Better Read than Dead: A Visit to the Martha Rosler Library
BETTER READ THAN DEAD
A VISIT TO THE MARTHA ROSLER LIBRARY
(by Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni, originally published in CLUSTER January 2008)
Parisian book-lovers peeved at the frosty reception and draconian security arrangements of the Bibliothèque nationale de France can, for a limited time, take solace in the somewhat cosier nook provided by the Martha Rosler Library, installed in the Galerie Colbert (Institut national d’histoire de l’art) until Jan 20 as part of a travelling exhibition project. The choice of reading matter may not be quite so vast, but visitors are at least free to finger the spines, delve into and even photocopy pages from any of the library’s 7,600-odd volumes, periodicals and catalogues, many out of print, some quite rare, on subjects ranging from Marxist theory to heraldry, cinema to cookery, Situationism to pattern making.
Rosler’s is no Library of Babel, you are unlikely to get lost in it, though it does predictably contain “The Library of Babel” along with those of Jay Gatsby whose books are, as one of his party guests remarks, “the genuine article” even if the pages remain uncut and unopened, and Walter Benjamin who had read less than a quarter of his books, though curiously not Peter Kein, the hapless sinologist of Canetti’s Auto Da Fé who knew all of his 25,000 volumes by heart and could hold lengthy conversations in his head with their long-deceased authors. According to art theorist Stephen Wright who welcomes visitors to the space, Rosler has read most if not all the books in her library, which over the years has served as both ideas bank and toolbox for her radical mixed-media art interventions: from witty critiques of the commodification of women and anti-war photo-montages to recent investigations into the living conditions of the poorest, most marginalised sectors of society.
The project’s curator, Anton Vidokle of e-flux, explains how the idea for the library initially came from his reaction on visiting the Donald Judd library in Marfa, Texas whose some 10,000 volumes were, according to a clause in the artist’s will, to remain as he had arranged them, undisturbed, on shelves and tables he had himself designed and built. Under the immaculate surface abstraction of their meticulously arrayed covers, many still in their shrinkwrap packaging, some simply embalmed in the stillness of dead time, the books’ contents were slowly crumbling to dust. Vidokle recounted his impressions to Martha Rosler (whether the slippage from Marfa to Martha was part of the game plan he doesn’t say) who also possessed a sizeable library but whose problem was of a somewhat different order – she had quite simply run out of space. So Vidokle proposed borrowing Rosler’s collection to install in e-flux’s Ludlow St. Art Space in New York as a fully functioning reading room. Rosler accepted the proposal and the Martha Rosler Library was born.
The name itself (not Martha Rosler’s library but the Martha Rosler library) gives some indication of the library’s playfully ambiguous status and of the visitor’s uncertain relation to it. While there is the temptation simply to use the space for personal study or relaxation, pretend for a few hours that it really is a library, the notion of it being also an “art project” makes the library equally something we are summoned to survey, interpret or read in some way, an urge which inevitably cuts across its proposed functionality. While the formality of the name might suggest a disinterested bequest, “Martha Rosler” as sign and symptom of a particular order and distribution, not to mention “ownership” of discourse, a particular memeplex, keeps getting in the way of any common (commons) reader’s agenda, just as the constant background “dumbiance” of National Public Radio, which Rosler apparently has on all the time at home, persists as index of the artist’s phantomatic self-presencing. As a result of this, and also because of the deception the installation perpetrates in posing as a more permanent structure, one you imagine returning to again and again, feeling it will continue to exist into the foreseeable future, the Rosler library continues to oscillate, one might even say flicker, imperceptibly between public and private domain, a tremor that makes concentration, whether as reader or viewer, difficult.
You would think these tensions might provide an interesting topic for debate among tarrying wayfarers. Unfortunately, the reading room risks reproducing the same kind of silence and self-enclosure, at least among adult visitors, that one normally finds in a reference library: its potential for renegotiating the meaning and function of the library as “public” space is undermined from the outset by a self-policing that invests the private body politic and which it seems no longer needs to be enforced or even administered. What is surprising is that while an opportunity clearly exists here (as it does to a lesser degree in any library or bookshop) for the public to engage more directly with the space, insinuating messages and letters between the covers, bookmarking pages as a sign of their passage, weaving a clandestine narrative of cryptic traces, few are sufficiently emboldened to put it into practice. Before we can create more open, communitarian spaces, we need more radical, relational bodies.
