Aliciamartn

Alicia Martín (Madrid, 1964)

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.
Jorge Luis Borge, La Biblioteca de Babel (1941)

For many years Alicia Martín has inhabited a literal artistic world. She has engaged in constructions and deconstructions of the sort that the late great Jorge Luis Borges inhabited in his mind and represented through his hauntingly intelligent, enigmatic, and labyrinthine texts. Borges posited worlds of words and worlds of books, an infinite library that was the sum of all knowledge that ever was and ever will be. Within the phantasmagoria of his mind, he was the totality of the possibilities embodied by all of these wondrous books bursting forth with hidden knowledge and psychological insights.
Martín has put this concept to the test with her constructions of exploding bookshelves and libraries. Her installations consist of countless books arranged on seemingly endless shelves that appear to posit a sum of all knowledge as in Borges’s short story, La Biblioteca de Babel. Other works involve collapsing or exploding domestic settings, tables and chairs, objects intimately related to the act of reading.
To cite from Borges further, “In truth, the library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.” Borges continues, “At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity’s basic mysteries―the origin of the library and of time―might be found. It is highly likely that these grave mysteries could be explained in words: if the language of philosophers is not sufficient, the multiform library will have produced the unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and grammars.” So far, so good.
A library, infinite or not, is also a form of art object, an archive, and, ultimately, a Wunderkammer that somehow reflects the intelligence of the person accumulating all these vast details. Yet as in the Biblical story, those who searched for the universal in the Tower of Babel were struck down when their presumptive quest for infinite knowledge that only God possessed offended God. Thus in other installations Martín presents us with shelves collapsing under their own weight and of books bursting from their shelves and from labyrinths.
Man’s relationship to the written word and to God is encoded in the Muslim reference to those religions relying on divine text of the direct revelation of God. We “People of the Book” are blessed and condemned at the same time to search for the divine in the written word. Yet this is a dangerous farce as Borges, himself a librarian, puts it bluntly: “You who read me, are you sure of understanding my language?”
The hubris of seeking infinite knowledge led to the collapse of the Tower of Babel. It leads to Martín’s exploding bookshelves. It leads us to the Internet and the presumption that everything on Wikipedia is correct. With her infinitely clever installations, here elegantly but simply represented by photographs, Martín reminds us to use caution.