“You had to be tough to have dinner at our house,” Buzz Spector recalls. His Jewish household in Rogers Park “strongly encouraged reading and intellectual arguments.” Respect for books was key. Later, when Spector began making art objects by tearing the pages of found books, it caused “a huge crisis. My mother was strenuously opposed to that work at first.”
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By 1980, Spector had already been tearing the edges of his prints to imitate fine handmade paper. Inspired by Keats’s “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” Spector wanted to create a book that would recall the sonnet’s metaphors for reading as discovery, as a moment of “wild surmise.” He decided to make a book of drawings torn to different sizes, so that one could see the edges of all the drawings at once. As a test, he tore the pages of an old book, but the result astonished him: “I’d reduced the book to a kind of single-page glyph. The structure of the page was preserved; it still looked like a text–except the a on page 19 was next to a c from a different word on page 22. I kept thinking I could see recognizable words; I kept reading and rereading this field of torn edges. I couldn’t find any words, but I couldn’t stop trying. Reading is ultimately optimistic: sitting at the breakfast table, you read the cereal box for the umpteenth time in the hope that finally some magic interior sense will reveal itself.”
Spector compares Double Kafka to the author’s famous story “Metamorphosis”: “The act of tearing becomes a metamorphosing gesture. But even if you’ve never read Kafka, the intact image on the left is remote and historical–you know it’s an old photograph–whereas the same image, torn, becomes more present because of the damage that’s recently been done to it. What appears to be damage releases it from history.”
