Reto Geiser, David Grubbs & John Sparagana - Projectile (Book)

Projectile is an artist's book by Reto Geiser, David Grubbs, and John Sparagana that spirals outward from a single source image: a news photograph of chair-throwing at the conclusion of a cancelled rock concert in the early 1980s.

Visual artist John Sparagana has long produced sliced and mixed collage works in which a source image is enlarged, and copies of the image sliced vertically into 1/8" strips and then sequenced horizontally, followed by a second stage in which the stretched image is sliced horizontally and sequenced vertically. The resulting works stutter, shimmer, extrapolate and radiate with all manner of dazzling visual effects.

Projectile disassembles and reassembles an image of the cusp of violence, playing on the many possible meanings of the pictured crowd, whether as witnesses, participants, dissenters or co-conspirators.

In their previous collaboration, Reading Revolutionaries, Sparagana and designer Reto Geiser translated a single work of Sparagana's into the format of a mass-market paperback book, proposing an encounter in which text and visual information collapse into a new mode of reading. Projectile deepens this engagement, with Geiser drawing from multiple works by Sparagana as a work of short fiction by musician and writer David Grubbs - a single 2,100-word sentence - wends its way through the entirety of the book.

John Sparagana is Grace Christian Vietti Chair in the Visual Arts at Rice University. His work has been shown internationally, most recently with exhibitions in Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, Houston, New York and Zurich.

David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Good Night the Pleasure Was Ours (2022), The Voice in the Headphones (2020), Now That the Audience Is Assembled (2018) and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (2014) and, with Anthony McCall, Simultaneous Soloists (2019).

Reto Geiser is a scholar of modern architecture with a focus on the intersections between architecture, pedagogy, and media. He is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Rice University School of Architecture, where he teaches history, theory, and design.