Josh Greene: Bound to be Held

Josh Greene’s Bound to Be Held: A Book Show presents a classic hands-off viewing experience paired with a very hands-on encounter. This two-part exhibition focuses on the value individuals give to literary texts, and invites museum visitors to share in this relationship. The two installations, while related, do not succeed equally.

The first part of the exhibition, Read by Famous (2013–ongoing), is an earlier project by Greene. The project collects books that have been read by people of note (Sterling Ruby, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Isiah Thomas, to name a few) and auctions them off via its website, with all proceeds benefiting literacy-focused nonprofit organizations. A selection of these books, along with enlarged scans of humorous and revelatory personal notes left by their celebrity readers, line two walls of the gallery. However, the process of selling to the highest bidder objects once belonging to the famous keeps the whole endeavor separate from the general public. Its inaccessibility forces visitors to remain viewers instead of allowing them to become participants. Read by Famous functions well in its origin as an online project, but as an aspect of a physical exhibition, it seems an unnecessary method of coping with empty wall space, and falls flat in comparison to its participatory sister project, The Library of Particular Significance (2015).

Josh Greene. Bound to Be Held: A Book Show, 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Photo: Johnna Arnold.

The center of the exhibition space presents visitors with an alternative library experience—The Library of Particular Significance. The open, carpeted space invites visitors to kick back on a chair or some pillows and enjoy a book. The space smells like used books in that very satisfying way. For this project, Greene asked the public to donate books that were of special significance to the donors, hence the name. These books were given anonymously or with limited information including year of birth, astrological sign, and religion (or lack thereof). This information became the delightful reference system of this modest library, hosting about 1000 books. Participants can check out books for two weeks by filling out a “checked out” form, and may also add personal comments to a book in the Library’s collection using the Post-it notes Greene provides. I checked out a well-read Umberto Eco book, previously owned by 63-year-old atheist Aquarius, and I’m hoping I can finish all 533 pages in the next two weeks.

Bound to Be Held—and specifically The Library of Particular Significance—allows for visitors to grasp, and possibly reciprocate, a relationship that a stranger has with a literary work. There is joy in holding a book with a sense of connection to those that have held and read it before. It creates a space of shared experience, yachad (unity, togetherness), between visitors and readers of all religions and identities.

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Adriana Rabinovitch is an artist and writer working in the Bay Area. She is currently an MFA candidate at California College of the Arts.

Josh Greene: Bound to be Held is on view at Contemporary Jewish Museum, in

San Francisco