Mark Pawson | Dividers

Mark Pawson

Dividers

London, UK: Self-published, 2015

[82] pp, 23 x 16 x 2 cm., loose leaves

Open edition

When Mark Pawson passed a couple of weeks ago I realized that I have never posted this great project that he sent me years ago. 

It’s a small cardboard box screenprinted with the title on the spine. Inside are printed sheets of coloured paper (making it a very economical publication to produce). The coloured pages are each represent a category of work in his collection, serving as a self-portrait of Pawson by way of his interests: 

Typewriter Art/Concrete Poetry/Visual Poetry

Zines/Fanzines

Radical Cultures/DIY cultures

Ray Johnson

Fluxus/Something Else Press

Book Making/Books About Books/Book Arts

Activist Graphics/Protest Art

Ant Farm & General Idea

Artist Monographs

Badges

Things I’m In!

Mexico

Kitsch/Dubious Tastes

Mail Art...

Dieter Roth

Fashion/Textiles/Pattern

Interesting Magazines Which I Only Have One Issue Of!

Artists Books

My Dad’s Books

Music/Sound/Cage

Photography

Hardly Worth Anything - See Later...

It was produced in 2015, eight years after he had moved into a new flat, when he realized that some books still remained in boxes. In one of them he found George Maciunas’ Flux Paper Events, which he had completely forgotten that he owned. 

“If I couldn’t remember such an inimitable book then it was definitely time to take action and develop a system for locating books quickly and easily,” he writes in the single page introduction. 

Much of Mark Pawson’s work used the materials of fan culture (stickers, buttons, badges) as a way to celebrate his interests and influences, setting up at book fairs and operating in the mail art community as a way of meeting like-minded people. 

This deviates only slightly from that larger body of work, with the librarian instinct that inevitably follows a collection that has grown so large that it demands some organizing principles.