it's on the shelf

I've blogged several times about LibraryThing but not recently. (see posts)  When I first started cataloging my library in LibraryThing, the closest libraries to mine (based on a weighted measure of common books and how many books altogether) were mostly architectural. Then I left New York City and started cataloging my books at the upstate family homestead. The closest libraries shifted to those with lots of gay titles or a mix of architecture and gay titles, and the amount of fiction climbed. I was delighted to notice today that the closest library is now HTCBooks which seems to be affiliated with the History, Theory and Criticism of architecture and art program at MIT, part of the Department of Architecture. Some of the tags look personal, such as SOA Home Guest Room Shelf 1. Maybe that's a good idea: you might be able to find a book when you want it. It might be especially good for the skinny little things without any spine presence. Still, it surprises me how many books are where I first look.

For example, I was indexing an article about a project by Wang Hui. There was an undifferentiated personal name record in LC/NAF for Wang Hui but none of them had any latin-script language titles so I couldn't tell if my guy was included or not. I thought I didn't have the Chinese character version of his name until I checked the firm website: Urbanus Architecture & Design. The projects there included Tulou affordable housing. Almost a decade ago, Tulou was included in a show at the Cooper-Hewitt and I had bought the catalog which was right there on that shelf downstairs with some other architecture titles. Wang Hui is in the colophon so I do have the Chinese character version of his name.

Sometimes I feel like my thousands of books are a burden. Too much stuff to just pick up and go live in Palermo for six months. I sometimes feel like I should give my architecture books to Alfred State which has a new B.Arch. program. On the other hand, it's nice to be able to have Tulou: affordable housing in China readily at hand.

me and Herman Melville

I've started cataloging the books in the ancestral home in which I'm living. Yes, I'm doing it in LibraryThing as I have done with my personal library. It was interesting to watch the libraries closest to mine as I cataloged my own books. LibraryThing tells you the closest as weighted, raw, and recent. The weighted comparison is number of common books to total number of books. I've done about 60 books so far from the sectional bookcase in the front parlor downstairs and my closest weighted library is now Herman Melville's. Pretty neat.

I have read a couple of Melville's books in the past few years: Moby Dick and Redfern. Enjoyed 'em both. I think it was the first time I'd read Moby Dick but probably read excerpts at various points in school.

We'll see how this progresses and which books I might keep out of boxes in order to read. The point, you see, is to put some of the ancestral books in boxes so that my own books can come out of boxes.

obsessed with relational art

A year or so ago when I was at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College for a week of cataloging, Bronwen Bitetti (assistant librarian) asked somewhat innocently if there shouldn't be an LC subject heading for relational art, aka relational aesthetics. She was not having much trouble wrapping her parameters around it but was with conceptual art. For me, it was the other way around but then I got involved with reading art criticism in the heyday of conceptual art, the 1960s. Many conversations, live and online, have happened since then and I think I'm beginning to get a sense of relational art. Now I see it everywhere.

This morning over my breakfast cereal, I was reading the Weekend Arts section from Friday's New York Times. Karen Rosenberg was visiting the Carsten Höller show at the New Museum and said in her review that "Curators tend to place Mr. Höller under the umbrella of 'relational aesthetics,' which, as defined by the critic Nicolas Bourriaud, is all about transforming the museum into a 'festive, collective and participatory' space." She goes on to say that Höller's show isn't really that similar to Rikrit Tiravanija's cooking at MoMA or Maurizio Cattelan's conversation piece sculptures. Each does involve considerable relating between the artist and the audience. And all the sliding down tubes in the Höller exhibition reminds me of the ARLIS/NA-VRA conference reception at the Children's Museum in St Louis. But was that art?

Also in the Friday paper, Carol Vogel wrote about Tiravanija's installation at MoMA which involves serving Thai curry at lunch time. Fire regulations prohibit cooking in the gallery so, alas, the food must be prepared elsewhere in the museum. Still, Vogel quotes curator Ann Temkin: "It's part of what has been called 'relational aesthetics.' Joseph Beuys created social sculpture; it's the act of doing things together, where you, the viewer, can be part of the experience." That brings us back to Bronwen's and my first discussion of relational art and conceptual art.

Dropping "participatory" and "social" into the words above reflect what Bronwen and I are now grappling with. Much of art criticism uses these and LCSH doesn't have anything that tidily reflects "social practice" as it is regularly used by artists and art critics. LCSH does have a reference from "Participatory art" to "Interactive art." To me, "interactive art" sounds rather like interactive multimedia or video gaming; on the other hand, most every essay I've read recently that talks about participatory art uses "interactive" within 25 words of the mention of participatory art.

Art terminology changes over time and it makes it hard for us catalogers who want some sustained literary warrant before we establish a heading. A heading used a few times over a short period of time is probably handled better otherwise and our users probably aren't going to try to retrieve on little-used terms.

In my LibraryThing tagging, I'm a little loose with "conceptual art" and maybe with "artists books" but that's the good thing about personal cataloging. You can be selective and a bit idiosyncratic, though consistency still helps. I know you're dying to know if Bronwen and I did anything about proposing a subject heading for relational art. As we were working on it, we discovered that LCSH already had "Relationism in art" and the title listed to justify it was actually CAP : art relationnel. We've proposed that that heading be changed to "Relational art" and we've added a scope note (thanks to Roberta Smith) and a couple more references and titles to justify it.

Life is relational and participatory, and both words are getting used pretty widely these days, e.g., participatory librarianship, relational acupuncture. I wanted to find a good picture to somehow represent this posting but ended up being reminded of Dennis Bellone's of "Joseph Beuys is underrated" in which Bellone faces a fierce cat in imitation of Beuys's and the wolf. I couldn't find that video on the web or even a still image but you might enjoy Bellone's "The Event in Ghent" in which he challenges S.M.A.K. director Jan Hoet to fight for art.

books and zines

Pretty exciting. I got to meet my closest parallel book collector in LibraryThing: Paul Ranogajec, a doctoral student in American architectural history. cf. paulranogajec.com He's a buddy of Roberto Ferrari, art librarian and now doctoral student himself, both of them at the CUNY Grad Center. Roberto is Paul's closest LT parallel, or is it the other way around? Anyway, we had a good time talking about our collections and art/architecture interests over a nice brunch in the garden at Bacchus on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I'm not sure that Paul is convinced yet that he should go to library school but we'll keep working on him. After brunch, we went to a couple nearby used bookshops. I escaped without buying any books at either shop or elsewhere today.

On the way to the subway to go to the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), I ran into Bill Jones, former colleague at NYU Libraries. That was fun.

The main reason I was running off to MAD was a panel on "Gay print/queer zines" with Scott Hug of K48, Tony Arena of Anonymous boy collection and other titles, Michael Bullock of BUTT, Jason Lamphier and Noah Michelson of Out, and Dan Avery of NEXT, moderated by someone whose name I didn't catch. Each of them described their magazine or project and then they talked amongst themselves and with us in the audience. I had expected that the hall would be jammed to the rafters but it was fairly sparsely populated. I loved the way Tony Arena talked about his desire for the informal and chaotic. The fellows from Out had some interesting things to say about being fairly mainstream, dealing with print versus web capacity and timing. And almost all of them talked about community as part of their mission. I was intrigued to learn that the founders/editors of BUTT started Fantastic man because they didn't want BUTT to have to go commercial, having started it as a cross between S.T.H. and Index. And the first issue of Gentle woman just came out so there was teasing about covering all the ground now.


This is all fine and dandy but I'm really enjoying the book I've just started: In spite of the gods: the rise of modern India by Edward Luce (Anchor Books, 2008) and I think I'm going to go back to that. I did go read for a while in Prospect Park after discovering and climbing Lookout Hill. The sunset was only just beginning and there weren't enough clouds to really light up the sky with color.

uptown

I don't consider myself religious but I am certainly moved by religious art. I'm in New York City for a week or so before going to the ALA conference in Washington. Diana Mitrano is letting me stay at her Brooklyn apartment while she's in Hong Kong. As I left her apartment yesterday thinking about the day's adventures, I decided to go up to the Cloisters, partly to see if I could find Building the medieval art in the bookshop. Being in that space with the fine art is always very moving for me. The view above is of the apse from the Church of Saint Martin in Fuentidueña, Spain with a crucifix from Palencia. Romanesque and Ottonian are probably my favorite medieval periods.

I'm not really sure where the love of medieval art comes from. My 12th-grade art teacher was fond of Romanesque Catalonian frescoes, or at least I got the small books on them that were a couple of my first art books about then. Them, along with the facsimile of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves.

Whatever, I found myself tearing up several times in the Cloisters: for the love of the art, for the joy of being in its company.

From Fort Tryon Park, I took the bus down to the Hispanic Society where I was delighted to find that the Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster show was still on view (closes June 27th so get there soon). She created three dioramas with books as the object in the landscape. There's a wonderful wall of quotations too. Since my last visit to the Hispanic Society, the Sorolla murals have been rehung in the room now called the Sala Bancaja. And it's never a problem to visit the collection of Goya, Velazquez, El Greco, and others.

I didn't have a guidebook with me but realized that the Morris-Jumel Mansion wasn't far away. I was too far South and missed it but did visit the hole where the Alexander Hamilton house used to be, crowded between a church and an apartment building just North of City College of New York. It's hard to believe that the house fit in the space, the hole doesn't look near big enough.

They picked the house up and moved it around the corner. It isn't open again yet but the setting is certainly more gracious and spacious.

Since I was there at CCNY, I figured I'd go say hi to the librarian, Judy Connorton, and see the new space. The architecture library has way more space, as does the school. Part of the library is double-height with stacks mostly on a mezzanine over the offices. The roof is open for visiting and there is a funky yellow amphitheater which also serves as the sunshield for the skylight over the central atrium. The end-of-year projects were up on the walls so there were some fun projects to look at. There were also some models of buildings by Palladio, Neutra, and others.

On to the Studio Museum which is showing highlights from its collection. Lots of good stuff. They have a print version of the Lorna Simpson video "15 mouths" which I first saw at Sean Kelly Gallery a few days after 9/11. The video is a grid of mouths quietly humming. It was mesmerizing and soothing in the days just after the World Trade Center attacks. The print version is quieter, just still prints of the mouths with a CD of the humming barely audible.

Supper was at Chennai Garden on East 27th Street, with John Maier, Elizabeth Lilker, and Dan Lipcan. We shared three of the combination platters and barely made it through them. The food was incredibly tasty. John and I walked down to Union Square and I figured I might as well as well veer off to the Strand and St. Mark's bookshops before leaving the neighborhood. I did find Building the medieval world at the Strand. It wasn't the fabulous study of architecture in medieval manuscripts that I'd hoped for, more of a general picture book with mediocre illustrations. Nonetheless, I figured that I'd just regret it if I didn't buy it ... and the price was down from retail.

Thinking about buying books obsessively, I am thrilled that I'll get to meet my closest LibraryThing parallel on Saturday. Paul Ranogajec is a grad student at the CUNY Grad Center and a friend of Roberto Ferrari's. We're getting together for brunch on Saturday. We get to talk books, books, books until the cows come home or we decide to go to the panel on queer zines, 3 pm at the Museum of Art and Design.

Barbara Kruger, book designer

So here I am, merrily adding books to LibraryThing, and I notice that the cover design for my copy of Medieval humanism and other studies by R.W. Southern (Harper & Row, 1970) is credited to Barbara Kruger.
Checking her biography, I note that she did indeed do magazine design and illustration after graduating from Parsons. The cover has the zodiac and the labors of the month and similar blockprint-like images in a circle against clouds and stars.

I've seen articles recently on Andy Warhol's early contributions to illustration, e.g., his album covers. I find it interesting to think about how the artist's "fine" arts are visible or not in the commercial work. Kruger's (or her editor's) use of moral images plays rather well into her polemical collages.

(Sorry about the image. It's "borrowed" from LibraryThing.)

LibraryThing paradigm shift

I haven't talked here about LibraryThing in a while and my LT universe shifted a couple days ago. One of the features on your profile is a comparison of your library to those of others. There's a weighted, raw, or recent choice on the comparison. Since I started significantly entering my books, the nearest libraries in the weighted category have been libraries with strong gay collections. Now that I'm with my books here in Alfred, I've been cataloging a shelf or two of books almost every day. My nearest library just shifted to one that is strong in architecture and I've still got many shelves of architecture books to enter.

When I was in Chicago for the American Library Association conference in early July, I went to the Stonewall Book Awards brunch and one of the speakers was Marie Kuda who had long ago contributed a Chicago profile to a Queer Caucus for Art newsletter issue when we were about to meet there. I talked to her briefly after the brunch and she emailed me with thoughts about Tee Corinne, my co-editor. She also said my LibraryThing profile picture with clipped hair was not as much fun as my liberated hair (description thanks to Dan Eshom).

LibraryThing beats worldcat.org?

As I was sorting books to put in boxes today, I came across the library copy of Cruising: Architektur, Psychoanalyse and Queer Cultures by Helge Mooshammer (Böhlau, 2005) which I have checked out. I couldn't remember if I'd put in the bibliography for the Queer Caucus for Art Newsletter or not. I thought I'd google it to see whether it showed up that way. I was surprised to see that the LibraryThing work record showed up as the first hit. The second hit is from the author's webpage and the OCLC WorldCat record doesn't show up until the third entry on the second page, not far above the listing from the new books list at Berkeley. While I'm quite a fan of LibraryThing, as you know, I'm sort of disappointed that the WorldCat entry doesn't show up first. After all, if someone wants access to the book, they'd have more luck with the public collections in OCLC than with the mostly private libraries in LibraryThing.

meme

Since LibraryThing is social computing, one of the interesting things to watch is the connection between libraries. One feature that I'd been enjoying watching as I cataloged my books was the listing of books I shared with one other person. Strangely, in LibraryThing, it's called "You and None Other." Why isn't it called "You and One Other"? Anyway, it seemed to disappear ... until I rediscovered it under the "Memes" tab in "Statistics." I'd maybe heard the word but I probably couldn't use it effectively (and correctly) in a sentence. Going to Wikipedia, I found that it "consists of any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation." Also, that the article was perhaps too long and should be broken into more articles. I'm not sure I'd agree that one-on-one shared books represent learned ideas or behaviors, or that we're imitating each other. It is also interesting to me that one could mispronounce it "me-me." And taking this seguing way too far, my favorite drag queen name at the moment is Mimi Imfurst. With any luck, January 20th will bring the full and complete end of the Mimi Imfurst Society.

the obsession with LibraryThing

It probably shouldn't have taken me so long to figure out this obsession with cataloging my books on LibraryThing. Duh. It's a chance to touch and think about the books that I brought to the city when I moved from Texas and those added since 1995. There is almost no book that doesn't have some pleasant vibration associated with it. There have been a couple "don't even remember" moments however. Now, Ottonian book illumination by Henry Mayr-Harting is sitting on my lap, ready to be looked at. So, excuse me; I've got reading to do.