AN EXPLANATION

DRUGSTORE BEETLE (Sitodrepa Paniceum) was organized by David Horvitz, and features:

Marley Freeman 
Paul Branca 
Mary Walling Blackburn 
John Sisley
Miranda Lichtenstein 
Annegret Kellner 
Emilie Halpern  
Barbara Ess 
Daniel Gustav Cramer 
Alex Klein 
Sarah Rara Anderson 
Graham Parker 
Suzie Silver 
Marijke Appelman 
Jon Pestoni 
Josh Kit Clayton 
Amy Lam
Luke Fischbeck 
Michael G. Bauer 
Avalon Kalin 
John Pena 
Santos Vasquez 
Zach Houston 
Michelle Blade 
Graham Anderson 
Steve Kado
Ken Ehrlich

An edition of 30 exhibitions were made, containing small works by the 27 artists. They were all bound in a four-flap, an archival enclosure used in libraries for the purpose of shelving loose prints. An ISBN was purchased for the exhibition. Meta-data was also inputted into WorldCat, the cataloging database librarians use to input and retrieve a publication’s information. With the exhibition’s meta-data existing in two digital databases, all thirty of them were sent to libraries around the world through the transaction of a book-donation (they were all made to exist, initially, as gifts, and only as gifts). The idea was that, since they were already legitimately placed in the two widely used digital systems, that they would slip with ease into the respective library’s collection. If accepted, they become subject to the rules and regulations of the library. Some may circulate, some may be held in special collections that are only accessible by appointment (where they can be handled with white gloves and looked at in the surrounding silence of the library). Some libraries may allow them to go on loan, making them an exhibition-ready-to-be-checked-out-and-displayed. Or, in the cases where they may be refused admittance, they may disappear, like the used-book with no place to go that one finds in the discarded-pile at a library sale.  

All 30 were donated. 1 other exists as the “artist-proof.”

This blog will serve as the project’s documentation. Only 7 of the 27 artists’ pieces can be seen here. To see the rest, it is suggested, that you go to a library near you (the list is below).

RAID Projects in Los Angeles will be taking the project out on loan from USC’s Architecture and Fine Art Library and exhibiting it April 3 – April 9.

The title refers to the most notorious of the book-worms, whose high reproduction rate sends larvae in the hundreds of thousands each year burrowing into books and shelves. The above photo was found in the article, Preservation of Rare Books and Manuscripts in the Huntington Library by Thomas M. Iiams in The Library Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1932), and depicts a technique from the 1930’s for removing book-worms.