Historic Avant-Garde Work on Paper Unavailable

Of all media, paper is perhaps the most ubiquitous, as well as the most invisible. Paper is everywhere, but we only see it as a pure host medium, the passive carrier of an inscription. By doing so, we miss its “paperiness,” that is, to quote the editorial introduction of Sascha Bru, “its intrinsic materiality, the tools, techniques and technologies employed to manipulate it, the conceptual and cultural practices it is most intimately associated with, the affects it haptically engenders and the creative uses [it was put to]” (p. 1). Historically speaking, we know that there was a kind of “paper turn” in Western culture, generally situated at the moment of invention of mechanically produced wood pulp paper, the invention of new steam and eventually rotative printing machines, and, of course, the increasing literacy rates and democratization of society at large, but the awareness of this “paper turn” did not always...