Self-Help Library, Cathy and Moyra Davey in the library, collaboration with Bob Flanagan, Visiting Hours, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, 1994.
Self-Help Library, library installation, collaboration with Bob Flanagan, Visiting Hours, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, 1994.
Self-Help Library, library installation, collaboration with Bob Flanagan, Visiting Hours, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, 1994.
Self-Help Library, library installation, collaboration with Bob Flanagan, Visiting Hours, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, 1994.
Self-Help Library, library installation, collaboration with Bob Flanagan, Visiting Hours, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, 1994.
Self-Help Library, library installation detail, collaboration with Bob Flanagan, Visiting Hours, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, 1994.
Self-Help Library, library installation detail, collaboration with Bob Flanagan, Visiting Hours, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, 1994.
Self-Help Library, book stamp detail, collaboration with Bob Flanagan, Visiting Hours, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, 1994.
Self-Help Library, New Museum (1994)
In 1994, Cathy Busby was invited to respond to Bob Flanagan’s Visiting Hours exhibition at the New Museum for Contemporary Art (New York). For this work, Busby created Self-Help Library, a collection made up of hundreds of used self-help books, with titles like Styles of Loving, The 14 Day Stress Cure, and My Mother My Self. Viewers could page through these books as a pause after witnessing Flanagan's performance and treatment of his cystic fibrosis with pain-inducing methods.
Self-Help Library was the basis for Where Does It Hurt? (1996) and is part of a collection of works which focus on pain and its management, including How... (2001), Testdrive (2002), Self-Help Book Library (2014) and the collaborative anthology, When Pain Strikes (1999).