Showing posts with label NYU. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYU. Show all posts
Fales Library and Special Collections: Riot Grrrl Collection
Best Way To Disseminate Feminist Punk Culture Through a Public Institution. The gong goes to the Fales. On shelf with some critical theory and a disaster plan.
Fales Library and Special Collections: Riot Grrrl Collection
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| Artaud-Mania |
Lisa enjoys the crossovers between the Riot Grrrl and the Downtown Collections.
A lot of the downtown scene was influenced by french thinkers and decadent poets, by Artaud.
She is particularly fond of the way this zine subverts the Riot Grrrl confessional mode, of dear diarism. It is apparently a smart, direct, work. It sure looked good.
A lot of these collections include the zine masters. These are the flats Johanna Fateman would copy from. In the unprocessed part of the collection are all the pieces that went into the zines, and a lot of the collections that are zine-related include variety of correspondence as well.
This collection was pretty well organised when it came in. An ordered shoebox.
Fales Library and Special Collections: Riot Grrrl Collection
The Fales' staff include a visual librarian for printed book matter and a media archivist for the huge AV collection. Director Marvin. And a Senior Archivist in Lisa Darms.
As expected in any, but particularly in smaller repositories, Lisa wears several large hats. As a go-to reference librarian, she works directly with scholars and sets up research remotely when necessary. She work with donors, assessing collections on site, managing the bureaucracy of collection transferral. She teaches. She supervises the staff: most of the archival work is done by students from NYU's humanities and archive courses. Their internship usually spans 1-2 years.
She oversees various conservation projects. Their digitisation program is ramping up as the increasing drive for use and conservation of the collections has required thousands of media files to be shifted, physical files transferred, and various objects rehoused in the preservation shuffle.
Lisa's favourite, and I suspect more feathery hat is as the keeper of the Riot Grrrl Collection.
The Fales cache is a comprehensive collection of the zines of the collective, but more importantly aims to document the development of the movement through the papers, correspondence, artwork and source material of the scene.
The awesome, interdisciplinary, feminist punk behemouth of the Riot Grrrls started in DC and Olympia, Washington, and Lisa went to Greens College in Olympia with many of the women involved.
While she never attended the meetings nor identified herself as a Riot Grrrl, as a zine reading, punk feminist librarian with a shared local and cultural history, Lisa in uniquely positioned to maintain and grow this collection, working with the various members and providing rich intel on the documents obtained.
Fales holds collections acquired from Tammy Rae Carland, Johanna Fateman, Kathleen Hanna, Milly Itzhak, Kelly Marie Martin, Molly Neuman, Lucy Thane, as well as the Outpunk Archive (which covers both the zine and queercore record label).
Fales Library and Special Collections
Some of my favourite Art Library Crawl stories are based in the Fales stacks. Holding a handwritten manuscript by Alan Ginsberg. Leafing through Richard Hell's diary. Gazing upon a large nondescript pile of uncatalogued zines just donated by Tammy Rae Carland. The incunabulum Nuremburg Chronicle.
Images of these library marvels were taken then Devastatingly Lost! on a wayward memory device. Alas! I record the audio of all tours and interviews on the 'Crawl and I have had to bear the pain of hearing the falsely reassuring click of the shutter as I photographed these uncommon sites/sights. Oh well. I have retained some gems.
Fales Library and Special Collections
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| A whole lotta Larry Rivers, shelved and trolleyed and ready for serious archiving. |
When I wooshed through, the team at Fales had been working through the Larry Rivers Collection for about 2 years. Papers, letters, fan mail and over 1700 elements of film, video and audio had kept them seriously engaged, pushing to get this extraordinary goldmine into working order.
Basic databasing and cataloguing, and sending off the AV components to be preserved and digitised was ongoing. Once all the items and media were properly preserved, there was still in depth description and cataloguing to do. Correspondance looked almost ready to view while the AV stuff was getting done.
I am sure they've made some Larry Rivers scholars very, very happy.
Fales Library and Special Collections
The poster above once hung on the walls of Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village in the 60's, incredibly chic birthplace and epicentre of off-off broadway, and lair of the Warhol crowd.
Says John Vaccaro (Theatre of the Ridiculous): "This [the Caffe Cino] is the beginning! This is it! The major things done in New York were done there, and nowhere else. I don't give a shit what anybody else says. They're lying."
Physically unrepairable, it is still exactly the sort of cultural remnant one can find rummaging through the Downtown Collection at Fales. I really, really love that.
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| An original poster for the film The Blank Generation. Everyone was in this. Most of all, Downtown NYC. |
Fales Library and Special Collections
While the Fales holdings of literature and food are important and impressive, it is the other major collections: the Downtown Collection and the Riot Grrrl Collections that propelled me that day into the office of senior archivist Lisa Darms.
Through the 'seventies the Fales was essentially a one-man show, a small, quiet, special collection attached to NYU's Bobst Library. Current director Marvin Taylor started the decidedly rowdier Downtown Collection in 1994.
I'd heard great things from Ken Soehner at the Met about Marvin's energy and passion for his role at the helm of this extraordinary repository.
Marvin was out when I was poking around the collection, but this micro interview gave me a teaspoon of the wit and the beard behind the Fales' program of highly networked contemporaneous collecting.
The Downtown Collection seeks to document the Downtown Scene of NYC in all its interdisciplinary iterations. The enormous living breathing archive of the arts of Downtown Manhattan is quite a brief. The Village, SoHo and The LES have been a magnet, a hive and home of the worlds artists for, well, forever. Archiving and preserving the various local histories of dance, performance, film art and anti-art, the Downtown collection is behemoth and unusually shaped.
Being the major repository for a diverse arts community equates to extraordinary holdings and an impressive generation of donations and acquisitions.
Bequests from writers, artists, collectives, performances spaces and performers of this locale results in an archive with a decidedly liberal definition of "document".
The shelves are crammed with objects of varying dimensions. We found a crocodile. Skateboards. Two filing cabinets are traditionally archived (cabinets themselves being the catalogued object).
While this special collection values the artifactuality of these objects, the focus is on formal research value (one of the catalogued filing-cabinet's surface is a palimpsest of graffiti, art and info, donated from the offices of Fashion Moda, the other cabinet housed Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna's personal archive).
And the research value is sky high. Sharing the shelves with all these beautiful and unconventional objects are the papers of Richard Hell, Gary Indiana, Lucy Lippard and David Wojnarowicz. Among many, many others.
There is 65,000 audiovisual elements in the Downtown Collection. All unique: documentation of performances of dance, and music, experimental films and elements that went into making those productions.
There is also a local cable network AV collection with elements numbering the thousands. An incredibly rich documentation of an era, donated directly to the Fales, that could be a stand-alone collection in itself.
And the collection has momentum.
As the downtown area gentrifies and develops, the Fales continues to (unfortunately, but gratefully) benefit from the urban shift in this once lower socioecononmic, culturally sensitive area.
Many collectives and artists simply cannot afford to live in Manhattan, or maintain the space required for their own studios and archives.
An all too familiar tune, even here across the pond.
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| Part of the Downtown Collection stacks, in stark contrast to the more traditional literature collection on the far shelves. |
Through the 'seventies the Fales was essentially a one-man show, a small, quiet, special collection attached to NYU's Bobst Library. Current director Marvin Taylor started the decidedly rowdier Downtown Collection in 1994.
I'd heard great things from Ken Soehner at the Met about Marvin's energy and passion for his role at the helm of this extraordinary repository.
Marvin was out when I was poking around the collection, but this micro interview gave me a teaspoon of the wit and the beard behind the Fales' program of highly networked contemporaneous collecting.
The Downtown Collection seeks to document the Downtown Scene of NYC in all its interdisciplinary iterations. The enormous living breathing archive of the arts of Downtown Manhattan is quite a brief. The Village, SoHo and The LES have been a magnet, a hive and home of the worlds artists for, well, forever. Archiving and preserving the various local histories of dance, performance, film art and anti-art, the Downtown collection is behemoth and unusually shaped.
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| "Magic Box" |
Bequests from writers, artists, collectives, performances spaces and performers of this locale results in an archive with a decidedly liberal definition of "document".
The shelves are crammed with objects of varying dimensions. We found a crocodile. Skateboards. Two filing cabinets are traditionally archived (cabinets themselves being the catalogued object).
While this special collection values the artifactuality of these objects, the focus is on formal research value (one of the catalogued filing-cabinet's surface is a palimpsest of graffiti, art and info, donated from the offices of Fashion Moda, the other cabinet housed Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna's personal archive).
And the research value is sky high. Sharing the shelves with all these beautiful and unconventional objects are the papers of Richard Hell, Gary Indiana, Lucy Lippard and David Wojnarowicz. Among many, many others.
There is 65,000 audiovisual elements in the Downtown Collection. All unique: documentation of performances of dance, and music, experimental films and elements that went into making those productions.
There is also a local cable network AV collection with elements numbering the thousands. An incredibly rich documentation of an era, donated directly to the Fales, that could be a stand-alone collection in itself.
And the collection has momentum.
As the downtown area gentrifies and develops, the Fales continues to (unfortunately, but gratefully) benefit from the urban shift in this once lower socioecononmic, culturally sensitive area.
Many collectives and artists simply cannot afford to live in Manhattan, or maintain the space required for their own studios and archives.
An all too familiar tune, even here across the pond.
Fales Library and Special Collections
I first came across the Fales Library and Special Collections through an exhibition loan at the MOMA.
It was Looking at Music 3.0, an exploration of the influences of music on contemporary art practices, focusing on NY in the 1980s and 1990s.
A time of boom after bust, when artists could afford to live and create in downtown Manhattan. Wall plaque after wall plaque designated the extraordinary objects in front of me as "on loan from the Fales Library and Special Collections". I took note. And arranged a meeting with Lisa Darms, Senior Archivist and all-round powerhouse at Fales, tucked away on the third floor of the gigantic NYU Bobst Library in Washington Square.
A special collection of NYU, the Fales opened its doors in 1959, founded on the donated collection of Commodore DeCoursey Fales.
Fales' personal library and focus was acquiring English and American literature. The current stacks in Washington Square support a rich catalogue of these geographic pools, with a eye not only on the high brow but quite keenly on the fiction of the time: a survey of what people were actually reading as well as a steller collection of first edition and rare titles. The American and the English Wings of the stacks are shelved by Mr Fales' original alpha cataloguing (everything else kept by LC), and in most part maintain original dust jackets: preserving the book as artefact and as originally presented.
These stacks also hold an remarkable Food and Cookery Collection, documenting via 55,000 titles the cuisine and food practice of the 20th century. Food stuffs and food habits of the New York area, in particular.
Not limited to bound recipes, this collection contains some of my favourite types of history: household and homemaker advice, etiquette and advice to the ladies of the house. A very real indicator of then current social norms: gender roles, ideas of nutrition, health science and other cultural practices both shocking and quaint are held on these shelves.
NYU: Elmer Holmes Bobst's books
Casual display of books in the lobby of the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, NYU. Please note the winsome arrangement of flourescent tubes.
NYU: Fales via the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
Impressive from the outside, I gape, ogle and unashamedly admire the totally, literally sensational lobby of the Elmer Holmes Bobst. My library sensors are actually tingling. The architecture providing the space and the light to the circulation desk/alter, and the regal purple banners aside, I am captivated by the tiles. I want my skates.
NYU: Fales Library and Special Collections
The Fales Library and Special Collections is housed in this, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, a fearsome research temple in the Village.
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