or misunderstanding. The contemporary version of this leitmotif would be "wtf - what the fuck" in an artwork that oscillates between the obvious and the indecipherable, the trivial or the commonplace and the strange and the unexpected; between sense and non-sense, logic and absurdity, simplicity and abstruseness; between what the artwork shows and what it says. Pigeon Reader is an intervention in a precise facsimile edition of Perec's book, "Species of Spaces and Other Pieces" (trans. John Sturrock, London: Penguin books, 1997). In remaking the full book, Morris' conviction has gone beyond the recent tradition of the artists' insert. Within the paratext he has corrupted the corporate branding, with penguins morphing into pigeons and advertisements re-imagined. One could be forgiven for asking why someone would remake an entire book just to make a conceptual play in a single chapter. Morris would likely respond with Perec's closing words from the very chapter re-played: "These are questions that I ask, and I think there is some point in a writer asking them."" -- from information as material website.