Language to Cover a Page

Working within a lineage which encompasses Joseph Kosuth’s Purloined (in which the author assembled a single novel from individual pages of different books), Tom Phillips’s A Humument (in which the author creates a new narrative by drawing on top of existing pages) and Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (in which the author erases words from Milton's Paradise Lost to create a stirring new poem), Mueller has done more than simply “compose the holes.” With Language to Cover a Page, Mueller has carefully aligned excerpts from disparate books—with differing typefaces intact—into two evolving pages. These pages crescendo before our very eyes, a flipbook of accumulating meaning, where with the passing of every page the narrative becomes aware of its own developing presence. —Derek Beaulieu (excerpt from text insert accompanying the book)