The interviews are accompanied by “top ten” reading lists assembled by each artist, an introduction by Jo Steffens, and Marcel Proust’s seminal essay “On Reading. Photographs of each artist’s bookshelves present an evocative glimpse of personal taste, of well-loved and rare volumes, and of the individual touches that make a bookshelf one’s own. This is a book about books, but it even more importantly highlights the role of literature in shaping an artist’s self-presentation and persona. the opening of Walter Benjamins Convolute N. Unpacking My Library, or, The Autobiography of Teddy is the tale of this uprooting, a series of meditations on place, time, and loss. Through engaging interviews, the artists discuss the necessity of reading and the meaning of books in their lives and careers. Unpacking My Library: An Experiment in the Technique of Awakening. As the author recently moved to Manhattan, he fulfilled a lifelong dream: to write his own version of Walter Benjamin’s Unpacking My Library while reorganizing his 10,000 volumes. Artists and Their Books showcases the personal libraries of ten important contemporary artists based in the United States (Mark Dion, Theaster Gates, Wangechi Mutu, Ed Ruscha, and Carrie Mae Weems), Canada (Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller), and the United Kingdom (Billy Childish, Tracey Emin, and Martin Parr). Library, I ask you to participate momentarily in the dialectical tension between. The essay is held to be a half-ironic self-portrait showing some tensions or uncertainties in. With these words, borrowed from Walter Benjamins essay Unpacking My. The exhibition also presents both artists who. Even when broke, virtually homeless, and in poor health, he spent what money he had on books. The works displayed in this exhibition, show different approaches and ideas to collecting. Benjamin referred to his love of books as his bibliomania. Like Benjamins text, the displays take interest in the process of collecting, as much as the content of each collection. Benjamins reflections on collecting are analyzed with reference to Modernist themes in Baudelaire and Proust, and to the Modernist concern with memory in the structuring of the self. Using Walter Benjamins text as a platform, the Te Tuhi exhibition, Unpacking My Library, looks at expanded approaches to collecting. Taking its inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1931 essay, the Unpacking My Library series charts a spirited exploration of the reading and book collecting practices of today’s leading thinkers. This is a note on Walter Benjamins essay on collecting, 'Unpacking My Library' (orig. A captivating tour of the bookshelves of ten leading artists, exploring the intricate connections between reading, artistic practice, and identity
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