Bookshelf
Art No: 13
Artist: Max Steven Grossman
Location: Lobby Lounge
Medium: Archival pigment print on Dibond
Date Created: 2024
There has been talk of the demise of the book and the demise of photography for quite some time now. It is unlikely, at least for the immediate future, that books and photographs will disappear, but it is a fact that those objects are no longer what they used to be, and that our relationship with the knowledge, truth power they articulated for centuries has changed. One of the changes most often spoken about is that there has been a democratization regarding who makes and collects both electronic texts and images. Millions with access to computers and certain infrastructural needs like electricity and Internet without having to think of themselves as writers of photographers. This kind of public literacy has demystified the ways in which power, knowledge and truth had been naturalized as intrinsic to technically produced and reproduced texts and images. Today everyone now knows that there is no scientific objective truth behind any printed word or any photograph -only the assurance that a specific point of view was adopted.
Max Steven Grossman's Bookscapes question these transformations. Printed large enough to pass as an actual library, these images point to the gradual loss of paper books, especially those that inhabited homes and fostered learning, dreaming, escapes. These surface only libraries are now commodities of the art world, that can be purchased according to themes-art, film, music, fashion- and literally reproduce both the classic cataloguing systems of libraries, as well as the fantasies and desires of their owners, collapsing the distance between public and private libraries. Yet these images are composites, collages in Grossman's own words. The books in every image have never quite been placed in that way except in the virtual space of his computer. Grossman photographs some of the books in bookstores he visits, others he finds floating in the sea of Internet images. He builds collections and then chooses from his own image banks. When looked at from a close distance, you can see that each book spine has a distinct image quality, revealing their different provenance, their composite or collage character.
Artist Bio