Édouard Levé, Jan Steyn (translator) · 2002 · PDF · Calibre ID 252
Resurfaced in Without Aid or Supervision (2026-10-05).
Role in the triad
Limit case: the unbuilt work
Why this book
533 artworks described and never made, mostly in the agentless present passive: the depopulated register as a style, with anyone as the Helping Hand; names Roussel and, in #418, weaves a tapestry of a homonym of Roussel. PDF is an archive.org OCR scan (517 of 533 entries parsed).
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being.” (#1)
- “Despite a compulsive desire to make a drawing, a man settles for describing the project. The drawing is realized later, following his notes.” (#240)
- “Visualizing what they hear, the listeners perform the inverse operation to the man: translating words into images.” (#283)
- “Villard de Honnecourt, a medieval architect, is not known for his buildings as much as for his writings on those of his contemporaries.” (#316)
- “A voice describes an unrealized work as if it had been completed: a pile of pipettes in the Sahel desert.” (#325)
- “The reading ends when no one asks him to continue.” (#533)
Themes
catalogue · conceptual art · copy/double · description vs instruction · instructions · passive voice · Roussel · unrealized works