Shepherd Steiner
Other Uses: Boolean Searches in the Martha Rosler Library
- Martha Rosler Library
- Site, Liverpool John Moores University
- 12 April to 14 June 2008
This essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Site, Liverpool, while the Martha Rosler Library was installed there. I was asked by John Byrne, curator of Site, and Paul Domela, Director of the Liverpool Biennial, to talk about close reading rather than simply interpret the Library. As someone who is committed to close reading, I found myself in an extremely delicate situation. Current fashion prescribes that such lectures focus on theory. But I could not. I had accepted an invitation that went against the founding precepts of the practice of close reading as I had come to know it explicitly through use.
Consisting of over 7,700 books drawn from the personal collection of the artist, the Library has been on an extended exhibition tour that began in New York in November 2005 and was variously installed and accessible for public use in Frankfurt, Antwerp, Berlin, Paris, and, most recently, Liverpool and Edinburgh. The problem for me was to talk about close reading and not _the Martha Rosler Library. The problem was that if one is committed to close reading, as I like to think I am, then one would have to speak about close reading _and the Martha Rosler Library_. That “and” is very important for close reading. Close reading is not a theoretical method of reading that one can extract from the practice of reading, abstract from the work at hand, or know in advance. It is a variable approach to reading dictated by the text, object, or image itself. The crucial distinction for me is using theory, rather than applying theory.1 To use theory—and I think that every work of art has a theory of interpretation built into it—one must respond to the singularity of the work confronted and let that determine what is to follow. In so doing, one can potentially perform a reading, something that exists inside interpretation—reading or theory being an event that happens within and beyond interpretation, what we can call interpretation’s constitutive act. The point here is that if we want to talk about acts of reading in all their fullness, we must talk about the Martha Rosler Library, since a general theory of textuality (let alone a distilling out of an abstracted version of theory) cannot be separated from the specific textuality of the Library. Thus my title (which shouldn’t be taken too literally), “Boolean Searches in the Martha Rosler Library,” for with that all-important “and” as well as those “ors” and “nots,” we are in the vicinity of what library insiders call the Boolean search.
For those of you unfamiliar with a Boolean search, I should note that a Boolean search is (as the dictionary on my Mac tells me) a “search characterized by a system of symbolic logic that uses combinations of such logical operators as AND, OR, and NOT to determine relationships between entities”—for instance, Rosler and her collaborator on the project, Anton Vidokle. For a “not” we could include the artist’s signature, Martha Rosler. In place of this ortho_doxy, Rosler would have us emphasize heterodoxy. As a close reader, I like the sound of this, primarily because close reading presupposes that one is inextricably tangled in the work’s system of symbolic logic—we could say part of its system of metaphoric exchange, an economy in its own right. This insideness seriously complicates the position of interpretative mastery, outsideness, or critical exteriority assumed by a majority of theoretical methods, especially those hailing from New York and, ironically, from those critics we imagine to be closest to Rosler, such as Benjamin Buchloh and Rosalind Krauss. I think that acknowledging the importance of being _in the library is crucial to fleshing out the wider stakes of the project that implicate use, the political, and the recuperation of agency, questions that are all easily lost when we simply walk into the library, look around, and just see and experience nothing more than a library—a kind of shabby, regional library at best, at least in its manifestation in Liverpool, and, thus, very different from its other manifesta- tions, say, in Paris, at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, or at the e-flux storefront reading room on Ludlow Street in New York City, where the Martha Rosler Library was first opened to the public in 2005. I remember spending some time in a shabby library not unlike Liverpool’s Martha Rosler Library in Horsham, Australia: a skylight made it too hot, the plants seemed to need watering, the space was originally intended for something else, the library monitor was occupied otherwise, a sense of boredom made reading anything more than a dust cover an impossibility. The critical work to be done here is contained within the coordinates of such an imaginative response—obviously one of many such responses given that we all use libraries in very different ways and use or inhabit different libraries differently. Drawing on one’s own experience of everyday type places like a library is at the crux of responding to work in the avant-garde tradition; it works upon and with one’s experience, grapples with it inasmuch as it is a question of form or aestheticization, something that older notions of the critical and specifically political interpretations of Rosler’s work have little if any purchase on.
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About this Article
Other Uses: Boolean Searches in the Martha Rosler Library was first published in Fillip 9 in Winter 2009. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Shepherd Steiner teaches Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Florida. Recent publications include Snow Changes Everything: Unfinished Form in the Filmwork of Ibon Aranberri (Funadcio Tapies, 2009); “(Art and) Democracy | Hegemony (and Anarchy),” in Becoming Dutch (Eindhoven, 2009) and “Curatorial Formalism and Tinkering with the Political on the Far Side of the Subject at Documenta XII” (Journal of Visual Culture, 2008). His curatorial project focussing on American painting and video art, titled Acts of Non-Agression: 1960–76, opened at the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, in September 2008. He is currently finishing a book on Modernism titled Mnemotechnical Bodies: Close Readings in Modernist Painting, Sculpture, and Criticism.
Notes
image: Martha Rosler Library, 2005. Installation view at e-flux, New York. Courtesy of Martha Rosler and e-flux.
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