“We can only guess what thoughts may have filled her mind. The books in her study give an indication of the range of her research: alchemy, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art, astrology, astronomy, biology, botany, cartography, comedy, criminology, dance, electronics, engineering, ethnography, film studies, geography, geometry, history, iridology, jazz, kinetics, linguistics, literature, mathematics, metallurgy, music, mythology, neurology, ornithology, philosophy, photography, physics, politics, pomology, pornography, psychoanalysis, quantum mechanics, religion, sexuality, sociology, sport, theatre, urban studies, volcanology, weaving, xylography, zoology.”
John Calcutt, ‘In the study', The Beautiful and Damned, Vague Vogue (2021), pg. 97
V for Vague, V for Vogue, W for Vague Vogue is a sculpture/installation made up of a set of assorted books that consists foremost of the publication VAGUEVOGUE- a pseudo-lifestyle magazine composed of scholarly writings and images complied for the A Beauty Centre Project, while the rest are made up of titles from 49 different disciplines described in the article “The Beautiful and Damned” featured in that same magazine and written by the late British writer and critic John Calcutt.
The work is not only the artist’s way of launching the publication as a piece of “sculpture” in which the content was ‘forged & shaped’ by a sculptor, the set of 50 books carefully hand-picked and “hand-framed” by the artist can also be seen as a conclusion of the artist’s painstaking project of A Beauty Centre. While John Calcutt’s quasi-fictional explores issues in the topic of Beauty and Aesthetics, the artist’s unique collection here further poses questions on what it means to “research” since artists’ quests are often idiosyncratic.