THE ICE PLANT --- Charles Gute: REVISIONS AND QUERIES

Revisions and Queries [brings] to mind text pieces by such artists as Lawrence Weiner and Robert Barry, but Gute’s work has a humor and visual energy unmatched by anyone else working in that vein.
—Kenneth Baker (ARTnews, March 07)

For many years, 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 overlapped when Gute—in the process of recovering proofreading data from a crashed hard drive—began taking corrected publisher's proofs and stripping out all content except for his own revisions, queries and proofreader's notations. Reframed as line drawings, these abstract constellations of marks resonate with their original subject matter in unpredictable ways. But as they consist solely of his own coded, precise markings, the pieces can also be read as a kind of 'self-portraiture,' a personal record of hundreds of hours of Gute's work as an artist engaged with the written word on a daily basis. Revisions and Queries is an art book about art books; playfully engaging the textual legacy of artists like Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and Allen Ruppersberg, it offers an amusing glimpse behind the scenes of both the art world and art book publishing.

Charles Gute is an artist and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. He has been awarded artist fellowships from the San Francisco Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and has twice been a MacDowell Colony Visual Arts Fellow. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley), ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), the UCLA Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Catherine Clark Gallery (San Francisco) and Feinkost Gallery (Berlin).