School of Visual Arts, NYC: Journals

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School of Visual Arts, NYC: Journals

School of Visual Arts, NYC: Journals

School of Visual Arts, NYC

School of Visual Arts, NYC

Next up on the Art Library Crawl was a meeting with Beth Kleber, the archivist for the Glaser Design Archives and School of Visual Art Archives, located within the Visual Arts Library in the School of Visual Arts, NYC.

Fales Library and Special Collections: Riot Grrrls files

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

Fales Library and Special Collections: Riot Grrrl Collection

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 Grrrls

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

A whole lotta Larry Rivers, shelved and trolleyed and ready for serious archiving.

Larry Rivers was classic downtown. A New York Expressionist, Godfather of Pop Art, NYU student and resident at the Chelsea Hotel during its zeitgeist in the 60s.
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.

An original poster for the film The Blank Generation. Everyone was in this. Most of all, Downtown NYC.

Fales Library and Special Collections

More. Trolleys.

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.

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.

"Magic Box"

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.

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Operation Conservation

After a year of extensive redesign and renovation the Watson Library has just opened an out-of-this-world book conservation lab called the Sherman Fairchild Centre for Book Conservation.

While I am pretty sure this isn't the lab responsible for the handling of the Met's collection of incunabula, the Watson does holds a strong representation of the art publishing that exploded in the 19th century. And beyond. Rare books abound. The new lab demonstrates the Watsons commitment to book conservation in the traditional sense and also to digitisation as a conservation method. And it is HUGE!

This lab is a veritable wonderland of devices new and archaic, book presses, glues, brushes, magnifiers. I feel like I have entered the book-preservation version of Wonker's factory. It is very exciting. And while the lab still has that new car feel, the smell of old books drifts about.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Florence and Herbert Irving Reading Room

I am quite enamoured by the Scandinavian-y chair design in the Thomas J. Watson Library and accompanying Florence and Herbert Irving Reading Room. Beautiful.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Thomas J. Watson Library

Not one to shirk his duties, Chief Librarian Ken Soehner still has regular Reference and Registration Desk shifts here at the Thomas J. Watson Library. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Chief Librarian's Office

Chief Librarian Ken Soehner shows me into his office and fills me in on the significance of this incredible Museum and its Library.
Ken himself is pretty impressive. Director of the Thomas Watson Library for the last 16 years (a tenderfoot compared to the regularly long tenures common in this august institution), he has a Masters in Art History from Columbia as well as the requisite MLIS. He was president of ARLIS/NA in 2008. He teaches Library Science at Pratt as Associate Professor. And was unendingly gracious as my chronically sleep-deprived, caffeine addled brain bumbled through the conversation. There is simply no
rest for those who tackle international travel with small infants.

The Met, founded in 1817, is the largest research institution in the world for the history of art. There are more active, productive scholars working in this place than any other place. On the Planet.
They are researching in all the areas the Met represents in its encyclopaedic collection. And the Thomas J Watson Library, helmed by Ken, maintains a research level collection in all these areas. See the holdings info for the library here and here.

The Book Called Celestina, on the shelf in Ken's office

I ask all the librarians I visit about any bespoke practice, approaches and projects they are doing that sets them apart from the other art school and museum libraries.
Approaches to collection management came up, naturally. A locale such as the Met is a powerful magnet for publications. It is not hard for museum libraries to acquire books. Directors give them, curators give them. Authors give them. Donations are encouraged by the American tax codes. The Watson Library acquires through purchase and donation about 1500 books a month. Making these (hundreds of thousands) of books a viable resource requires some serious library science. So organisational development here at the Watson is paramount.
But dedicated, proactive acquisition practices also came up. To support the extraordinary reach of the museum's collection the Watson is making extra effort to acquire material from far flung corners of the globe. When I spoke to Ken they were working on acquiring modern and contemporary catalogues from Estonia, and also New Zealand.
One does not usually see NZ, Australia and eastern bloc countries lumped in together, but apparently we share a highly ineffective record of distribution of our museum and gallery catalogues. This stuff is simply not getting circulated out of the region. The Met is working to build their collection in these areas, and is soliciting material directly form the organisations when necessary.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Thomas J. Watson Library

I set off for my meeting with Ken Soehner, longtime Chief Librarian of the Thomas J Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sometime President of ARLIS/NA on a stunningly beautiful New York afternoon. Ken had been very encouraging of my art-library-tourist endeavours at the ARLIS/NA VRA conference earlier in 2011 in snowy Minneapolis, and I was very pleased to have some time with him in his august domain here at the Met.

The Very Impressive entrance to the Met (above) is matched by the Very Impressive chamber (below) one crosses to enter the Watson Library within.

Once within the library proper, however, I feel a little closer to familiar scale. The ubiquitous, imperceptible buzz of fluorescent tubes is a great democratiser.

The Cloisters: Very Old Books

I thank and farewell Michael, and traipse through the austere halls and galleries of the Cloisters.

I pause awhile at this illuminated Illuminated Manuscript.

This is the Manuscript of the Apocalypse, and I really want to touch it. Good thing it is covered with (probably bulletproof, certainly UV proof) glass. With a name like that who knows what could happen?

The Cloisters: Deep Stacks

This second, deeper stack room of The Cloisters Library holds the monographs unconverted to LC, and the rest of the archival material.

This has resulted in a awesome salmagundi, the best kind of bits and pieces.

Museum administration papers, the personal papers of founder George Grey Barnard, early glass lantern slides of material held by the museum, collections of images of museum under construction, curators papers both internal and external, scholars papers. Bequests of dealers records (particularly those whose merchantry contributed to the Cloisters collection), a bequest from scholars of medieval architecture. Spools of reel to reel tape of classical music for piping through the museum halls, back when one used reel to reel technology to sidestep vinyl records skipping. Piles of loose maps in various states of repair and decay. Basically, this room is crammed with wonderful, ephemeral and very orderly treasure.

And the longest, most impressive compactus I've ever met.

The Cloisters: Deep Stacks

Guest Post: A Tour of Biblioburbia

Vanessa Berry is a prolific zine maker (Vinnies, I Am A Camera, Disposable Camera) published author (Strawberry Hills Forever), artist (Firstdraft) and blogger (Vanessa Berry World). 
We are very excited to welcome her to the Art Library Crawl as Guest Writer, reporting on her truly splendiferous project Biblioburbia, which saw her explore and document Sydney's suburban public libraries and those libraries publics, culminating in an exhibition at Firstdraft Gallery in 2012.

Welcome to Biblioburbia! In this guest post I, Vanessa Berry, will be taking you on a tour of a few of Sydney's public libraries, based on the Biblioburbia blog. I started Biblioburbia in April 2011 to document my visits to suburban libraries. I'd done a similar project way back in 1999, in which I travelled to all of Sydney's St Vincent de Paul op shops. I made them into a zine, Vinnies. I don't plan to visit every one of Sydney's libraries - there are hundreds of them - but to date I have visited about forty.

The first library I visited was in Dural, in Sydney's north west. It is a small branch library, the first library I have strong memories of going to as a child. Everyone has childhood memories of libraries, and my memories from here were how much I liked my books being stamped when I checked them out, and of borrowing many hardback children's classics from here, books like The Water Babies. When I revisited Dural Library, it was naturally much smaller than it was in my imagination.

At this point in the project I wondered what exactly I would discover visiting public libraries, and if in fact it would be interesting enough to write about. But Dural library was more than interesting enough, in particular, people of all ages seemed to need books about Ancient Egypt urgently.

While some libraries I visited were familiar to me, others I chose at random, like Padstow, or Sans Souci. These were place I'd seen on the map but had never visited. As I was visiting "undercover" (I didn't inform library staff of my project or ever speak to anyone about it while I was on my missions), it was a somewhat unusual feeling to be sitting in the library of a suburb I'd never been to before, browsing through books and taking notes. I had chosen a good place to be inconspicuous with a notebook, however, libraries being one of the few places you don't draw attention to yourself writing in a notebook.

Sans Souci Library

Padstow Library

Many branch libraries were built in the 1970s, and have a similar brick appearance, although some were more unusual. The more I mentioned Biblioburbia to people the more library stories I was told, and some people recommended particular Sydney libraries. One man suggested I visit Greenwich library, as it is an octagonal building accessed via a bridge. Well, I had to check it out after this curious description.

Greenwich Library had a very cosy interior, classical music radio was playing, and the librarian quietly shelved books. It felt almost like being in someone's parlour, rather than a public library. 

Although I have a fondness for branch libraries, with their 1970s architecture and quirks - some, like Padstow, had many indoor plants, others, like Greenacre, are a curved building that made me imagine  I was inside a ship - I visited plenty of central libraries also. Often these were much newer buildings, such as Merrylands or Blacktown, pictured below. 

I developed a method for my library observations. I'd spend about 2 hours in each library, taking notes, browsing books, observing what was happening. There were plenty of library characters that I encountered, my favourite a man in Campbelltown library who was peering out from behind a large biography of Dennis Lillee, also observing everyone in the library, like an alternate universe version of me. 

After almost a year of writing Biblioburbia, I started work on an exhibition based on the blog. For this I made a map of Sydney, with each of the libraries I visited on it, as well as a detail from the blog post I wrote about each. I spent many nights at my desk, drawing the libraries, and noted that the older the building, the longer it took to draw. Waterloo Library, in the old town hall building, for example, took a particularly long time. 

I had chosen to visit Waterloo Library out of the ten City of Sydney library branches, as it was the one I knew least about, and I like the Addams Family style building it is housed in, even if it did take a long time to draw.

For the exhibition I made a large wall chart displaying all the libraries I'd visited. Each was marked with a coloured library card, and related to the relevant section of the blog, which I'd printed out and made into a book (on the plinth in the photo below).

I also made a print of the map with the Big Fag Press, a Sydney printing collective. 

The exhibition is now over, but Biblioburbia continues, exploring the suburbs and collecting library details, browsing the shelves and making all sorts of library discoveries. Many people have asked me which library is my favourite out of all the ones I've visited, but it's impossible to choose. I liked Avalon for being the only public library still to use date stamps and for having a puzzle section, I liked Burwood library for its book lined mezzanine, Engadine for its pink walls, Chatswood for its large collection of quarto books, Double Bay for its harbour view, Ashfield for its large biography section... every library I have visited has had something distinctive about it.