The Artist in the Library

Abstract

This article reflects on the relationships between artists and libraries, particularly in terms of how their spaces, systems and structures provide inspirational possibilities for artists, and how artists’ involvement, working processes and interventions can highlight the potential that libraries hold as complex spaces of knowledge and cultural development. Interviews with artists Jennie Savage, Serena Korda and Madeleine Hodge provide insight into their connections with libraries and inform the discussion of my own proclivities for their spaces and systems—along with a shared desire to communicate this with diverse audiences through social practice works. These are considered alongside archival research and analysis of artworks by Martha Rosler, Joshua Sofaer, Ruth Beale and Ian Breakwell in order to define a set of library aesthetics. The library aesthetics identified and discussed include: practices of classification, cataloguing and organisation; languages of display; ephemera and the palimpsest of shared use; ideas of order and chaos; and relational aspects of library interaction connecting in turn to discourse around conceptual art, the everyday and systems art as well as social practice.