The Ex-Files

The monstrous is simply that which eludes established categories of knowledge. Such definitions (or lack thereof) are culturally determined, but time may also play a decisive role, marking objects as either too futuristic or archaic for us to fathom from the perspective of the present. This rift has held David Bunn in its thrall for some time, but it is only in the most recent work that the monstrous nature of his project is made explicit.

Information has been our ultimate commodity for a while, but its delivery mechanisms are constantly changing. Bunn knows that in order to represent information, to really show what it is made of, you have to take several steps back in time. Only in a prior moment of incipient obsolescence may we occasionally glimpse the true form of that which surrounds us in the here and now but is too dazzlingly new to grasp. In this sense, Bunn's art can be thought of as a service: a card-carrying Conceptualist, his work is conceived as an incremental unfolding of the idea from abstract thought into the time and space of the material world, and back again.

Bunn set his sights upon a transitional moment: the shift from analogue to digital information. His chosen context could not be more apt: the library, repository of the world's knowledge. But it is a context which partly chose him: in 1990, he was invited to furnish the newly rebuilt Los Angeles Central Library with a permanent installation. Two devastating arson attacks in the mid-1980s provided the incentive to overhaul the institution along with its increasingly unwieldy filing system. Bunn intercepted the redundant card catalogue on its way to the pulping station, having grasped its evidentiary potential. Like library books, the cards are always encountered en masse (an informational profusion that must be somehow ordered and contained), and are comprised of the same substance as the volumes they refer to.

Some 9,506 cards were utilised in A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place (1993), lining the walls of the passenger elevators, both the cab and shaft, from top to bottom. Over two million cards remained, and it took Bunn several more years to decide just what to do with them. Through a process of intellectual drift which he describes as a bookish variant on the Situationist dérive, he came upon the idea of poetry. Delving into the files at various randomly designated points, he began to extract whole stacks of titles that, together, read like a kind of ready-made concrete verse. The artist's own authorial input is deliberately limited to very basic decisions as to where the sequence of titles begins and ends. Bunn applies a geological analogy, likening the textual assemblages to core-sample drillings. While the poems are essentially void of expression, they do offer a deeply layered reading, yielding up a kind of communal knowledge that has accrued over time and from countless disparate sources.

Following an exhibition of card-poems at the former Burnett Miller gallery in Los Angeles ('I Feel Better Now, I Feel the Same Way', 1996), the project steadily branched out as Bunn set about annexing the former analogue holdings of other institutions undergoing the same process of digital remodelling. After collaborating with the Liverpool Central Library ('Here, There and Everywhere' 1997), he was invited to look through the files of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, which refer not to books but actual things medical implements, physical specimens and the like. Connected to the College of Physicians, where the Siamese twins Chang and Eng were autopsied, the museum has a certain side-show appeal, boasting a morbid array of morphological anomalies, mutations, and accidents. As with the system initiated in Liverpool, it is up to the guest institution to provide thematic cues which are then linked to, and twinned with, related material from the original Los Angeles card catalogue. Hence the title of the 2000 show, 'Double Monster', which refers to the Frankenstein-like process of montaging the two archives; to the two-part structure of the resulting
exhibition, divided between Brooke Alexander in New York and Angles in LA; and, finally, to a record from the Mütter Museum which reads: 'Double Monster. Showing two heads and trunks: abdominal union, three legs and a fourth rudimentary. An early foetus. Missing.'

In a more general sense, however, the 'Double Monster' is information itself. The library cards from Los Angeles and Liverpool were subjected to various means of reproduction ranging from the analogue typewriter to the digital scanner. Those from Philadelphia, on the other hand, were painstakingly copied by a trained medical illustrator sensitive to every tonal shift in the decaying card stock, as well as the changing styles of notation and calligraphy that date each new entry like geological strata. Information here assumes materiality, a thickness, that verges on the obscene, but this also is the source of its value. Time is slowed to a crawl in these works, reminding us of the traumatic nature of information, and of the wound at the juncture of inscription and surface. One side-effect of obsolescence is the aestheticisation of the library cards whatever distance they gain from their original purpose only serves to heighten their status as art.

Bunn's ongoing effort to privatise the public archive and turn it to his own expressive ends attains a baroque sort of denouement. Paradoxically, perhaps, the more dated his treatment of the material, the more relevance it gains with respect to the present. If the ultimate aim of the personal computer revolution is to standardise all knowledge in preparation for trade on the global market, then Bunn may be offering us a last chance to peer inside what no longer even has an outside any more.