Required Reading
Posted by Steffen Böddeker
A small selection of LACMA catalogues has been digitized and made available in a very nice online interface called the Reading Room.
On line now is the first Reading Room selection entitled “Southern California Art of the 1960s and 1970s”, which includes ten exhibition catalogues of art from Southern California published between 1963 and 1981. They range from publications documenting one-person shows such as Edward Kienholz (59 pages) and Billy Al Bengston (69 pages, designed by Ed Ruscha) to the exhaustive A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 (391 pages) and the slight Late Fifties at the Ferus (7 pages).
Once selected, a new window opens to display the scanned book. The menu allows you to view, zoom, and “leaf through” the books in different ways, as well as search for content (results give you the pages on which the search term is found), share (via email, facebook, twitter, delicious, google) and “take it to go” (download the PDF). That’s right: you can download out-of-print catalogues you probably should have read but couldn’t find in your local library or used bookstore. Time to catch up.
By making this material so easily available, the museum is serving itself and the reader. The Reading Room is a testament to the institution’s historical role and curatorial ambition (presumably future selections will also include more recent titles), taking full advantage of online tools to better disseminate LACMA’s vision. The benefits to the rest of us are obvious.
What more can I say; there is a new requirement for all museums: Copy the LACMA Reading Room.
Also see this related video with curator Stephanie Barron (who organized The Museum as Site: Sixteen Project the catalogue for which is also part of the Reading Room selection). The short, simple video adds a valuable sense of the catalogue’s physicality that is absent in the flat page scans.
