Abstract Expressionism's Outsider: Stella Waitzkin and Her Resin Books without Words
New York-based abstract expressionist, Stella Waitzkin (1920-2003) struggled with the idea that after her death collectors and institutions might dismantle her work, conceived as a library of cast-resin books without words, and present them as individual books. As she anticipated, her estate executor dispersed the library to collections throughout the United States, generating a rupture between her works’ two lives: first as a collective library and second as discrete sculptures. However, Waitzkin incised her own sort of deterritorialization the moment she cast her first unreadable “book.” Unlike contemporary artists who incorporated text into their work to emphasize language’s limitations, Waitzkin abandoned words entirely, declaring them lies and thereby promoting the authentic expressive potential of material over language. Her work and the viewer’s encounter with the work, as either library or individual book, operates rhizomally emancipating and condemning the work to change over time and geography. These conflicts between text and book, book and library will complicate my attempts to resolve her library’s two lives, much as her own interests shifted away from the medium of her teachers Hans Hoffman and Willem de Kooning toward the experimental sculpture akin to that of Eva Hesse.