Free Words to Free Manifesta: Some Experiments in Art as Gift

Free Words

It began this way. Standing nervously in a bookstore, in front of the section on literary theory, hidden from the eyes of the staff, I reached my hand into my bag like a thief and pulled out a hot pink book. I looked up and down the aisle. No one was watching. O.K., now. I slipped it into the shelf among the F's (file under Free) and it was done.

So I began my career as in infiltrator of public spaces, a thief not of books but of shelf space, of access. A bypasser of gateways, permissions, and procedures.

The book was called Free Words, and was an art project of mine. Its content was a list of 13,000 words I had collected over ten years. I had uncopyrighted the text, placing it in the public domain (no rights reserved), and labeled the book as free. No price tag, no barcode, no ISBN. The back cover said only "this book belongs to whoever finds it." I had printed 1,000 copies of it, and the idea was to create a kind of situation.

Someone who came across the book would have to decide what it was and who really owned it. If they wanted it, they would have to decide whether to walk out with it like a shoplifter, or whether to negotiate something with the sales clerk. Bookstores would have to either purge the book or harbor it. There was a brief explanation and a web address at the back of the book, and if anyone made it to the site there was an invitation to become a distributor of the book, to join in the process of placing it in bookstores and libraries.

I spent a few months like that as 2001 came to a close: October, November, December; walking through a New York stunned by September 11, developing the habit of nonobedience. ¹ This was the time when the media was telling us to shop, when we were being told to agree,as if agreement and shopping were the definition and extent of our citizenship.

At first I was nervous, afraid of being stopped, but after a couple hundred books I relaxed. I was never questioned. The more I did it, the more the commercial space of the city seemed like public space, my space. The city, recovering month by month, felt more like an ecology—a human social ecology, intricate and interdependent. There were more ways of living within it and participating in it than I had supposed.

One of the questions raised by cities is who we are in them. How do we find ourselves as individuals, as agents? What kinds of citizenship are possible? Something about this project changed my relationship to the city from being a passive inhabitant of its structures, both social and architectural, to being more active, as I began to feel free to engage those structures more playfully, and to create new structures.

As the winter deepened, the Free Words project began to develop in a surprising way. On the website I invited people to become volunteer distributors of the book. I expected that a small number of people would find their way from the book to the website and an even smaller number of those might become distributors. What happened was something quite different: a few people did find the book and the website, but they weren't all interested in simply becoming distributors themselves. Some of them told the story of Free Words on various online forums, journals, and blogs, passing it on through their internet communities. Dozens of people who had never seen a copy of the book found their way to the site, and I began shipping batches of books to volunteers all over the country and the world. I printed more, and then more again.

For me the project became like a kind of...