THE ANTI-LIBRARY

Lucie Fontaine is pleased to present “The Anti-Library,” an exhibition including works by Claire Fontaine, Agnieszka Kurant and David Robbins together with the Milan archive and Toute la mémoire du monde, a film directed by Alain Resnais. It will open on May 20 from 7 to 9 pm.

The exhibition is accompanying the homonymous and ongoing project that was presented in July 2012 at the space in Milan and it includes works by the aforementioned artists who have all been previously involved with Lucie Fontaine: Claire Fontaine worked with Lucie Fontaine on “Exceptions” a collaborative exhibition showcased at The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Agnieszka Kurant had a solo show at Lucie Fontaine’s Stockholm satellite as part of her project “Body of Work” at iaspis and David Robbins exhibited his work in “Estate,” Lucie Fontaine’s project at Marianne Boesky’s upper east side space.

At the same time what put these three artists together is their interest in writing as a tool to be employed in parallel to what can be defined as their ‘main’ practice, a division that Lucie Fontaine investigates through the selection of works of art by these artists that highlight how these two practices – writing and art making – are in their case definitely intertwined and therefore difficult to separate.

Claire Fontaine’s Surveiller et punir (2007) is part of the so-called series “bickbats.” These brickbats lift their name from the projectiles wrapped in a letter where a last warning is written and are generally thrown through windows as a threat. These sculptures are composed of bricks and brick fragments and a modified book cover scanned and digitally printed. The size of the books’ spine has been changed in order to match the thickness of the bricks, therefore the petrified books all seem to have the same size. The gesture of ‘petrification’ of these volumes underlines the illegibility of the books, the fact that theory is inaccessible for the majority of the population and that it is increasingly difficult nowadays to attribute a use value to written texts.

Agnieszka Kurant’s Phantom Library (2011) is a project, which consisted in creating a library of fictional, invisible books – books that don’t exist, except in the pages of other books. Fictional, imaginary books unwritten, unread, unpublished mentioned or described in real books by authors such as Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Richard Brautigan. Kurant produced the fictional invisible books as real sculptural objects for which she bought ISBN numbers and barcodes to give them status in the material world. Behind each book there is a complex economy of its production process designed to manufacture hundreds or thousands of copies.

David Robbins’ bookcase was designed especially for Lucie Fontaine’s space in Milan and embodies their ongoing dialogue. Its goal is to host Lucie Fontaine’s publications, three of which feature contributions by the aforementioned artists. Deliberately dysfunctional, this object – which will permanently remain in the space – appears as one of the several symbolic materializations of his practice, which questions the boundaries between art and entertainment but also analyzes American culture and its movement between the intellectual and the vernacular.

Following the first presentation of the Anti Library, the Milan archive consists of a group of unread books selected by members of the Milanese artistic community, following the invitation of Lucie Fontaine. You can find more details about the initial here.

The project’s coda is Alain Resnais’ Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) a film on the potential and the limits of dutifully archived human knowledge, masquerading as a documentary on the organization of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

Lucie Fontaine is open by appointment only, if you would like to see the show please email her employees.

Photo : The Human Bookshelf by David Blazquez.