Tauba Auerbach
Alphabetized Bible, 2006

The Alphabetized Bible investigates the idea that any piece of writing, no matter its intellectual weight, is nothing more than a collection of letters.

Auerbach’s book reorders and presents all the characters in the King James Bible in alphabetical groupings, showing capital and lowercase instances in the order in which they appear in the original text. Some letters and sequences of letters appear more frequently than others, in some cases hundreds of times more than their counterparts.

As the artist describes it, “The intention of my work is to formally and conceptually break language down into its tiniest essential units, and apply the unique properties of the system to the system itself, subjecting it to its own idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies in remarkable patterns.”

Artwork Info

Artwork title
Alphabetized Bible
Artist name
Tauba Auerbach
Date created
2006
Classification
printed material
Medium
case bound book with offset printed pages
Dimensions
8 in. × 6 in. × 1 1/2 in. (20.32 cm × 15.24 cm × 3.81 cm)
Date acquired
2007
Credit
Collection SFMOMA
Accessions Committee Fund purchase
Copyright
© Tauba Auerbach
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2007.8
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

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