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.
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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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