There are more rare books in Manhattan than in the entire country combined. Proud to be a part of this is the Fales Library, located on the third floor of NYU's Bobst Library. The Fales Collection is home to literary artifacts that capture the cultural values of New York City -works of fiction, art, performance and cuisine.
The Fales Collection included rare manuscripts in English and American literature, including the very first "novels," with over 200,000 volumes of fiction. Today, the library receives a copy of every new fiction that is published. Rare collections include the work of Robert Frost and Lewis Carroll. The Downtown Collection concentrates on Greenwich Village's performance art and punk music scene that came to life in the 1970s. The Food and Cookery Collection, which continues to expand today, archives the world of food, concentrating on New York City's food culture.
Last Thursday, my journalism class, famous for its trips to local "unknowns," ventured to Fales Library for first-hand exposure to New York City’s rarities.
We first toured an exhibit displaying the different kinds of art that emerged at the Judson Memorial Church, a historical landmark for Greenwich Village’s art scene.
Coming from a strong musical background, I was intrigued by the displays of graphic scores, which took sheet music to an entirely different level. But the most memorable part of the exhibit (as I’m sure it was to most of us there) was the video showing the first examples of installation art that took place in the basement of the Judson church where the pews were taken out in order for more performance space.
The first clip shows a performance titled “Meat Joy,” where dancers roll on the floor and prance across the screen in just undergarments, all the while rubbing raw fish and chicken onto their bare skin. One man stuffs a chicken down his underwear while another man playfully drags a girl across the floor who rubs a fish in between her legs.
The next clip shows the infamous “Flag Show” in which, once again, nude dancers with American flags tied around their neck exhibited their own definitions of “dance.” The moves are very postmodern, lack limitations and are mostly random movements.
“It’s quite beautiful,” says Marvin, our charming guide, from behind. Marvin, a bald man with pierced ears, who serves as Director of the Fales Library, would continue to narrate all the bizarre treasures that didn’t deserve to be confined in just the third floor of Bobst.
Marvin continues to explain how it was not only aesthetics of the dancers’ youth and beautiful bodies that made this so visually pleasing, but the idea of the flag being let to cover their bodies. Though the dancers were accused of desecrating the flag, Marvin thinks it was actually a very respectful action.
He discusses the theme of “destabilizing expectations” that was created within performance art pieces like these. It was a critique of conventional dancing like ballet, of physical gender roles, of the Vietnam War, of society, all in one performance. He refers back to the “Meat Joy” clip in which the commentary nature of the work is much more explicit. “Women aren’t supposed to have a fish in their vagina,” he laughs.
We are next given what Marvin calls “a dog and pony show” of the Downtown Collection that has relics from New York's brand of the punk movement that took over Greenwich Village in the seventies, eighties and nineties after the Judson. Pieces of the archive include issues from “Punk Magazine,” which was responsible for using the word “punk” to represent the artistic movement. The term was originally associated with men that were associated with prostitutes, and, later, men who “put themselves at the bottom” in prison. The magazine sculpted the word to have a meaning that "glorified the loser" but the meaning essentially became too complicated even for them. Other artifacts include photos of a younger Billy Idol, Mick Jacker, Iggy, and other big names in the music scene.
Marvin’s love and obsession for “punk,” as a word, a culture, a musical genre and a community, was what got him to this dream job. He was originally a Comparative Literature major who developed a specific interest into a career. “You can take a desolate childhood and turn it into a career,” he says with a laughter that has been present throughout our trip.
The room holding the Downtown Collection looks like any old conference room, and definitely does not do the collection justice. Inside the white envelopes and brown boxes, that we dare not touch or even stare at for too long so to not break its fragility, are all kinds of colorful personalities, an entire culture that we can now only look at through photos and journals and call it “history.”
The Fales Collection first started as a collection of "pop entertainment"; as a much more humble, but still impressive compilation of books by Dickens and Irving. In the 1950s, it was first offered to Harvard, the alma mater of the Fales family, but Harvard declined because it was a collection of fiction. It shows that even Harvard can make mistakes.
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