The Artist’s Library
Books for creation and illustration of history
There were twelve banker’s boxes of books stacked in the front of a storage unit. She told me again and again that she was glad I was taking them, but she didn’t sound elated. I had a Zipcar, paid by the hour, and was throwing the boxes in the hatch as fast as I could, to make it back to my apartment in the Lower East Side. After the last one was jammed in and I closed the trunk, I turned to her and she reiterated the few details I’d given her. So you’re an artist? Yes, I confirmed. What kind of art do you make? I’m working in sound and video. Sam was a filmmaker. There are some books in there that he read to learn how to make films…I let her drift off, watching her eyes graze over the boxes that didn’t fit in the trunk and sat in the passenger side seat. The gold light deepened the wrinkles on her face, and suddenly the necessity of mandatory chit chat seemed to wilt. I thanked her and got in the car and drove the books down the FDR, delighted to estimate my timely return but shortly afterward realizing that twelve boxes of books were going to become the dominant feature in my 12 x 12 foot room.
I cobbled together every piece of wood or hard structure I had and made a bookshelf that reached from the floor to the ceiling. It looked more like a jigsaw puzzle than a library. Openings in the pattern of book spines would accommodate an object that had no other place in my room. A projector, a sculpture, a bike helmet.
The procedure of flipping junk was pretty simple. Search Craigslist for something in the free listing, compare it to the price on eBay in the Sold listings. Contact the person, pick it up, list it, pack it, ship it. Ideally the thing would be small, located in Manhattan, esoteric. In the most-densely populated chunk of rock in the world, with little space even for the affluent, there was no end to this wave of discarded goods.
Books were another story. As I went through each of the boxes, I’d find the ISBN and add it to my inventory on Amazon. I’d list it for a dollar less than the prevailing price and the copies were soon flying off my little jigsaw puzzle bookshelf. As I packed the book to ship, I’d look up the title and author, just to see what I was losing, and search for the buyer, to see who was interested. I’d write a little note saying “thanks.”
For about three years I’d sell at least one book a month. It wasn’t enough to pay the bills, but it regularly paid for drinks. The real benefit, or curiosity, was to learn of these art historians–Gombrich, Hebert Read, Erwin Panofsky, Susan Langer–names that were completely absent in my undergraduate and graduate studies.
I found the artist’s name inside one of the covers: Sam Feinstein. An abstract expressionist painter turned filmmaker. His books annotated a venture away from specific topics of painting and drawing to more general artistic movements to the mystical and ancient and finally, to filmmaking. Of course I read some of the books, but few in their entirety. The authors were canonical, but topically it was like another language. Everything was aesthetics and illusions. Their hypotheses started and ended with universal maxims. Instead of cultural theory they talked about visual culture. Marxism, feminism, science, politics or sociology more generally weren’t even alluded to. Where they did theorize on something I’d read, for example modernism, the way they wrote about it in a different way and a different voice. For them, modernism was simultaneously triumphant and spooky. They were living in modernity, saw it formalize, perhaps even supported it, voted for it, integrated it into their homes. In my graduate classes in San Francisco, during the subprime-lending crisis, at best we talked about modernism like jurists in recess. At worst we made it up like a mortician preparing a cadaver.
Each book that I packed and shipped was a facial feature of a fading silhouette, a historical discourse once animated and nearly recognizable but decidedly idle from today’s concerns. I traced the steady abandonment of these ideas. The Freudian turn. It wasn’t just aborting these authors, but replacing each of the keystones with a new speculation.
I moved two apartments in ten years, each time bringing the diminishing library with me, each time less of Sam and more of titles of my own interest. Moving is usually a wonderful opportunity to cull the junk you don’t want or need, but this artist’s library doesn’t exist on the spectrum of desires or necessities. It’s a physical manifestation of intellectual history.
As I’ve left the world of junk-flipping, I think about the few gems that I intend on keeping: a catalog of Yves Klein’s exhibition at the Jewish Museum, or a pocket book of William Blake. The remaining titles deviate from the plastic arts. Mostly dated filmmaking books, which talk at length of an equally dead technology, celluloid.
Libraries force us to become librarians. We have to ask ourselves what order to endow, what patterns we find and accentuate, what threads to expose to a hypothetical borrower. Some systems of arrangement are better than others; some systems uncover what couldn’t be found within any of the pages. Systems of arrangement show another intellectual history, the shift from where ideas are sourced. Decreasingly do we search through the thematic stacks and increasingly we search by results delivered by algorithm. The technological shift supports and accelerates how we keep books around. Once stows of information are now objects of decoration.
I was delighted when I found a text on the Maya. I was preparing a trip to Belize to visit these tourist attractions cum archeological sites. Feinstein’s texts on ancient civilizations meditate on the unknown and cultivate a healthy level of skepticism necessary to nurture A&E episodes of Ancient Aliens. There’s an evident urge to believe in something greater. That well describes Abstract Expressionism. My interest in the Maya is more about the formation of Mayanists, the archeologists, ethnographers and epigraphers who have crafted this obsessive sub-topic. What was the purpose of their adventures? Who benefited from their excursions? Beyond deciphering the eroding stelae, what value do they offer today? Whose authority do their publications legitimize?
Like the Maya ruins, the artist’s library tells us about the world of the past. At the turn of the 20th century the temples had been overgrown by the jungle, the stones were piles of rubble. The trees were cut back and burned. We can see the photos of F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, who blew up these mounds, in search of treasure. The buildings were as illegible before as the wreckage after dynamiting. By the turn of our millennium, many temples had been reconstructed. We can see how it looked at the end of the Classic period, 900 CE. The murals at Bonampak and San Bartolo illustrate the Maya rituals. Hieroglyphs of blood-letting to recreate historical events of divine kings buried in the descending levels of the temples, or decapitation of opposing kings. The calendar supported the events to happen again and again. We see their gods. And like the artist’s library, we’re left to wonder if these ideas are locked away in a material culture, abandoned because the truth went elsewhere, and someone decided to stop paying the rent on a storage unit.
