National Post Article
An Artistic Giveaway
Artist’s entire library up for grabs in new installation
Brianna Goldberg, National Post
January 5, 2007.
Robin Pacific is giving away all 1,670 pieces of her psyche.
The stanzas of Gwendolyn MacEwan, the pages of Jung, snippets of all the books that made Pacific who she is, are now part of an elaborate art installation.
Or is it a closing-out sale? Either way, Pacific says everything must go.
Starting Saturday the Red Head Gallery opens its doors to Shelf Portrait: A Disappearing Archive, Pacific’s lifetime library. Hundreds of books will be stuffed into eight towering racks, and many will clutter the floor.
But with any luck, the mess will be temporary.
Pacific wants every item to exit with a new owner over the installation’s three-week run.
“There were period in my life, many periods, when I would become passionately interested in a subject,” says Pacific.
“I used to call it my crocodile brain—I would just want to eat boos. I would go into a bookstore or a library and it would almost feel like certain books would jump off the shelf into my hands. I think that time of my life is in the past. I’ve absorbed all that information, and it is what has gone into creating my psyche as an artist. Dispersing it is a way of sharing that psyche with the world.”
As gallery goers enter and take their souvenirs, all Pacific asks is that new owners note their selection on her wall-sized catalogue sheets and snap a picture of themselves with a disposable camera provided. The act of giving will thus be transformed into living art—not between artists, but between people.
“I’m always trying to dissolve boundaries and bring people together,” she explains of her democratic approach to making art.
“I think this sharp divide between those people who are called artists and those who aren’t is an artificial one. Everyone is creative, it’s just that in this society our creativity devolves into our consumer choices.”
And so Pacific says Shelf Portrait is both an act of art and an act of generosity. But once you get a few tomes into Pacific’s psyche, you see that it’s also an act of closure.
“After my husband died, I spent three years going through his things. Keeping some things, giving some things away, taking things to the Goodwill. And the last things I gave away were his books. That was the hardest thing to give away. I thought, “Well, why don’t I give mind away, and do it meaningfully? So it’s also a way of saying goodbye to the past and looking towards the future.”
Saying goodbye to a lifelong book obsession is no small task. The compulsion to collect and digest literature has been with her since she was a girl—accounting for her staggering collection of reads.
“When I was a child, we could only take four books out a week from the library. So I would get the thickest ones I could find, and then I would ration them out so I wouldn’t sit down and read them all on the first day.”
But despite her longtime fiction fervour, Pacific has no regrets about shedding her library with the show this week.
“Once I was ready, I was ready,” she says with conviction. “I’m ready to let them go.”
The rich and diverse collection includes vast selections of French philosophy, Marxist orthodoxy and troves of Canadian theatre, fiction and poetry. Some of them have never been opened. Others are worn thin with attention.
And with each storyline, great swathes of Pacific’s equally rich and diverse life are played out: her PhD in English literature her foundation of the Pelican Players political theatre group, her paintings, her installations, her world.
Well, almost all of it. Pacific has in fact stowed away a few choice pieces of her collection.
“I did keep a few. I kept first editions of Canadian poetry, I kept some books that had been gifts with strong sentimental value. I kept books that my friends had written. And I kept my Shakespeare and Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Those are the ones that have shaped my thinking the most.”