Produced as an artwork in the format of a solo gallery show, this public reference library repurposed the ground floor of the gallery as an ad hoc reading room. There visitors were presented with ten free-to-handle books of new poetry by ten different authors. Each of these books explores what it might mean to write about speaking in the twenty-first century, each confronting the old and new forces that function under the surface of language to objectify speaking and the spoken, be it for better or worse. These authors, listed below, each took the double risk of calling that exploration 'poetic' and making it public in print.
The 'Pretty Brutal Library' walls displayed another collaborative poetic work, The Matter (2013), which I composed with Kim Rosenfield. This two-sided wall text hinged on a doubled doublet, which reads, "The brutal material of worlds / The brute material of words," amplifying the tensions which charged the exhibition as a whole. This text was also distributed as a component of a print edition, Notes for a Pretty Brutal Library, first for the inaugural Hannah Festival (for whom the text had been comissioned) in June 2013 and then at the Pretty Brutal Library that same year. The edition functions as a four-panel, folded card bookmark (250gsm; two-colour offset litho print with laminate; 60 x 420 mm; edition of 500). When the bookmark is unfolded the reader can interlock the slot joints to erect a self-standing model with exterior and interior walls. The front face of the print (which can be made into an exterior wall) presents nine sentences that contextualise the &Model Gallery exhibition. The back face of the print, when interlocked, presents the doubled doublets mentioned above in an infinite loop.
This show also marked the publication of my second book, Of the Subcontract (2013), a collection of poems about computational capitalism.
