Becoming Fahrenheit 451 Excerpt from text by Kjetil Roed for Bare Words at Lautom Contemporary, Oslo full text click here “Bare Words moves through semantic openness and participation but- these designs should all be read in connection with Eve K. Tremblay's reworking of (both Truffaut's and Bradbury's) Fahrenheit 451. In both the novel and film Montag, the protagonist, lives in a future where books are forbidden, but he is no longer able to refuse himself the pleasures of reading. He escapes at the end of the film and ends up in a utopia-like community in the woods outside the City. There the people actually become books: they memorize them by heart, and burn them. The gesture is intriguing: the reader becomes, through endless repetition and recitation, a dust jacket for the book (as they themselves define their role), a vessel for the artwork. Tremblay presents a photograph showing all the book people in the movie Fahrenheit, as well as herself in a burned forest, becoming the novel Fahrenheit. Maybe more captivating is her installation, Le refuge des amis de Truffaut, 2007 that is a remake of one of the common devices for hiding books in the film: a hollowed out TV. Tremblay's work indicates a love for the book, the word, and the inescapability of reading, but she also – by placing the hiding-device in the gallery – elaborates on the idea of depth in art and literature. Within a work of literature or art there is, one is inclined to think, some kind of “real” or “original” meaning, which the act of reading or viewing brings out. Tremblay's work touches on grounding myths and literature – the myth of meaning as something internal. Rosalind Krauss’ concept of myth is instructive here. Myth, she claims in her essay Grids, “deals with paradox or contradiction not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradiction, but covering them over so that they may seem (but only seem) to go away.” Both the gallery and the book are myths, in this regard. We usually imagine the book as a vehicle for our imaginative transportation into a fictive or otherwise alternative world, different from the site of reading. But while the book is a portal to another place, the gallery already is this place: it is, already, an alternative world, a space more ideal than real.”

Excerpt from text by Kjetil Roed

for Bare Words at Lautom Contemporary, Oslo

“Bare Words moves through semantic openness and participation but- these designs should all be read in connection with Eve K. Tremblay's reworking of (both Truffaut's and Bradbury's) Fahrenheit 451. In both the novel and film Montag, the protagonist, lives in a future where books are forbidden, but he is no longer able to refuse himself the pleasures of reading. He escapes at the end of the film and ends up in a utopia-like community in the woods outside the City. There the people actually become books: they memorize them by heart, and burn them. The gesture is intriguing: the reader becomes, through endless repetition and recitation, a dust jacket for the book (as they themselves define their role), a vessel for the artwork.

Tremblay presents a photograph showing all the book people in the movie Fahrenheit, as well as herself in a burned forest, becoming the novel Fahrenheit. Maybe more captivating is her installation, Le refuge des amis de Truffaut, 2007 that is a remake of one of the common devices for hiding books in the film: a hollowed out TV. Tremblay's work indicates a love for the book, the word, and the inescapability of reading, but she also – by placing the hiding-device in the gallery – elaborates on the idea of depth in art and literature. Within a work of literature or art there is, one is inclined to think, some kind of “real” or “original” meaning, which the act of reading or viewing brings out.

Tremblay's work touches on grounding myths and literature – the myth of meaning as something internal. Rosalind Krauss’ concept of myth is instructive here. Myth, she claims in her essay Grids, “deals with paradox or contradiction not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradiction, but covering them over so that they may seem (but only seem) to go away.” Both the gallery and the book are myths, in this regard. We usually imagine the book as a vehicle for our imaginative transportation into a fictive or otherwise alternative world, different from the site of reading. But while the book is a portal to another place, the gallery already is this place: it is, already, an alternative world, a space more ideal than real.”