The Preparator

This fiction, a collaboration between Kasper Andreasen and Louis Lüthi, takes as its starting point the painter Alexander Cozens’s publication A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785). Set one morning in an empty gallery and told from the point of view of a young man who installs exhibitions for a living, The Preparator combines text and image in a series of compact, associative tableaus, each revolving around a landscape—or rather, the memory of a landscape: a title page, an eighteenth-century ink drawing, the network of cracks in a ceiling, a walk along the Rhine, a satellite photograph, Thomas Bernhard holding forth in a private garden, and others.