Graham Wiebe
29 Ability Plaza, Arbutus Street
London, United Kingdom
28 June - 13 September, 2025
Over the last three years Graham Wiebe has been amassing a collection of self-help books, usually bought from secondhand stores in Winnipeg, Canada. In his studio, Wiebe slices the books into sections that isolate words and phrases from the books’ titles on their front covers. The words, phrases, and cover art sections are organised and over months are rearranged by the artist to create new spliced books, hybridising their titles.
The self-help book has general traits that allow this kind of gesture to work endlessly. Books in the self-help genre have a nearly universal size and format in order for the book to be easily packed and travelled with. Most of their titles start with “How to…” and employ similar types of language to communicate their claims. Each book differs in designed attempts to stand out, but generate a general typographic and visual aesthetic that is dredged out by Wiebe’s incessant recombinations.
The spliced books manifest as bizarre but feasible titles and designs that technically function. They operate through the culmination of the confrontation of the individual with the intellectual and its realisation, typically via knowledge marketed as new or alternative truths to the masses. The interchanges cut the attempt to generate ideology from the inside out, creating objects that present messages that still play by the same rules and capable of the same effects as their Frankensteined source material.
...
“The motif of necessity stands at the very center of the work of this French school, who named themselves idéologues—literally researchers into ideas. The word “ideology” arises from one of greatest exponents, Destutt de Tracy. He drew from empirical philosophy, which dissects the human intellect in order to lay bare the mechanism of knowledge, in order to reduce questions of truth and bindingness to this mechanism. Yet his aim was not epistemological, and nor was it formal. He did not want to seek out the conditions for which judgments of the mind were valid, but instead sought to observe those intellectual phenomena that constitute the content of consciousness itself, and to describe them like some natural object, a mineral or a plant. In a provocative formulation, he once called ideology an element of zoology. Following Condillac’s tangibly materialistic sensualism, he wanted to trace all ideas back to their origins in the senses. He was no longer satisfied with refuting false consciousness and indicting whatever cause it lent itself to. Instead, he thought that each consciousness, regardless of whether it was false or correct, should be brought before the laws that govern it. From there it would only be one step to comprehend the social necessity of all contents of consciousness in general. The idéologues shared the adoption of a mathematical or natural-scientific orientation with the older tradition, just as they do with the most recent positivism. Destutt de Tracy also placed development and training in linguistic expression in the foreground; indeed, he wanted to connect the verification of primary data with a mathematized grammar and language, in which each idea would map directly to a sign, in just way that Leibniz and earlier rationalism famously intended. However, all of this would now be rendered applicable for a practical political purpose. Through confrontations with what was given to the senses, Destutt de Tracy still hoped to prevent the establishment of false, abstract principles, as these damage not only communication between people but also the construction of society and the state. He anticipated that his science of ideas—ideology—would be able to demonstrate the same measure of certainty as physics or mathematics. The strict methodology of science should prepare to put an end, once and for all, to the arbitrariness and caprice of opinions, which had been the scourge of philosophy since Plato. False consciousness, which would later be called ideology, would finally dissolve when confronted by the scientific method. At the same time, though, he allotted a primacy to science and to the intellect. The school of the idéologues, whose thought drank not only from materialist but also from idealist sources, faithfully held to the belief, despite all empiricism, that consciousness determines existence. Destutt de Tracy considered this highest science to be a human one, which would provide the basis for the entirety of political and social life. Comte’s notion of the ruling role of sociology within the sciences, and ultimately in real social life, is therefore already virtually contained in the work of the idéologues.”
- Theodore Adorno, Contribution to the Theory of Ideology
29 Ability Plaza, Arbutus Street
London, United Kingdom
28 June - 13 September, 2025
Over the last three years Graham Wiebe has been amassing a collection of self-help books, usually bought from secondhand stores in Winnipeg, Canada. In his studio, Wiebe slices the books into sections that isolate words and phrases from the books’ titles on their front covers. The words, phrases, and cover art sections are organised and over months are rearranged by the artist to create new spliced books, hybridising their titles.
The self-help book has general traits that allow this kind of gesture to work endlessly. Books in the self-help genre have a nearly universal size and format in order for the book to be easily packed and travelled with. Most of their titles start with “How to…” and employ similar types of language to communicate their claims. Each book differs in designed attempts to stand out, but generate a general typographic and visual aesthetic that is dredged out by Wiebe’s incessant recombinations.
The spliced books manifest as bizarre but feasible titles and designs that technically function. They operate through the culmination of the confrontation of the individual with the intellectual and its realisation, typically via knowledge marketed as new or alternative truths to the masses. The interchanges cut the attempt to generate ideology from the inside out, creating objects that present messages that still play by the same rules and capable of the same effects as their Frankensteined source material.
...
“The motif of necessity stands at the very center of the work of this French school, who named themselves idéologues—literally researchers into ideas. The word “ideology” arises from one of greatest exponents, Destutt de Tracy. He drew from empirical philosophy, which dissects the human intellect in order to lay bare the mechanism of knowledge, in order to reduce questions of truth and bindingness to this mechanism. Yet his aim was not epistemological, and nor was it formal. He did not want to seek out the conditions for which judgments of the mind were valid, but instead sought to observe those intellectual phenomena that constitute the content of consciousness itself, and to describe them like some natural object, a mineral or a plant. In a provocative formulation, he once called ideology an element of zoology. Following Condillac’s tangibly materialistic sensualism, he wanted to trace all ideas back to their origins in the senses. He was no longer satisfied with refuting false consciousness and indicting whatever cause it lent itself to. Instead, he thought that each consciousness, regardless of whether it was false or correct, should be brought before the laws that govern it. From there it would only be one step to comprehend the social necessity of all contents of consciousness in general. The idéologues shared the adoption of a mathematical or natural-scientific orientation with the older tradition, just as they do with the most recent positivism. Destutt de Tracy also placed development and training in linguistic expression in the foreground; indeed, he wanted to connect the verification of primary data with a mathematized grammar and language, in which each idea would map directly to a sign, in just way that Leibniz and earlier rationalism famously intended. However, all of this would now be rendered applicable for a practical political purpose. Through confrontations with what was given to the senses, Destutt de Tracy still hoped to prevent the establishment of false, abstract principles, as these damage not only communication between people but also the construction of society and the state. He anticipated that his science of ideas—ideology—would be able to demonstrate the same measure of certainty as physics or mathematics. The strict methodology of science should prepare to put an end, once and for all, to the arbitrariness and caprice of opinions, which had been the scourge of philosophy since Plato. False consciousness, which would later be called ideology, would finally dissolve when confronted by the scientific method. At the same time, though, he allotted a primacy to science and to the intellect. The school of the idéologues, whose thought drank not only from materialist but also from idealist sources, faithfully held to the belief, despite all empiricism, that consciousness determines existence. Destutt de Tracy considered this highest science to be a human one, which would provide the basis for the entirety of political and social life. Comte’s notion of the ruling role of sociology within the sciences, and ultimately in real social life, is therefore already virtually contained in the work of the idéologues.”
- Theodore Adorno, Contribution to the Theory of Ideology
HOW TO see it & Believe It AND STILL LOVE WHAT ISN’T GOOD, 2025
Spliced self-help books
28 x 11 cm
HOW TO SHIFT THE VISIONS OF Death TO A POSITIVE TREATMENT WITHIN THE BODY FOR YOUR
PERSONAL Life After LOVE WITHOUT THE STRESS OF PSYCHIC WARFARE, 2024
Spliced self-help books
66 x 11 cm
How to be an EFFECTIVE NOBODY IN TIMES OF COMPLETE SPIRITUAL DISASTER WITH FAITH in THE
ART OF SELF-HYPNOSIS FOR YOUR PERSONAL RETURN TO POWER!, 2025
Spliced self-help books
44 x 11 cm
HOW TO REDUCE SELFISHNESS and THE WORRY OF CHANGE AFTER Never GETTING TO BE LOVED
BEYOND THE POWER OF YOUR Peak SUPER-NATURAL SUCCESS AND NO-NONSENSE CONFIDENCE,
2025
Spliced self-help books
59.5 x 10.5 cm
HOW TO RAISE QUESTIONS IN SEARCH OF THE ANSWERS TO SAY LESS AND CONTROL YOUR STRESS,
2025
Spliced self-help books
31 x 10.5 cm
How to Develop EARTHLY CONFIDENCE OVER THE REALITY OF BEING A PRISONER Of PURPOSE TO
KEEP FEEDING THE VOICES OF THE HUNGRY HEART IN THE SHADOW OF SPIRITUAL JUDGMENT,
2024
Spliced self-help books
57.5 x 11 cm
How to NEVER HAPPEN AND succeed in DYING OUT, 2025
Spliced self-help books
24.5 x 10.5 cm
HOW TO BUY BACK THE TIME YOU’VE LOST FROM THE HOPE OF SELF-HELP AND HELP YOUR SELF
MAKE A LIVING, 2025
Spliced self-help books
41.5 x 10.5 cm
HOW TO OPEN UP TO THE ANGELS ABOUT YOUR FEAR For Each FUTURE AND YOUR PLAN FOR THE
PRESENT, 2025
Spliced self-help books
32 x 11 cm
How to Stop CHANNELING ATTACKS On THE HEART THROUGH FASTING: NUTRITIONAL INTIMACY AND
THE END OF THE HIGHER SELF, 2025
Spliced self-help books
39.5 x 11 cm
HOW TO Influence THE ULTRA CONTROLLING POWER OF YOUR NEGATIVE Thoughts From the PRESSURE
of Preparing for A Better LIFE WHEN YOU DARE TO Understand THE LAST SECRET ABILITIES OF THE
MIND AND DISCIPLINE YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS, 2024
Spliced self-help books
66 x 10.5 cm
HOW TO Work with YOUR Fear of The WORLD TO UNLOCK CREATIVE MATURITY AND MANIFEST THE
COURAGE FOR JOY AFTER YEARS OF Longing to Be ENOUGH, 2025
Spliced self-help books
51.5 x 11 cm
HOW TO PREPARE YOUR HEART FOR the HATE OF SELF-IMAGE and THE COMPULSIVE SUFFERING OF
SELF-LOVE, 2025
Spliced self-help books
46 x 10.5 cm