In 1990, when the Los Angeles Central Library transferred to an on-line filing system, American conceptual artist David Bunn acquired the Library’s “dead” card catalog in its entirety, roughly seven million cards.
For the Double Monster Box Set (2000), he drew upon both the LACL card catalog and that of the Physicians Library and Mütter Museum, a 19th century medical museum of pathological specimens, wax models, medical equipment and curiosities, ordering scans of said cards into provocative, and often funny, groupings. Bunn combines an archivist’s rigor with a poet’s sensibility, a comic’s wit and a conceptual artist’s willingness to go out on a limb to create a verbose work (taking particular relish in matters of the occult/irrational) of behemoth proportions.
This box set contains seven books housed in a shiny buckram-sheathed case reminiscent of nothing if not libraries of the latter half of the 20th century.
