The library is larger than an influencers list - Understanding the breadth of art.

A lot in the online contemporary art space is hailed as revolutionary. Much is made of individual moments of novelty and newness, yet frighteningly little of it is actually new. In fact I’d say most often the only reason it is lauded by those with hordes of wealth and influence is simply because it is new to them.

Like so many who find themselves in a position of success they have fooled themselves in to thinking their skills and knowledge are ubiquitous, therefore if something is novel to them, they feel it must be so for others, and so they hold it up, proclaim it as such, and the mob does the rest.

But it is not just them I am begging to read more, there are plenty of creatives and consumers who all could do with a broader horizon. I’m not saying you have to dive headfirst in to a wall of academia and oeuvres, you don’t need to become a historian or install a personal library. Hell I’m not even strictly talking about “reading” as a literal concept.

In this instance in fact I say reading as a stand in. A stand in for viewing, for looking, for letting your attention both wander and be held by the work you look upon. Read in to the symbolism of the painted marks and colours, read about the medium, read subtitles on a foreign film or the mise en scene of another.

Buy a single compilation book of works in a genre of medium and flick through a few pages each day. Click on to the webpage or social of an artist who’s work you don’t understand and try to, try something new. Read some instructional for a medium you despise and realise the work that exists within it. Read the google results for “artworks that contain or do this” and realise that piece you’re about to hail as the most unique creation on the whole internet is actually a half century old idea copy and pasted.

Reading, the codification, preservation, and sharing of knowledge. It is our greatest magic spell. It has granted each generation that follows access to the distilled refined sum of all our knowledge, and in it all our power. It is a gift, and it is vast. Books hold such a paramount of potential and influence that they themselves have even been used as a medium, to add great meaning to the works they make up.

One such work that beautifully illustrates exactly what I describe here is by Sofia Leitão. In this work books are stacked, the older at the bottom, and fonts of gold push forth and flow from between them. In this they mirror the process through which life is compressed by time in to oil, here our knowledge is compounded, compressed and turned to gold.

Other works of note address the harder power held in books. Marta Minujín created the instillation “El partenón de libros” (above) using books that had been banned by the military Junta in her country, creating a powerful visage of knowledge and resilience, that spoke of what it was and why it was necessary all through the use of its unique medium.

In Jorge Mendez Blake’s work “castle” (above) a brick wall is seen distorted, its laying interrupted at the bottom by a copy of Kafkas book of the same name. Whilst the book focuses on the crushing inhuman nature of bureaucracy, the artwork aims to reframe it in to looking at how one individual can affect structures of power.

To compound my point those three works were pulled from a handful of pages in a single reference book on typographic art. There is so much out there. So much has been said in so many ways. And yet you’re still just reading the same five social studies books, Michelangelos work, and Warhols philosophy, and that’s fine if it’s all you want, but don’t judge the worlds library by the books you happen to have at home.