Artists use books to make powerful statements in ‘Contemporary Volumes’ at Morris Museum

DAWN JOSEPH PHOTOGRAPHY

Viewers look at part of Samuelle Green’s “Permutation 3″ at The Morris Museum in Morris Township.

For centuries, books were seen as holy things. If they were represented in works of art, it was likely that they were nestled in the arms of saints.

The printed word, we are often assured by tech supremacists, has been eclipsed by other forms of communication. Maybe so. But for many — including many of those who never crack a binding — the book remains a sacred object. The loss of digital media may be a problem for an archivist, but the deliberate destruction of a book feels like defilement.

Brian Dettmer’s “The World at Home.”

In recent years, New Jersey galleries have made the most of our visceral reaction to seeing spoiled pages. In “Founders Day,” a gut-punch of a show at Eonta Space in Jersey City in 2023, the late Lauren Farber torched hundreds of books and fashioned blackened archways out of their burned husks. At MANA Contemporary in Jersey City, last year, director Kele McComsey floated un-openable books on planks while the sculptor Ann Messner dug circular holes out of the hearts of atlases.

Nothing at “Contemporary Volumes,” a thriller at the Morris Museum in Morris Township, is quite so funereal. Nevertheless, curator Bryant Small plainly believes that books are in big trouble. He has gathered nine excellent artists to investigate the forces that bedevil literacy. They do it with tough, colorful, dramatic pieces, some of which use entire chambers of the special exhibition gallery to make their conflicted feelings apparent.

Like Farber did, “Contemporary Volumes” artist Amanda Love puts books to the torch not to channel Fahrenheit 451 but to prove a point. In “Tigris,” she smothers a corner of the gallery with scorched pages, and shears other books of their pages at the spine, leaving mangled vessels afloat on a sea of charred paper. She has done it to call attention to the intentional targeting of libraries and schools by oppressors and story-erasers worldwide.

In another brutal, oddly beautiful sculptural piece, Love strings together scores of torn-up books into a beige curtain. Though no literary meaning is recoverable from these pieces, there is a surfeit of symbolic significance. Repositories of knowledge and cultural memory have been targeted and pillaged. We are poorer for it.

Diana Schmertz, too, is sensitive to the ways in which the inflammatory world we share is particularly dangerous to books. Much as a preservationist might, the North Jersey artist paints portraits of an endangered species: texts that have been banned outright or pushed off of school curricula by legislation and court decisions.

Diana Schmertz’s “1836 Project.”

Using a laser, Schmertz cuts the charmless language of these laws into paperback covers: “The Color Purple,” “Invisible Man,” “The Hate U Give” and other famous pieces of jacket art. In “1836 Project,” she has carved a Texas proclamation mandating “patriotic education” into images of books by African-American authors. The works of literature are still recognizable, but they are riddled with holes.

Schmertz lets the lacerated letters collect on the bottom of the frame. Evidence of pain and damage is everywhere. How much more abuse can history take before it falls apart completely?

Other pieces in the show hint that book culture faces forces more tornadic than censorious governments. In Samuelle Green’s breathtaking “Permutation 3,” hundreds of thousands of pages have been shorn from the spines of books, curled into cones, and bunched together into giant columns that twist from wall to wall. A walk beneath these enormous paper crullers feels like stepping into the maelstrom of a post-literate era. Green amplifies the turbulence of the piece by suspending scores of old desk chairs amid the mass of folded pages. Some are upside down. It looks as if a cyclone has torn the library apart, and taken our sources of comfort with it.

And of course it has. People are reading far less than they once did. Our communication through the written word has become increasingly automated. Predictive text has taken the place of thinking for ourselves. “Permutation 3” may not be a deliberate commentary on the sorry state of letters: The artist may simply like sculpting with paper and alluding to wasp’s nests and birch branches and other permutations of wood. She may be interested in connecting the book back to its natural source. But it is telling that she has chosen to work with printed pages rather than blank sheets. Her decision to slice her material out of existing books makes “Permutation 3” a sculpture made of words and paragraphs severed from any organizational force that might create meaning. It is possible to get close to these honeycombs and glean a few sentences, but you will never connect them to anything, or follow a narrative through-line. A dedicated reader — a reflexive reader, a reader by habit — is out of luck.

Works like this could not have been made in a healthier culture for books. The sad fact is that Green, Love and other “Contemporary Volumes” artists have no shortage of materials to repurpose. With each year, more books become homeless. Not only aren’t used bookstores willing to take old paperbacks anymore, there are barely any used bookstores left. Getting pulled apart and refashioned into a sculpture as magnificent and horrifying as “Permutation 3” is about as good a fate as an old book is going to get in 2026.

To be read, however, would be a better fate. Although “Contemporary Volumes” contains the remnants of thousands of texts, most of the show is intentionally illegible. It is worth wondering whether the enthusiasm with which these artists have pulled the wings off of these paper butterflies and roasted these tomes is a secret expression of glee — or at least a desire to be free from the tyranny of traditional print and the structure it imposes. In “The Kaleidoscope,” Cheryl R. Riley fashions pages from a 1957 encyclopedia into mandalas and paints over them in streaks and patterns of bold color. The rhythms of the paragraphs make these pieces hum, but the old definitions are buried under new marks.

Brian Dettmer, another encyclopedia-modifier, lives out every schoolboy’s fantasy by slicing the text out of old reference books and leaving nothing but the illustrations. What emerges is a kind of bas-relief made of educational primers: pictures atop pictures, communicating through image rather than the written word. In the troubling but undeniably gorgeous “The World at Home” (see above), Dettmer arranges nine hollowed-out hardcovers in a shape reminiscent of an iconostasis. Even with the writing excised, he still treats these books like they are sacred.

The most extreme treatment comes from Susan Rostow, a sculptor who shares Green’s affinity for the natural world and her suspicion that books would really like to turn back into tree bark. “Cochinal,” beautiful with mossy green and beetle-red pigments, is paper metamorphosed by the pressures of its own materiality: folded, bunched up, bestowed by the artist with mottled edges and prints of dragonflies and mosquitoes. Yet somehow it still looks like a book. There is something downright optimistic about it. It suggests that even if civilization collapses and the contents of libraries are fused together by the glues and unguents of time, trace evidence of our literacy will persist.

Colette Fu’s “Noodle Mountain.”

Of course, some books don’t need years of erosion or the sculptor’s scalpel to be word-free. Many are pitched to children who can’t yet read. Among the most explosive of these is the pop-up book, a childhood staple that reimagined the starter story as an interactive sculpture, changing as a child turned the pages. The bigger the pop-up, the more impressive it looks, and Colette Fu’s “Noodle Mountain” is about as massive a specimen as a kid of any age could want.

Fu’s paper monster in the size and shape of a roaring bonfire requires a mechanical crank to open and close (see video below). Tossed into this great plate of lo mein are representations of flames, blood, giant sliced scallions, leaping fish, and at least one roller coaster loop. This is not a linear story, but it still tells a tale of the Chinese restaurant and the sweat it requires of its proprietors, its place within a divided American society, and its preservation of tradition and heritage. It is bright because the artist demands your attention; it is big, because big is how she feels about the world she inhabits.

In that way, “Noodle Mountain” contains the virtues of traditional books. As we move from word-based media to communication based on pictographs, we hope that images can do some of the work that paragraphs and sentences used to do: perhaps not as specifically or with as much detail, but every bit as emotionally.

There may be no artist in the Garden State currently striking a balance between image and text with greater grace than Cheryl Gross, a trained illustrator who has written her own speculative fiction about post-gender humanoids with strange and unmapped chromosomes. Gross’s accordion-style panels, held together by metal hinges, arrive spring-loaded with a love of literature. These folios are adorned with dramatic images from mythologies ancient and very present, including fantastic beasts, harpies, cellphones and ascending airplanes. Only someone well-read could have made these works, and Gross, who loves to tuck tiny quotations into her pieces for the observant, leads with her erudition. “If you wait long enough,” reads the text beneath the platform that holds her artwork, “science fiction will become reality.”

A lot of sci-fi is, you may have noticed, pretty scary. Hold on to your hats — and your books, too.

“Contemporary Volumes” will be at The Morris Museum in Morris Township through March 8; curator Bryant Small and artists Diana Schmertz, Amanda Love, Samuelle Green and Susan Rostow will give a guided tour, January 31 at noon. Visit morrismuseum.org.

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