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Artist Adam Bateman figures he handled more than 100,000 books when he assembled a monumental, although temporary, structure of paper and ink at Brigham Young University last month. Using donated books, he crafted a 12-foot-high structure that is the exact geometric shape and size of a side room in the gallery where his latest show is displayed.
Another piece in the show is a 32-minute video loop he shot of books going through an entire cycle in a front-loading washing machine.
"You can watch as the books spin around and get turned into pulp. Books are symbolic of knowledge, but they are knowledge themselves. That's the beauty of the printing press — if there is one book out there, there are lots of books out there. A story is independent of a book," Bateman said.
His 41-ton book installation is a centerpiece in a new exhibit at the BYU Museum of Art titled "The Matter of Words: Adam Bateman, Harrell Fletcher and John Fraser," featuring 46 pieces by these contemporary artists. The exhibit explores the idea of language as landscape, according to Jeff Lambson, the museum's curator of contemporary art.
"The words we choose reflect our mindsets and establish our connections to our physical and social environments," Lambson said. "Language can be thought of as a landscape of codes that we negotiate in order to understand or express a particular world or personal view."
Bateman, a Weber State University art instructor and BYU alumnus, is the only Utah artist in the group and will attend an exhibition preview Thursday in the museum's Marian Adelaide Morris Cannon Gallery. His art illustrates how language is made up of arbitrary symbols that generate meaning only when they are arranged in a certain way.
One of his BYU pieces fills a gallery room, the one that matches the book sculpture, two inches deep in pasta letters painted black. On the walls, he hung rubbings taken from the sculpture's sides, connecting the piece with the very architecture of the building.
Thanks to the way the books compressed under their own weight, they give the sculpture the appearance of geological strata deposited over millennia. The piece gets its title, "The Fourth Thousand Years," from one of the books Bateman built into the sculpture. As he was stacking, he wrote down some of the titles. One was a book by the conservative Utah activist Cleon Skousen, a one-time Salt Lake City police chief, early leader in the John Birch Society and vocal proselytizer of Mormon beliefs.
His book, The Fourth Thousand Years: From David to Christ, describes the fourth millennium after the biblical creation of the world.
"It lends to the idea of time passing and reinforcing the idea of sedimentary strata. I found the title to be rich especially in the context of this sculpture," said Bateman, stressing that he is no creationist. The books were donated by the Provo nonprofit Worldwide Book Drive, which gets them back after Bateman dismantles the sculpture in November.
"I would say over 50 percent, maybe as much as 70 percent, are Mormon-related in some way. There are lots and lots of scripture, official things published by the Mormon church and a lot that is peripheral, like Skousen," he said.
His contributions to the show convey how printed material, in the end, is simply printed material. If a book gets turned to mush or compressed into a stack, the ideas it contains live on, he said.
"I would consider burning books if it weren't for the Nazi association," Bateman said. "I wouldn't have a problem with burning books because a book is just paper, cardboard and ink. Every particle, every piece of ink, piece of paper, piece of glue, is still there, it's just reconfigured. If words are truly special, they should maintain their meaning."
'The Matter of Words'
Installations by Adam Bateman, John Fraser and Harrell Fletcher.
When • On display through Nov. 26. The museum is hosting an exhibition preview Thursday, 7 to 9 p.m.
Where • Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo.
Admission • Free
Hours • Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Info • moa.byu.edu