ahistoryofreading + 1000 Accidents
Richard Grayson
Institute of Modern Art, 1999

As artist-in-residence at the Institute of Modern Art, Richard Grayson worked on and presented 1000 Accidents, an installation based on descriptions of common and minor accidents. Taking lines such as 'stand on glass', 'slip in shower' and 'fall down stairs', Grayson transforms them into dynamic (spherised) texts which seem to leap from the bright yellow walls and bombard the viewer. The use of yellow and black specifies a 'hazard zone' as the environment in which the viewer is located.

This installation operates as a stage, by suggestion, niggling at paranoia and experience: both tragic and comic. I understand the colour code of danger and the bubbles of text. The mere suggestion of these 'accidents' makes me cringe and shudder at not just their possibility but their likelihood. This is a chamber of horrors for the accident-prone. Grayson also seems to play with scale: big words for small occurrences, a monument for the everyday. In some ways, the exaggeration of these moments in text, gigantic and pushing from the wall, seems cartoon-ish and funny. These are just words, but their evocation seems somehow laughingly catastrophic, especially when exposed to them as a litany, en masse. Perhaps it is our familiarity with Itchy and Scratchy or The Three Stooges which makes these references seem so humorous.

Also by Grayson, the video installation, ahistoryofreading in which the artist, as Ihor Holubizky describes in his catalogue essay, "emptied the shelves of books, stood them up, and videotaped them being pushed down one by one."1 If these books had belonged to Grayson, the work might be understood as a biographical statement, a reflection on a personal relationship with books and reading. However, this is not the case, and the books belong mostly to someone else, with a few supplied by Grayson. So, one wonders which history of reading is being represented in this work. Perhaps that is the key to this work, these books belong to someone, even if at some point they will be discarded or shelved.

The book is an important and pervasive object, iconic in Western culture. When it appears in artwork, it cannot escape a literal interpretation: it is still a book, even when it is an artist's book. This is what makes ahistoryofreading a puzzling and mesmerising work. At first, it might appear to be about (if indeed it is 'about' anything) reading and literacy, but then perhaps it is about libraries and collections, perhaps it is about lines and linearity, perhaps it is about meaning. Perhaps. Strange isn't it, how a line inevitably produces a search for narrative?

Alberto Manguel states in his A History of Reading, it is the reader who reads: "we all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read."2 Manguel argues that through reading we learn, creating understanding and accruing knowledge. Is knowledge accrued in ahistoryofreading or is it created or applied? Apparently, there is intent in the ordering of the row of books: contradiction, pun, narrative. Of course, this won't stop the reader from making their own meaning and association.

Grayson describes this as making 'sense of no sense'. Perhaps these books reference the Borgesian encyclopedia or library, revealing a partial logic. Allen S. Weiss argues that "any text can be grafted on to any other text, to every other text ... And every text is the object of partial identification on the part of the reader."3 As the video reveals, this ordering is not the commonsense of the Dewey Decimal System, but rather a set of fragile symbolic relationships through which one thing, we are told, regardless of its random or spurious connection, leads to another.

NOTES
1 Ihor Holubizky, 'Speed Reading', ahistoryofreading catalogue, IMA: 1999
2 Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, Flamingo: 1997, 7
3 Allen S. Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess, State University of New York Press: 1989, xii