This book assembles images, texts and documents corresponding to Ross Birrell’s Envoy series of site-specific actions – ongoing since 1998 – where a relationship with utopian ideas resonant in books and other objects is structured around the gestures of gifting, reading, and throwing.

Envoy combines the individual and the ideological in a series of actions and interventions which explore the role of the artist as a potential courier of meanings and messages – an envoy sent by an unknown power for an unspecified end. Undertaking arduous journeys in order to gift a book to a symbolic institution, or to throw a sealed package into the sea, or quietly reading a utopian text in a related location, these solitary and poetic gestures are by turns desperate, ludic, ironic, apostatic, contemplative and redemptive, and simultaneously articulate and challenge the reported loss of the utopian grand narratives of modernity and democracy.

The book includes documentation of Envoy actions, a letter by Lars Bang Larsen, and fragments of readings of the work of Thoreau, Mauss, Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, Pynchon and others.

The publication is supported by Talbot Rice Gallery and Glasgow School of Art.

Published as part of Counterpoint group exhibition at Talbot Rice Gallery, as part of Generation: 25 Years of Art in Scotland

Published by LemonMelon
Edition of 200 copies

In the documents 14 daybook Adam Szymczyk writes: 'Birrell’s ongoing project “Envoy” is critical thought performed as gesture. A book—usually of certain historical weight—is thrown into a body of water or a ravine; most recently, it was Thomas More’s Utopia thrown into the Mediterranean Sea, in Piraeus, on March 11, 2016. The book reaching the apex of its short flight and the thrower standing on firm ground are captured in a photograph. Every project (from the Latin: projicere, to cast forth) is a throw, and there is always an abyss gaping ahead.'

https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/12797/ross-birrell

• Organisation