Libraries are not all vanilla 

“The man who does not read has no advantage over 
the man who cannot read.” 
 Mark Twain

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.
Raoul Vaneigem

Libraries are exciting spaces, believe it or not. I sell books to collection librarians and they are some of the most engaged, interesting and articulate individuals I work with in the publishing business. They are ardent book lovers, adamant about the knowledge, power and fun of reading and the value of free access. Librarians are excellent resource people in our culture, oft under appreciated, they have the uncanny ability to link community needs to big ideas, and can immediately put iany books or ideas that they encounter into the perspective of culture and global history. No mean feat.

There is a lot that goes in libraries besides reading dusty books. Libraries provide an alternative to corporatized culture, by providing a non-corporatized civic space. Free programming and skill building offer the chance for people to empower themselves, in a welcoming environment. A central space to  include new Canadians of all income brackets, they promote literacy, both as a value in society as well in families, by offering access to link people to books in all areas of their lives. For example, looking for a way to cook kale? Use a cookbook. Want to learn about a language? Get language CDs. Interested in building a resume or starting a club? Get a book to learn how.

Libraries also give us a space to interact with people who may not be from our own communities, or our own milieu. They have the power to democratize social relations, unlike Starbucks.

Calgary Public Library is one of the most heavily used libraries, per capita, in Canada. The new plans for Castell Central Library are going ahead, and they are seeking input from Calgarians
Go to their survey at http://calgarynewcentrallibrary.ca/

You will be asked what your priorities are for the library and what the new library can do for you.

As I filled out the survey, I imagined a beautiful and open access space, the library as civic landmark. It would centralize books, civic life, and the sharing of ideas in Calgarian consciousness via a free and open cultural space. My top priorities for this library then, in accordance with their categories on the surgery, are Arts and Culture, Lifelong Learning, Local Heritage, Civic Landmark and a Vibrant Space. I am hoping the new library will look like one of these fantastic library spaces, but this is getting my hopes up

Librarians are the keepers of our cultural knowledge. The internet is not a permanent nor neutral space. There is no accountability and it is driven by the market. Libraries are not driven by the market but are driven by larger social history both including and excluding the market.  For example, they store books that don't necessarily hit bestseller lists. And this is important because how can we know what it means to look at ourselves if we cannot see what we produced in times past? How can we know what it means to be a civic person, rather than a consumer, if we don't have any physical spaces that are about free and open access?

To me, the act of checking out books from libraries represents what Mark Kingwell calls participatory citizenship, defined as:

"...a new model of citizenship based on the act of participation itself, not on some quality or thought or right enjoyed by its possessor. This participatory citizenship doesn't simply demand action from existing citizens; it makes action at once the condition and task of citizenship." (The World We Want, p. 12)

By using libraries we are acting, and this action is a recognition of the value of the shared commons, a non commercial space for resources, ideas. It is also an act of recognizing the value of sharing our costs of housing such collections. We are recognizing the value of individual non-ownership as a conceptual space. We are recognizing the value of our shared past and the value of appointing librarians as keepers so as to make such an archive accessible and navigable in an intelligent systematic way.
Ultimately libraries are the embodiment of the value of equality and equal access, for everyone regardless of income, to the world of ideas.

If, in a kingdom of consumption, the citizen is supposedly king, then we, as kings, would all need an education to know how to rule ourselves; books are our path to such an education.
Such an education can never be had in such a kingdom where only that which gets published is that which supports the kingdom. Thus libraries and their non commercial space, as well as government grants, provide such a refuge.

An unwitting consumer without access to knowledge outside the system is not a ruler but is merely a tool- a tool of a system designed to exploit those very tools at the bottom.

Thus the library card, and its free passage to knowledge, is a shining jewel in such a kingdom and librarians become the gate keepers of our freedom.

Burtynsky Exhibit at the Whyte Museum in Banff, Alberta, Canada

The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies is hosting Edward Burtynsky: The Residual Landscapes

For more info go to www.edwardburtynsky.com 

or www.whyte.org

Burtynsky is one of Canada's most prominent photographers, made famous by the documentary Manufactured Landscapes. His photos are in galleries around the world including the National Gallery of Canada and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York. The opportunity to see his work in its life-sized glory in Banff is a special treat. These are incredible pieces of scale and seeing them in a book as a small reproduction does not do them justice.

Burtynsky's photos are of scarred landscapes changed by industry. These are haunting pictures, simultaneously beautiful and horrible. They are seriously disturbing images: he is exposing the oil, mining and other heavy industries' dark side, the side that most people never get to see. By exposing this, he brings the real effects of our consumer lifestyle into our consciousness. As a consumer most days, I don't think about how the product got to me, I just see the lovely product on sale at the shop. But this photographer, by his amazing ability to scope out the details and the whole picture at once, forced me to understand the universal scale of this big economic and social experiment we call the modern world.  It is truly scary stuff, and I think overwhelming to anyone of conscience. But weirdly, although I was looking at evidence of worrisome pollution at an incomprehensible scale, I was also seeing gorgeous images characterized by beauty and symmetry as well. In his photo "Oxford Tire Piles #8", he is shooting from above a landfill dump of millions of chalky, deflated automotive tires in Westley California. In the centre of the photo runs a brown fault line of reddish dirt. When I saw this photo, my reaction was immediate: "I drove here. I participated in this mess, I own a car and like the convenience of it. I drove here to Banff today, I put on new snow tires last month so I could get to see this very exhibit". My responsibility for, and connection to this pile of tires is obvious and awful. But there is something else going on here too: I also saw a stunning and gorgeous photo, the nip of yellowish- green grass poking from the background that runs seemlessly into the amber road of earth. It is a perfect composition and is strangely calming when I can forget for a moment the reality of it. This is wonderful stuff and I want to see more. 

I think that the most startling image of the exhibit is the oft-shown Nickel Tailings series, I saw image #30, from Sudbury Ontario. When I was looking at this photo I had to keep reminding myself that this was man-made, not a natural thing. It was so wondrous and pretty that I felt the way I do witnessing the Northern Lights or a harvest moon. Even though my thinking self had to keep saying that this harvest fed us with toxins and death. This duality of emotion is so strong for me while looking at these images. With just a camera this man had me thinking about the context and limits of human knowledge and understanding. I was pondering how amazing the human mind is, that we can conceive of two competing realities and yet on another level cannot accept it. I cannot split into two minds, though these photos ask that of me. 

The largest series of the exhibit was the series on the Alberta Oil Sands, taken in Fort McMurray in 2007. From the tiny photo in the exhibit brochure, the flat greenish field with the pretty finger-like patterns in pale yellow, looks like a tennis court, bordered by neat grey, divided in the middle by a row of short, orderly posts. On closer inspection the "green" of the "court" is actually a huge pool of poisonous waste sulphur. When I walked around that room and saw these giant images surrounding me, all hung together like that, I fully understood the vastness of this experiment and the scope of this man's work to photograph it. It is a respectable chore, one Burtynksy undertakes at great risk to his own health, and as a society we need it. We are indeed ready for this.

In his artist statement Burtynsky says "These images are meant as metaphors for the dilemma of our modern existence, they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear".  I felt all these complex and competing emotions and to me this is what art does and why we need it in our society!

The Globe and Mail did an amazing in depth feature on the Alberta Oil Sands, narrated by Burtynsky and showing Burtynsky's photos see here for the link:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/v5/content/features/oilsands/index.html