TOTEM

TOTEM takes the marks from the paintings off the wall and stands them up. A tall column of dark blue paper, its four faces carrying the same invented signs, pale shapes lifted out of the sheet rather than drawn onto it, so the writing is not printed on the surface, it is what the surface is missing.

It is not one object but two, and each of them is two things at once. The column unfolds: four panels hinged flat and pinned at the corners, so the totem exists both as something standing in a room and as a sheet lying on a table. TOTEM II works the same way in a different hand, fewer marks, larger, and in places burned right through the paper, so some of the signs are open holes instead of pale shapes.

The title is literal. Every alphabet was a set of shapes before it was a set of meanings, and this is a monument to the shapes.