This interview explores my works which involve the destruction of books, whether by burning, cutting, grating or throwing.

Birrell engages with burning in Burning Kafka: The Complete Works of Kafka Burned, exhibited in individual boxes with a copy of Kafka’s final request to Max Brod to burn his works, letters and manuscripts, and also in a series of ‘pop up books’, featuring books burnt in toasters (Kafka’s Metamorphosis; Dante’s Inferno; the Diary of Anne Frank). Cutting features in ‘Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp’, where Pierre Cabanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp is cut in half with a hacksaw and grated in a domestic grater; and in ‘A Shorter Finnegans Wake’, where a copy of Finnegans Wake has the bottom cut off of the book (all 1996–7). Birrell’s ongoing ‘Envoy’ series features books thrown into the sea or void, including The Interpretation of Dreams thrown into the Gulf of Finland (2001); Brave New World thrown into the River Vurjan on the Norwegian-Russian border (2001); and Heidegger’s Being and Time thrown into the Grand Canyon (2012).

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