Coffee House Press: In the Stacks Presents Valeria Luiselli

A rather beautiful Tumblr has appeared thanks to Coffee House Press, who has, "[a]s part of its continuing effort to put books into action...launched an initiative to place writers and readers in residencies at various area institutional and community libraries." Right now, they have writer and essayist Valeria Luiselli in residency at The Reed Foundation Poetry Library at Poets House. Coffee House Press: In the Stacks features Polaroids taken by Luiselli, and an interview with Shannon Mattern of the School of Media Studies at The New School about the Poets House collection (an interview with Poets House Librarian Gina Scalise is there as well!). Luiselli and Mattern will be giving a public presentation tonight at 7:00 PM. In the meantime, Mattern had a lot of interesting things to say about libraries and varying artistry engaged therein:

What are some of your favorite examples of ways in which artists have collaborated with libraries, either as source or subject?

I think the Library as Incubator project has tons of great examples. I love the Reanimation Library, whose collection of misfit books has inspired tons of writers and artists. I wrote about a few other “little library as art project” projects in an article from a few years ago. There are lots of archive- and library-minded artists; my favorites include Ann Hamilton, Mark Dion, Thomas Hirschhorn, Erica Baum, Emily Jacir. We explore a lot of these examples in my graduate “Archives, Libraries + Databases” course. This year, the students have the option of creating work for a spring exhibition that I’m helping to organize, so, in our class on October 28 we’re looking at a whole bunch of precedents for library- and archive-themed exhibitions — from the “Deep Storage” show at PS1 in Queens in 1998, to the “As We May Think” exhibition (an obvious homage to Vannevar Bush) at Kunsthal Aarhus last year.

I’d like to highlight two additional projects:

In 2011, I was lucky to see the experimental theatre troupe Elevator Repair Service (in partnership with statistician Mark Hansen and artist Ben Rubin) perform their Shuffle in the periodicals room of the New York Public Library. The script was generated algorithmically, in real-time, by pulling from the scripts of three previous ERS productions — Gatz, The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928), and The Select (The Sun Also Rises) – and the literary texts that inspired them. The performers accessed the ever-evolving script via iPhones tucked into print copies of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway’s books. All the while, the group, dressed in their librarians’ best, shuffled throughout the periodicals room, champagne flutes in hand. The pace and placement of their actions seemed to vary in relation to the speed of the script: small groups might congregate and chat leisurely at the circulation desk, while a colleague would bolt from one end of the room to the other, in response to some apparent reference emergency. Others performed the signature actions of librarians: one might rifle through a card catalogue, extracting and organizing slips of paper with no apparent rhyme or reason; another might peck away at a typewriter; while still another might scramble up and down the stairs as her colleagues amble or dart through the stacks. The audience, meanwhile, was free to wander around the room, watch the script unfurl on monitors positioned at each of the library tables, peruse print-outs listing a selection of the text snippets fed through the algorithm, and come and go at will. By removing and remixing familiar codes and contexts, Shuffle shifted our engagement with these classic texts and spaces and genres of performance. It made for an especially productive decontextualization.

Find it all at Coffee House Press: In the Stacks!