Mein Buch

by Lucas Michael

Editors Note: This webpage contains two projects by Lucas
-the first entitled Mein Buch is published in the print version of issue five.
-A video documentation of the Mein Buch performance at Skylight Books is online here.
-Roll Call, a video project is available only online. Click to view the video.

These drawings are a part of a sustained project by Lucas that include a series of drawings of title pages drawn from books with bigoted texts or subtexts. Lucas renders these drawings meticulously in graphite, signing them with his own hand and signature, reclaiming authorial voice and rendering each text what it is- an object to be critically examined. In this issue of the Journal, Lucas pairs the title page of the new age blockbuster, Jonathan Livingston Seagull with a May 11th 2007 performative reading of the novel at skylight books, later adding his own signature to his rendering of the title page of the same subject.

Read in part as a critical examination of the dubious construction of community and self at the intersection of neoliberal and new age ideologies popularized in North America in the 1970's, this time-based project also serves an actively reflective response to the rhetorical call underpinning The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest issue 5 , how do we say we? Through his reading performance, Mein Buch: A Submission, Lucas deconstructs a genre whose near exclusive focus on affirmation of the individual, even when speaking in the plural- ends finally as 'we can for us,' or 'we are all in this together: seperately and each to his own.'

page one
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page two
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Original cover to Jonathan Livingston Seagull

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