"If a form is repeated enough times, it could signify a monument, a mythology, or both–simultaneously–so Marcel Duchamp writes in a journal entry. Over and over and over again, the subject is the one who writes themself into the place of subjecthood; as Roland Barthes puts it, “the I is no more than the [one] who says I.” An ur-text with no direct meaning at all, the self-titled, self-published book Joseph Cohen emerges from a Vandercook printing press that Cohen cranks, and by turn, in the turn of the printing cylinder, a body is manufactured into an edition of ten books. The “I” is let loose into a hall of mirrors where language moves from the tongue to the page to the archive. A myth takes a hold of the sign and works the signifier, Joseph Cohen, until it can work (or signify) no more."

-Joseph Cohen
6/13/2022