Doug Argue

Reading in the Library of Babel

Now the whole earth had one language and few words. - Gen. 1 1: 1

The works in this exhibition are based on a mural-sized painting by the Minnesota artist Douglas Argue, called Library of Babel, completed in 1997 and now in the collection of The Minneapolis Institute of Art. Argue's 11 1/2 x 22 foot canvas depicts a towering heap of books that seems to extend beyond the edges of the already huge picture. In the selection of works on view here, all designated Untitled, that same image of the collapse of organized knowledge is given an artist's version of encyclopedic treatment, rendered variously in oil, encaustic, pastel, watercolor, ink and graphite on canvas, paper, wood, aluminum and plastic.

In Genesis 11:1-9 we read of the Babylonian city where Noah's descendants, who all spoke the same language, dared build a tower that would reach up to heaven. For their overweening vanity they were cast down and scattered across the face of the earth. (If there was in fact a library in Babel, it most likely contained scrolls rather than bound volumes - but never mind. Argue's post-cataclysmic pages are individually rendered, wrinkled and wavy as if they were made of parchment or papyrus. Or perhaps they're dampened, as if from being tossed in the hold of a ship in anticipation of a sudden voyage - as if from Noah@ library!)

Jorge Luis Borges, in La Biblioteca de Babel(1941), imagines a library as infinite as the universe itself. The library contains every possible volume - so many that only a fraction are intelligible, thus the reference to Babel - yet the existence of the librarians is impoverished and miserable. In fact they are dying out.

In Argue's library, not only are the books in disarray, removed from their order on the shelves and tossed into a random heap, but their titles have been effaced as well. The covers and spines of the books are blank. The systematic kinship of the Dewey Decimal System has given way to admixture, a amorphous cacophony of cross-pollination. Knowledge is returned to a random state, something like what Nicholson Baker, in his essay Discards (1 994), called "the inspiringly miscellaneous assembly of all that has been done and thought." These naked covers are raw material, waiting for new inscriptions, the artist's order.

The critic Mary Abbe has referred to Argue's painting as an "exploded Cubist still life." In this sense, Argue's Library of Babel is an allegory that illustrates the way in which literary texts - conceits of language - underline the supposedly purely pictorial gambits of modernism. Argue's books are emphatically pictorial elements. Individual volumes are arranged across the picture by color - green, red, blue, yellow, orange. Indeed, what little that can be seen of the basic element of the book - the page - is here represented by the basic element of the painting -the brushstroke or line.
Figuratively speaking, Argue has erected his easel within the archive as a challenge to the authority of the scholar and the academic. The notion thatthe library of books coherently and adequately represents a nonlinguistic universe, as the Postmodernists like to argue, is itself a fiction.
"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method," wrote Walter Benjamin in Unpacking My Library (1931). Clearly, here, we have a gesture of translations, an artist's hypothesis for a new order of things. The Old Testament feared the power that knowledge gave at Babel. "Thisisonlythebeginningofwhattheywilldo,"hesaidwhenhesawthetowerthatmenhadbuilt. "Nothingthat they propose to do will be impossible for them."

Walter Robinson New York, 1997

 

artist biography | press release | catalogue essay

gallery collections | exhibitions | contact us | guest book | home

© 1997 Associated American Artists, 20 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10019
Tel: (212) 399-5510 ..... Fax: (212) 582-9697..... Toll Free (US) 888-44 NYART
E-mail: aaa@agrp.com
A Division of The Associated Group.

Web site Design and Developed by Chariot Productions,
a Division of Applied Business Computers.
Site maintained by Synetex.
Any problems with this site should be reported to Synetex.