January 27-February 2, 2005

art

Card Shark

library science: Artist David Bunn, shown here in the surgical amphitheater at Pennsylvania Hospital, was an artist in residence at the Mütter Museum.

A Temple Gallery exhibition is one artist's ode to the dying art of the card catalog.

by Susan Hagen

Many relics of our former stone-age lives we remember fondly: floppy disks, cassette tapes, fax machines. And then there's the card catalog.

At least artist David Bunn remembers it fondly.

Beginning in the late 1980s, card catalogs in American libraries were rendered more or less obsolete by the information age. Since then, the vast majority of them have had their contents transferred to computerized catalog systems. As a result, thousands of card catalogs have been dismantled and trashed or, infrequently, put into deep storage. Sometimes, like the catalog cards in Bunn's show at Temple Gallery, "Double Monster," they are creatively employed for a new purpose.

David Bunn is a Los Angeles-based artist who has worked with old catalog cards extensively since 1993, when he created A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place as a permanent installation in the elevators of the new L.A. Central Library building. He has worked with the library's obsolete two million-card collection, given to him after completing the project, ever since that time. He said his inspiration derives from his amazement that "something so public and so important could be discarded and picked up by an individual."

Bunn developed the idea for "Double Monster" in 2000 while he was an artist in residence at the Mötter Museum in Philadelphia, where he worked with the card catalog of its pathological specimens — everything from giant skeletons to children's hearts. The project was exhibited shortly afterward in New York and Santa Monica, Calif., but this is its first exhibition in Philadelphia. All of the 17 sections of the show are based on framed groups of alphabetical catalog cards from the L.A. Central Library, all with the same first word, displayed in an extended vertical array. Bunn has grouped them with framed "poems" constructed of typed lists of headings and one to three images of cards from the Mötter catalog. These trompe l'oeil drawings in acrylic, watercolor, pencil and ink are renderings of cards from the Mötter by collaborating medical illustrator Madena Asbell, complete with faux fingerprints, tears and smudges like unique specimens of an endangered species.

Most of Bunn's choices of cards (containing subject, title and author headings) are richly evocative. Some conjure images of monsters and horrors with amazing specificity, including one set that contains a drawing of a card from the Mötter Museum catalog with the handwritten description "Double Monster. Showing two heads and trunks: Abdominal union, three legs and a fourth rudimentary" and "Missing." It's suggestively grouped with catalog cards with the words, "Double Story," "Two-headed Poems," "Missing from her home," and "Monsters and Ghouls." Other sets contain compelling allusions to corporeal traumas and perversions: "Heart laid open.(model)," "Needles and pins removed from the body of an hysterical female," and "Knives for Frozen Sections, hand operated."

Some cards point out the inevitable absence of complete facts and the inevitable redundancy of classification systems, whether scientific or informational. A set of cards beginning with "Skeleton of a Giant," also included a card with the words: "Of the person whose skeleton I propose to describe, nothing is known, with the exception of one fact — that he was a native of Kentucky, U.S.A." Even more trenchant is "Unknown Specimen (File Card Missing)," a clean ivory card painted by Asbell, grouped with an L.A. catalog card for a book titled "The Missing Card" and the typed words "The Missing Card." Looking at Bunn's groups of cards, you begin to appreciate the aesthetic of the card itself. You notice the buff paper, the typeface, the delicately scripted additions by generations of catalog librarians. The repetition and permutations of words is much like chanting. A DVD of Bunn reading a list of headings runs continuously in the gallery's media area and emphasizes that analogy.

Not just a key to the world of books, the well-protected cards of card catalogs are artifacts beautifully weathered by the touch of their users. A seven-volume set of artist books by Bunn, published by Brooke Alexander Editions, highlights their beauty and offers an interesting parallel to the cerebral-somatic experience of flipping through a card catalog in a way that the framed pieces do not. I've always relished the dry poetry of the card catalog, having myself worked in libraries (like the sub-sub-librarian in Moby Dick) during the last years of the card catalog. Bunn helps us to see that these discarded catalog cards, once so mundane and ordinary, have turned into rare, aesthetic objects themselves.

David Bunn: Double Monster Through Feb. 26, Temple Gallery, 45 N. Second St., 215-925-7379 Howard Singerman, associate professor at the University of Virginia, will give a lecture on David Bunn's work at 7 p.m. on Feb. 7 at the Arden Theatre, across the street from the Temple Gallery. A reception will follow at the gallery to meet the lecturer and the artist.