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Reading the library: Institution, archive and the future of a field

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2022

Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock*
Affiliation:
Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art University of Leeds Leeds UK Email: [email protected]
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Extract

In my last years of teaching at the University of Leeds (2019-20), I invited all first-year Fine Art and Art History students to meet me in the circular Reading Room of University of Leeds Library. I felt that, for many students arriving at university, the space, form, function and use of a research, or even a reference, library might be inhibiting, alien at worst and certainly overwhelming. My aim was to get them inside, and to then explore the Library as an architectural-spatial text written with books ordered and spaced according to classification systems that already encode and pre-frame their fields of knowledge amidst other discrete fields. Moreover, my lectures to them would question the system of classifying art and its histories laid out for them in the library. I might indeed deeply challenge this ‘order of things’ (to quote Michel Foucault.)1

Type
Research Article
Information
Art Libraries Journal , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 59 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of ARLIS

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References

1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966).

2. Williams, Raymond, “Culture is Ordinary,” in Williams, Raymond, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy and Socialism, ed. Gable, Robin (London: Verso, 1989), 3Google Scholar.

3. Williams, 4.

4. Forster, Kurt, “Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents,” October 77 (Summer, 1996), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Pollock, Griselda, “Artists, Media and Mythologies; Genius, Madness and Art History,” Screen 21, no. 3 (1980), 57-96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Mowitt, John, “On the One Hand, and the Other,” College Literature 42, no. 2 (2015), 311-336CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

8. Park, Gill, “Feministing Photography: The Pavilion Women's Photography Centre: Looking Back to Act Forwards” in Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms, ed. Depwell, Katy, (Amsterdam: Plural/Valiz, 2020)Google Scholar.