DANIEL BOSSER / PHILIPPE THOMAS — Philippe Thomas Declines His Identity, Occasional Papers, London, 2015

Softcover
16 × 23 cm, 32 pp., black-and-white illustrations
Publisher: Occasional Papers, London, 2015
ISBN: 9780992903909
Condition: Very good. Light shelf wear and minor handling to cover edges.

First authorised English translation of Philippe Thomas décline son identité, originally published by Galerie Claire Burrus, Paris, in 1987. The text relates to a performative lecture delivered by Philippe Thomas at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1987 and subsequently at the Musée de Grenoble — a lecture whose gestures, pauses, and delivery were already scripted within the book itself before it was spoken aloud.

The publication is attributed to DANIEL BOSSER, the collector who acquired the work, in accordance with Thomas’s central practice: the systematic transfer of authorship from artist to owner. Under Thomas’s agency readymades belong to everyone® (founded 1987), the buyer’s name replaced the artist’s on the work’s surface, documentation, and public record. The book enacts this displacement directly: Thomas’s name recedes; Bosser’s advances. The lecture becomes a script. The script becomes a publication. The publication becomes evidence of a transfer that has already occurred.

Occasional Papers — the London-based publisher known for its rigorous programme of artist writings, translations, and critical texts — produced this edition as part of its ongoing effort to make key documents of conceptual and post-conceptual practice available in English. The translation makes Thomas’s system legible to an anglophone readership for the first time in authorised form.

A small but structurally important publication within Thomas’s body of work: printed matter as script, authorship as transfer, the book as the record of an artist’s deliberate disappearance from his own name.