Many artists’ books explore the metaphor of the person-as-book or the book-as-person. There are the common clichés (to read someone like a book) and the shared anatomical vocabulary (spine, shoulder, head). At a deeper level, if we believe that a book enables communication between reader and creator, then it would seem to embody the creator in some way. And as the biblical reference in Johanna Drucker’s The Word Made Flesh (1996) suggests, the incarnated book is nothing new. Rather than offer a theory of the book-as-person, this blog post is exploratory: I survey works of contemporary art that deal with books, and especially with libraries, to see how the metaphor has been used.
Individuals as books
If we are told not to judge a book by its cover, it is because the analogy between books and people goes deeper than the spine or shoulder. After all, every person has a story. Perhaps the Human Library Organization has gone furthest in realizing this version of the person-as-book. While not framed as art, their events “where readers can borrow human beings serving as open books” to “have conversations they would not normally have” share obvious parallels with social practice art.[1] Tellingly, the organization’s slogan is “unjudge someone.” Artist duo Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead instead lean into first impressions in their take on the human library book: Borrow Me (2006). The human books are tagged with labels like “sleeper” or “gossiper,” and, as expected, they perform versions of these stereotypical behaviors that one might encounter among library patrons.
Books as their creators
Just as people can stand in for books, so too can books stand in for people. For his first sculpture, Pense-Bête (1964), Marcel Broodthaers entombed the remaining copies of his final poetry book in plaster to signal the death of his literary self and the beginning of his career as a visual artist. Publication and person are also equated by Thomas Hirschhorn in his monuments to philosophers: Spinoza Monument (1999), Deleuze Monument (2000), Bataille Monument (2002), and Gramsci Monument (2013). Each of the increasingly complex public works includes a library of works by the philosopher, which viewers can read.
Libraries as their collectors
Thus far, we have dealt with the analogy between books and their creators. But books can also represent their collectors. Anyone who has felt proud, or more likely self-conscious, as a guest examines their bookshelves will sympathize with Craig Dworkin’s The Perverse Library (2012). Having enumerated his entire collection, Dworkin can project an imagined book that would, in some way, represent himself: “a 48-page perfect-bound volume by Clark Coolidge [New York: Sun & Moon, 1982]. No such book actually exists; its details are merely the projection of a statistical mean.”[2] Buzz Spector’s exhibition and book, Unpacking My Library (1995) similarly investigates how the organization of one’s books represents them — with a nod to Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same title.
Dworkin and Spector bare their own libraries, but others are more interested in the voyeuristic (or scholarly) appeal of other people’s books. Abra Ancliffe’s Personal Libraries Library (2009–) recreates the libraries of influential thinkers and makers, and allows readers to check out the books. The idea that you can learn something valuable from someone’s library had led Anne H. Young to argue that artists’ personal libraries should be preserved as writers’ often are.[3] An example of one such project is Donald Judd’s library, perfectly preserved in Marfa. I would argue that its digital presence (you can virtually browse every foot of shelving) combined with its physical presence (where viewers are not allowed to browse) are as much a monument as anything by Hirschhorn. Robert Smithson’s library has also been saved, and furthermore, is the subject of artist Conrad Bakker’s Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library & Book Club, an impressive series of painted book surrogates.
Libraries as multitudes
For Dworkin, Spector, Ancliffe, and Bakker, the library stands in for an individual. But if a book can represent a person, then one can also see the library as a collective of many people. This is, indeed, the logic behind many memorials and monuments. Yinka Shonibare’s British Library (2014) is an installation of more than 6,000 books bound in the artist’s signature Dutch wax fabric. Many of the books’ spines are stamped with the name of immigrants or prominent opponents of immigration. The blank books are meant to represent future migrants. Shonibare’s follow-up American Library (2018) and African Library (2018) replicate the installation format but also include websites with archival documents and additional information about many of the people represented on the shelves.
Using a similar logic, Rachel Whiteread's Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (2000) is in many ways the opposite of Shonibare’s libraries. It is devoid of color, anonymous, and signifies loss. The memorial is one of the best-known libraries in contemporary art, but it is preceded by Micha Ullman’s The Empty Library (1995). Both are voids that resist would-be readers — Whiteread turns her library inside out, as if it is a negative space cast from an absent positive, and Ullman’s empty shelves are sunk beneath the street, extending meters underground. A plaque added later to Ullman’s memorial bears the most infamous analogy between people and books: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.” It is worth noting that Heinrich Heine wrote these words a century before the holocaust, and it is therefore no surprise that artists have used libraries to memorialize other conflicts.
Wafaa Bilal’s participatory installation 168:01 memorializes the University of Baghdad’s art library, which was burned during the 2003 US invasion. With rows of uniforms white books representing 70,000 lost volumes, it is through participation that the analogy between a person and a book is made. Donors can exchange one of the blank books for a new book requested by the university faculty. One book — one donor — at a time, the blank library gives way to culture. Another poignant work about a lost library derives its impact through the analogy of the book as person: Emily Jacir’s Ex Libris (2010–12). Jacir’s book presents books from the Jewish National Library in West Jerusalem that were looted during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Nakba. By photographing the handwritten inscriptions from the books’ frontispieces, often gifts from one person to another, Jacir reminds the reader of the individual behind the book.
Bilal and Jacir memorialize conflicts that destroyed people and books alike. However, the fact that both artists were drawn to the library shows how wrong it feels when books are assaulted. It may be unsurprising, then, that the analogy between the destruction of books and people can be reversed. Mohammad Sharaf’s installation The Cemetery of Banned Books (2018) envisions a mass grave of books to criticize the banning of 4,300 books in Kuwait. The rectangular tombstones echo the shape of a book, and each is inscribed with a title and stamped with “Banned in Kuwait.” The installation was, predictably, dismantled by the authorities.
- The Human Library Organization. “Unjudge Someone,” May 1, 2024. https://humanlibrary.org/.
- Dworkin, Craig. The Perverse Library. York: Information as material, 2010.
- Young, Anne H. “Preserving Artists’ Personal Libraries: Providing Insights into the Creative Process.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 35, no. 2 (2016): 339–51.
Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.
