“The mystery of what’s supposed to be inside of there intrigued me,” Gibbons said. “I always thought it would be a good idea to look.”
Gibbons teamed up with Maria Kokkori, associate scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago, to finally turn the page on this mystery. Kokkori uses Concrete Book in her classroom, teaching materials science as it relates to art. For her, Vostell’s work represents a turning point in the use of concrete to create art, instead of to construct buildings and bridges.
“Concrete is a material you would see in construction, but not in the art world in the ‘70s,” Kokkori said. “Construction and art are often considered different fields and disciplines, but Vostell was a pioneer of new technologies to use concrete as an artistic material.”
The pair first tried to peer inside the 20-pound, two-inch-thick chunk of concrete using ultrasound and X-ray machines at the University of Chicago, but were only able to detect metal wires inside, not the book. The wires may hold the book between them, or may be there to provide reinforcement of the concrete.
They knew they’d need a more powerful X-ray beam to truly crack the case, so they turned to the Advanced Photon Source located at Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory that is affiliated with UChicago.
The Advanced Photon Source generates some of the brightest X-ray light in the world, at energies that allow it to penetrate thicker objects. At beamline 6-BM, they used a technique called X-ray diffraction to search for signs of paper and vellum inside the concrete.
“First we scanned a different copy of the book itself, the book that is meant to be inside the concrete,” said Argonne beamline scientist John Okasinski. “This gave us a signature to look for in the object itself. Although the sample is different, the techniques we are using are the same we would use for materials science experiments.”
