CARRIÓN, Ulises.

Tell me what sort of wall paper your room has and I will tell you who you are.

[20] leaves. Small 8vo (178 x 115 mm.), orig. black printed dust-jacket, perfect-bound. Geneva, Switzerland: Ateliers Typographiques Héros-Limite, 1995.

The very rare second edition of Carrión’s beguiling bookwork composed of bound wallpaper samples, one of the artist’s lesser-known books, due to its rarity. The 1973 first edition, published by the artists’ space In-Out Center, was made in an edition of 50 numbered copies. The present work is one of 52 copies, 26 of which are lettered A-Z, the rest numbered 27 to 52; our copy is no. 42. This book is part of a series of re-publications that Juan J. Agius, an executor of Carrión’s estate, undertook to replicate the increasingly scarce and fragile bookworks Ulises Carrión (1941-89) created in the 70s. Under the imprint of Editions Héros-Limite in Geneva, Agius produced second editions of Mirror Box (1st ed.: 1979), Looking for Poetry / Tras la Poesía (1st ed.: 1973), Arguments (1st ed.: 1973), and the present bookwork.

”In Ulises Carrión’s bookworks, the ellipsis of the literary text is accompanied by an ellipsis of the narrative, as can be seen in the listing of names or the identification of characters that are not linked by any narrative relationship within a story…In Tell me what sort of wall paper your room has and I will tell you who you are (1973), Carrión cuts out and binds together a set of wallpaper samples, typing on them the name of the room in which each will appear. The names start in the first person (my room), then identify the members of his family and relations (my parent’s room, my sister’s room, my uncle’s room, my wife’s room, my teacher’s room), finally reaching a progressive lack of differentiation of the person to whom the room with the specific wallpaper belongs (your room, a room, …’s room). The subtlety of this bookwork is apparent not only in the readymade of the wallpapers but also in the suggestion of a narrative that does not require a text for its construction: the simple association of the identities of the rooms’ owners in the first person informs us that the narrator has a teacher, a wife, etc. The progression of these identifications suggests a leaving of the family home to enter the world, the framework of so many narratives found in short stories, novellas, and novels. The new art of making books permits the insinuation of a story without resorting to text or narrative…”–João Fernandes, “Art as Subversion: Make and Remake to Make Anew” in Guy Schraenen, ed., Dear reader. Don’t read. (2016), p. 41 (analyzing the 1st ed.).

In excellent and fresh condition. The first edition is unrecorded on WorldCat, and we find only three copies of the second in North American institutions.

❧ Juan J. Agius & Ricardo Ocampo, eds., Ulises Carrión: Books & More, Catalogue Raisonné (2013) 25 (pictured).