Unpacking a collection: Phil Cleaver’s Book-Object-Art

The text performs a semiotic and material analysis of Phil Cleaver's series of more than 120 book assemblages. It unpacks what I describe as a general principle of foldability, which I identify at the heart of Cleaver's work. Thus, each assemblage does not so much tell a story, but organises a discourse about objects, meta-narratives that say something about the life and fate of objects: how our cultures use objects, how we save objects, and how we dispose of objects.