Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won\u2019t come again
And don\u2019t speak too soon
For the wheel\u2019s still in spin
And there\u2019s no tellin\u2019 who
That it\u2019s namin\u2019
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin\u2019<\/em>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Bob Dylan, \u201cThe Times They Are A-Changin\u2019.\u201d Song Lyrics. 1963. http:\/\/bobdylan.com\/songs\/times-they-are-changin\/<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that\u2019s a good thing. <\/em>Bob Dylan meet Martha Stewart. In the rhetoric of equal access and social justice that is often attached to libraries, this hypothetical introduction is not so absurd. But the \u201cspatial imaginary\u201d of libraries is a far cry from their \u201cspatial reality.\u201d Much like the conversion of royal art collections into public museums in the nineteenth century symbolized the fall of the ancien r\u00e9gime<\/em> and the transfer of power into the hands of the people, libraries have symbolized democracy since their first inception. However, both libraries and museums were often housed in impressive buildings that reflected the authority of the governing institution and, in reality, only a small percentage of the public passed through their doors. Only in the last few decades are they starting to shed their aura of privilege and power. Bob Dylan\u2019s recent Nobel prize for literature is an odd harbinger of the twenty-first-century library: the rebelliousness and dissent associated with him is now bound, catalogued and shelved, effectively re-packaging 1960s oppositional politics as a style that holds mass appeal. Times have indeed changed but the question remains hanging: has any actual power been transferred from the \u201cwinners\u201d to the \u201closers\u201d?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the visual arts, the institutionalization of critical practices continues to be met with great reservation, as does the collapse of the high\/low distinction. However, not only are both co-option and collusion necessary for an artist to gain visibility and currency (monetary and cultural), but also, the possibility of launching a critique from an external position is now theoretically suspect. The oppositional practice of \u201cinstitutional critique\u201d now operates as a genre within<\/em> the art world, not extrinsic to it. As Jennifer Tobias of MoMA asks, \u201cWhat is the nature of \u2018messing\u2019 in the fully participatory museum? How do contemporary ideas about the social role of art museums change relationships between participant and observer, between collusive and critical actions, between what can and can\u2019t be messed with?\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Jennifer Tobias, \u201cMessing with MoMA: Critical Interventions at the Museum of Modern Art, 1939\u200a\u2014\u200aNow,\u201d May 26, 2016, http:\/\/post.at.moma.org\/.<\/span> The growing list of artist-in-residence programs in libraries (recently including the Stuart Hall Library as well McGill\u2019s Osler Library), speaks to their openness to being messed with and the same questions apply: in the new \u201cparticipatory\u201d library, what is the nature of the participation? Is it possible to intervene in the library\u2019s procedures in more than a symbolic way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cliff Eyland has been making a \u201cmess\u201d in libraries since the early 1980s, long before their holdings began to be digitalized. Since then he has been inserting drawings the size of standard file cards for library-goers to find by surprise when perusing the card-catalogues and collections.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - NSCAD Library, 1981; Raymond Fogelman Library, 1997\u200a\u2014\u200a2005; National Gallery of Canada Library & Archives, 2013.<\/span> Library-goers were given no instructions as to what to do with the cards should they chance upon them; they could keep them, leave them or move them to another book or another library. In 1997, Eyland was invited to insert File Card Works Hidden in Books<\/em> at the Raymond Fogelman Library at the New School University in New York. In 2005, he was asked to stop by a new librarian who said, \u201cWe pay people to take out what people like you put in.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Cliff Eyland, in conversation with the author, November 2016.<\/span> Indeed, like the unwanted marginalia of a weary or distracted student, Eyland\u2019s drawings annotate the books in which they are inserted and speak to everyone who comes across them in an intimate and unpredictable way. According to one reviewer, \u201cEyland\u2019s endless intellectual curiosity has been channeled into an artistic bibliophilia that recognizes the book not only as a repository of ideas but also as an object, with its own look, feel, even smell. Eyland\u2019s work celebrates the eroticism of ideas, challenging cultural stereotypes of libraries as hushed, sterile centres of controlled and regulated information. In Eyland\u2019s view, libraries are places of chaos and entropy, home to sudden, idiosyncratic urges, quirks of taste and all kinds of fertile and promiscuous knowledge-swapping.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Alison Gillmor, \u201cCliff Eyland,\u201d Border Crossings<\/em> 34, no. 2 (May 2015): 90\u200a\u2014\u200a91.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the new Halifax Central Library, these intimate \u201cpromiscuous\u201d encounters have been turned into an official public display: five thousand file card sized paintings are permanently installed on the library\u2019s wall as part of the provincial art in architecture program (Library Cards<\/em>, 2014). The library, which includes a couple of caf\u00e9s and a space for people coming off the street, has become an active social hub in the downtown core and has succeeded in drawing in people who would not previously have gone to libraries. In this context, Eyland\u2019s conceptual practice can no longer be thought of as an intervention; rather, the artist is one of the many participants invited to mingle in the new library space among the new library-goers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The understated sensuality of Eyland\u2019s hidden file cards is one of the losses incurred when libraries switch to automated storage and retrieval systems that are kept out of view. Elisa Lee and Adam Hinshaw\u2019s intervention at the library of University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), is an interesting \u201cdigital\u201d counterpoint to Eyland\u2019s \u201canalogue\u201d work. During their residency at the library, the artists asked themselves how they could make visible the workings of the university\u2019s state-of-the-art underground Library Retrieval System (LRS), which stores books in 11,808 steel storage bins. They asked, \u201cWhat happens when you visualize the interaction between organic human behaviour and a rigid mechanical storage system?\u201d The answer came in the form of 11-808<\/em> (2014\u201315), a playful video installation of the comings and goings of books requested from the LRS. Each time an item is moved, a virtual catalogue card flies in or out of the bin where it\u2019s located. The books\u2019 titles also appear on the screen, allowing viewers to track what subjects are most in demand. Interestingly, even though the books are classified according to topic using the standard Dewey Decimal System, they are stored in the LRS according to the height of their spine. Consequently they may land in many different bins among books of many different topics. As such, 11-808 <\/em>imaginatively questions what new types of \u201cpromiscuous knowledge-swapping\u201d might occur between the books themselves as they mingle beyond the limits of their colour-coded classifications.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - In conjunction with 11-808<\/em>, the artists recorded an imaginary conversation between the books in the LRS titled Conversations<\/em> (2015).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Similar to Eyland\u2019s, Lee\u2019s and Hinshaw\u2019s work, Julia Weist\u2019s understated interventions use humour to question the library\u2019s procedures, specifically that of deaccessioning books. In an early project titled With Drawn I<\/em> (2007), she collected discarded library books and displayed them on a simple shelf in the gallery. With Drawn II<\/em> (2007) is a modified discarded wooden card catalogue filled with the file cards of five thousand books deaccessioned from the libraries of twenty-five states.In a similar project she exhibited discarded and borrowed copies of her own romance novel, Sexy Librarian.<\/em>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Julia Weist. Discarded library books I collected; Library books I wrote; Library books I discarded; Discarded library books I wrote; Discarded library books I collected, plus diplomas<\/em> (2006\u200a\u2014\u200a2013).<\/span> More recently, Weist questioned Google\u2019s feature \u00adcalled \u201cIn-depth articles,\u201d which was launched in 2013 after a study reporting that \u201conly 10 percent of searches required more than a quick, fact-based answer\u2026 Algorithmically speaking, content should be homogenous, popular, recent, shallow, and short.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Julia Weist, \u201cIndustry vs. Machine: Canonization, Localization, and the Algorithm,\u201d Red Hook Journal,<\/em> March 3, 2015, http:\/\/www.bard.edu\/ccs\/redhook\/industry-vs-machine-canonization-localization-and-the-algorithm\/.<\/span> Weist asks, \u201cwhat could this mean for art? I\u2019d like to think that an art history major turned software engineer is having a private chuckle somewhere in California. Because how could someone at Google not have realized? With the In-depth feature, the company has essentially created a math machine for determining canonization.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Jeff Koons has In-depth results, Janine Antoni does not. Cindy Sherman, yes, Robert Gober, no. I Googled a few new names, which turned into making a list, which turned into creating a database. I wanted to know what the Google canon looked like.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> In Industry vs. Machine: Canonization, Localization, and the Algorithm<\/em> (2014), Weist organized her research in a wheel-like \u201cinformation visualization\u201d organized according to how artists appear to have been selected by the \u201cin-depth\u201d algorithm. As you scroll around the wheel, the statistics of specific artists appear in pop-up text boxes. Just like the Library of Congress can decide whether or not a subject is important enough to merit its own subject heading, thereby impacting the circulation of ideas on that subject, recognition by Google\u200a\u2014\u200aor the lack thereof\u200a\u2014\u200acan significantly impact an artist\u2019s career. In both cases, it is the interface that determines what does and what does not get sanctioned as \u201cimportant knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than idealizing the library as a quintessential democratic space, each of these interventions showed it to be a site of both rigid order and creative invention. They also demonstrate the art world\u2019s current interest in participation and social engagement, and its institutionalization of critical practices. Ultimately, for these artists the library functioned more like a \u201cmuse\u201d for their work than a site of contestation. Hal Ingberg\u2019s 1\u2009% commission at the new NDG Cultural Centre bypasses critique altogether and engages library-goers in a more sensorial way. As you walk through the space you may notice the shifting colours of a large glass wall, which has a film installed on it that refracts the light in variable ways according to the viewer\u2019s position. The installation, titled Chromazone<\/em> (2016) suggests that libraries and their \u201cgoers\u201d are in a constant state of transformation and mutual invention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, who first published The Experience Economy<\/em> in 1999, we have now entered the next phase, the \u201ctransformation economy.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, The Experience Economy<\/em> [updated edition] (London and New York: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).<\/span> That is, customers want to be personally transformed (physically, emotionally, intellectually or spiritually) by the products, services or experiences they invest in. Libraries have been apt to embrace this cultural shift (or business strategy) and offer a plethora of ways to transform oneself. In this light, Ingberg\u2019s Chromazone<\/em> functions like a signpost for participatory libraries: it envelops library-goers in a quiet phenomenological experience that suggests a spectrum of reciprocity between the space and the viewer. On the spectrum between criticality and collusion, however, it is resolutely the latter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Quasi-spiritualism aside, the idea of personal transformation is not new to libraries, given their long-standing, almost mythical association with bottom-up self-directed learning. But whether or not the new participatory libraries are now, at last, actualizing this imaginary upward transformation is still up for debate. Certainly they have responded to the economic shift toward \u201ctransformation,\u201d as well as the ideological shifts toward \u201copenness\u201d in education and \u201cparticipation\u201d in general. The egalitarian, highly utopian rhetoric that equal access somehow equates equal opportunity creates a \u201cspatial imaginary\u201d in which all participants are innately self-defining and \u201call participants\u2019 voices will be equally valued, and that the working of systemic power and privilege around categories such as gender, class and sexuality will be suspended.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Lesley Gourlay, \u201cOpen education as a \u2018heterotopia of desire,\u2019\u201d Learning, Media and Technology<\/em> 40, no. 3 (2015): 314.<\/span> However, as Lesley Gourlay argues, unfettered access to library resources does not in itself critique or challenge the power dynamics at play in any particular institution. The interventions by Eyland, Lee, Hinshaw, and Weist provide us with opportunities to identify, visualize and question certain aspects of how libraries function, yet they make no real mess. In the new participatory library, there may be more participants than before in both number and diversity, however, at the end of the day, their participation is more symbolic of agency than actually catalyzing the transfer of power from \u201cwinners\u201d to \u201closers.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Eyland_LibraryCards\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Eyland_LibraryCards-scaled.jpg\")
& Library Cards<\/em>, 2014, detail.
Photo : Steve Farmer, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Eyland_LibraryCardsPanorama\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Eyland_LibraryCardsPanorama-scaled.jpg\")
Library Cards<\/em>, Halifax Library, 2014.
Photo : Steve Farmer, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Lee-Hinshaw_11-888\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Lee-Hinshaw_11-888.jpg\")
11-808<\/em>, 2014-2015.
Photo : \u00a9 Elisa Lee & Adam Hinshaw, courtesy of UTS Library
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Lee-Hinshaw_UTSLibraryRetrievalSystem02\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Lee-Hinshaw_UTSLibraryRetrievalSystem02-scaled.jpg\")
UTS Library Retrieval System<\/em>, 2015.
Photo : Jackson Mann, courtesy of UTS Library<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Weist_WithDrawn2\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Weist_WithDrawn2-scaled.jpg\")
With Drawn II<\/em>, 2007.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Weist_IndustryVSMachine\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Weist_IndustryVSMachine.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Weist_IndustryVSMachine\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Weist_IndustryVSMachine3.jpg\")
Industry vs. Machine: Canonization, Localization, and the Algorithm<\/em>, 2014.
Photos : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Weist_IndustryVSMachine\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Weist_IndustryVSMachine2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Weist_IndustryVSMachine\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Weist_IndustryVSMachine4.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Ingberg_Chromazone\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Ingberg_Chromazone2-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Ingberg_Chromazone\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_DO01_Bock_Ingberg_Chromazone-scaled.jpg\")
Chromazone<\/em>, 2016.
Photos : Steve Montpetit<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n