CHICAGO — Ever read “Betonbuch”?
Don’t look for it on Amazon.
Only 100 copies exist. And actually, no one has read it. Not a single copy has even been cracked. Literally. The author was the German artist Wolf Vostell, best remembered as part of the Fluxus artist community of the 1960s and 1970s whose experimental acts questioned the process and materials of traditional art. He’s known in Chicago for once encasing a 1957 Cadillac in concrete for a Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition. (That piece, “Concrete Traffic,” can still be found in a parking garage in Hyde Park.) Soon after, he wrote a short book about his future plans, though being the Fluxus artist he was, Vostell decided to encase each copy in its own rectangular block of concrete.
