Rachael Morrison: Having a job as Senior Library Assistant at The Museum of Modern Art Library has been a big influence on my artistic practice. I use the library for research and inspiration, and as a site of investigation. In early 2010, I began the performance “Smelling the Books“, which consists of me smelling every book in the MoMA Library collection. This performance was recently highlighted in New York Magazine as one of the many reasons to love New York.
My performance started with the first call number in the Library of Congress classification system AC5.S4 1934, Sermons by Artists, and I will smell until I reach ZN3.R45, Bibliography of the History of Art. I document the performance in a ledger, recording the call number, title, and a description of the smell of each book. The goal of this personal olfactory exploration is to foster a discussion of the future of print media, the ways we read, methods of classification, and the way in which smell is entwined with memory.
Smelling notations:
no authority control in smelling
this is completely unscientific. she omits all types of metadata that a librarian would include.
how long did she sniff each book?
did she sniff a random page or the inside cover or page 23? and “paper-y” in place of “paper”??? is that like saying a book has “around 200 pages”?
this “Senior Library Assistant” needs to get back to school if she wants to convince me that her performance is a worthwhile endeavor. that’s the difference between art and a hobby. and someone who sniffs books for a hobby isn’t an artist, she’s just creepy.
See…that’s the cool thing about “art”…
…any response is valid.