Revisions and Queries [brings] to mind text pieces by such artists as Lawrence Weiner and Robert Barry, but Gute’s work has a humor and visual energy unmatched by anyone else working in that vein.
—Kenneth Baker (ARTnews, March 07)

For many years, Charles Gute has worked with text as a primary material both as a conceptual artist and as a freelance editor of art books. These separate activities overlapped when—in the process of recovering proofreading data from a crashed hard drive—Gute began taking corrected publisher’s proofs and stripping out all content except for his own revisions, queries and proofreader’s notations. Reframed as line drawings, these abstract constellations of marks resonate with their original subject matter in unpredictable ways. But as they consist solely of his own coded, precise markings, the pieces can also be read as a kind of ‘self-portraiture,’ a personal record of hundreds of hours of Gute’s work as an artist engaged with the written word on a daily basis. Revisions and Queries is an art book about art books; playfully engaging the textual legacy of artists like Joseph Kosuth and Allen Ruppersberg, it offers an amusing glimpse behind the scenes of both the art world and art book publishing.