John Sparagana Libri

John Sparagana is an artist and the Grace Christian Vietti Chair in the Visual Arts and Chair of the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts at Rice University. Reto Geiser is an architect and scholar of modern architecture with a focus on the intersections between architecture, pedagogy, and media. The work of Sparagana is known for its various types of physical manipulation. Following this concept, this book proposes an alternative “reading” of his work in the form of a literal understanding of visual information as text. His large-scale work of art “Crowds & The Revolutionaries” is translated into the format of a mass-market paperback book. Arranged over eighty double-page spreads, each individual page frames a full-scale fragment of this work. Not only does it allude to a growing discourse on the control and manipulation of visual narrative, as increasingly witnessed from political imagery to popular culture, but it also investigates the way we read and process (visual) language.

Exploring the interplay between art and criticism, this collaborative work features distressed magazine pages by artist John Sparagana accompanied by the insightful commentary of critic Mieke Bal. It challenges conventional perceptions of dictionaries and fashion ads, weaving together these elements to provoke a rethinking of the dynamics between image and text, as well as the often complex relationship between artists and critics. The innovative format invites readers to engage in a dialogue about the nature of representation in contemporary culture.