Relics of the Material Age - David Bunn turns library catalogue into poetry1 - Bibliography

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Leah Ollman

As libraries replace their card catalogues with on-line databases, the cards themselves--obsolete, bulky, worn--are usually discarded. Artist David Bunn rescued two million such cards and, in his elegant installations, directs our attention to the strong poetic voice still coursing through them.

In 1990, David Bunn took possession of the two million cards in the Los Angeles Central Library's catalogue somewhat in the manner of an eccentric heir claiming the unwanted portion of an estate. To administrators at the library, the card catalogue was not so much an inheritance as the deceased itself. Its contents had been made available on-line several years earlier, and it sat, an unwieldy, inconvenient corpse, awaiting suitable disposal. Why fill a storeroom with information that can now be saved on a chip the size of a postage stamp?

Bunn has paid loving attention to the catalogue ever since, embracing it on the very terms by which it had been rejected by others--its physicality, age and obsolescence. He spins poems from the titles running across the tops of the cards, extracting a lithe and quirky spirit from these unlikely remains. He honors the catalogue's systematic order and succinct formality, while crediting it also with personality, history, ideology, even an unconscious. Bunn is, in a sense, acting the ghostwriter, helping the card catalogue write its autobiography. Far from outlasting its usefulness, the catalogue, which now rests in boxes along a wall of gently bowed shelves in the artist's East L.A. studio, has proven inexhaustible, an archive suffused with possibility.

The first installment in Bunn's ongoing work is plastered on the walls of the very library from which the cards were ejected. A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place, the artist's only public-art commission to date, was completed in 1993 as part of the renovation and expansion of the Central Library, which had recently been damaged in two arson fires. Bunn installed nearly 10,000 cards from the deactivated catalogue in the two elevators of the building's new wing. Cards pertaining to the subject areas of each floor of the library can be seen on the shafts through glass panels in the passenger cars. Bunn covered the back and side walls of the cars themselves with all the catalogue's cards for titles beginning with the words "the complete" and "the comprehensive"--The Complete Accounting Course, The Complete Book of Self-Defense, The Complete Greek Tragedies, The Complete Guide to Ethnic New York and so on.

Wrapping around passengers like a familiar old quilt in ivory and manila, the patchwork of cards is nostalgically comforting, but also subtly subversive in its evocation of the power and also the presumptuousness of the library's mission to be either complete or comprehensive. Bunn's installation was echoed a few years later by another, similar work by Ann Hamilton and Ann Chamberlain, in San Francisco's rebuilt main library (1996) [see A.i.A., June '99]. Hamilton and Chamberlain used 50,000 of the library's defunct catalogue cards to sheathe a broad section of wall on three floors of the building. On each card, a reader from the community had transcribed an excerpt from the referenced work or a related text. The citations appear in over a dozen languages, and the handwriting forges a new human link to the cards, beyond that of their original indexical function.

For Bunn, the catalogue's condition of uselessness has become a liberating opportunity. Computerized library catalogues began replacing the paper-and-wooden-drawer variety in the early '80s, and few libraries still rely on the pre-digital version. Less obvious facets of the catalogue's identity--as art, artifact, social commentary--can rise to the surface now that computers have taken over its strictly practical purpose. The cards, demoted from their position of authority, can now speak from the heart, with Bunn as their facilitator.

Since the library installation, Bunn has created three bodies of work drawn from the catalogue, the first of which, "I feel better now, I feel the same way," was exhibited in 1996. Each of these projects consists of a group of loosely related poems extracted from sequences of title cards. The poems, typed in sober uppercase letters on a manual typewriter, are simply framed and hung in tandem with separately framed groupings of the cards from which they were derived, together comprising an austere form of concrete poetry on the wall. Bunn likens his process to an archeologist's excavation of core samples, and he applies a conceptual, quasi-scientific rigor to the enterprise, ruling that in any given poem he must include all the title cards beginning with a particular word or words, in alphabetical order. But within that self-imposed structure emerges a voice with stream-of-consciousness fluidity, wry humor, self-reflective poignancy and a memory--the voice of the catalogue speaking through Bunn, Bunn speaking through the catalogue.

Strains of both Dada and Duchamp course through these found objects rendered into found poems. Mere alphabetic adjacency is the operative force, making close neighbors of utter strangers and catalyzing all sorts of disarming associations. Some of the poems are more like quips--"Sometimes a great notion/ sometimes a hero/sometimes a little brain damage can help" (1996)--while others offer swatches of casual beauty: "The sea is a magic carpet/the sea is also a garden/the sea is for sailing/the sea is for sailing/the sea is strong" (1997). The multiplicity of meanings and contexts for a single word, the very thing that stymies subject-driven computer searches and causes them to produce a cumbersome load of search matches, is what makes these snippets blossom on the page.