NEWSgrist - where spin is art

The People's Library

From the Occupy Wall Street Library (pre-raid). Image: Mira Schor

What follows is an excerpt from a recent post by Mira Schor about The People's Library at Zuccotti Park, and a piece from Inside Higher Ed on the librarians who make it all possible, with a video clip by author Matthew Battles on the history of libraries and protest. Links to the history and catalog of The People's library provided at the end.

 

via Mira Schor, A Year of Positive Thinking, November 15, 2011:

Books are like people

When the NYPD raided the Occupy Wall Street Encampment at Zuccotti Park this morning, they tossed  the 5,554 books that were assembled from donations into The People’s Library, an extemporaneous institution with a proper librarian and its own website,  into dumpsters.

According to the story as reported this morning on mediabistro.com: “According to the city’s eviction notice, the “property will be stored at the Department of Sanitation parking garage at 650 West 57th St.” But the librarians dispute this: “it was clear from the livestream and witnesses inside the park that the property was destroyed by police and DSNY workers before it was thrown in dumpsters.”

The People’s Library, set into the North East corner of the Park near the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street, was one of the most beautiful aspects of the occupation site.

The legality of the eviction is being ejudicated (after the barn door…) as I type, but the city junked everything nonetheless. I hope and I believe that Occupy Wall Street will be back there, and will figure out a new way to outwit the authorities. But if anyone thinks that once set into motion, there couldn’t have been anyway for the police to preserve the books, a story occurs to me. [read on...]

...

The library in its more permanent structure. (Photo via David Shankbone's flickr). Found at Gothamist.

via Inside Higher Ed:

Guerrilla Librarians in Our Midst

November 2, 2011 - 3:00am

BY Scott McLemee

When thinking about the future of Occupy Wall Street, there is something to say for meteorological determinism. An open-ended protest movement may grow when the weather permits, but an Arctic blast means shrinkage. OWS may bloom again in the spring, perhaps on a scale to dwarf anything that's happened so far. But when you ask people involved in the movement about what to expect in the meantime, the response can be rather evasive, and it sometimes comes with a look that says, “Have you ever tried to do anything by consensus, let alone long-term planning? Seriously, quit asking me that.”

But one segment of the movement has been thinking about the cold months ahead, and even beyond that. They are the “guerrilla librarians" -- the people organizing and distributing books and periodicals to keep the demonstrators informed and entertained. A library was established in Zuccotti Park at the very start of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and it has received a good deal of attention. Several more sprang up as the protests spread. With the occupation movement, decentralized improvisation is the name of the game, so it’s impossible to tell just how many libraries have sprung up. But they exist in Boston and Philadelphia, in Portland, Ore. and Halifax, Nova Scotia, among other places. They are staffed by a mixture of professional librarians and activist volunteers, with "stacks" created through donations from publishers, bookstores, and individuals.

Just keeping their collections running has been plenty demanding. But that's where a slowdown in activity during the cold months could help the libraries consolidate themselves while also establishing contacts with one another. The blog of the flagship OWS library now serves as an unofficial journal providing information and advice for the whole milieu. A stronger network is likely to come out of the American Library Association meeting in Dallas in January, where an informal working group of library and information-science professionals who supporting the occupation movement will get together to compare notes.

Mandy Henk, a librarian at DePauw University, will be attending the session in Dallas. Being on fall break gave her the chance to work with the Occupy Wall Street library in early October. When we spoke by phone, she was back in Indiana but planning to return to Zuccotti Park within a few days.

“A lot of academics have volunteered,” she said, “mostly grad students or professors from the New York area.” Her description of the work required to keep the collection running covers all the basic functions performed by the staff of a more traditional collection: acquisitions, cataloging, building and maintaining a reserves collection, and working the circulation desk where patrons can check books out. “We also have a Friday night poetry slam,” she says, “and events where authors discuss their work with the public.”

I asked how meet-the-author events were organized. This, with hindsight, was a pretty silly question. As with everything else in OWS, the voluntarism sustaining the library follows its own rhythm. Authors just show up. Librarians work when they can and leave when they must. Flux is part of the ambience: a feature, not a bug.

“People are enjoying having a space where they are surrounded by books and ideas,” Henk says. “The great thing about Zuccotti is that constant political and economic debates take place that people might otherwise shy away from.” (Not that the library provides only fodder for argument. Plenty of fiction also circulates.)

Steven Syrek, a graduate student in English at Rutgers University, has been working at the OWS library since about the third week of the demonstration. “People talk about this movement like it’s a ragtag bunch of hippies,” he told me when we spoke by phone, “but the work we do is extremely well-organized.” The central commitment, Syrek says, is to create “a genuine clearinghouse for books and information.” Volunteers have adopted a slogan summing up what the library brings to the movement: “Literacy, Legitimacy, and Moral Authority.”

The hours he spends at the OWS library are, admittedly, cutting into the time Syrek has for his dissertation. Figuring out how to “strike a better balance” between research and public service is an priority. But adding to the mass of secondary literature on Shakespeare feels less urgent than the work to be done in Zuccotti Park. (And besides, short of a massive improvement of the job market in literary studies, devoting energy to open-air scholarship might make more sense now than the narrower sort of professionalization that once prevailed.)

As with the “book bloc” that formed during protests against education cuts in Italy and elsewhere some month back, the occupation libraries seem like a new development. And a welcome one, after too many years of demonstrations where the cultural tone was set by giant papier-mâché puppets engaged in mirthless satire. (I used to feel guilty for wanting to see them consumed in flames, but eventually realized that this was a pretty common desire.)

But the libraries at the anti-Wall Street protests are not quite as novel as they first appear. They have a tradition going back the better part of two centuries. In a recent article, Matthew Battles, the author of Libraries: An Unquiet History (Norton, 2004), noted the similarity to the reading rooms that served the egalitarian Chartist movement in Britain. For that matter, the Chartists also anticipated the occupation strategy as well. Battles, who is working on a forthcoming book on the history of the written word, discusses the OWS-Chartism connection in a short video [...]



Immanuel Ness, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and editor of The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500 to the Present, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), points out that libraries emerged as part of the sit-down strikes that unionized the American auto industry in the 1930s. Over the past 20 years, scores of workers' centers providing training and legal help for low-income people have been established around the United States. “All of them have libraries as essential components of the process of educating workers,” says Ness by email. (His most recent book, Our to Master and to Own, co-edited with Dario Azzellini and published by Haymarket, is in great demand at occupation libraries, I'm told.)

So the OWS library and its spin-offs have a venerable ancestry. But what distinguishes them is that the collections are drawing in people with a deep background in library work – who, aside from their feelings about the economic situation itself, are sometimes frustrated by the state of their profession.

“I’ve worked in libraries since 1998,” Henk told me, “and throughout that period we’ve lost more and more control over budgets and collections. The information sources that people need are controlled by corporations, while we keep getting hit by the push for austerity.”

The issue here isn't just the impact on the librarians' own standard of living. Their professional ethos is defined by a commitment to making information available to the public. They are very serious about that obligation, or at least the good ones are, and they are having a hard time meeting it. If knowledge is power, then expensive databases, fewer books, and shorter library hours add up to growing intellectual disenfranchisement. Extreme economic inequality reinforces inequality of access to information, and vice versa. 

It is an exceptionally vicious circle. Joining the occupation movement is a way for librarians “to begin taking power back,” Henk says, “the power to create collections and to define what a library is for.” It is, in effect, a battle for the soul of the library as an institution.

The get-together at the American Library Association meeting in Dallas early next year will be an important chance to work out the next stage of that campaign. In the meantime, the occupation-movement librarians -- professional and otherwise -- have to figure out how to meet more pressing demands. “We’re going into a very cold winter,” Henk says. “It’s important to get our people through 16 weeks of that while also preparing for the longer term." At OWS, they are working out plans for fund-raising, storage, and, in due course, expansion.

The poet and rock performer Patti Smith has donated a tent that the organizers could use to protect the collection.  But putting it up would risk a crackdown by police, since tents in parks are prohibited by city law. It’s against the law in Washington too, though the Occupy DC library in McPherson Square has one up anyway. The image of cops destroying a library, even an informal one, would go around the world in about two minutes. That’s not to say it won’t happen, though. Beyond a certain point, strategy and tactics replace cataloging and collection management as core concerns.

In any case, Henk sees the occupation-movement libraries as the shape of things to come. "We have to keep serving the information needs of the protesters," she said, "and of other communities being hit by the economy. This work needs to continue."

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/11/02/essay-librarians-occupy-movement#ixzz1dsZepXl5
Inside Higher Ed

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People’s Library Re-Opens : by Michael | November 15, 2011 · 21:41.

This image was just posted on our twitter feed by an awesome librarian with a smartphone. Not yet sure who. The General Assembly is going on in Liberty Plaza now and is livestreaming here.

via About Page, The People's Library (via OWS Library):

ABOUT

The People’s Library is the collective, public, open library of the Occupy Wall Street leaderless resistance movement.

Located in the northeast corner of Liberty Plaza, the library provides free, open and unrestricted access to our collection of books, magazines, newspapers, ‘zines, pamphlets and other materials that have been donated, collected, gathered and discovered during the occupation.

You can find an overview of how our borrowing system works at the Lending FAQ.

Please see our Catalog for a list of titles, our History for the story of how the library came to be, Contribute to learn how you can help, and come visit us!

"erica"

"erica" (Times Square series). Seems timely. ~ JG

When It Comes to Understanding the Need for Copyright Reform, Musicians Are a Decade Ahead of Visual Artists

I linked to this article in an earlier post, but I think it's well worth reblogging here in full.

via Creative Destruction (from the vaults):

Creative Culture and the Growing Copyright Extremism

Posted on 19. Jun, 2009 by refe in INNOVATION

Creative culture is on the rise, thanks largely to recent technology. Anybody can shoot a video or record a song and upload it to YouTube and millions of people might see it. Digital technology has put the arts back into the hands of the people.

Copyright lawyer and chairman of Creative Commons Larry Lessig gave a presentation about a year and a half ago in which he talks about the way that the younger generation’s perception of creativity and copyright has changed since their parents’. This generation has the tools and the desire to remix, mash-up and recreate the music they hear and the videos they watch and turn them into something new. The way they appreciate art is by engaging with it and making it their own.

Lessig suggests that the law has not greeted “this new use of culture using digital technologies” with much common sense. Common sense would have been to realize that times have changed, that digital technology has fundamentally altered the way that consumers and creators alike are able to produce, enjoy and interact with art. Common sense would have been for entities like the RIAA to acknowledge that fact and adapt business practices to be remain competitive in the emerging market.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Instead, “the architecture of copyright law and the architecture digital technologies as they interact have produced the presumptionthat these activities are illegal.” Lessig continues, “because if copyright law at it’s core regulates something called ‘copies’ than in the digital world the one fact we can’t escape is that every single use of digital technology produces a copy. Every single use therefore requires permission. Without permission you are a trespasser.”

So this presumption that remixes, mash-ups, videos or any other fan created content that uses copyrighted material are illegal has made nearly an entire generation guilty of breaking the law. I love it that he uses the word presumption – this is one of the foremost lawyers on copyright saying that what the RIAA believes about copyright law is not correct.

The RIAA has seen the internet and digital technology as a threat to their business, and responded by taking an extreme position regarding copyright law. This exaggerated version of copyright all but ignores the concept of fair-use and considers – wrongly – that every use of copyrighted material is illegal.

So they crack down, launching a huge legal offensive against just about everybody, including individual consumers suspected of violating their interpretation of copyright law. This in turn creates a growing backlash – both among those whose genuinely illegal activities were thwarted, and those whose legitimate fair-use was wrongly lumped together with piracy. Now the world is experiencing a “growing copyright abolitionism” says Lessig, “a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do … and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible. The extremism on one side begets extremism on the other – a fact we should have learned many, many times over.”

You and I can’t control the RIAA. They have proven that they are out of touch with today’s digital culture and determined to snuff out any innovation that smells like it might disrupt the traditional models. We can influence the other side of the table, though.

Artists don’t have to get in bed with the RIAA. The new independent, DIY approach to a career in music is not just a pipe dream anymore – there are plenty of success stories to look to now. In this new marketplace the artists who recognize the value of openness will be the ones who succeed. The ones who see the benefit of allowing their fans to remix their tracks, or to produce amateur videos for their songs and spread them across the Internet.

Regardless of what we have been taught to believe recently, there is such a thing as fair use, and it’s in the artist’s best interests to allow it. [emphasis newsgrist's] Release your music under a more open license such as Creative Commons and see what happens. Let your fans do the promoting – if you give them a quality product and the freedom to use it the way they want use it they’ll do a surprisingly good job. Better than you could ever do, maybe even with a big-label marketing budget that only the top acts see anyway.

Thanks to Eugenia for the video.

 

Mabrouk!

Cleaning Omar Makram Mosque with Raed,Heba,Daniel & Lili #Jan25 #Tahrir #BetterEgypt

posted by @mizozee from Twitter for BlackBerry

Policing the Sacred #CAA2011

Via CAA conference blog:

Policing the Sacred

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Joy Garnett

Dennis Oppenheim: "Device to Root Out Evil" 1997. 20’ H x 10' W x 12' D. Galvanized steel, perforated metal, Venetian glass. Collection: The Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado Photo: E. Smith.

Image Via

One always wants to attend at least two panels that happen to coincide – it’s the unfortunate Law of Conferences. Come Wednesday I wanted to attend several sessions all happening at 12:30pm: “Modern Arab Art and Its Historical and Methodological Relationships to the Post-Colonial Context” exerted a certain kind of pull, but also Creative Capital’s “Risky Business”  – do not ask if I entertained fantasies of cute non-profit arts professional nerds stripping down and dancing in their Tighty Whities (no, I did not).

The session that won out was the National Coalition Against Censorship‘s “Policing the Sacred: Art, Censorship, and the Politics of Faith” – it did not disappoint. Chaired by critic and writer Eleanor Heartney, its unwavering tone was set by NCAC’s own Svetlana Mintcheva and artists Richard Kamler, Boryana Rossa, Shirin Neshat, and Shoja Azari. I correctly assumed that its context would necessarily have to be framed by the recent round of protests and discussions over The National Portrait Gallery’s removal in late November 2010 of David Wojnarowicz‘s 1987 unfinished video “Fire in My Belly,” an edited portion of which was included and rather innocuously installed in the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” While this session was obviously organized long beforehand, the recent firestorm over NPG’s decision to remove the video, still fresh in our minds, would lend it a particular immediacy.

Left to right: Shoja Azari; Shirin Neshat; Richard Kamler; Boryana Rossa; Eleanor Heartney.

I arrived early and instinctively sat near the back – knee-jerk practice after years of attending boring panels and the need for easy and discrete egress – but there was no need. The conversation was equal to the complexity and seriousness of the subject at hand. By the time I remembered to survey the room it was crammed – standing room only.

“Policing the Sacred” broached the most interesting age-old conundrum of art, religion and censorship. It asked that we ourselves examine the lines between hate speech, critique, parody, and appropriation of the sacred and its symbols by artists as well as by governments. Several factors were noted as being particularly relevant now:

- An upsurge of religious values since the fall of Communist regimes;
- Muslims under fire since 9/11;
- The Internet and increased mobility/accessibility of artists and images, across cultures and contexts.

The panel looked at some recent instances of artworks that have been censored in the name of religion, across a range of contexts and cultures, from democracies in the West where free speech rubs up against the manipulations of the religious right, to totalitarian theocracies that appropriate religious iconography as part of broader manipulative strategies of oppression. The range of viewpoints presented was broad, by dint of the array of experiences of the artists present, which ranged from fending off and negotiating small town USA reactionaries, to fleeing the deadly persecution of dictatorships in Iran and Russia.

In her introduction, Eleanor Heartney opened by referencing the Wojnarowicz incident, and then gave us a list of recent instances of censorship and/or desecration that reflect the increased sectarianism of our post-9/11 era:

- France’s prohibition against women wearing the hijab;
- The Swiss ban on minarets;
- Up-tick in the desecration of Jewish grave sites;
- Problems installing Nativities in public spaces in the US;
- Intolerance for satires of Christianity;
- The Danish cartoon flap;

The list goes on.

One recurring theme throughout history, and one that finds particular traction now according to Svetlana Mintcheva, is the rampant desire (of regimes, political manipulators, religios, etc.) to find images that “offend”, even when (usually) the offense is taken through wild misinterpretation.

For me, perhaps the most interesting set of exchanges occurred toward the end of the session as the artists aired their different personal feelings about “boundaries” (paraphrasing):

Shirin Neshat, after her pointed explication of her work as a  challenge to the Iranian regime, asserted that she personally likes boundaries, and that she doesn’t think globalism as such promotes behaviors that respect them. Her example was the veil in muslim countries, and how we in the West tend to equate it rather simplistically with servitude and oppression of women. She notes: the West wants to imagine that this is one world with one set of values.

Shojah Azari erupted with (in reference to the outcry over the perceived desecration of books in Richard Kamler’s art): “I would like to burn all the books” (laughter). “I was raised an atheist, at war with religious orthodoxy…” He went on to describe the repeated incapacity of Westerners to accept the fact that he is both Iranian and atheist (post-9/11, assumptions run rampant).

Richard Kamler: “I’m not that into boundaries”. He notes: they change as we grow, and contexts shift. One needs to look at religious boundaries with respect in order to change them. For this task, our notion of boundaries must be fluid.

Boryana Rossa: Agrees with Shirin’s take on boundaries – they are important.

Svetlana Mintcheva: Policing the boundaries – we all have them. Interesting that most of the artists censored by the Catholic church are CATHOLICS  (laughter). There’s something about Catholicism that makes Catholics want to go against it…. Hate speech laws are dangerous, because they could conceivably be used to silence people and to suppress dissent. Once you have such legislation, how do you control who controls it? Such a law – you would want it to serve certain purposes; but you have to imagine how it would be wielded in the hands of oppressors.