Title: The Serving Library and Bulleting of the Serving Library
Artists: Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey | David Reinfurt) with Angie Kiefer
Website: servinglibrary.org
Publisher: Sternberg Press, Berlin/New York
Format: Downloadable pdf-files; Bulletins: 16.5 x 23.5 cm, sofcover, varying number of pages
Accompanying essay: The Serving Library Company, Inc. Statement of Intent (draft)
The Serving Library is a long-term project conceived by Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey | David Reinfurt) with writer Angie Keefer. Founded on a consideration of how the role of the library has changed over time – from fixed archive through circulating collection to a point of distribution – the format has become an umbrella project for all of Dexter Sinister’s activities. According to the project’s website it consists of:
1) an ambitious public website;
2) a small physical library space; and
3) a publishing program which runs through #1 and #2.
Bulletings of the Serving Library is a composite printed/electronic publication. The “bulletins” that make up each issue are first published online as pdfs at The Serving Libarary over a six-month period, then assembled, printed and distributed. Each collection makes up a semester’s worth of loosely-themed material, with its constituent pdfs grouped together on the website. According to the project’s website the following issues have been published:
Issue #1 was intended as an expansive statement of intent, broadly concerned with Libraries, Media, and Time (though not necessarily in that order);
Issue #2 emerged from a course we ran at The Banff Center in the Summer of 2011
Issue #3 doubles as a catalog-of-sorts to “Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language,” a group exhibition at MoMA (New York) from May 6 to August 27, 2012, and is preoccupied with the more social aspects of Typography.
Issue #4 circles around psychedelia – a lo-fi, black-and-white flavor that emerged from the exhibition Dexter Bang Sinister at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen. Next,
Issue #5 passes like an arrow through the past, present, and future of Germany;
Issue #6 circles around the outskirts of Fashion;
Issue #7 is about Numbers;
Issue #8 is smaller than large but larger than small: Medium; and (in a breaking update),
Issue #9 tackles all manner of sports and games.