CataBlogue
Catablogue is a project that documents my collection of arts and artists publications. It is an extension of the Wording project which is comprised of a series of writings that explore ideas of art writing and writing art. In so doing, those essays explore artists books, text based artworks, arts publishing and criticism through a multitude of lenses and encounters including my own forays into publishing, artist books and text based work.
CataBlogue is an attempt to repersonalise that project by documenting this personal, informal and accidental collection of work, including my own. I am exploring the idea of the catalogue while also critically using the blog as a platform for cataloguing, using its functions of chronology, time stamping, category and tag to create a dynamic document that is equally personal and critical. A quick Google reveals that I am certainly not the first person to conflate cataloguing and blogging, and there is already a practice – a tradition even – of using the blog as a form for all kinds of documentation and record keeping. This catablogue will somehow cross the territories of information management and memoir. It is only made of what I can create, remember or find. Anything else will have to be supplied by readers through comments.
I had been considering writing about the works that have somehow accrued in my life, filling shelves and boxes, as a way of reflecting on my own aesthetic leanings, as a way of reflecting on what kinds of objects an arts writer holds close, as a way of celebrating my own type of bibliophilia and mutiplied literacy, my own compulsion to explore the fugitive, ephemeral and furtive aspects of arts publishing practices. I was prompted to commence on this project after reading Robert Harbison’s essay Contracted World: Museums and Catalogues from the anthology Eccentric Spaces in which he refers to Rushkin as an obsessive cataloguer and objectifer. What’s particularly interesting about art/ist publications is that they traverse a pathway between museum or gallery and library. In the context of the museum, Harbison writes that catalogues “always survive the exhibition, rather test cases of the relation between art and experience, which fix the shortlived assemblage forever. The objects and the words are two systems that nearly coincide, the catalogue the meaning of which the things are only symbols.” (2000, 153)
I was also moved to initiate the project upon receiving a copy of Peter Anderson’s catalogue of Robert Jacks work, Jacks: The artist’s books of Robert Jacks. Important projects aren’t always wrapped up in monumental bindings or hard covers and Anderson’s catalogue of Robert Jacks’ work is a sensitive bibliography that embraces historiography and narrative. It is a catalogue – it is a history – it is a book. My own attempts at librarianship were shortlived: a few weeks working on the loans desk in a university library and then, some years later, another few weeks undertaking postgraduate study in the field. I am perhaps not sufficiently obsessive or orderly to undertake great cataloguing feats or amass magnificent collections. Though as those tentative forays might indicate, perhaps I would like to be. However, on both ocassions I felt overwhelmed – by books, by information – and I marvel at the abilities of librarians to ride those rising tides and chaotic currents.
Next to my computer lies Anderson’s Jacks catalogue (as I have been referring to it while writing), tucked between some papers on my desk is a small catalogue, (Un)coverings: Art, Writing and The Book, produced by Horus & Deloris Contemporary Art Space, Sydney, in the shelf next to the Harbison book is a commercially produced copy of Tom Phillips’ A Humument (a gift) and straight ahead, sitting side by side, are copies of a Ruark Lewis book (bought at Dark Horsey in Adelaide) and a David Byrne book (bought at a remainders store), also commercially printed. There is also a small stack of book-like works by my partner and former conceptual artist, JM John Armstrong, produced in the past decade as gifts and experiments. Not so long ago, while cleaning a storage space, we found a book John had produced in the early 1980s after an extended period of travel and while in residence at the University of Tasmania: this work, Ten Menhirs, is now in the custody of the State Library of Queensland.
Clearly, I am no librarian – books stack and tumble, they are strewn and random. The works will be logged as I find them with the chronology based on discovery. Tenuous links will be made through categories and tags. CataBlogue will chart a path through my own whims and whimsy, elaborating strange encounters in this world of artists writing and publishing.
Visit CataBlogue at
http://wordingcatablogue.wordpress.com
