When libraries finally upgraded for the information age in the late 80s and early 90s, one of the first features to go was the card catalog, which was replaced by a computerized version. Many of us, including myself, may not even recall using the files of cards arranged by subject, title, and author, but they were the map of the library for a long time and their significance as such cannot be underestimated. Yet when they were discarded (literally), no one knew what to do with them, and the catalogs languished in storage or were shredded.

David Bunn actually gained possession of one card catalog, the Los Angeles Central Library's, and he's been putting it to good use ever since. His show, from "I Feel Better Now/I Feel the Same Way" (1996) and "Here, There, and (Nearly) Everywhere" (1997), is at the Bayly Art Museum until May 23, courtesy of the Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York. Among other recent university appearances, the artist presented his work to Assistant Professor of English Tan Lin's Modern and Contemporary Poetics class -- which, incidentally, was more valuable than the Bayly's cramped and cursory exhibition.

What Bunn does is generate poetry from the catalog by linking together all the title cards that begin with the same word. With the word "you," for instance, there are only three books and the memorable result is "You are a consumer. / You are a data processor. / You are a rainbow." Then he types up these poems in the same font as the actual cards and displays the cards and poems together. It's a kind of recuperation of the dead catalog, and as Bunn said to our class, he likes to think of the cards as lying in state or as the remains upon which he performs autopsies. Each card, after all, bears the wear and tear -- and fingerprints and smudges -- of a lifetime of use.

Although the project raises several interesting questions, I find it most provocative as a critique of the institutionality of knowledge and memory. The card catalog is fundamentally a system that organizes those ethereal items into a concrete structure for the benefit of the public. But at the same time, this very "organizing" regulates people's experience of knowledge and memory, reducing amorphous and unquantifiable cognitive activity to sheer numbers and words while also denying its immediacy. Of course one could say that there is no such thing as knowledge without such a structure, but that case is harder to make for memory, which I would argue encompasses knowledge anyway and which at any rate is certainly more slippery and visceral. The library, however, contains them -- more accurately perhaps, determines them -- in the form of the card catalog, and this is exactly what Bunn's work demonstrates.

Take the Beatles and the Doors, two of his prominent examples. When he went to Liverpool to work with its Central Library's sheaf catalog, he often noticed cardboard cut-outs of the two bands on the street. These fake representations of particularly memory-evocative groups from a particularly memory-evocative period, the 60s, are basically the same as a card from the catalog with the title of a book about the Beatles or the Doors. Neither the cardboard cut-outs nor the cards on their own can signify anything except what they are -- they may only trigger memories of the groups insofar as they are attempts to signify them. And in fact, Bunn's poems made from the title cards of books about the Beatles and the Doors don't evoke any memories at all but rather make them seem foreign and abstract. The distinctly generational phrase "far out," for which I can conjure multiple associations, is completely defamiliarized. The memory and knowledge institutionalized by the card catalog suddenly becomes fake.

Yet one of the problems the show raises for itself is what to make of the gallery setting. For work that is so strongly a commentary on the nature and practices of institutions -- of the library, of knowledge, of memory, of art -- exhibiting it in this particular context, a powerful institution in its own right, complicates whatever critique Bunn is trying to make. His reticence about this kind of politics in the presentation to our class was noticeable, although he did seem (to want) to imply, as does the work, an intent somewhere between subversion and irony -- my reading thus far suggests this as well. In the installation at Brooke Alexander, the cards and poems were on one wall and a towering stack of the actual card catalog in boxes was on the other, and this arrangement helps to counteract the energy of the gallery by literalizing the cards and a person's experience of them. Yet even situated like this, the cards and poems are still literalized as "art" by their frames. Although the problem here may be one of continuing uncertainty about the institution of art, a space originally destabilized by Duchamp and the Dadaists near the beginning of this century, I wish Bunn had been more resistant to its influence.

The books that collect the poems and cards actually amplify this problem. Already the only weak part of the project, they contribute nothing and often seem a cheesy stand-in for an exhibition catalog. Worse, I think they detract from the integrity of the work by reinscribing the same system of knowledge that it was emancipated from to begin with. While I would consider it wonderfully disruptive to get the real cards back into the library somehow, as Bunn did with initial elevator installations in the L.A. library, he now scans them and prints their thoroughly disembodied copies in the books. Does this not seem like the very practice that Bunn is trying to critique? Is not sitting in an art gallery perusing these determinate versions of the show the same as sitting in a library perusing its determinate versions of knowledge and memory? Forget about the cardboard cut-outs of the Beatles -- with the books, Bunn has made a cardboard cut-out of the whole entire project.

Nevertheless, the work doesn't purport to be any one thing. On the contrary, its success comes from appropriating a text so full of meaning that it can be almost anything. A rejoinder might assert that as a conceptual work, it should by definition be unassailable, and clearly Bunn has made certain choices that are less effective than others. Still, his critique, and our own critiques (like this one), are valuable because they bring the card catalog, one system of knowledge and memory among many, back to life.