Bildsammler

“Bildsammler,” or “Picture Collector,” is what Volker Renner might print on his business card, as each new item in his series of artists’ books may be read as another chapter in a single huge collection comprising found as well as photographed images. For his twenty-sixth book, he has compiled pages from collector’s albums, a medium that became popular in the mid-nineteenth century and for over a century and a half blended a consumer’s approach to knowledge with knowledgeable consumerism. Pasting collectible pictures into their albums, children and adults learned about art, animals, and the world while also learning to love the right brands and department stores. What interests the artist in these “picture collectors” is not so much the completed and perfectly preserved copy as rather the multiple authorship of everyone who helped shape a particular album. Marginal notes, flagrant gaps, and manifold traces of destruction make the collector’s album a unique artifact and cultural-historical phenomenon. With the serial arrangement of various albums and targeted creative interventions, Renner puts his co-authorial stamp on the volumes’ design and brings the systems of knowledge and classification implicit in them into the present.