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Library of Art

“Library of Art” is an eight volume set of books: “Material,” “Process,” “Structure,” “Action,” “Situation,” “Duration,” and “Color,” each contain words or sentence fragments that can be combined to form an almost infinite number instructional artworks. An eighth book, “Participation” is left blank for anyone to record the works they create.

The beginning of an already-futile attempt to contain the world, the Library of Art looks at language as a magic trick – out of the immateriality of language you can make realities and then realities can collapse back into language. The thing and the name of the thing: we know they are from fundamentally different orders of being. And yet! Presto change-o! We can go from one to the other in an instant.

The Library of Art is inspired by algorithms and recipes, by Fluxus event scores, instructional works and the legalistic descriptive captions of conceptual art (the work of Barry, Cage, Kaprow, Knowles, Lozano, Ono, Weiner and others). By reanimating instructional art in the form of a library of possibilities, the hope is to open up authorship and let art be a game that everyone plays.

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2008-ongoing

The Library of Art was shown at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, and at P.P.O.W. in New York (invited by Hope Hilton).