Dead Stock is a publication and installation by artist Roman Vasseur that employs a library of books from the vampire genre to create a single large volume publication, bringing together the previously dispersed ‘children’ of the vampire genre and its sub genres to generate this single-edition book.
Using an exhaustive collection of vampire novels collated by the artist in collaboration with the Stanley Picker Gallery, students of the BA Fine Art course at Kingston University and members of the general public, the pages of this amassed library have been reassembled, combined, scanned and transcribed by a data entry service in Bangalore (Flatworld Solutions) to produce the final rolling text. The book traverses every experiment using the genre, from soft pornography to thriller to historical drama. The resulting text reads as a glitch-ridden block of exhausted repeating clichés, narrative devices and archetypes ending with the demand “Make me what you are.”
Designed and produced by Fraser Muggeridge studio, this one-off book will be displayed as an installation in a temporary reading room within the Stanley Picker Gallery Project Studio, which will include a small sculpture made of fired Transylvanian Earth from the Borgo Pass that will preside over readers as they view the publication at one end of a three-meter long reading table.
An artist-proof of Dead Stock will be held at the British Library ISBN 978-1-907684-23-4. An editioned version of the publication can be made to order; price on request.
Roman Vasseur lives and works in London and is currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Fine Art at Kingston University. Previous solo shows include Designs Towards a Meeting Place for Future Events of Universal Truth at Cubitt Gallery, London in January 2013.