CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/9/2019

Artist book lovers, rejoice! 'Slant Step Book' facsimile is a new release this week!

“I first saw the Slant Step in Bruce Nauman’s studio on the University of California, Davis campus, in 1965,” Phil Weidman wrote in his 1969 artist’s book Slant Step Book, a 36-page booklet documenting this mysterious, homely riser’s trajectory from artist to artist, studio to studio, and into mythology. “Didn’t know what it was. Nauman wasn’t there, so I asked Pete Gadberry, who shared the studio, about it. He said it was just a slanted step. I asked him what it was for. He didn’t know. I was mystified. Couldn’t get it out of my head.” Neither could anybody else, and so generations of slant-step-inspired artworks, films and poems have been created, inspired by the original—which was, in fact, gifted from a salvage shop to Nauman by the artist William T. Wiley. Ray Johnson’s “Duck Slant Step Pets” (1969) is one such work, reproduced from the second volume in this new edition, which pairs a facsimile of Weidman’s book with a selection of artworks that this mysterious object inspired.