Library

In this essay, Anja Bock discusses the paradigm shift that libraries have undergone in the last few decades and artists’ position within them. By looking at the work of Cliff Eyland, Julia Weist, Elisa Lee and Adam Hinshaw, as well as Hal Ingberg, Bock shows how the library is both a rigid institution and a place of creative potential. She questions the idealistic rhetoric of democracy that envelops libraries, as well as the possibility of intervening in library procedures in more than a symbolic way.

The contemporary public library is a proactive performative space that liberates creative energies to challenge warped social and political dynamics. Yet the collective identity of the library still reflects an image of book repositories. The collections, which are less and less browsed, potentially become the material for creative stimulation. As library programming is rooted in its socio-political context, the ambiguity and contradictions within post-soviet Hungary present interesting experiments. Two Budapest-based exhibitions, Concrete and Dead Library, reflect on the socialist (written) heritage while encouraging visitors to think critically about their discarded history, and especially their present.

Although their work diverges on many points, artists Christine Hill and Shooshie Sulaiman both embrace the library as a social space that encourages engagement from the spectator including roaming, handling, reading, information gathering, social exchange and conversation. Using carefully crafted handmade books, as well as a range of appropriated books, Hill and Sulaiman tap into an everyday object that is both familiar in its form and at home in multiple social contexts, making it ideal for individual and collective consumption.

In 2014, Berlin-based Scottish visual artist, Katie Paterson, in collaboration with Bjorvika Utvikling, and the city of Oslo, began an art project called Future Library – Framtidsbiblioteket. Future Library is an art project intended to span over one hundred years. A forest with one thousand trees has been planted in Nordmarka, Norway, in order to supply the paper to print an anthology of books that will be read in one hundred years’ time. While at first glance Paterson’s art project is a reflection of what the library as an institution and the transfer of knowledge in general might look like in a hundred years, it is also an alternative way of reflecting on what the library is representative of and what role it plays in contemporary society.

The Québecois artist Simon Bertrand has retranscribed major works in the history of literature, among them a selection of foundational texts such as the Bible, Homer’s Odyssey, and Plato’s Symposium. To ground his process, Bertrand is particularly inspired by Truth or Death: The Quest for Immortality in the Western Narrative Tradition, by Thierry Hentsch, in which the philosopher looks at foundational texts from a different angle. Following Hentsch’s path, Bertrand proposes new writing of the great narratives.