Library

The phantasmic library presented here is a depository of real and imaginary books, and is meant to show that the latter can influence us as much as the former. Looking back at the artistic and literary tradition of rewriting one’s own biography around imaginary books (literary examples include E.T.A. Hoffmann and Vladimir Nabokov, and Ilya Kabakov has done the same in art), Pepperstein explains that he has created the library based on two opposite ideas: the fetishism associated with books as sacred objects and their potential interchangeability, which allows for endless variations in the canon, where Kant can be replaced with Schmant and Pascal with Mascal. Momentary appearances by Levi-Schmuel and other non-existent people are fairly common in art: non-existent characters light up before us and vanish without a trace to make way for others, as in Pepperstein’s series People Who Have Never Been. The same could be said of books: the great texts that transformed our view of the world never existed, even if we can see them: there they are, standing on the shelf with their gold-embossed spines.