Categories and order systems: Claude parent and the serving library. Intersections of architecture, art and editorial design

Abstract

This paper discusses the work of Claude Parent and The Serving Library, considering the critiques generated by their intersecting of architecture, art and editorial design. Through focus on the ways in which hosting environment, architecture and forms of expanded publishing can serve to dissolve disciplinary boundaries and activities of production, spectatorship and reception, it draws on the lineage of 1960s/70s’ Conceptual Art in considering these practices as a means through which to escape medium specificity and spatial confinement. Relationships between actual and virtual space are then read against this broadening of aesthetic ideas and the theory of critical modernity.