Gleaners Notebook

Gleaners Notebook, an A5 format notebook specially produced for LB03, takes as its point of departure the small-scale workshops that produce the bulk of exercise books for the city’s many students. The printers employ older paper ruling machines that use inked thread to line the sheets, and require some degree of manual labor. As part of the process, accidents or off-registered paper are generated during warm up and slow down. Made from these castoffs, the Gleaners Notebook emerges out of Yang’s longstanding practice of transforming school exercise books, diaries, and other such vernacular printed matter into artist publications. In doing so, Yang draws our attention to items that normally pass beneath notice, but which have been designed to regiment our daily life. The Gleaners Notebook is perhaps most closely in dialogue with Yang’s off-and-on Grid Bloc series, begun in 2000, and produced in the format of standardized graph paper pads found in stationary stores. By filling these normally utilitarian objects with playful and unexpected standards, the artist invites the user to create their own ways to fill the page.