structure to acquire its distinctive identity. In a structuralist study on bookworks,8 Ulises Carrión begins by drawing a distinction between the traditional book page, promoter of linear reading, and the newspaper page, promoter of non-linear reading, with different typefaces and spaces that make reading multifocal, plural, and simultaneous in an analogy that compares the former to pre-Cubist painting and the latter to Cubist painting. By then defining a succession of intersections between vertical and horizontal axes, between categories such as continuity, seriality, and a spatio-temporal reality beyond verbal and visual axes, Carrión associated bookworks with film, video, performance, and mail art precisely because all of them were spatio-temporal, in contrast to painting, the traditional book, or the newspaper. This association materialized in the intersection between these categories, as video was used to present bookworks, performances, and projects. The structural analysis practiced by Carrión was a methodology for his new forms of making art through operations of organization, commutation, suppression, substitution, and diagram representation. These operations were used, for example, to modify or suppress the literary text by iconoclastically identifying some of the structures that will represent it. In his first published bookwork, Sonnets (1972), he presents forty-four variations of a sonnet by the poet and Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Heart’s Compass, in versions in which the verses are underlined, feature every word in capital letters, or are subverted by orthographic signs and punctuation that transform its meaning and form; or he modifies the verses by suppressing words or sentences. Around this time, Carrión sent Octavio Paz a group of texts created by modifying poems by authors from the Spanish and Portuguese Renaissance, such as Juan del Encina, Marqués de Santillana, Jorge Manrique, Fray Íñigo de Mendoza, or Gil Vicente.9 He replaced the syllables with marks that identify their metric intervals and also used punctuation or words that did not exist in the originals so as to deconstruct them while preserving their strophic form, albeit transferring the writing into its visual representation. A similar operation of textual suppression is to be found in the sound work Hamlet for Two Voices (1977), in which he carries out an ellipsis of the entire text of Shakespeare’s tragedy, resulting in a reading in which two voices, male and female, recite the names of the characters in the order they appear in the original play. In Ulises Carrión’s bookworks, the ellipsis of the literary text is accompanied by an ellipsis of the narrative, as can be seen in the listing of names or the identification of characters that are not linked by any narrative relationship within a story. Arguments (1973)10 features twenty-five chapters in which lists of male and female names organized in columns come together and separate without any narrative relationship to justify the spatial relationship of one set of names to the other. Many of them are anaphoric repetitions that result in a spatial expansion independent from any meaning. In Tell me what sort of wall paper your room has and I will tell you who you are (1973),11 Carrión cuts out and binds together a set of wallpaper samples, typing on them the name of the room in which each will appear. The names start in the first person (my room), then identify the members of his family and relations (my parent’s room, my sister’s room, my uncle’s room, my wife’s room, my teacher’s room), finally reaching a progressive lack of differentiation of the person to whom the room with the specific wallpaper belongs (your room, a room, . . .’s room). The subtlety of this bookwork is apparent not only in the readymade of the wallpapers but also in the suggestion of a narrative that does not require a text for its construction: the simple association of the identities of the rooms’ owners in the first person informs us that the narrator has a teacher, a wife, etc. The progression of these identifications suggests a leaving of the family home to enter the world, the framework of so many narratives found in short stories, novellas, and novels. The new art of making books permits the insinuation of a story without resorting to text or narrative. The textual ellipsis liberates the interpretation of the dear reader, who, instead of reading a story, could create his or her own. The same type of situation occurs in a different form in The Muxlows, a book prepared in 1972 but published only in 1978.12 In an introduction, Ulises Carrión mentions that this is the tale of an English family from Yorkshire, the text of which he found in the pages of a secondhand Bible in Leeds in 1972. This bookwork features all the names of the Muxlow family who lived between 8. “Bookworks Revisited,” The Print Collectors Newsletter (New York) 11, no. 1 (1980). 9. Ulises Carrión, “Textos y Poemas,” Plural: Revista cultural de Excélsior (Mexico City), no.16 (January 1973), 31–33. This set of poems was later published together with other unpublished poems in Ulises Carrión, Poesías, ed. Roberto Rébora (Mexico City: Taller Ditoria, 2007). 10. Ulises Carrión, Arguments (Cullompton: Beau Geste Press, 1973). 11. Ulises Carrión, Tell me what sort of wall paper your room has and I will tell you who you are (Cullompton: Beau Geste Press, 1973). 12. Ulises Carrión, The Muxlows (Düsseldorf: Leaman Verlaggalerie, 1978).
41