art/library

A distinctive, if not distinct, subset of the book arts are those artists inspired directly by libraries. Both the mechanics of library work and its intellectual pretensions are invoked.

One fundamental text in this context is Jorge Luis Borges' nightmarish vision of The Library of Babel (which inspired an artwork at the libraries of the Courtauld Institute). Another is Richard Brautigan's novel 'The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966'. Brautigan invented a charming institution which provides a repository for any book, never turning away its donors' unpublished work. This was realised in Burlington, Vermont, in the 1990s: Jessamyn West describes her visit.

Caroline Jupp's Library of Unpublished Books is a similar, peripatetic collection based in London. Meanwhile, in cardigan and delectable spectacles, Annabel Other is Head Librarian of the Bristol Art Library. This rather special cabinet of artists' books is lovingly housed with the accoutrements of the public lending library: Dewey numbers, card catalogue, library stamp and membership tickets.

David Bunn is an American artist who acquired a redundant card catalogue and set about giving it new uses: poems created from the arbitrary juxtaposition of book titles, and the decoration of the lifts in the Los Angeles Public Library with walls of cards. Reinterpreted catalogue cards at the San Francisco Public Library have been photographed by the ubiquitous Jessamyn West. Even pop funsters Radiohead used distorted library-book packaging for a limited edition of their scary album Amnesiac.

Some other projects include: Babel: a data browser by Simon Biggs which takes a subjective classification of websites with the Dewey decimal system transformed into points of light; Book Works' commission Library Relocations, four disparate installations in libraries across Britain; and Ken Thompson's site The Peter Greenaway Public Library Project, on the construction of a postmodern library in homage to the filmmaker.

owen@massey.net