Ulises Carrión | For Fans and Scholars Alike

Ulises Carrión

For Fans and Scholars Alike

Rochester, USA: Visual Studies Workshop, 1987

[92] pp., 20 x 14.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 200

One of the artist's final books, For Fans and Scholars Alike was produced by Carrion while he was artist-in-residence at the Visual Studies Workshop Press in March 1987. The volume consists entirely of graphic text elements using only the letter 'i'. 

The book's title was used for a retrospective of Carrion's work at westlondonprojects, in 2009. 

For Fans and Scholars Alike is available from Jonathan A. Hill Booksellers, here, for $500 US. 

“In For Fans and Scholars Alike, Ulises Carrión composed pages which are organized in graphic terms but do not contain any specific verbal or visual messages. The text blocks on these pages are tightly laid out, shaped around the opening of image elements so that they make frames, windows, and spaces for those images in the exact manner of magazine or book layouts. But these blocks are composed entirely of the letter ‘i,’ with ‘headlines’ made of brackets in bold and semibold weights…At the other end of Carrión’s spectrum, these images are snippets of leaves, or of wrinkled cloth, architectural fragments, or washes suggesting sky, water, or ground. The cover is a simple grey paper wrapper, with the same pattern of ‘i’s as in the interior. The format of the pages changes from double to single to triple columns and back again…The book displays a self-conscious level of organization as a structural feature of a work, not necessarily tied to the production of meaning in the pedestrian sense…”

– Johanna Drucker