Against Decorum

In Against Decorum, Michael Hampton conveys a rich, centuries-long culture of book damage.Against Decorum is an exploration of the many ways in which the physical integrity of the printed codex is put under strain. A connoisseur of the frayed, the scuffed, and the torn, Hampton describes 'a new era of bibliographic unorthodoxy' in which books are fallen things.To these contemporary works Hampton brings a scalpel and excises a language of time-worn use. Hampton calls these excerpts 'gleanings', 'trawlings', and 'shards', among other things.The result is a piling up that is a kind of poem built from a language of book damage.What we see is that books have never not been altered, and in place of the fantasy of the pristine volume, Hampton gives us an index-that is also a poem, and is also a manifesto-of handling, of wear and tear, of water-stained pages and insect damage.Photocaption: Angus Fairhurst, A magazine - everything removed except 1cm border (2005); unique; cut magazine. Courtesy of the Estate of Angus Fairhurst and Sadie Coles, HQ, London