In 2012, on his farm in Warwick, New York, Jared Bark began arranging columns of books at the edge of a field, realising an image he had carried in his mind’s eye. What started outdoors moved into the studio, where the medium widened: stacks painted in colour, burned, effaced, pared back. Later came the acant, vertical columns of books milled on all four sides like squared timber. Their slender profile calls up two distant references at once — the trees that become paper, and the freestanding columns Bark encountered at Pompeii. An artist whose earlier work moved through performance, body art and chance procedures, Bark treats the book as sculptural mass rather than vessel of text.
Book of Stacks, Stacks of Books is the first publication to assemble a decade of this activity. Across 104 pages, 124 plates survey the stacks indoors and out, tracing a practice that has developed quietly and without a commercial centre of gravity. Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi directed the edition for Chose Commune, with design by Atelier Tout va bien; the book appears in English and French, published in June 2022 as a first edition and bound as a section-sewn hardcover with trimmed edges, at 22 by 30 centimetres.
What gives the volume its weight is the way the sequence holds together so heterogeneous a body of objects: the pastoral stacks in grass and woodland beside the studio variants, the burned and the blanked, the sawn columns. The book becomes the site where the project is finally seen whole — as one line of thinking about paper, trees, and the column as form, sustained over years and across a farm, a studio, and a mill.
For collectors, the case rests on the work itself rather than on claims of scarcity. This is the first consolidated record of a decade-long body of sculpture by an artist with a long and varied career; the plates are extensive, the design is considered, and the bilingual edition places the project in a European publishing context. It documents a series that has largely existed in fields, woods, and a working studio — which is precisely why a book of it matters.
