The Unreal of Preservation

How can one think of preservation in terms of what is real? I think this while sitting in the main reading room of the Abbot Library at the University at Buffalo. I had been meaning to come to this library for some time after seeing a picture of it. Books are a passion of mine and thus so are the repositories of knowledge that we simply call libraries. Gone, it seems however, are the days of the beautiful library. Filled with grandeur and craftsmanship to be an edifice of thought itself imbued in structure. A space in which one can think, connected to the history of Mankind. A space that could anthropologically be called a place; that is, imbued with history, emotion, tradition. I could just as easily now be writing of the strangeness I experienced walking through the very modern, yet not all unpleasant, 39th Street Stavros Niarchos Public Library in New York City that felt the need to display photographs of the world’s most beautiful libraries on their walls. A strange display of the past in a space in which the past is abandoned, if only preserved within the books themselves, and yet, how real is the copy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Joyce’s Ulysses that is printed in 1994, covered in its protective plastic laminate? In fact, the main 5th Avenue library that is imbued with history and beauty has lost its practical purpose and has become a museum that is its own relic.

Here, in this library, there is a similar affect that is being produced to these two other libraries. In the main reading room one is enveloped by the vastness of space under the vaulted ceiling, from which hang baroque chandeliers that harken back to the time of Descartes, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, surrounded by the dark wood of the high bookshelves and long tables, the brass lamps reminiscent of the great places of study and pursuit of academic enlightenment of 19th century Northern Europe and the Americas, the colonial fireplace as the centrepiece, accompanied on either side by oil portraits of college founders, and the entrance marked by the doric pillars of Plato and Aristotle. This is a place imbued with history. However, this same entrance also marks the precipice of something else. Much like the strangeness of the pictures on the wall at the Stavros Library, here the unnerving amalgamation of the old and the new becomes even more manifest. For just beyond these pillars, lies the aesthetically blank, rationally functional non-place of modernity. This is the term the French Anthropologist Marc Augé used to describe the transitory places of super modernity such as airports and train stations that lack connection, history, or culture.

Beyond the pillars, lies the world of recessed lighting, low, tiled foam ceilings, off-white plaster walls, lightly stained pine doors without ornamentation, plastic cubicles, and dusty computers. This is the realm of the cheaply mass-produced, made by automated machine, lacking in humanity. Marcel Duchamp coined the term the infrathin to describe the imprint left by a person on an object. A word described by its creator as defying definition but preferring to be understood through examples such as the warmth you feel on a seat that tells you someone else was just sitting there, or the smell of cigarettes in an empty room. Objects themselves can also contain the imprint of Man within their very structure, whether by creation or contact. What primordial infrathin of humanity can exist within an object made by machine?

What happens here is that the pillared entrance of the library becomes a kind of portal between one world and the next, producing an unusual mental vertigo, as if standing on the fault lines of time. It is as if being in one time and looking out to another removes us from either and we become Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, unstuck from time.

It does not take long, however, for one to realize that this portal between worlds is not as sealed as initially thought, but that the new is seeping into the old. The brass lamps are lit by LEDs, there is an outlet on every wall, in fact, there are outlets built into the oak table on which I write betraying that these are certainly reproductions. The wood in the fireplace is fibreglass and the fireplace is sealed. Even the atmosphere teems with the modern as vents silently pump in air conditioning. A security camera adorns the entrance. What is most telling, however, is that between these two worlds of time, the carpet remains the same, so that the barrier is ultimately broken, and one comes to realize that they are not in another time at all, but merely a preservation. This inhabiting of a relic, a museum display, produces the quality of the unreal, what Freud may have called the uncanny. Something out of place, inhabiting the space between dreams and reality.

Karl Marx once said that through Capitalism, “all things solid melts into the air”. What is meant by this is that everything becomes transactional, our daily lives and connections and our institutions become rationalized to produce function over beauty and connection. Perhaps there is some truth to this. Perhaps, what has happened, is that our places that at one time coupled us to our own history, our traditions, our culture, have become merely preservations. And now, for those that wish to live in the physical world, the world of real connection, connection to others, to the Earth, to humanity, are exiled to live in preservations.