Micah Lexier
I am Born
Brescia, Italy: Tonini Editore, 2026
64 pp., 11.5 x 16.5 cm., softcover
Edition of 100
Last month Micah Lexier released his second book with the Italian imprint Tonini Editore. Both are small, bare-bone, minimal works, yet also strangely cinematic.
The first is Autobiography, from 2022. It first appears to be entirely blank, part of a long lineage of blank conceptual artist books. The title suggests it might owe a debt to Piero Manzoni's Life and Works from 1963, which is also an entirely blank book. Closer inspection reveals that the pages of Autobiography are perforated.
No stranger to the fetishization of printing techniques, Lexier could simply be celebrating the perforation for perforations' sake, or the circle and the hole, which have increasingly featured in his work of late.
But given the dominant recurring theme of life-lived vs life still-to-come in Lexier’s practice, I’m inclined to see the pages akin to a wall calendar, which can be torn off and discarded. Specifically, the now-lampshaded trope from cinema, where calendar pages fall like autumn leaves to suggest the passing of time, in films like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Man They Could Not Hang, Phantom of the Paradise, and countless others.
I am Born shares a size, page count and sensibility with Autobiography. But rather than blank, the book is entirely comprised of entirely of numbers - beginning on the front cover, continuing on the endpapers and throughout, and ending on the verso. The only colophon information is contained on the outer spine.
The first number is 1, and the final is 11,520.
The book is clearly an homage to previous artists’ publications that utilized grids of numbers, perhaps most famously Stanley Brouwn’s 1 step-100000 steps from 1972 [see below], as well as the non-art book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates [see previous post].
On Kawara’s One Million Years, from 1999 [see post, here] and Claude Closky’s satirical Three Thousand Four Hundred and Fifteen Friday the 13ths and The 365 Days of 1991 Classified By Size [see next post] are clearer precedents, as they count dates.
The numbers in Lexier’s book are years, and all are printed the same, in grey. The lone exception is 1960, the year of Lexier’s birth, which is printed in black.
The impulse to identify your existence on a larger timeline might be viewed either as a self-aggrandizing or humbling gesture: seeing oneself as part of something much larger. It brings to mind the Sequoia Forest sequence in Vertigo where James Stewart and Kim Novak stand in front of a redwood cross-section showing its growth history by date and she points out when she was born [see below].
With almost two thousand years before the protagonist enters the book, I’m also reminded of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. Published from 1759 to 1767, in nine volumes, the novel purports to be a memoir, but the narrator digresses to such an extent that the books begin with the story of his conception and Shandy is not even born until the third volume.
I am Born is available from the publisher, for €25.00, here.
