SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The Contemporary Jewish Museum is presenting a solo exhibition of the work of San Francisco-based conceptual artist Josh Greene. Bound to be Held: A Book Show celebrates the relationship between a reader and a book and extends Greene’s career-long interest in instigating social interaction among people.
Born in 1971 in Santa Monica, CA, Josh Greene has exhibited widely including at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the Nelson Gallery at UC Davis, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and more. He holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts where he is currently an adjunct professor. Greene works in the conceptual art tradition with a focus on public actions and interchange. His projects have included Service-Works, a monthly grant of his tips earned as a waiter to various artists’ projects; Sophie Calle’s Bed, in which Greene requested and received the bed of Sophie Calle, in order to help him through a grieving process; Unlicensed Therapist, where he was the co-creator of an unlicensed therapy practice that was shut down by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences; and more. Greene has also addressed issues surrounding the distribution of wealth by selling money for less than face value and placing the entire contents of his apartment on sale, among other actions.
“This exhibition demonstrates The Museum’s commitment to exploring all facets of contemporary art, in this instance social practice and community engagement,” says Lori Starr, Executive Director of The CJM. “The show reinforces our Jewish identity as an institution—the ‘people of the book’—while at the same time inviting everyone in from all walks of life to celebrate being ‘peoples of the book.’ We honor the rich literary history of the Bay Area while exploring the tangible object-hood of the printed, bound, held, and cherished.”
Greene’s love of books blossomed early on. For him, as with many others, the pleasure of reading is not just in the storytelling, but in the very ‘objectness’ of a book in hand. “Books can be picked up and held, annotated, underlined, dog-eared and passed along,” says Greene. “In our increasingly fragmented and digitized world, a physical book is an antidote of sorts, providing a reprieve from other aspects of our lives in which we are in a constant state of multi-tasking.”
The exhibition, in two parts, includes a selection from Greene’s ongoing work Read by Famous. Since 2013, Greene has asked a wide range of well-known and successful people to pluck meaningful books from their shelves and donate them to the project. Each affirms that he or she has personally read that copy and provides accompanying notes about why the book was meaningful or important. For the exhibition, a sampling of twenty-five of these books are on the gallery wall, alongside photographs of inscriptions, notes, annotations, and other markings that the book donors have made. On view are contributions from Gavin Newsom (Make it in America by Andrew Liveris), Isiah Thomas (The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X), Jill Soloway (Valencia by Michelle Tea), Junot Díaz (The Earth by Arthur Beiser, from the publishers of Life Magazine’s Nature Library series), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther), Fred Wilson (Othello by William Shakespeare), and many more. Greene has collected nearly 100 volumes in total from a wide variety of individuals, all listed on the project website readbyfamous.com and searchable by category, from MacArthur Geniuses to Mormons on TV. Greene plans to auction the books through the website to benefit literacy campaigns.
The second part of the project is called The Library of Particular Significance, consisting of approximately one thousand books donated by the general public, also with statements about the donors’ relationship to a specific book. Visitors can browse the shelves, which Greene will periodically rearrange at whim by such organizing principles as donors’ zodiac signs and more. A special card catalog with further information is also available. The Library of Particular Significance is a functioning lending library, so visitors can temporarily check out books. Or they can leaf through the pages within the gallery in a comfortable reading area for individuals or small groups. A variety of reading events will take place in The Library during the run of the exhibition.
Greene’s interest in initiating social situations is at the heart of these installations, from crowdsourcing the content to repurposing a museum gallery into a library. In this unlikely setting, Greene not only creates an environment to share the book donors’ collective effort but also establishes a place for exchange and participation, inviting the public to indulge in the feel and smell of real books and to consider their social role: Where do we encounter books in our lives? Do we see them by chance at friends’ homes, read about them in reviews, catch strangers reading in public? How do the means of distributing (or not distributing) books—selling, loaning, owning, hoarding, recommending—have an effect on our experience of them? Why is the experience of reading in public different from reading at home? What changes when we know what someone famous reads in their private time?
