Posted by Claire Barliant - The New Yorker March 5, 2013
A few months ago I was talking about research with a friend who is an academic. I told her I’d found a crucial text at the library: it was adjacent to the book I’d gone there to find. “Yes,” she concurred, “it’s never the book you want, it’s the book beside the book.”
Remember that? Along with embossed hardcovers or tattered paperbacks, the “book beside the book” will soon seem quaint. You know the feeling: searching for something specific and stumbling on another book you’ve been curious about, then finding yourself, almost involuntarily, leaning against a wall or sinking onto a footstool, happily giving up the next half hour of your life.
I’m sure some people think of browsing as an invitation to distraction, but I like to think of it an intellectual stroll. Some paths lead to meaningless cul-de-sacs, others to revelations. The tactile process of pulling out a stack of books and flipping through them is, to me, more stimulating than toggling between the windows open on my Web browser. Even the nomenclature “browser” is worth noting: it removes our agency. The software does the browsing. Not us. Browsing is fundamentally an act of independence, of chasing your own idiosyncratic whims rather than clicking on Facebook links or the books recommended by some greedy algorithm.
I write about art, so I spend much more time in galleries than bookstores or libraries. This requires serious looking, but in a managed way—the white-cube architecture dictates where I look and how. Picking and choosing books from a shelf offers more freedom, a chance for relaxed concentration. But lately I’ve been able to indulge my bibliophilia while on assignment. Both Art in General, a nonprofit gallery in Chinatown, and the EFA Project Space, a nonprofit gallery in Hell’s Kitchen, feature non-circulating libraries in their current exhibitions.
At EFA Project Space, the curators David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska have carefully selected over a hundred novels by artists for their show “The Book Lovers,” and displayed them on tables at the gallery where viewers can pick them up and read them. The eighty-three-year-old artist Yayoi Kusama, who had a Whitney retrospective last year, has written at least ten books; to produce at such a rate she must pick up her pen the moment she puts down her brush. The British artist Stewart Home, who wrote a book in 2002 called “69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess,”, is just as prolific. Writer’s block is enviably foreign to these scribomaniacs. The collection includes experimental poetry and graphic pulp fiction, and promises many “wasted” hours of browsing. One caveat: the artist novel tends to be of the shaggy-dog variety, plotless and confounding, which generally means you can lose yourself in it all the more easily.
At EFA Project Space, the curators David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska have carefully selected over a hundred novels by artists for their show “The Book Lovers,” and displayed them on tables at the gallery where viewers can pick them up and read them. The eighty-three-year-old artist Yayoi Kusama, who had a Whitney retrospective last year, has written at least ten books; to produce at such a rate she must pick up her pen the moment she puts down her brush. The British artist Stewart Home, who wrote a book in 2002 called “69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess,”, is just as prolific. Writer’s block is enviably foreign to these scribomaniacs. The collection includes experimental poetry and graphic pulp fiction, and promises many “wasted” hours of browsing. One caveat: the artist novel tends to be of the shaggy-dog variety, plotless and confounding, which generally means you can lose yourself in it all the more easily.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/the-art-of-browsing.html#ixzz2NA26e4DR
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