San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Making noise in the library
New sculpture-and-sound installation at the Athenaeum celebrates readers by tapping into their inner voices
The library is supposed to be, by its very essence, a quiet place. A place of study and comprehension, and of deep, immersive reading.
The Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla is such a place. Walk in on a regular weekday and visitors will find a muted atmosphere — a quaint, historic place to grab one of the thousands of art books in its collection and get lost in thought.
This concept was fascinating for Jared Stanley and Matthew Hebert, friends and fellow creatives who have collaborated on a number of art exhibitions over the last decade. Their latest exhibition, “La Jolla Reading Room,” which opened Friday at the Athenaeum, explores and upends the idea of the quiet reading space via a sculpture-andsound installation that, according to Hebert, intends to “crack the space open to the audience.”
“I’ve always been fascinated with the specifics of that place and the collection of books,” Hebert says of the Athenaeum. “We were thinking about what it would be like walking into a room like this and suddenly you’re a scanner and can hear everyone’s thoughts as they’re reading, and you’re sort of overwhelmed by these strange fragments. You don’t get the whole picture, but you get a crude representation of the book.”
‘Chorus of readers’
For Hebert, a sculptor and installation artist who works as an associate professor of art at San Diego State University, his friend and collaborator Jared Stanley was a natural choice for what he had in mind for the Athenaeum space. An award-winning poet based in Reno, Stanley says he’s always been fascinated with the idea of reading in public.
“We think of this exhibition as a chorus of readers,” Stanley says. “Over my time as a writer, you notice how much less people are reading books in public. Some writers will think about reading as something very intense, a rebellious act that you do in public. You don’t get that with a phone, because they could be doing something related to work, whereas reading a book is tied to leisure.”
“La Jolla Reading Room” was first conceived in 2020 as what Hebert described, at the time, as an exhibition of “talking books.” It has since morphed into an interactive installation of “laminated plastic and plywood concoctions” or table sculptures, the tops fashioned to look like book covers, and assembled within the Athenaeum’s North Reading Room to resemble a maze. As the viewer moves through the labyrinthine installation, motion-activated sensors are tripped and audio snippets from interviews that Stanley conducted with readers are played from speakers hidden within the sculpture.
“The voices here are the voices of readers, and that’s where it’s like angels in a way,” says Stanley, who interviewed dozens of local readers, having them reflect on a particular title in the Athenaeum’s collection. “It’s disembodied. If you go to a room like that and 50 people are reading at the same time, that’s a lot of brain space happening. These things usually happen silently, so we wanted to see what that would be like if it wasn’t like that.”
Both Stanley and Hebert acknowledge that the experience of “La Jolla Reading Room” will largely vary depending on a number of factors. If experienced with a group, for example, the result could be a chaotic cacophony of voices melding or even clashing together. If a viewer were alone, however, the experience could sound more conversational depending on how fast they move through the space. What’s more, because the interview snippets are shuffled consistently, each visitor will get a wholly unique permutation of the exhibition.
“When you walk by one, it will occasionally trigger another one, so there will be this cascading effect through the space,” Hebert says. “It makes sure that even if someone is in there by themselves, they will still have that layered experience. When there’s a couple people in there, it will do that naturally, but we really wanted it to not be one voice at a time.”
“It will change every time because the audio is on these triggers, and that’s where this idea of the collage comes in and thinking about it as a choral work,” Stanley adds. “You could hear it as a linear poem. Let’s say you go through it once, you could go through it again and it would be completely distinctive from the first time.”
Stanley goes on to say that some of the audio clips range from a train-ofthought discourse to one person who had an almost “noir” style of speaking. Some range from people reading excerpts from the books to simply saying things that just sounded “interesting” to Stanley.
There were some where people would describe what was happening in the book in a new and interesting way, Stanley says. “There were moments where people were digging out their own biographies and telling stories about their own lives that were elicited from the book. It was just a large range of experiences.”
Tribute to readers
Stanley and Hebert met 20 years ago in Chicago and bonded over their shared experiences of being two displaced Californians in the Midwest. It wasn’t until 2010, however, that they had the idea to collaborate with “The Desert Die,” an installation in Palm Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. The idea, says Stanley, was to “combine interactive sculpture and language within landscapes,” and the two have brought that same creative ethos to “La Jolla Reading Room.”
“We were friends for over a decade before we were ever collaborators,” says Stanley, who adds that despite their seemingly disparate artistic practices, the collaboration seemed organic. “We had a lot of shared interests that transcended the genres that we were working in.”
Both Hebert and Stanley see “La Jolla Reading Room” as not only the result of a two-year collaborative process, but an abstract tribute to readers and the importance of libraries.
“It’s such an interesting space to me,” Stanley says of the Athenaeum. “As a writer, I of course grew up in libraries, so even though this is a very conceptual project, I also feel like it’s a bit of a love letter to readers. There’s a part of this that’s also about the resilience of reading as an act.”