Blair's Books — Nico B. Young

I built my first piece of furniture in February 2020: a bookcase made of pine wood boards.

I was taking a sculpture course at the time and I wanted to learn how to use the shop tools. I had also just inherited a collection of books from a deceased family friend and needed a place to store them. I decided to make a bookcase to match their dimensions perfectly, so there would be no excess space on any shelf, no room for any more books, since the collection of a dead person is essentially complete. The books also created a portrait of Blair, their previous owner, through his interests.

The plan was: to build a bookcase as a reliquary for a collection of books→show it as a sculpture→live with it for a period of time (which turned out to be one year)→decide which books I wanted to keep and clear out the rest→keep the bookcase and use it for my own books, as furniture. The piece’s status would shift from Art to furniture over the course of its lifetime.

I showed the sculpture for my final critique on March 12, 2020 (which turned out to be my final in-person critique of college. The cancellation of in-person schooling was announced the day before, so our professor wasn’t allowed to be there. He Facetimed in instead.)

I lived with the bookcase for a year, during quarantine. When moved out of a gallery context and into a domestic space, its status as art became much more precarious. It was distinguished from the other furniture in my room by not being freely usable to me, since it was filled with another person’s books. The only way to maintain the integrity of the work was treating like art, instead of furniture. I began cataloguing the books, and then each bookmark and annotated page from Blair in each book.

A year later, I was invited to show the piece at Punto Lairs Inc. When it was shown again, I decided to rearrange the books in order by height. When I had originally made the bookcase, the books were arranged by genre, and then the height of each shelf was dictated by the height of the tallest book on it. Rearranging them by size meant that the bookcase was the shortest it could be- 11cm shorter than it had been originally. I thought this made the concept of the bookcase fitting the books “perfectly” more visually clear. And, arranged by height, the books were still mostly separated by genre, since most of the novels were small and most of the reference books were large.

I adjusted the heights of each shelf and then chopped 11cm off the top before showing it again.

I installed Blair’s Books at Punto Lairs Inc., inviting visitors to take a book with them. By the end of the show, most of the smaller books had been taken, but, predictably, the larger, obsolete programming books had stayed.

I brought the bookcase back home after the show and donated the books I didn’t want to keep. Then the bookcase began a second life in my room as ordinary furniture. I adjusted the shelves again and filled them with my own things. I even added a little side-shelf for a reading light next to my chair.