(reprinted with permission, © 1994)
David Laufer's sculptures consist of wooden blocks painted with acrylics to look like books. They weigh the proverbial ton that those massive best-sellers weigh... A bundle and an armful, as an object they signify weighty intellectual matter and a determination to read it through, even if it kills you. They are that beloved doomed venture of contemporary publishing, a brick of a book, which ends up as unread bric-a- brac. They have such a solid presence that at first touch you can't help take them very seriously and you vow to change your life -- knock on wood; literally in Laufer's case -- by reading that single book. But in the end, it is the physical bulk of pulp, drained, on second look, of serious purpose, that signifies a state of civilization. Like massive volumes one picks up at sales tables in book stores, one can hardly believe that so much paper and ink was used in publishing the thing, let alone ever reading it. Laufer's sealed illustionistic objects by weight alone both satirize and lament the exhaustion of the literary epoch.
Over this object-based commentary on the passage of eras and the transfer of values, Laufer adds ?what? amount of clever, creative small paintings, mounted on wood, disguised as the covert art of an illustionistic book. In "Hut 2-3-4" Laufer satirizes thick technical volumes, published by small presses, written by authoritarian quacks. The cover art is meticulously drawn, the sense of illusion is high. This is where Laufer distinguishes himself from other contemporary book artists, as Laufer has not simply lifted a real book from a particularly bereft corner of the sales table and made it his own, but dreamed up his own effort in fictional vanity publishing. In "Hut", he as created a satricial world in his design, and the German expressionist "hut" punning on a hut (a small house in the woods) combined with and image of a very, shall we say, bumpkinish foot soldier, snares the backwoods militarist in his own contradictions. The best thing about Laufer's satire is that it is embodied in design, it is not illustrative, but pictorial. His cover designs are much more determined and meaningful than real cover art in the book world. Here the "4" of the Hut 2-3-4 is writ large, subdividing the cover like a half baked, or partly broken swastika. But the 4 is also the drain down which the author's regimentation goes: in one quadrant of the first 4, a second sequence of Hut 2-3-4 takes off. Doctor Dave's Hut 2-3-4 quite literally marches his troops in to a corner of the cover. And the Hut 2-3-4's theoretically subdivided, on the emphasis of the 4, into infinity. The cover design then quite literally signifies regimentation going down the drain. Laufer tops off his basic pictorial device -- using abstract form to express meaning -- with book jacket add-on's: here we note that Doctor Dave's Magnum opus was published under license from the Nicolae Ceaucescu Council on Governance. Ceaucescu of Romania, the Dracula dictator that ruled from behind a maze of palaces and tunnels, only to be shouted down when he actually confronted his people, is a mighty good mentor for Doctor Dave. This reference gives one last layer of meaning to Laufer's book as brick: if you don't read it you can use it to throw at dictators.
All of Laufer's books combine material and pictorial satire to comment broadly on the decline of civilization. They capture the ridiculousness of books and art too, now, in a world spinning out of control. Elsewhere, in "Last Refrain for Free Rain" Laufer lampoons get-rich-quick books, "Tit for Tat" rewrites the rules of engagement in international affairs, and one can only imagine "Why We Couldn't Let You Be Born" is a heart wrenchingly Oprahesque letter from regretful parents to an aborted unborn. Laufer likes the Borgesian paradox; "Why Men Lie" reopens an ancient conundrum with the assertion that "all men (not jut Cretins) are liars." "Diagnosing Uncertainty" and the "Pocket Cyclopedia of Systematic Doubt" summarize Doctor Dave's relativistic philosophy and (as one fictional reviewer lauds) "does for logic what Les Paul did for guitar." In taking the route of games-playing and recursive imaginings over an observation on the decline of reading Laufer leaps past the past the postmodern concern in some book art today, to involve books in the infinite regress of doubt. The physical book is the one certain thing, alone, in a spiral of fictions within fictions, spinning away from it. Finally, then, Laufer's books are like those few thumbed-through tomes one sees on college English major's bookshelves, twenty years after they abandoned art for business.
Stopped clocks, sadly, wistfully, trapped somewhere between "Naked Lunch" and "Beauty and the Beast" in a spell of unrealized dreams and accomplishments which have been spun into a web of self-generating fictions.
