Charles Gute

For many years, Brooklyn-based Charles Gute has worked with text as a primary material both as a conceptual artist and as a freelance editor of art books. These separate activities--studio practice and day job--unexpectedly overlapped when Gute hit upon the idea of taking corrected publisher's proofs and stripping out all content except for his own revisions, queries and proofreader's notations, reframing the results as line drawings. Displacing the editorial process with a purely visual agenda, these abstract constellations of marks resonate with their original subject matter in unpredictable ways, while playfully engaging the textual legacy of artists like Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and Allen Ruppersberg. Featuring more than 50 drawings, Revisions and Queries is an art book about art books; it offers an amusing glimpse behind the scenes of both the art world and art book publishing.