Class Description

Cataloged Responses: Archives and Libraries as Laboratories

Librarians and archivists manage and mediate information, and thus will furnish access to your production in the future, whether you are self-conscious of it or not: your books, videos, letters, photographs, MP3s, etc. All of the information and data which will ultimately amount to knowledge of and about you is analyzed and mapped by these individuals according to time-tested professional standards.

Some artists are fascinated with this, and/or stand it on its head – registering an ISBN number for a stone, performing traceable library acts, creating unbound signatures (book sections) in lieu of a finished book for the user to finish, for example. The conversations that art librarians are having with artists alight on issues like the difference between the videos on their websites and the editioned ones that gallery prices place out of reach of a research and reference context.

Ultimately, artists must wrestle with many of the same issues as librarians – ideas of distribution, audience access and preservation.

This will be a conversation about how the art and science of organization and access provide a well-spring of possibilities for the artist to think in new ways about the library catalog and an opportunity engage meaningfully with it.

The objective of the class is to expand the artists-librarian dialog and commemorate the effort by creating a work that responds to/engages with an online public access catalog [OPAC].

Introduction

Building a library is a creative act.

Private libraries are unique and ever-changing creations, as well as biographies of their hosts' knowledge and curiosity, accomplishments and aspirations.

Town & Country

Luc Sante

University of Washington i-School does Gaga Librarian video

Wings of Desire Library Scene

Recent development at Olin Library - Cornell University

Toute le Memoire du Monde [Alain Renais, 1956]

Reservoir

Because Librarians and Archivists need to create access to knowledge/content/context, they have a surprising armory of resources at their fingertips. Some would bore you, but some are things that would make an artist much richer - for free.

NYPL Electronic Resources [the redesign of the NYPL site is my horror of the new year, but you can use this link to reach their resources available outside the building.

Within this set of over 80 databases, you will have access to Worldcat, Ulrich's Periodicals, Biography database, etc.

Getty Vocabularies

Union List of Artist Names [ULAN]

Art & Architecture Thesaurus [AAT]

There is a richer trove of references and links on my blog called Researching a Photo Project.

Librarian Think

I think about Libraries pretty much all the time, somehow.

One of the Gods in my cult is Ranganathan.

I am going to lift the hood and show you some of the working parts of a library in hopes of signing up more recruits in my cult.

Here is a David Senior text on Ranganathan that puts it all so well.

Then there is Charles A. Cutter, Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue, which you can read in the digital library of University North Texas. Cutter's formula for alphabetizing names is still employed widely. The alpha-numerical designations in our library are "Cutter numbers."

What used to be a specialization is way more part of the culture nowadays. I regularly discuss cataloging with bankers and art patrons, to my astonishment. In spite of my passion, I never have adequate time to work on my own catalog.

A juicy read on everything beautiful is Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.

Equally evocative, but different, is Audrey Niffenegger's "The Night Bookmobile," about the relationship between every library and its patron[s]:

Graphic version from The Guardian

Christina Pickles read it on Selected Shorts

Francis Ford Coppola's literary magazine All-Story published it

The ten best songs about libraries and librarians.

Bibliography:

Manguel, Alberto. The Library at Night. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, c2006.

Shelf Reading

The most recent ICP Library "shelf reading" was in December 2009. The open stacks are a place of discovery, but also a fragile ecosystem that tends towards chaos.

The dedication to maintaining an open stack library [at any cost] is part of what makes ICP distinctive. Serendipity is fostered and valued as a great source for creativity.

The Artist in the Library

The artist in the library

A while back Dexter Sinister created a work for the local chapter of the Art Librarians Society [ARLIS/NY] to give as a premium for a conference on Contemporary Artist Books we organized.

Dexter Sinister's explanation

The designer's explanation

Also at the Art Book Fair 2010 was Filip AAAARG Library.

Likewise,

Bert Teunissen's book Domestic Landscapes: An Introduction Manual can be sequenced by the beholder.

Alfredo Jaar's Marx Lounge

Joachim Schmid's weird world of books.

Nina Katchadourian

Svetlana Kopystiansky

Sexy Librarian ny Julia Weist

Interstitial Library

Clegg & Guttman

Sorted Books

Martha Rosler's Library

Ellie Ga

Carlos Motta

Learn to Read Art

Pradeep Dalal

Cabinetlandia

Bruce High Quality Foundation University Library

Googling Ourselves

Matej Kren

Kathy Slade - 52 Transactions

John Stezacker re-thinks Plicka Praha

1 Traditional Methodology for Processing Information

Does this qualify?

Book sculptors

Bibliography:

The Archive [Documents of Contemporary Art]. Edited by Charles Merewether. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, c2006.

Archive Fever-Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. Edited by Okwui Enwezor. Gottingen: Steidl/International Center of Photogaphy, c2008.

Baum, Kristin Alana. “The Cartalog Project.” Umbrella, 29: no. 2 (1 Jun, 2006).

Baum, Kristin. “The Story in the Cards: Intimacy, Empathy and Reader Response.” The Bonefolder: an e-journal for the bookbinder and book artist, Vol. 3, no. 1 (Fall 2006). [About CARTalog]

Bodman, Sarah. “Bookmarks: Infiltrating the Library System.” ArtBook, v. 12, no. 1 (Feb 2005), pp. 54-55.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, c2002, 2007.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, c2009.

Breynard, Shane. “Archives and the Everyday.” Art/Text, no. 60 (Feb-Apr, 1998), pp. 83-84.

Buchhart, Dieter. “Clegg & Guttmann: Sha’at nez oder die verschobene Bibliothek: Sigmund Freud-Museum, Wien.” Kunstforum International, no. 170 (May-Jun 2004), pp. 330-331.

Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art. Edited by Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen. New York: Prestel, c1998.

Eye on Europe: Prints, Books and Multiples 1960 to Now. Edited by Deborah Wye and Wendy Weitman. New York: Museum of Modern Art, c2006.

Jana, Reena. “Cover Story: An artist painstakingly re-creates books from his own library.” Art on Paper, vol. 10, no.3 (Jan/Feb 2006), pp. 33-34.

“Joyce Cutler-Shaw at Four Libraries.” Artweek, vol. 34, no. 10 (Dec 2003/Jan 2004).

Linfield, Susie. “Every Photo an Archive.” The Nation, May 5, 2008, pp. 30-33. [Review of Archive Fever]

McDonough, Tom. “The Anarchive.” Art in America, May, 2008, pp. 77-79.

Mendelsohn, Adam E. “Do You Like Stuff? Swiss Institute New York.” Art Monthly, no. 290 (Oct 2005), pp. 34-35.

Murray, Soraya. “Digital Aesthetics: Two Handbooks.” Art Journal, Vol. 63, no. 3 (Fall 2009), pp. 112-115.

Osthoff, Simone. “Elsewhere in Contemporary Art: Topologies of Artists’ Works, Writings and Archives.” Art Journal, Winter 2006. [About Paulo Brucksy’s mail art archive installation]

Public Information : Desire, Disaster, Document. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, c1994.

Scheyerer, Nicole. “Clegg & Guttman.” Frieze online, 9/13/05.

Schmetterling, Astrid. “Archival Obsessions: Arnold Dreyblatt’s Memory Work.” Art Journal, Winter 2007. [About a 2000 installation called “Wunderblock”]

“Strunk & White the Opera.” Artforum International, vol. 12, no. 4 (Dec 2005/Jan 2006 supplement), p. 5.

Tumlir, Jan. “Bureaucratic Poetry.” Art/Text, no. 63 (Nov 98 – Jan 99), pp. 34-7. [About David Bunn’s catalog card project.]

Tuzunoglu, Azra. "Open Library: Istanbul." Art Papers, vol. 31, no. 5 (Sept/Oct 2007), pp. 62-63.

Wang, Zhe. “The Promise of Database Cinema: A Review of Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky’s ‘Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database.’” Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 10, no. 2/3 (2009), pp 289-94.

Databases Aesthetics

My friend Hans Witschi is an amazing artist who writes code as beautifully as he paints.

His work has been painstakingly documented in an impressive image database he has been constructing, and I have asked him to give you a behind-the-scenes tour of it.

Bibliography:

Database Aesthetics

Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Edited by Victoria Vesna. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, c2007.

Fraser, Gray. “The National Library and Archives of Canada’s Exclusionary Policies in Regards to their Definition of Artists’ Books.” Umbrella, 30: no2 (1 Jun, 2007).

Hilderbrand, Lucas. Inherent Vice. Duke NC: Duke University Press, c2009.

New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art. Edited by Christiane Paul. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, c2008.

How it is Done

I want to unpack libraries for you a little bit, not to make any converts, but to give you some valuable perspective about how it is done.

Cataloging

The guides to cataloging various items according to standard might give you a sense of how complex it is to create uniform and authoritative access to informational - and inspirational - items.

Video recordings

Serials

Electronic Resources

MARC21

Library of Congress Subject Authorities

Subjects:

Library of Congress Classification Schedules

Genre Form Subject Headings for Motion Pictures

Beautiful online catalogs:

Corsair

Arcade

Guggenheim

Standards:

NISO

Copyright and the Eye of the Beholder

From Lip by Tracey Moffatt [1999]

Both librarians and artists struggle with the issue of intellectual property. Art librarianship demands that there be a productive and evolving dialog between "makers and keepers," if you will.

For example, our curators keep the video works by artists in the collection, galleries sell them as pricey editioned works of art, and I would like the library to be the access point to these works, but in order to do so, I must rely upon relationships with artists and persuading gallerists to allow me to secure copies for a reasonable sum of money.

Meanwhile, there is a lot of content being developed for the web that we plan to just start cataloging, since we do have open access. In a way, I want to advocate that kind of production by making intellectual trails to it, although, having fallen down more than one "YouTube holes" in my day, I embrace the serendipity of discovery already possible in their interactive world.

Stepping back a few more feet, the overall conversation going on is shared by more than artists and librarians - the media, even "the Google" are grappling with the idea of balancing content with delivery, and the results are indifferent and still somewhat experimental [I hope].

Some readings on the topic:

Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia

A Review of Inherent Vice by Lucas Hilderbrand

Artist Rights in the Digital Universe

Status of Artists in Europe

Pete Turner v. Robert Rauschenberg

Creative Commons

A video from TED:

Larry Lessig

Images online and Educational Use

Artstor

Clay Shirkey, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations is referenced in an article in the March Vanity Fair by Michael Wolff, "Ringside at the Web Fight."

"At its heart, the digital-behavior theory is that the old media business imposed unnatural behavior on its users - not least of all a strict divide between creators and audience."

There are natural concerns that all of these enthusiastic amateurs are creating such a huge mountain of crap, but I believe that artists and librarians are the remedy to that. Both create access to excellent content, when they succeed.

By the way, I love Shirky. I recommend his writing.

Here is a memorable TED Talk he did.

Movie clips and copyright.

Some Libraries You Know and Others You Don't

Schwartzman Building of the NYPL
Collection description

Art Students League Library

New York Society Library

What you should know is New York is host to a tremendous number of curating librarians!

Arezoo Moseni, Art Librarian, New York Public Library Mid-Manhattan Library

Suzanna Simor, Director, Queens Art Center at Queens College Library

Deirdre Lawrence, Director of Library and Archives, Brooklyn Museum of Art

David Senior, Bibliographer at Museum of Modern Art

Brooklyn Public Library

In fact, there are likely to be an infinite number of venues...yours for the asking.

Access to Free Scholarly Content Online

There are a couple of resources where you can find free journals to access:

Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek EZB

Database of Open Access Journals

I feel the earth move under my feet...

The 1998 collapse of the landmark J.L. Hudson department store in Detroit. Credit: Jack Gruber / Associated Press

Why am I so in love with being a librarian to a photography institution?

Is it the glamour, money, love?

Maybe.

Mostly, we share so many qualities. Chief among them is the shifting technological terrain and forces both artists who work in a photographic medium and librarians to be reeaaaalllly flexible and open to change.

News from the Library of Congress

Does any of this sound familiar?

Some Fun

A bizarre array of design options.

Ubuweb

Wolf Loves Pork