Selections from the A.C. Rutherford Ephemera Collection (2017-2020)
ephemera collected from books at the Rutherford Library at the University of Alberta, collected during library hours from September 2017 to March 2020; print facsimiles of ephemera collected with letterpress labels, placed into books in the Rutherford Library; installation views, selections of facsimiles in situ below
ephemera collected from books at the Rutherford Library at the University of Alberta, collected during library hours from September 2017 to March 2020; print facsimiles of ephemera collected with letterpress labels, placed into books in the Rutherford Library; installation views, selections of facsimiles in situ below
All Things Considered
edited excerpts from MFA thesis essay:
I am unpacking our library, yes I am. In borrowing this framework, ex post facto, from Walter Benjamin, I am not starting as he did, in the state of boxed and crated books—“not yet touched by the mild boredom of order”—but with the large and functioning library of the University of Alberta, where books are on the shelves, and I can, for the time being, “march up and down their ranks to pass them in review.” [1]
It’s not so much the books of the Rutherford Library that I unpacked as a daily practice from September 2017 through March of 2020, but the traces of readers that remain within these books. As they are borrowed, the items of this library, like any other, accumulate evidence of their readership through the things left behind within them. There are newspaper clippings promoting cures for depression and touting Hollywood gossip; letters, in turn, from loved ones and pioneer newspaper-women. A faxed copy of Duchamp’s Large Glass cohabits with call signs for short-wave radio broadcasters.
Unlike the systematic principles that order the library at large, the items I’ve found are unregulated, uncategorized, and delinquent from the oversight of the catalogue. Though at times marked by signatures, or deliberately placed in acts of alternative publication or religious proselytizing, most are incidental, and almost all are entirely anonymous. Their accidental loss into the ordered shelves of the library could suggest an end to their ability to communicate: uncatalogued, they are lost in the archive, with no ability to be searched out or recalled. However, as Homi Bhabha notes of disordered collections in his response to Benjamin, Unpacking My Library Again, “disorder challenges the shelved order of the study, and displaces the Dewey decimal system […] it is the contingency of these ‘un-packed books,’ through their concatenation and contestation, that produce a shared belief in the need for Benjamin's ethical and aesthetic imperative: ‘the renewal of life’ through relocation, dislocation, and re-situation’.” [2] Removed from the particulars of their origins, and juxtaposed strangely to new eyes, these lost items engender new meanings, opening those who find them to narratives the library catalogue could never have anticipated.
My speculation on the objects I find each day, however, is grounded in a geography that is rapidly shifting. Around the world, libraries and other depositories of public knowledge are facing fiscal cuts, ideological reframing, and physical closure. The networks through which items in the archives can operate are becoming scrambled, their stories irretrievable as institutions are forced to downsize, deaccession, and move remaining collections to high density storage. The dismantling of the ways in which stories have been told for millennia, from the disruption of oral tradition through to the foretold demise of the printed book, cuts us off not only from the historic flow of information and documents, but also their embodied context––how each story comes to be told, maintained, and interacted with over its lifetime.
When Vartan Gregorian came to the New York City Public Library in 1981, he found in their collection numerous telephone directories for most of the world’s major cities, dating back several decades. As newly-appointed president of the United States’ second largest public library, Gregorian was asking questions of the institution in order to understand its practices and identify places for change: Why did the library need all these phonebooks? Why did they collect materials which go so quickly out of date, take up so much space, and were never designed to be archived? What purpose could, say, the 1939 Warsaw telephone directory have in the 1980s, long after it was obsolete, and in a city far away from its intended users?
As it turns out, in this case, the 1939 Warsaw telephone directory was one of the most frequently consulted books in the collection during the post-war era, when it made possible the identification of Holocaust victims after so many other traces of their lives had been eradicated. Here in New York was the only known list of all the Jews of Warsaw—their names, phone numbers, addresses—preserved in the kind of cheaply printed annual that most libraries would have discarded decades before (if they even collected them in the first place). Gregorian extols this as a prime example of how seemingly outdated, worthless data can be transformed through the reframing of use—“it became a document, a legal document, a document of social history and economic history and national history. That is how through proper guidance and questioning, the 1939 Warsaw telephone directory became knowledge, because information has to be transformed, to be given a structure, in order that we are to control and understand it, and not be manipulated by it. Nothing is useless, because we don’t know what is useless temporarily, what is useless absolutely.” [3]
***
“Blasted landscapes are what we have,” says Anna Tsing, anthropologist and cultural theorist, describing the habitats which humans have disturbed through acts of war, resource extraction, and in misguided attempts at rehabilitation to suit anthropocentric needs and desires. Of these spaces, she says “it is no longer possible to offer an easy dichotomy between pristine and damaged landscapes […] Which disturbance regimes are we willing to live with? Given the realities of disturbances we do not like, how shall we live?” [4] Arguing that precarity characterizes the state of our global ecosystems, the natural landscapes Tsing discusses can be read analogous to, and indeed intimately bound up in, the broader ecologies of human action which have ‘blasted’ our cultural commons and repositories of knowledge. In turn, her questions morph to ask which disturbances to these institutions will we continue to allow, and how will we respond as we navigate such systems in flux?
I turn, by way of answer, to the acts of maintenance which I have attempted over the my three years in the site of the library; through actions equally indebted to archival artists and relational aesthetics, librarians and gardeners. From each of these sources I see some version of Donna Haraway’s call to ‘stay with the trouble;’ to dwell with, to learn, to be unsettled by—and to pointedly refuse retreat from—the complexities of the world. [5]
This suggests, once again, an ecological analogue: the lesson learned by Voltaire’s Candide, who, having undergone a picaresque journey across multiple continents, grows disillusioned with optimistic philosophies promising ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. In the face of the seemingly insurmountable disorder and chaos which undermines an optimistic outlook, he chooses to contribute his skills and actions toward making change on a local scale, doing what he can in ways that are small, sustainable, and ‘cultivate conditions for ongoingness’.
“Il faut cultiver nôtre jardin.”
We must tend our gardens.
edited excerpts from MFA thesis essay:
I am unpacking our library, yes I am. In borrowing this framework, ex post facto, from Walter Benjamin, I am not starting as he did, in the state of boxed and crated books—“not yet touched by the mild boredom of order”—but with the large and functioning library of the University of Alberta, where books are on the shelves, and I can, for the time being, “march up and down their ranks to pass them in review.” [1]
It’s not so much the books of the Rutherford Library that I unpacked as a daily practice from September 2017 through March of 2020, but the traces of readers that remain within these books. As they are borrowed, the items of this library, like any other, accumulate evidence of their readership through the things left behind within them. There are newspaper clippings promoting cures for depression and touting Hollywood gossip; letters, in turn, from loved ones and pioneer newspaper-women. A faxed copy of Duchamp’s Large Glass cohabits with call signs for short-wave radio broadcasters.
Unlike the systematic principles that order the library at large, the items I’ve found are unregulated, uncategorized, and delinquent from the oversight of the catalogue. Though at times marked by signatures, or deliberately placed in acts of alternative publication or religious proselytizing, most are incidental, and almost all are entirely anonymous. Their accidental loss into the ordered shelves of the library could suggest an end to their ability to communicate: uncatalogued, they are lost in the archive, with no ability to be searched out or recalled. However, as Homi Bhabha notes of disordered collections in his response to Benjamin, Unpacking My Library Again, “disorder challenges the shelved order of the study, and displaces the Dewey decimal system […] it is the contingency of these ‘un-packed books,’ through their concatenation and contestation, that produce a shared belief in the need for Benjamin's ethical and aesthetic imperative: ‘the renewal of life’ through relocation, dislocation, and re-situation’.” [2] Removed from the particulars of their origins, and juxtaposed strangely to new eyes, these lost items engender new meanings, opening those who find them to narratives the library catalogue could never have anticipated.
My speculation on the objects I find each day, however, is grounded in a geography that is rapidly shifting. Around the world, libraries and other depositories of public knowledge are facing fiscal cuts, ideological reframing, and physical closure. The networks through which items in the archives can operate are becoming scrambled, their stories irretrievable as institutions are forced to downsize, deaccession, and move remaining collections to high density storage. The dismantling of the ways in which stories have been told for millennia, from the disruption of oral tradition through to the foretold demise of the printed book, cuts us off not only from the historic flow of information and documents, but also their embodied context––how each story comes to be told, maintained, and interacted with over its lifetime.
When Vartan Gregorian came to the New York City Public Library in 1981, he found in their collection numerous telephone directories for most of the world’s major cities, dating back several decades. As newly-appointed president of the United States’ second largest public library, Gregorian was asking questions of the institution in order to understand its practices and identify places for change: Why did the library need all these phonebooks? Why did they collect materials which go so quickly out of date, take up so much space, and were never designed to be archived? What purpose could, say, the 1939 Warsaw telephone directory have in the 1980s, long after it was obsolete, and in a city far away from its intended users?
As it turns out, in this case, the 1939 Warsaw telephone directory was one of the most frequently consulted books in the collection during the post-war era, when it made possible the identification of Holocaust victims after so many other traces of their lives had been eradicated. Here in New York was the only known list of all the Jews of Warsaw—their names, phone numbers, addresses—preserved in the kind of cheaply printed annual that most libraries would have discarded decades before (if they even collected them in the first place). Gregorian extols this as a prime example of how seemingly outdated, worthless data can be transformed through the reframing of use—“it became a document, a legal document, a document of social history and economic history and national history. That is how through proper guidance and questioning, the 1939 Warsaw telephone directory became knowledge, because information has to be transformed, to be given a structure, in order that we are to control and understand it, and not be manipulated by it. Nothing is useless, because we don’t know what is useless temporarily, what is useless absolutely.” [3]
***
“Blasted landscapes are what we have,” says Anna Tsing, anthropologist and cultural theorist, describing the habitats which humans have disturbed through acts of war, resource extraction, and in misguided attempts at rehabilitation to suit anthropocentric needs and desires. Of these spaces, she says “it is no longer possible to offer an easy dichotomy between pristine and damaged landscapes […] Which disturbance regimes are we willing to live with? Given the realities of disturbances we do not like, how shall we live?” [4] Arguing that precarity characterizes the state of our global ecosystems, the natural landscapes Tsing discusses can be read analogous to, and indeed intimately bound up in, the broader ecologies of human action which have ‘blasted’ our cultural commons and repositories of knowledge. In turn, her questions morph to ask which disturbances to these institutions will we continue to allow, and how will we respond as we navigate such systems in flux?
I turn, by way of answer, to the acts of maintenance which I have attempted over the my three years in the site of the library; through actions equally indebted to archival artists and relational aesthetics, librarians and gardeners. From each of these sources I see some version of Donna Haraway’s call to ‘stay with the trouble;’ to dwell with, to learn, to be unsettled by—and to pointedly refuse retreat from—the complexities of the world. [5]
This suggests, once again, an ecological analogue: the lesson learned by Voltaire’s Candide, who, having undergone a picaresque journey across multiple continents, grows disillusioned with optimistic philosophies promising ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. In the face of the seemingly insurmountable disorder and chaos which undermines an optimistic outlook, he chooses to contribute his skills and actions toward making change on a local scale, doing what he can in ways that are small, sustainable, and ‘cultivate conditions for ongoingness’.
“Il faut cultiver nôtre jardin.”
We must tend our gardens.
[1] Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library" in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955) 59.
[2] Homi Bhabha, "Unpacking My Library Again,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 28, No. 1, Identities (Spring, 1995): 5-6.
[3] Bernard Levin, A Walk Up Fifth Avenue (London: Sceptre, 1989), 122-123.
[4] Anna Tsing, “Blasted Landscapes (and the Gentle Arts of Mushroom Picking),” in The Multispecies Salon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 92.
[5] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), see 3-4, 37-38.
[2] Homi Bhabha, "Unpacking My Library Again,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 28, No. 1, Identities (Spring, 1995): 5-6.
[3] Bernard Levin, A Walk Up Fifth Avenue (London: Sceptre, 1989), 122-123.
[4] Anna Tsing, “Blasted Landscapes (and the Gentle Arts of Mushroom Picking),” in The Multispecies Salon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 92.
[5] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), see 3-4, 37-38.
