Robin Waart – Part One

Book coverRobin Waart – Part One
Book coverRobin Waart – Part One
Book coverRobin Waart – Part One
Book coverRobin Waart – Part One

How on earth could anyone come up with the lunatic notion of collecting book pages bearing the words ‘part one’, and then reproducing the collection in a book? That is how Robin Waart has documented both his collection and his compulsion to collect, which he compares with the endlessness and senselessness of the labour of Sisyphus. It is a continual beginning without an end, an infinite repetition of attempts, and a reference to a short story by Albert Camus in which a writer spends his entire life trying to come up with the first sentence of a book.

What Waart has created here is an installation in the form of a book of 101 pages – reproduced in stencil print – preceded by an exemplary list giving the precise origin of each. As a bonus there is the occasional original part one page. The majority of the panel found the absurdity of this undertaking persuasively charming.

Edition: 2011
Language: English
Publisher: Robin Waart, Amstelveen
Designer: Jonas Wandeler
Printer: Extrapool/Knust, Nijmegen
Binder: Boekbinderij Amsterdam, Amsterdam
Dimensions: 160 x 239 x 22
Amount of pages: 216 p.
Number of copies: 202
Price: € 49
ISBN: 978 90 902617 6 8
Font and foundry: Helvetica Textbook
Binding style: Japanese style soft cover, then split open
Material: 100gsm DaCosta (interior), 300gsm Keaykolour Original, snowwhite (cover)