Space

Space is architecturally defined and architecture is not neutral. It encodes relations of bodies to places, institutional identities, and layers of symbolic class, gender and cultural significations and effects. So let me play art historian for a moment and offer a reading of what it takes to approach, enter and use the main Brotherton Library. Obviously, architects and social advisors have changed library design and architecture over the years. The new Laidlaw student library at Leeds involves café areas as well as sitting areas, cosy corners, spaces of co-learning. Its access is significantly street level. Nothing disguises the library as still the prison-house of books, requiring users’ entry passes, check-ins and checkouts and turnstiles and alarms. The library as a collection of books is upstairs, like a storeroom. The Brotherton Building has a round reading room with beautiful wood worktables like so many spokes radiating to the outer circle of rooms each containing its treasure house.

Let me introduce a famous story about a library visit from cultural theorist Raymond Williams’ 1958 essay titled ‘Culture is ordinary’. It starts in the library of Wells Cathedral where priceless medieval manuscripts were actually chained to their shelves.

Williams then describes the bus journey into the Welsh Valleys where he grew up before he went to Cambridge and felt at home once again in the Wren Library of Trinity College, even as he felt the social divisions between his working-class Welsh but highly literate home and the treasures on offer in Cambridge. Cutting through class as a divider, and tearing down false divisions between high or privileged and low or vernacular culture, Williams theorized culture broadly and inclusively:

For Raymond Williams class is perhaps the most forgotten of our current anxieties about the nature of our teaching, curricula and the experience of accessing the pasts through the special processes of discovery and learning. Every gendered, ethnically specific or neuro-sensorially singular person is also a product of class, experiencing a common or uncommon way of life. Public libraries were critical instruments for the democratizing possibilities for scholars such as Raymond Williams who considered himself the heir of the Wells’ clerics. Class also continues to alienate and exclude students from feeling at home in the architectural and cultural form of the library. So, with Williams on our minds, let me now take you on a more mundane journey to a library where ways of living and the specialisms of arts and learning come into stark confrontation.

To get to the Brotherton, we must climb up ceremonial steps derived from sacred or political buildings, enter portals that dwarf the normal individual's body height, and find ourselves in the vast halls of the Parkinson Court. This entry into the building takes place under a clock tower, rising into the sky. Is it a beacon of enlightenment or a phallic spire pointing up while making visible on the city's skyline the monumental building it landmarks? The scale and extent of the double wings of Parkinson Court again makes us feel small and lost in borrowed classical grandeur. The 1930s Parkinson building and its interior are fronts built around and containing the original Brotherton Library whose architectural form is modernist-classical, echoing the unbuilt but ever symbolic project of Etienne-Louis Boullée to build a cenotaph to Isaac Newton as the former sought a visual and architectural form beyond classicism by embracing the ordering of the universe imagined in Newtonian mechanics, by science itself. Thus Boullée used a globe form with an interior of concentric circles. This clearly inspired the builders of the British Library in part because a circular library enabled natural illumination from a domed roof. Industrialist Baron Brotherton and those who commissioned and paid for his library's construction wanted to rival the British Library. They built a central reading room several centimetres larger in diameter than the London building. Thus, we enter the symbolically circular space of the Brotherton that also evoked the Pantheon in Rome with its central opening to the sun.

Gendering space and form might lead us to ask if the circular models of reading rooms and libraries are more psychologically hospitable, calming and inviting to the reader or user. One example of the use of the circular for intellectual reasons is the library I spend much time studying, titled the Mnemosyne Library, created by Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) for which he built a special building in a very rectangular modernist style inside which was his circular library that exemplified his major principle: good neighbourliness. The design itself was a critique of the disciplinary divisions in the European university. Faculties segregated subjects from each other, subjects that were inherently interactive, mutually determining, and creatively in conversation. The Kulturwissenschaft Bibliotek Warburg (KBW) physically demonstrated Warburg's radical theory of intersecting knowledge, and equally proposed art as a form of migratory cultural memory.

Kurt Forster has argued that:

Faced with imminent destruction by the Nazis, the KBW was rescued and brought to London in 1933 and is now housed in a rectangular early twentieth century building — the Warburg Institute — full of straight lines and ranks of shelving. It has lost, in its vast scale now, the intimacy and hospitality of its original curving interior.

So when I invited my students to join me in the circular centre of the Brotherton University Library, I wanted them to experience finding, entering and being in vast and already symbolically charged spaces where class, ethnic background, regionality, educational experience, privilege, or deprivation, would all shape how they felt there — what being in the university library would be like psychologically. Dwarfed by scale and feeling tiny amongst so many are themselves a shock, a physical reminder of the material making of knowledge and the treasuring of it in the form of the Library.

Let's move onto behaviour, etiquette, know-how. How do you know what to do in a library? Silence is not our normal state. It is here. Stillness of people sitting reading is not most of today's students’ everyday world. I wanted the students to be open about this phenomenological and psychological journey. I also hoped they would think it through as artists and potential art historians, becoming aware that behind what I had simply asked them to do — join their lecturer in an academic space — was the substance of what they would study, and for that they would need what was stored up in this space.

System

I wanted to enable them to see more than lots of books. Library science is all about information management and the key is a code, namely the classification system that enables us to find individual books. I took them into the area for Art History—such a treasure trove for bibliophiles such as myself. I wanted to help them to see Art History as a discipline by analysing the ordering and layout of the books in this subject area. Classification defines what the subject is. I gave them all the classification guide provided by the Library. The system starts with a section called ‘General’, itself subdivided by political geography (French, British, Italian etc.), then by themes and media. The largest category, taking up bay after bay after bay is ‘C.0: Biography’ — artists classified by name.

This confirms that conventionally Art History has become artist-centred. Two kinds of books — the monograph and the catalogue raisonné — are the both the tools and the products of art historical research. Through my work on Van Gogh, I came to identify this focus on the artist as an ideological process that produces a ‘subject’ (a psychological centre) for art so that we consume and understand art through artistic subjectivity at the pinnacle of which is the genius.Footnote ⁵ This has two sides, like a coin. One produces the creative subject for art that increasingly came to be identified only with men as genius. The obverse is the disappearing of artist-women documented since antiquity but actively exiled from art's histories during the twentieth century. Hence artist-women belatedly re-enter their actual place in the histories of art because Art History (the discipline's selective account of art's diverse histories) has already disappeared them inside a concept of the artist that is indifferent to difference and specificity because it is sustaining a singular, masculinized concept of the artist-genius.

Aby Warburg was not interested in Vasarian hagiography of individuals or artist-centred Art History. He focussed on the cultural process of the image that he analysed as carrier and transmitter of cultural memories of once real actions. Art originated in actual rituals that exorcized the terrors of fragile human life shaped by forces our ancestors did not control or that celebrated ecstasies and conveyed depressivity. Warburg termed the performances-become-memories-in-images as pathos-formulae, formulations of intense affects. Pathos formulae slowly engendered symbolic and religious practices that further managed and institutionalized these affective states. Opposing the directions of formalist and connoisseurial Art History of the later nineteenth century, Warburg defined his project as Kulturwissenschaft— translatable as cultural analysis. It cannot, however, be classified by geography or nation, period, theme or artist, because Warburg revealed these image-memory forms as trans-spatial and migratory. He had, therefore, to invent his own classification system for their neighbourliness rather than hierarchy, periodization and political geography.

The politics of knowledge, or what is not there

Looking across the disciplines, the publishers, the marketing, the museums, the trade in artists, we can uncover another value system at work: a politics of knowledge. Libraries can only buy what is written, published and reviewed. They thus curate the exclusions and the selectivity: our libraries have conserved a Eurocentric and male-gender-exclusive version of art's histories. Man equals artist and everyone else, black, queer, women, becomes a sub-category, if acknowledged at all.

From the early 1970s, my co-author Rozsika Parker and I researched the missing histories of artist-women in the private London Library. Forbidding in its long metallic stacks, its collection formed in the 19^th century and enriched by donations of bibliophiles, the London Library cherished histories of artist-women through the ages, alongside the literary, musical, and philosophical works by women. Over my 43 years at the University of Leeds and my 51 years as an art historian, I have seen this change — a little. The effect may be, however, only that more monographs of artists who are women will take their place in the ‘C.0 Biographies and works of artists’, reinforcing the cult of the individual artist. Group shows will be placed under movement, possibly geographically and nationally separated. Feminist, postcolonial and queer international studies in the visual arts cannot and do not fit into this much used classification of art. One idle summer, I decided to analyse where the books I have written as a feminist art historian were classified in the University Library's unique classification systems. Old mistresses: Women, art & ideology was first filed under gender in ‘Sociology’: but now is under “B.0 PAR. General”. Charlotte Salomon and the theatre of memory is in ‘C.O Biography etc.’; After-affects/after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in ‘A.0.05 Aesthetics, criticism, appreciation’; Avant-gardes and partisans reviewed ‘B.05 1800-1945’ (collections of essays); Vision and difference in ‘A.0.06 Study and teaching of Art’; Psychoanalysis and the image in ‘A.0.05 Aesthetics, criticism, appreciation’; Framing feminism goes into ‘Period: Twentieth century’, and so on. All this attests to the genius of the librarians finding homes for books within a classification system that does not have theoretical, methodological locations or we might even say a space for politics of knowledge created in the historical challenges to the modes of knowledge production post-1968: namely the ‘studies’ movements such as women's, postcolonial, cultural etc. What would a library look like if theoretically-enriched and historically situated feminist, queer, international postcolonial art historical cultural interventions, let alone Holocaust studies, trauma studies and so forth also had locations in the classification or indeed appeared as good neighbours, and thus made present the cultural revolutions of the later twentieth century that are not folded into the categories of bourgeois knowledge created by the Humboldtian system of faculty and discipline: History, Philology, Philosophy, Aesthetics, Art History, Classics, etc.?

With my students I wanted to help them see the historical and ideological scripting of knowledge that would make their task of finding the good neighbours of feminist studies in Art History impossible – let alone enable them to follow one author's lifework.

The Studies movement was the revolt within the new social movements — anticolonial, civil rights and Black power, feminism, gay & lesbian movements, battling against imposed cultural invisibility and non-recognition in the official maps of social knowledge. Universities and libraries, not the librarians, have not grasped the nature of that challenge to knowledge systems that these movements and their intellectual project incited, because, as we know from Foucault and others, knowledge systems sustain systems of power. Librarians can cross classify and create invisible chains that make possible ways of searching. Yet, the physical library stores the books in ways that segregate them. Obviously, you will say, students may eventually find them via the search engines and cross referencing. I know that. The question of the library as physical entity remains.

What I was introducing was a lot for first years to take in. I did not take them all the way down this line. I just wanted them to see that even in this archaic collection of real books there was also an algorithm, as it were — the politics inherent in the classification system. In addition, I hoped they might grasp that their entire sense of knowledge, in the non-physical cyberspace universe, also was being also pre-packaged— if not by a Dewey classification system, but by an algorithm-based system shaped by advertising, popularity and profiling. They would be offered that which they had already been recorded to have been seeking.

Their only bulwark against circularity and limiting reinforcement of such a process—that is not research — but iteration, is the librarian, the human expert in information management and also engaged and dedicated scholar of the world of writing, thought and its resources. This brings me closer to your theme. There are real threats to jobs, to the very existence of arts and design libraries as the Arts and Humanities are further eroded and devalued in the dominant rationality of economic instrumentalization. In his inaugural lecture in 2015 as Chair of Critical Humanities at the University of Leeds, cultural theorist John Mowitt warned demoralized Arts and Humanities scholars from mobilizing ultimately failing defences of our areas based on value. He argued that we need to avoid advocating the value of the Arts and Humanities, which, being incalculable, cannot compete with what is calculable in neoliberal economic rationality. He advised us instead to mobilize the terms and methods of the Arts and Humanities, namely the skills of analysis, reading, interpretation.Footnote ⁶

What I am presenting here is the figure of the library as an idea: its agency, its phenomenology, its physical, material and architectural relation or perhaps alienating-relation to those whose minds and creativity we wish to foster and support in their acquisition of the critical tools with which to decipher the opacity of contemporary capitalist societies in their constantly morphing, liquid, yet relentlessly cruel and unequal forms.Footnote ⁷ The decolonizing, queering, ‘feministing’ — to use the phrase created by Gill Park in 2018 — is clearly on the agenda for meeting the critique of the inherited forms, buildings, contents and omissions.Footnote ⁸ As a writer, I aimed to supply libraries — rather than to research their histories — with the kind of historical knowledge and theoretical framing of a scholar such as library historian Alistair Black. My sense of the future takes me to my final section.

Mourning and melancholy

When doing my tax returns some years ago, a rookie accountant puzzled over the item ‘Books’ which had quite a sum beneath its title. ‘Oh, so this is capital investment: you are creating a library’, she said. ‘No’, I said. ‘I just buy books, earning the money to do so by giving lectures based on those books that I acquire’. Why? To collect them together from a library would involve both exceeding my allowance and running all over the place. This way I can arrange them in my study according to the patterns of my various projects with cultural theory being at their core. These books, classified by my own politics of knowledge, form a double portrait of my academic and intellectual trajectory across a changing cultural-theoretical landscape. My non-library is, finally, a self-portrait of a feminist, postcolonial, queer, international, Jewish and feminist studies art historian and cultural analyst who studies the work done and by images, space, experiences, formulations, systems — all taught by art. Finally, I could not trust that I would find what I needed in libraries for the reasons above.

My family now despair of my books. No actual library has the space or the financial resources to acquire and catalogue collections such as mine that constitute a political history of the formation of feminist studies in art, film and cultural studies. I intend to document this library for myself and, with the Holberg Prize, I may be able to fund the archivist and the classification. This is not an appeal for a home. My books archive the cultural memory of an age that, at its end, is unlikely to value books in the way that historically-minded societies do.

I recently attended a conference in Jewish studies. Its theme was crisis. The subpanel was on crisis in Jewish heritage in libraries and museums. The librarian of the amazing Leo Baeck Library in London gave a presentation on what she had done during the pandemic when her library went unnaturally silent. She created an exhibition about the stamps in the books, tracing histories not only of ownership, but of communities, of links, of trade and markets, collectors and journeys. It was riveting. Even as the demonstration and indeed the platform had necessarily been virtual, the indexing via the material history of the object to the fragile and almost destroyed cultural histories of a very book-oriented Jewish culture and theology, philosophy and art resonated in the listeners, who were formed, as I was, in book culture. This is not just fetishism, but a practice whose memory we may now need to preserve as historical model of what culture has been. Jewish culture is a case study as a minority culture with a menaced future, placeless in our to do list. If we take it as exemplary of physical, scribal, visual and material culture, we might use this example as metaphor for what we confront in art and design. Art books are being produced but in very small publication numbers, often richly illustrated and hence vastly expensive — especially if they focus on a named artist and say nothing difficult. Scholarly books are, however, intellectually dense. Their publishers can afford fewer and fewer illustrations. The costs of illustration for my books have ranged from £2-7k a go! Sources for funding are limited and subventions paid for academic publishers are de rigueur to get any colour.

This is a more than a small element of the major issues you are confronting as art and design librarians. You are keepers of cultural memory at a time when cultural memory has become cheap or irrelevant in the constant flow of electronic information and the flux of banalized ideas. In the topic I proposed for Holberg symposium in 2020, Is Feminism a bad memory?, I wanted to explore the modes of cultural memory of an intellectual revolution inspired when ‘feminist’ was a call to thought and action that has been banalized in the era of what I term (pace Derrida and Spivak) ‘instagrammatology’. I am not being another dinosaur bemoaning social media and its malign effects. I am another concerned intellectual watching with anxiety the flattening of thought into weaponized positions of inflexible and divisive certainty. ‘Instagrammatology’ is not to be confused with the genuine urgency with which the politics of knowledge has exploded around us under the influence of profoundly important social and cultural uprising against terminal injustice and inhumanity. The calls for ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, for decolonization of the curricula and teaching personnel of universities and colleges is the outrage at and genuine impatience with delayed justice and failed inclusivity. The delusion is that calling for change and reform by calling out the individual wrongdoers makes visible the power systems that benefit and that have no intention of making anything more than cosmetic change.

If there is any specific feature of my own work, it has been the struggle with the entanglements of power and the agonism that arises between the powerless in their diverse struggles against single facets of the systems. Have I wandered too far from libraries and the future? Probably, but in fact, not. My little anecdote about taking some students to the University of Leeds Brotherton Library was all about the benefits of being an art historian crossed with cultural studies that produces the transdisciplinary triangle of analysis, theory and history enshrined in a now derelict CentreCATH that I have maintained for 20 years. Without the tools of visual, image and cultural analysis, power, class, race, sexuality, difference, language, architecture, space, thought gets classified into separate disciplinary boxes, departments, schools and library spaces. Their division sustains us in powerless ignorance.

The History of Art is my chosen field while Art History — the discipline — has been my life-long antagonist, or rather, the object of my not entirely benign critique. Art History is a disciplinary formation, a museal and academic technology of class, race and gender knowledge production that has simultaneously produced ignorance and maintained indifference to the agonism of all three. The discipline creates its officiants, many drawn into a field made rich by the inflated monetary values created in the art market for its prime commodity — ‘the artist and his (rarely her) works’. Against the vast gains from financialized investment in art post the banking crisis (2007), the massive draw of income-generating blockbuster exhibitions, the necessity to offer art as painless leisure entertainment, dinner party conversation topic, and cultural capital, the painful questions of intricated histories and continuing and very present legacies of enslavement, genocide, femicide, homophobia and the brutalities neo-liberal and state capitalisms are feared or silenced, trivialized or dismissively ignored while publics are insulated by massaged media.

Our libraries are the basis of any critique and challenge. Yet they are captured in their own formations by the classes, race and genders of the collectors and donors who created the core collections of, or even the instituted, the great libraries. Public libraries are starved out of existence by impoverished councils choosing between heating for the old and cultural nourishment for the everyone. Neoliberal economism is not, however, just a nasty recent turn. It is the full force of a reactionary defence of the inequality and injustice that the radical social and cultural movements erupting 60 years ago called out and protested both on the streets and in the libraries. The Arts and Humanities are being delegitimised as valueless expenses. Why? The critiques of the politics of knowledge and the systems they support have emerged within them and been articulated loudly by their thinking scholars. While genetics research carries a legacy of racist origins and physics, we now discover that genetics and even microphysics are very queer — I am thinking of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Lynn Margulies, Isabelle Stengers etc. These fields are not, however, the leading sites of resistance or revolt in the ways in which the humanities and arts have been. Those of us in art practice or Art History find ourselves between a once critical project and the current financialization of art and art consumption. There are vast millions involved in manufacturing the artist as individual genius, making the case for and sustaining the marketable status of selected names as leaders of the investment pack. Little money exists to support the poorly illustrated, text dense works of the critical thinkers hardly able to afford copyright fees and reproduction licenses for artworks in the straitened academic publishers.

What future for art and design libraries? You are the experts. I am a user and a creator of a library. The doubled burden of being keepers of cultural memory and facilitators for new learners more accustomed to a virtual ‘library’ at the touch of a computer keyboard travelling the internet with its inbuilt algorithmic selectivity is a challenge to which I can offer no immediate consolation. I do feel, however, that there needs to be more understanding of the architectural and material library as more than a reserve, a café with books, a last resort when the internet fails, a place to meet up. Nostalgic for the materiality and integrity of the world of books, I face the publishers’ decisions to print hard cover at ridiculous prices for libraries, often printing only on demand, and butchering conceptually coherent books into purchasable cuts, chapter by chapter, again at ridiculous prices for each individual slice.

I want to end where I concluded on the last occasion when I spoke to the ARLIS community. Then, I discussed with the fate of the specialist library created for and by the Department of Fine Art, founded in 1949 by Herbert Read with its collection regularly enlarged by donations from its academic staff — artists Maurice de Sausmarez, Lawrence Gowing and Stephen Chaplin, art historians Arnold Hauser, T.J. Clark, and many others like myself over the years. Too expensive to maintain (the cost was 13k per annum for a quarter-time librarian and space charges), the holdings were summarily given away to another local university who thought that the books were about contemporary art. Abandoned by that institution the 10,000 unwanted books were left to be pulped. Alerted to this tragedy, four of us, all bibliophiles, rushed to rescue the remnants no other library would take because we knew the importance of, and loved, the history of Art History, the history of art publication, all of which relativize the present by revealing how recent the field is, how it coincided with photographic illustration and illustrated publication itself, how scholars for generations wrote using only fine printed black and white illustrations, how national schools of interpretation emerged and diverged, how key art publishing houses were founded by exiled Jewish refugees from the great European cities, how popularisation witnessed the arrival of handbooks and cheap readable publications. Many of your libraries in art and design are in art colleges, serving fine art students uninterested in Art History even as they have to do some academic research and writing — largely contextual, presentist and driven by current exhibition visibility. Your choices for acquisition will be budget-driven and depend upon knowledge of where art is at present, what are the key issues for your students’ needs. That means exhibition histories and catalogues, sales, and big expensive show catalogues with short essays and lots of images.

But who is, at the same time, teaching the students to analyse — to read — the biennial catalogue, to deconstruct the blockbuster, to recognize the cultural politics of the curatorial? How can make sure that the students’ access to the work they need to know about is accompanied by the ways of knowing what their present is, how and why the market defines what is shown and vice-versa, what the nature of art today is — if they do not get a critical purchase on the past, even as the past that is stored up may still be too white and too male, Eurocentric and heterocratic.

The future does depend on libraries, but it also depends on libraries that themselves examine and enable — with critical study using cultural analytical tools — the figure of the library, the institution itself, its systems, and the way the library speaks power and cultural structures that exclude, dislocate, dissipate, and thus deny the contesting voices while also being a potential site of their collection and preservation. Adding in more books by and about artists of colour may do some, but not enough, transformative work — simply because classification by geography and nation is an imperial relic incapable of grasping the meaning of migratory and postcolonial identities. Artists, thus listed might are separated from those whose writing frames them in related fields of post-colonial, queer, feminist and neurosensorially diverse studies.

Thus, on my trip with my first-year students to the Brotherton library's amazing art section I had to invite them physically into its space, that I am sure the majority of art librarians also invited them to come and explore, with inductions they may or may not have attended. My purpose was not just to enable them as users. I wanted them to understand a library differently as a deep resource but also as text to be deciphered and read. Perhaps a recorded podcast or video integrating the tools of their subject of study with the analysis and how to use guidance would have been better. Art History, however, like architectural history, cultural history and even the real library itself, is materialized in the form of books and the shape and system of their collection. The library is a phenomenological experience in present time and space without a feeling of being at home. It is also a force field through which we must wander to encounter Warburg's good neighbourliness and experience the unforeseen discovery. It might be thought that the erosion of real space for electronic space and its instant digital pathways might approximate to Warburg's archaic idea of the electrical charge generated in the proximity of disparate fields within a circular library that does not privilege linearity or divide books by temporality. I do not think so. I mourn the fact that I cannot share my delight in the book. In one of my most recent projects, preparing a reprint of Helen Rosenau's remarkable book, published in 1944, Woman in art, I bought some original clothbound, black and white Phaidon publications from 1935 that she had herself used in order to find certain images for her own work, but also to imagine this moment when Art History (the discipline) in Britain became a matter of books only when two presses were created by exiled Jewish publishers—Thames & Hudson and Phaidon — who aimed to cultivate a wider reading public for art's histories.

We, the lecturers and writers, need to work more closely with the librarians at a much deeper level of analysis of our cultural present and the ways we can speak back to its corrosive liquidity (Zygmunt Bauman) by enabling both understanding of and pleasure in the book, the magazine, the flyer, the catalogue, as well as the advances of contemporary virtuality and technology. To the bemused students, I am sure that I appeared like an alien from another world seeking to fascinate them with ‘orders of knowledge’, ‘pleasures of the book’, and ‘the space of discovery of the not-programmed unknown’. I retired soon after and could not follow this initiation up. So I returned to my own headache: how to catalogue and share perhaps virtually online what my feminist library had been. Rendered as images on an internet seller the real books may find other homes on other continents, in school libraries who need something to teach Art History with—or at the pulpers recycling the paper. I should have followed up my introduction to the Brotherton to see if it had any effect, except to keep me thinking about the issue. Instead I think, thanks to you, about the history of the library as a form, an experience, and an urgency, and as cherished home to thought, wonder and discovery.

Paper originally presented as keynote at the ARLIS UK & Ireland Conference 2021, 21 July 2021.