The Invisible Book
The Invisible Book is a book produced in limited edition at the affordable price of €0. It will work as a digital book too, on any platform. The edition is limited to 100 copies (neither numbered nor signed).
This is a product without a single fault, available at the lowest price possible. The book was made as a reaction to both the trend of decreasing booksales and the trend of increasing expectations from audiences.
Published by Elisabeth Tonnard, Leerdam, April 2012.
The book’s first edition was sold out on the day of its release. A second edition has become available on June 11th. It too is limited to 100 copies, neither numbered nor signed, but all made to perfection and available at the price of €0. If you want to order the book, please send me an email, and note that it will not be possible to buy more than one copy of the book. If you would like to order more copies or would prefer to obtain copies of the first edition, please follow this link to the German site of Ebay, where artist Joachim Schmid is offering for sale the first edition copies he bought immediately after the launch of the book.
Ah, my love, the glory of works which have been lost for ever, of treatises which today are mere titles, of libraries which burned down, of statues which were demolished! How blessed with absurdity are the artists who set fire to a beautiful work! Or the artists who could have made a beautiful work but deliberately made it ordinary! Or the great poets of silence who, knowing they were capable of witing an absolutely perfect work, preferred to crown it with the decision never to write it. (For an imperfect work, it makes no difference.) How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn’t see it! And if someone were to rob it just to burn it, what an artist he would be, even greater than the one who painted it! Why is art beautiful? Because it is useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all aims, objectives and intentions. All of its roads are for going from one point to another. If only we could have a road connecting a place no one ever leaves from to a place where no one goes! If only someone would devote his life to building a road from the middle of one field to the middle of another – a road that would be useful if extended at each end, but that would sublimely remain as only the middle stretch of a road!
Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet
In October 2012 I was invited to do a few presentations at The University of Toledo and found these frames hanging in a hallway of the Center for Visual Arts. When I left Toledo, I made a small intervention.
