A project to digitally catalog the 13,000 book library of artist Donald Judd has recently been completed and the results are pretty phenomenal. Behind the scenes there is an ordinary database which can be accessed through the standard interface of input fields and a search button. However, unlike a boring old library catalog, the Judd Library is best viewed through a custom augmented reality style interface akin to Google Street View.
Starting with the library’s top-down floor plan, you can click on various rectangles representing each bookcase. They’re unlabeled, so pick one at random and you are presented with a photograph of the bookcase overlaid with catalog information. Click again to zoom to a particular shelf, then mouseover to reveal information about each book. As a huge proponent of not overdoing the interface metaphor, I was surprised by how much I didn’t hate this interface. In fact, I love it.
One reason that it works so well is because it preserves—and honors—the aspects of a library that are lost in the conversion to a database. Artinfo has an excellent interview with the Judd Foundation’s executive director Barbara Hunt Lanahan, who expands on this:
Touring the library online, it’s interesting to note the different objects placed here and there on the shelves.
Isn’t that the case for everyone? Don’t you have objects placed on your bookshelf? When you go to someone’s home, it’s always intriguing to look at somebody’s bookshelf and see what books they have and also the small objects they’ve collected from different travels around the world. It gives an incredibly interesting portrait of the owner. On Judd’s shelves, there’s a piece of volcanic rock, there are little wooden objects, there’s a beautiful magnifying glass. There are lots of rocks, since Judd often used them as paperweights.
These bits and bobs don’t show up in the search, so chancing upon them is like finding little pieces of treasure. You’ll also see lots of empty spaces, piles of horizontally stacked books, and other idiosyncratic forms of organization (all consistently linked to individual book pages).
While the order may be less logical than the Dewey Decimal system, Judd arranged his books with meticulous intention:
Rainer [Judd, the artist’s daughter] tells a story about seeing her dad carrying these boxes of books stacked high across the courtyard and telling him, ‘You know, Dad, you could have one of your studio assistants do that for you.’ And he would say, ‘Absolutely not.’ He personally arranged those books on the shelves, he didn’t want somebody else to be organizing his books there.
Browsing through the photographs and floor plan of Judd’s library is like stepping into his memory palace. “If you go to the library I think you start to understand how thorough and complex and interesting an artist he was. You get it,” says Lanahan. It reveals how he dealt with information. For example, he arranged his art books by the birth date of the artist as opposed to their names but never completed filing them in this way. Another treat is that you can look through the empty space in one shelf onto further rows, giving a sense of the organizational logic as it exists in three-dimensions.
I can’t imagine a more perfect and faithful posthumous digitization effort.
Touching on Judd’s sometimes contentious relationship with museums and galleries, Lanahan concludes:
I think the art world doesn’t necessarily want to hear from an artist who has very strong views about how their work should be presented, and so perhaps that’s a view that the art world’s had for whatever reasons because he was an artist who was standing up for himself and defending his rights.
Props to the Judd Foundation staff and programmer Ryan Tainter on this site. There is (of course) lots of room to improve the browsing experience and to experiment with new possibilities, but in a time where Google is reducing libraries to a database of scanned pages, it’s absolutely heartening to come across this site.
