I was drawn into the New Museum on New York’s lower east side this morning, because I was curious to see “Museum as Hub: In and Out of Context”. I’m starting a new job on Monday as a Web Librarian at San Jose Public Library (yes!!!) and I was curious to see what kind of “hub” activities going on at the New Museum might be adaptable to the library world, especially since the web is such a great medium for collaboration. In their words, the Museum as Hub “reveals a partnership of arts organizations looking to pursue experimental methods of exhibition, communication, and collaboration, and considers the consequences of being part of a “hub”—what it means to displace conversations and activity from elsewhere to New York”.
I like this idea of “displacing conversations” from their origin, location, and intended context and rethinking their meaning in a completely different place. For that reason, I was really interested to find a public library project in the exhibition, a piece by Young Whan Bae of Korea. I’ll copy and paste the blurb from the New Museum’s pdf explaining the whole show.
“In his ongoing, utopian Library Project Young Whan Bae transforms used shipping containers into public amenities. With a goal of manifesting art as progressive social alternatives, Bae creates a self- sustaining system in which resources and funding from each commissioned library generate an additional library in a rural area lacking in public resources. Part of the artist’s larger “Rainbow” series, which includes Homeless Project (2000), a handbook for homeless citizens of Seoul, Tomorrow offers information and recreation to a remote community in which the notion of communion has been weakened by mobilization and displacement. Bae’s library is conceived to be a core medium that can resuscitate, reactivate, or catalyze a sense of communion in local communities. In his presentation for the New Museum, Bae presents furniture prototypes in corrugated cardboard and handmade scale models representing the modular system he adapts for each library location. Utilizing the official cultural space of the museum to promote and potentially actualize a small- town library demonstrates the artist’s purposeful quest for an art with social function.”
What DOES that mean, to bring an idea like this out of Korea and into New York City? Can this display, at the museum “hub” be useful to the New York Public Library as something to consider, or is it just a neat-o thing to look at in an art context? If you wanted to create your library as a hub, connecting international ideas, thoughts, and trends to your location for the sake of experiment, how could you improve on what they are doing in the education department at the New Museum?
