Although the book’s interior was printed in six colors, its cover was humble, unfinished binder’s board, quarter-bound in cloth, with tipped-on cover and spine labels. These Tetenbaum printed on waste sheets from her studio, so that each copy would be unique. In broad terms, the cover was meant as a deconstruction of the bookmaking process, revealing the book’s component parts and hinting at the structure within.

The first nine pages of Half-Life feature pages from the artist’s most recent title at the time, Gymnopædia No. 4, reproduced actual size, to give the reader an idea of the level of texture and detail in her work.

Gymnopædia No. 4 is also a “piece for four hands”; these pages helped to set up the four-column motif we used to organize the book’s text . . .

. . . wherein the four simultaneous narratives of the books are defined. The background is a detail of a linocut, and a motif that reoccurs in Tetenbaum’s work: mark-making as a method of keeping record.

The artist, shown in a large, tradesman-like portrait upon which the curator Jim Carmin’s notes are set in an orderly field of flat, neutral color.

The book is composed of four simultaneous narratives. From left: an illustrated timeline of the artist’s life and work; a critical essay, in English and German, from the Leipzig artist and critic Ute Schneider; illustrations of all of the books included in the exhibition; and a selection of old advertising cuts from Tetenbaum’s collection, which figure prominently in her work.

Given the large number of parts to be included within forty-eight pages, the curatorial section of Half-Life was an exercise in compression. It was here that presenting the content as four concurrent threads was most useful: we couldn’t afford to be precious. Once the planning had been done, we had to get over ourselves and let the content fend for itself.

For example: images, though placed according to a set of rules, were free to intrude into neighboring areas, as necessary; and as it happened, they did. Books are shown in relative scale, and the accordion-folded work in particular would often stretch into and cover the catalog of advertising cuts in the right column.

Entries in the advertising-cuts column wrap from one page to the next—a leftover from our original production spec (digital printing on one side of a 12×18 sheet; French-folding the result). But we found that even without the physical link of a French fold, the images supported continuity and created an organic frame for the otherwise rationally constructed page. We printed the cuts themselves in the orange-red of the European craft tradition.

Curatorial pages wrap up with technical notes regarding Tetenbaum’s process and endnotes for the essay. At right, illustrations of some of Tetenbaum’s installation work.

Toward the back of the book, we modulated the underlying grid into four even columns to handle more homogenous content types.