What is a photograph? A book? A collage? A textile? A sculpture? We think we know the answer. Each is a separate medium, with separate training, even separate museum departments. Then we see the work of Keith A. Smith. Art needs no taxonomy. This is certainly true of Smith, a cult artist who might combine photography, collage, and fabric in a single sculptural book, and whose work is now on view at Bruce Silverstein.1
Book Number 28: Stitches (1972) is a perfect example. Here is a book in an edition of one. Smith has made over two hundred such individual books, and few have been shown or seen, although Smith self-published an annotated bibliography (in multiple) as his 200th book in 2000. So why is Book Number 28 even here, in an exhibition dedicated to Smith’s “fabric works”? Because the subject of the book is, in part, the thread that has been ingeniously woven within it, and which moves through holes punched in the pages as you flip through it. “The paper and thread used for binding were also the means of ‘imaging the book,’ ” Smith explains in his bibliography. But that’s not even why it’s called “Stitches”: “The title did not come from the thread which stitched the book and imaged the pages. Rather, making the book and turning the pages kept me in stitches. I was laughing so much from this strange book experience that I had to be careful that tears did not hit the page.”