"Unpacking My Library" Exhibition Visit

Te Tuhi Centre For the Arts,    Week Three - 16/03/2010

"I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeking daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood - it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation - which these books arouse in the genuine collector. " - Excerpt from Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting," in Illuminations; Essays and Reflections, Engl. trans. (London: Fontana, 1982), pp.59.

Walter Benjamin goes on to say, “...What I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection.” Benjamin argues that in a detailed collection certain traits of the collector will be revealed. His invitation into his unpacked library is an invitation to enter a collector's mind - to dwell upon what the order and disorder of collections reveals about their gatherers. (danitorres.typepad.com)

Using Walter Benjamin's text as a platform, the Te Tuhi exhibition, 'Unpacking My Library', looks at expanded approaches to collecting. Like Benjamin's text, the displays take interest in the process of collecting, as much as the content of each collection. The works displayed in this exhibition, show different approaches and ideas to collecting. The exhibition also presents both artists who actively explore collecting as a daily practice, and artists who reflect on pre-existing systems of collating and organising objects. (tetuhi.org.nz)

One of the displays that showed pre-existing collecting was that of London based artist Elizabeth McAlpine, who's ongoing project "Found Time: Big Ben" attempts to represent every minute of a twelve hour period through existing postcards of Big Ben. Each hour of time is framed individually with the missing minutes left as blanks. This also clearly shows the process of actively explore collecting as a daily practice.

This particular art work plays on time, as she has structured the work in Perspex squares that are 12 high and 60 long. The postcards that she has collected are placed in order of time according to what is on Big Ben in each image. Elizabeth's work is a form of conceptual art. Her concept is ordering time, this order creates the artwork. The fact that there are empty spaces that she still has to fill, creates an ongoing concept of collection.

When I first glanced at this work, I was confused, as well as a bit bored. Staring at a wall full of old post cards, which seemed to be all over the place and in no particular order did not exactly draw me in. But when listening to the story behind the work, I became fascinated. By unpacking the work, and discovering her process of collection, I was able to really grasp a sense of her direction and what she wanted to achieve. Instead of a confusing bunch of postcards stuck on a wall, the work suddenly made sense, and became a very intellectual and clever piece of art work. "Found Time: Big Ben" ended up being my favourite display in the whole exhibition.

When researching Elizabeth McAlpine, I found out that she works mainly with time-based media and that she describes her working practice as 'close to geology'. Often in her work she tracks the repetitions and gestures found in popular media. She extracts pieces of found material from archives, and repositions them in a way that reveals patterns and associations that we would never have considered before. (elizabethmcalpine.com)

Another very clever example of some of her work is, "Quintent". "This is a sound installation of spliced together coloured vinyl records that, whilst rotating, generate the illusion of three dimensional dynamic objects. Her selection of records, based purely on colour, work as an audio-collage, that jumps from one track to another, just as the viewers eye jumps from spinning colour to moving object."(spacex.co.uk)

Elizabeth has based this work on Marcel Duchamp's "Circular Painted Disks that Rotate" (1920's). "In this work she addresses Duchamp's theories of 'precision optics': the idea that optical illusions would actually help visualize the working process of individual perception."(marcelduchamp.net)

Overall, I really enjoyed looking at her work. Elizabeth McAlpine is very clever in the way she presents her ideas and processes.

Another work that I enjoyed at the exhibition was Anne Shelton's studies of the "Fredrick Butler Archive". This work also analyses pre-existing collections. In this work she has selected some of Butlers books and created a slideshow of images. These books consist of handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, diagrams and references. Her display of his collection is a creation that shows us a bit of his personal world. She is in fact, sort of documenting his world and giving us a look into his mind. This is another form of conceptual art. You can see that she has carefully forethought her idea because the work shows every single page of each of the books, even the blank pages. It is a precise and good representation of Butlers books, and it gave me a glimpse into his world.

When researching about her, I was fascinated by her work "A Library to Scale". This work records a likeness of a collection of scrapbooks, a visual re-enactment of a collection of books. The display focuses on the obsessive documenting of local events, by Frederick B. Butler, who for sixty years used thousands of old hardcover novels to create scrapbooks for newspaper clippings about Taranaki history and life.

Butler clipped articles, ads and images from the many newspapers he read; he then pasted these articles, or transcribed them where he was unable to obtain an original clipping, he then ordered them thematically and pasted them into upside down novels. Butler observed, condensed, re-constructed and re-shaped his newspaper archive, which contains some 3,500 volumes. Spanning two world wars, Butler’s project forms an alternative mapping of Taranaki. His archive marks out the space of Taranaki’s settler history, from conflicts to commerce, politics to land confiscations and its changing social climates. 

Each of the 3,500 books was first covered with wallpaper, every second page then sliced out to add space for the glued in cuttings, and after the clippings were added, a thematic title and period was handwritten on the spine. These files are now stored in the Puke Ariki Museum, and have been documented by Ann Shelton as life-size images of the books, as they are positioned on the library shelves, with the spines facing the camera. (annshelton.com)

Ann's work engages the viewer in a process of recovery, retrieval, and re-presentation, as it seeks to show Frederick B. Butler’s project anew, to look back on it from today's time period. The viewer is propelled from record to account, from the ‘then’ to the ‘now’.

Overall, I really enjoyed this exhibition. I have never been to anything like this before, and it really opened my eyes to see the processes and thought behind each of the pieces of work. I was intrigued by each work, as I began to get insight into the collectors minds, I began to see the order or disorder of the collections and what that revealed about the collectors themselves.

Bibliography:

Unpacking My Library
1 http://www.tetuhi.org.nz/
2 http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/benj-bookcoll.htm
3 http://danitorres.typepad.com/workinprogress/2010/01/unpacking-my-library.html


Eliszabeth McAlpine
1 http://www.elizabethmcalpine.com/
2 http://www.spacex.co.uk/pl39.html
3 http://www.marcelduchamp.net

Ann Shelton
1 http://www.annshelton.com/omwf/01.shtml
2 http://annshelton.com/publications/the_reflecting_archive.pdf
3 http://www.annshelton.com/articles/library.shtml