If is beyond obvious to say that to reach the words in a book, it first has to be opened. Well, at least for living, human readers. Even though the shelves I haunt comprise of rows of closed tomes, one of my abilities as a library’s ghost is that I can see within them and […]
From the library to the book; from the book to the word. Let’s start by highlighting the glaring use of light by Natalie Diaz in her collection Postcolonial Love Poem – and in her podcast with Tin House – only to turn to the hidden touch of delight in the repetition of the word thigh.
This week, in spite of clearing my throat, I don’t yet feel like I’ve found my voice. As yesterday’s post testifies, my librarian – old Loosh, Minus, Mr Feddle, whatever you want to call him – is so often in a rush to get these daily missives out there, that he doesn’t represent me or […]
And, no, I’m not primarily thinking of the cast of the Victory of Samothrace in Ohio State University’s Thompson Library (although I’m open to hacking that space in the future!). Instead it is a whole other library (one in which material matters) that prompts me to have my librarian post this today and I’ll let […]
There are innumerous books about libraries as well as books that behave like libraries in their anthologizing ambitions. But just as no man is an island, no library is a book. We all know men who would beg to differ, although that’s what makes men men (their relentless mansplaining in begging to differ!). Take my […]
is how Pamela M. Lee describes Martine Syms’ ten-minute video Notes on Gesture (2015) in her book The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption (no place press, 2019). I am looking at a spread of Syms’ 2020 book Shame Space (Primary Information) comprising a seascape and a room with two empty swivel office […]
Following the thread from yesterday, another exhibition at the Wex at the same time as Gretchen Bender’s in Gallery B, looked back through its archives on the cusp of the 2020 election was Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese’s Political Advertisement X 1952–2020. Here are a couple of trailers: If it wasn’t for the privacy settings, […]
It is still taking me some time to loosen up my (metaphorical) tongue after the silence of the last few weeks. Sure, I know he’s still been posting every day, but he’s not been channeling my voice and so I need get back into the swing of speaking to you through my stenographer/librarian. Yesterday I […]
Ok, enough placeholders. From now on, you will hear from me directly and not mediated via the cut and paste of quotations, images and links. This means that the books that prompt these words – which I dictate to my faithful librarian for you to read – will now be moved into the background. Since […]
Realized in close collaboration with a wide range of artists, academics, writers, students, community activists and interested members of the public, these projects attempt to ‘think outwards’ from a somewhat peripheral ethnographic exhibition, and the histories that have produced it, towards a collective investigation of the connections, resonances, resitances and possible sites of transformation that […]