I got chills as I walked into Law Warschaw Gallery at Macalester College last week to see “Mickey Smith: Morphologies.” It felt to me as if I were entering a tomb, where knowledge itself was being laid to rest. The exhibition was originally going to end Dec. 15, but it’s been extended through Friday, Dec. 20.
Artist Mickey Smith, born and raised in Minnesota and now based in New Zealand, has been exploring the dramatic shifts happening in the world of libraries and academics for 20 years. Through photography and installation work, Smith investigates the evolution of archiving in our increasingly digital world, and in a way acts as an homage — even a monument — to past practices.
Heather Everhart, director and curator of Law Warschaw Gallery, curated the exhibition, and also co-edited the catalog with Laura Wertheim Joseph (formerly curator at the Minnesota Museum of American Art), who is now director of curatorial affairs at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
“This exhibition offers rich opportunities to explore themes of memory, permanence, and the evolving role of libraries,” Everhart wrote in an email. “Smith’s ability to celebrate the formal beauty of books while questioning their cultural permanence is especially resonant in an era of rapid digital transformation.”
One of the first pieces I encountered when I visited the exhibition was called “Platform, Vol. 1,” (2024), consisting of donated bound periodicals lined up along the floor, appearing as a kind of platform. With their brown, green, and blue covers and plain type, the periodical covers appear as a sea of uniform design.
Some examples are the 1980 issues of the Hastings Center Report and the Journal of Experimental Botany from 2005.
As first installed, the work was made of 3,276 bound periodicals. That number is reduced now, as visitors are encouraged to take a volume with them after they leave.
The installation has a stately appearance. On social media, I’ve seen photographs of people walking on the volumes, but I didn’t feel comfortable enough to do that myself. There’s a reverence for books that’s been instilled in me as someone who grew up in the pre-digital age, and I couldn’t bring myself to put my weight on the installation. But it also may have felt more inviting to step on them toward the beginning of the run of the show. As people have taken books since the exhibition opened, the flooring area has become quite a bit more reduced.
In any case, Smith’s trick here is to at once show the books as foundational — powerful enough to hold those who stand on them, and also held in memorial. Usually bound periodicals are tucked away in the stacks of a library — unseen by everyday library visitors except for those who seek them out. In Smith’s “Platform,” they are given reference and a dose of awe.
On the wall above the layer of books on the floor hangs a photographic tryptic, “Collocation No. 19 (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE),” (2024), photographed from the stacks of Macalester’s DeWitt Wallace Library. The photographs depict a series of book covers similar to the bound periodicals on the floor but are ominously titled “Artificial Intelligence.” The photographs don’t capture the bottom of the spines of these book covers, so we don’t see the years these journals are supposed to be, and I think that’s intentional. While there is an actual peer-reviewed journal called Artificial Intelligence Journal (and others with similar names), Smith’s photographs here capture the metaphorical implications of artificial intelligence being bound and stacked in some tucked away backroom of the library.
Other works were photographed during Smith’s residency at Macalester, including “Bound: Withdrawn From” (2024), showing a stamp marking publications marked for deaccession, and “LIT,” (2024), a photograph of a single bound periodical with that title. “LIT,” kept catching my eye as I was in the gallery. The book is tilted at just an ever so slight angle, and it looks almost sassy. Still here, literature seems to be saying.
Another piece that struck me with a visceral jolt was Smith’s “Stack Vol. 1,” (2024). It’s made of shredded National Geographic magazines, with issues spanning 98 years, plus donated library shelves. The magazine shreddings sit precariously on the shelf, as if they might blow away with a heavy wind. The piece reminds me of ruins of some forgotten city.
The shredded National Geographic issues startled me for two reasons. One is that I have myself been faced with my own internal quandary about what to do with old issues of that very magazine and others like it that take up too much room in my apartment. Filled with guilt for putting them in the recycling, I sometimes take old magazines to my neighborhood Little Free Library, where they often sit for months and I have to feel guilty about that as well. The piece also serves as a reminder about the precarious market for mainstream magazines in general. Let’s not forget National Geographic made headlines in 2023 for laying off all of its staff writers.
I remember having a conversation with an archivist many years ago about preserving books and physical documents as opposed to preserving digital content. What she told me is that we have hundreds of years of practice preserving paper — it’s a science that is well understood and studied. We don’t have as much experience preserving digital files, and even less preserving internet sites that are no longer active. How will we remember the important things in generations to come? If we don’t figure it out, Smith’s pile of rubbish serves as a warning.
“Mickey Smith: Morphologies,” runs through Friday, Dec. 20, at Law Warschaw Gallery at Macalester College, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. After that, the exhibition travels to the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND, opening Jan. 18, and running through May 25, before heading to a joint showing at University of Nebraska and Fiendish Plots in Lincoln, Sept 2-26.
Note about visiting Law Warschaw: there’s a specific door you need to enter from if you are not a student. Visit this page for a picture of that door and directions for getting inside.
