Martha Rosler Library Vis-a-Vis The Danish Cartoons

Barbara Rosenthal

Martha Rosler Library Vis-a-Vis The Danish Cartoons

“Martha Rosler Library” e-flux 53 Ludlow St. NY, NY 10002

As I walk through Chinatown toward the Martha Rosler Library at e-flux, three other things ride my mind and whisper in my ear: the growing Danish Cartoon situation in which art has initiated a worldwide face-off between liberty and tyranny; my 1988 videotape My Whole Wardrobe / All My Books which suggested that one’s collections are autobiographical clues to both individual and species; and my current task of integrating my architect-father’s thousands of books into particular public and private collections, including my own, primarily by narrowly differentiated subjects.

From the street, the trim storefront at 53 Ludlow looks like a used book shop, but the depth-sides of tall shelving face outward – so come in!  The lighting’s good.  There’s a pleasant little chair in one corner.  Pick any random volume and start reading any page.  Other people wander by, browse a while, and walk out. The diverse collection of over 6,000 books is from the living and working quarters of Martha Rosler, whose image-text works illustrate her perspective on contemporary socio-political issues.  She has published ten books of her own and been represented often in interviews and articles, and at venues such as the Kassel “Documenta,” Whitney Biennial, MoMA, and Dia.  The books come from her homes in New Jersey and Brooklyn, and from her faculty office at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers.  Although they are on new shelves, they have been transported as a moment in pre-existing time, a dada arrangement of seriously written literature, arts thinking, culture and politics. It is an extensive trove.

There are also photos of the books in situ, and one list of the e-flux shelves and what books are on them, entitled Guide to Martha Rosler Library: Record of Original Shelving, Number Assignment and Categories, prepared by cataloguer Mary Chou; a sign reminds to handle gently, reshelve exactly — but you’d better remember where: there is no index of book or author that points back to location; there is no Library Science here.  We begin to enjoy the random jumps her shelving makes our ideas take: Edmund White’s biography of Jean Genet stands between The Park and The People: A History of Central Park, (Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, 1998) and Social Radicalism and The Arts (Donald Drew Egbert, 1970); then comes a vintage stove pamphlet, Universal Electric Range Cookbook and Instructions; then George Herman’s Krazy Kat.  On another shelf visit Franz Kafka and Arthur C. Clarke.  Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, and The Colossus of Maroussi, four novels by Henry Miller, are side by side, but a fifth one, Black Spring, is in a different bookcase. 

You are what you read, and how you shelve: an artist who displays their library makes an autobiographical statement.  Right now, the world is at war over a cartoon.  A miniscule work of political art has fallen into the tinderbox of an irrational mob, and been blown to conflagration by their leaders.  In the Feb 8 New York Times, art critic Michael Kimmelman notes “the silence of the art world on this issue.” Susan Sontag died this year.  Before much longer, I’d expect that people have listened for Rosler’s response to this intense, media-meets-message affair.  Many clues to what she might think sit on the e-flux bookshelves  A personal library isn’t just an external storeroom: it’s a manifestation of discreet bits of pre-recorded unprocessed information and opinion housed in its owner’s internal mind. Clues to all her work, and to her endeavors yet to come, are on those shelves – not the whole of her thinking, of course (more are in the scrapbooks of genetics and direct experience), but surely there are enough to make it worthwhile for searchers and browsers to locate.

I have fun in the stacks of this e-flux project as they were meant to be seen, teasing me over and over into their roiling freeze-framed surf, but I imagine the library as evolving, Rosler’s home-array documented in the installation photographs and in Chou’s Guide, perhaps to someday become organized and catalogued, and on its way from personal incident to public record.