I recently went to the Museum of Arts and Design to take a look at their current exhibition, Slash : Paper Under The Knife. The exhibit is amazing and I would highly recommend it.
One of the pieces, I found the most meaningful to me was Between The Lines by Ariana Boussard-Reifel. The core of the piece is a book from which all of the words in black ink have been painstakingly removed. They lay in a pile an inch or so from the book itself. The book is in fact a fundamental text of the white supremacist movement.
The piece, I believe, demonstrates the absurdity of a world in which white and black are surgically removed from one another. Symbolically pushing such a racist ideology to the extreme, which is in fact it’s ultimate goal, Ariana Boussard-Reifel shows us just how absurd such an enterprise would be. The application of such precepts would render our realities completely meaningless and unintelligible, just like the white wordless book !
Another possibility could be that Boussard-Reifel was performing a sort of artistic surgery upon the ideology itself by removing all the malignancies from the book, thus, demonstrating that for such an ideology to be sane, it would inevitably have to cease to exist. This is achieved when one contemplates the dissected pages. It almost appears harmless in it’s glass show case. Unfortunately, racism runs far deeper than the ink on those pages !
Nevertheless, I found the piece visually and politically compelling. I imagine there are more than two ways of looking at it. I wish there had have been a lengthier explanation of the piece and the artists intentions. If anyone has any other ideas, comments are more than welcome ! I wonder what you all read between the lines …
