“The Last Library” by Ward Shelley

We are thrilled to welcome artist Ward Shelley to the LAIP today! He talks about a piece that is currently exhibiting at SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, OH called “The Last Library” (you can see why we were intrigued). Enjoy! ~Laura

Library as Incubator Project (LAIP): Please introduce yourself. Who are you, and what sort of creative work do you do?

Ward Shelley (WS): I am an artist and I do a few different kinds of work. I think the main idea I work with is this: we live in a constructed world of our own devising, and that when you shape your world, it shapes you back.

As an artist I worked about 10 years in Miami and about 20 years in Brooklyn. Now I live in a garage on a hill in Connecticut. I have a website with lots of pictures of what I do. You can see my diagrams about where things come from, or you can look at me living in on a big wheel or a see-saw with my friends. I have a couple of friends I work with a lot.

LAIP: Can you give us an overview of your new piece at SPACES gallery, The Last Library?

WS: The Last Library is two fake rooms with 3500 fake books inside, lined up on the fake shelves. Being an artist, I would normally refer to them as “sculptural elements” rather than fake stuff…But they look reasonably authentic, so your eye mostly goes to the words–all the books have bold titles on their spines, and that is what most people end up engaging with–the titles. The titles are written by people who volunteered. We proposed “what are the books that should be written before we stop having books?” and people went off from there. Douglas Paulson wrote more than a thousand. He and I work together a lot and he had an idea of how to do this. From the early examples he and I wrote, people got the general idea and started making their own. We got a lot from some people, and a few from about 30 people, and people found they could submit titles on-line, so we are getting more all the time.

“The Last Library” by Ward Shelley. Photo provided by SPACES Gallery.

“The Last Library” by Ward Shelley. Photo provided by SPACES Gallery.

These titles, taken as a whole, comprise a snap-shot of what people are thinking about right now, just put into a short phrase that sounds like a book title. It is like 3500 bumper stickers. Our titles are guided by the same sort of mind set as bumper stickers: they try to make a point simply, often with some humor. Except books have a different gravity in our culture than bumper stickers, don’t they? They normally come from serious people rather than a solitary loud-mouth dude in a pickup. But that’s an illusion in this case – and that’s the fun part.

“The Last Library” by Ward Shelley. Photo provided by SPACES Gallery.

LAIP: What are some of the titles that people have contributed to The Last Library?

Bacon Lovers’ BIble
Burn This Bank
What To Say When Your Zipper’s Down
I’m A Piece Of Meat, You’re A Piece Of Pie
Knitting For Hipsters
The Better Part of Valerie
How to Become Click Bait
60 Butt Bromance
Why Toe Nails?
Lap Dances Saved My Life
Golden Showers: How the Trickle Down Economy Really Works
You and Your Epistemic Closure
Hate Yourself Thin
Fossil Fuel Barbecue
Wine, Women, and Hip-Hop
Go Thee and Suffer Less
Why Zombies, Why Now?

“The Last Library” by Ward Shelley. Photo provided by SPACES Gallery.

LAIP: What is/has been your relationship to libraries – as an artist, as a reader…however you feel like answering the question.

WS: Libraries were my refuge from an early age – twelve, anyway. I had certain locations and shelves memorized – and I had the completist’s ambition to read every Walter Scott and Howard Pyle. As I aged, only the authors changed. For a while I used the Whole Earth Catalog as my portable library (or at least card catalog). When I started to be able to buy and own, I got a little trapped in that collecting/owning/craving thing – which I hope to outgrow some day.

LAIP: What do you think the future holds for libraries? Do you think there will be an eventual Last Library?

WS: I think the last library will be something like the cloud, but free for everyone. But we have to stand up against the Big Men who want to own more than their share.

LAIP: As an artist, what does your ideal library look like? What does it have in it? What does it smell like?

WS: 

I think for some of us, libraries are self portraits. So I guess, my ideal library looks just like me but smells a little better, with notes of apricot and pepper. It contains the books I believe will transform me into the person Merri Mann will finally love.

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