With the skills of the surgeon, Brian Dettmer reveals sculptures hidden in forgotten books

In fact, he often repurposes these items, which may not have found a second life. When he lived in New York, Dettmer often soured books from people

Will be left on the sidewalk for passers-by to take away the garbage truck. “I rescued them from the bin a lot of times,” he said. He also heard that people who were moving or cleaning up their deceased parents’ homes need to remove items like old encyclopedias. “So far, the encyclopedia went and I got more ways,” he noted. Then there were garage and real estate sales, resale stores and used bookstores. Sometimes, if he needs a specific type of book to search for eBay.

“A lot of the time, I buy books that look interesting and I stay in my studio for months, or even years — before working with them, I have a library that is constantly changing,” he said. “A lot of the time, I deal with books that I already have, but sometimes I look for something specifically, and sometimes I find things online in this way.”

Dettmer’s process of making sculptures has remained largely the same for the past two decades. It started by sealing the book with varnish. “After sealing, the edges are when I started digging out, removing the layers and sculpting around what I found interesting,” Dettmer said. “I didn’t move or add anything in the actual book. It was just a subtraction method, it was a kind of excavation.”

Artistically speaking, Dettmer’s work has been developing since the first development of this sculptural style. Earlier, he was usually one of a book. “The format of these works has become larger over the last five to ten years,” he said. “I have been putting multiple books together to create big towers and big walls.”

In 2021, Dettmer and his family moved from New York to Chicago, the artist and wife’s hometown. “Especially moving here here makes me think about the United States, think about America, think about America’s ideas, think about our history, and question the greatness of this country, but what needs to be open and re-examined is what needs to be cracked, and stories that need to be re-narrated,” he said. This is reflected in his use of American history books in his works, whether it is the image of violence against Native Americans in Europe, the carvings of American stories in his pictures, or the engraving collage of the president’s face in his sculptures, “Inhabitants”, both of which were made in 2022.

“I don’t know if I’m really telling people how to feel through the work, but by carving a president’s Facebook, making this surreal-looking creature…people will look at it, some will offend the people I carved in the president’s face, some will offend the fact that I am.

present the president’s face at work. ” he said.

In another recent article, Dettmer carved into a book called Civilization and Climate. Concerns about the climate and the environment have always been in his mind. “It has always been my concern and interest inside and outside my artwork,” he said. By choosing to keep words and images in the page layer exposed in the sculpture, Dettmer connects an old-fashioned book to the current climate crisis.

“I think by using books, it’s a way to re-examine past ideas and re-verify certain things that need to be transferred,” he explained. “However, you can also see that many of these problems are not new, and these are the problems and problems we have had over the decades (even if not longer).

Dettmer’s comment on how he recycles: “I’m physically recycling materials, by recycling books or repeating books or repurposing a book, I can also recycle ideas and information inside,” he explained. The way this information is recycled depends on the information the artist finds when stripping more pages. Dettmer planned the shape and feel of a piece, but the details were realized when working on the sculpture. “I might browse a book and think it’s a great image and hopefully I’ll run into it when I work, but once I sealed the book and I’m carving, I might completely forget what it is, or, when I do run into it, it may not work properly, or partly might work,” he said. “It’s like reading myself, literally reading with a knife. I’m going to a page or a layer at a time and I’m surprised by what’s there, so I can’t really control what I’m encountering, rather than choosing the right thing.

Book first. Of course, I can control my reactions. ”

Additionally, the images and text used by Dettmer in his works may change as he continues. “There’s a little bit of a push, like the way you’re collage or painting, and suddenly, something new comes up and it eliminates other things,” he said. “A lot of the time, I’ll carve an area, browse a few pages and find something interesting, but there’s something else that happens, maybe half a day of work is deleted or carved.”

Dettmer’s engravings are more than images. Sometimes, poetry also appears from his carved text. “William Burroughs used to do this with his writing. He did cut it,” he said. “In a sense, it’s something that exists to create something new.”

In his works, images and text play with each other. Dettmer notes that when he gives a lecture, he will point out how people use language to interpret the images they see, and instead rely on the images in their minds when looking at language. “In a sense, I think of linguistic clips as the image itself, just because the reader or viewer creates the image in their minds, and the image is the opposite,” he said.

There are many considerations in Dettmer’s work. It’s about a drastic technological shift in the early 21st century and what’s missing in the process. It’s about deconstructing history and reprocessing information. This also reflects how human memory works. “We only remember little pieces of what actually happened, and I think when we tell people what happened, we fill the rest of the pieces,” he said. “I like the idea that I re-divided these stories into smaller pieces, more open.”*

This article first appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 65. Get the full question here.