FREE WORDS TO FREE MANIFESTA:SOME EXPERIMENTS IN ART AS GIFT

Abstract

It began way. Standing nervously in a bookstore, in front of the section on literary theory, hidden from the eyes of the staff, I reached my hand into my bag like a thief and pulled out a hot pink book. I looked up and down the aisle. No one was watching. O.K., now. I slipped it into the shelf among the F's (file under Free) and it was done. So I began my career as in infiltrator of public spaces, a thief not of books but of shelf space, of access. A bypasser of gateways, permissions, and procedures. The book was called Free Words, and was an art project of mine. Its content was a list of 13,000 words I had collected over ten years. I had uncopyrighted the text, placing it in the public domain (no rights reserved), and labeled the book as free. No price tag, no barcode, no ISBN. The back cover said only this book belongs to whoever finds I had printed 1,000 copies of it, and the idea was to create a kind of situation. Someone who came across the book would have to decide what it was and who really owned it. If they wanted it, they would have to decide whether to walk out with it like a shoplifter, or whether to negotiate some-