Library Interventions : Sharon Kivland
Lesley Guy
During our first tutorial you told me to find and read Mladen Dolar’s essay ‘I Will Be With You On Your Wedding Night’. It was perfect; it was just what I needed at that time and it took me where I needed to go. This was the first of a hundred acts of generosity that I always knew I would struggle to return.
Over the years you have given texts to me that have taken me by surprise or sent me in new directions and this has given me so much pleasure. Some of these still sit on my shelves: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Animal That Therefore I Am, The Freud Reader, The New Black, and more. One recommendation triggered an entire project and a trip to Lascaux, Bataille’s ‘Lascaux: Or The Birth Of Art’. And of course, there are your own writings, which I still receive in the post from time-to-time and treasure.
Please send me out to the library to find something for you. I want to find something that you might not have read, a gift that you are not expecting. Whatever I find may or may not represent new knowledge, it might miss the mark completely – either way it would be some token of recognition.
Don’t worry – my library research will have you and your work guiding it. The fact is, I do not know what it is I will be looking for but I will know it when I find it.
Artists' Books: Reading Room 