The Park Bench Reader is an ongoing performance series by the artist Bram Thomas Arnold. Regular Sunday afternoons find Bram reading a classic work of English Literature to passing members of the public. In 1840 Joseph Strutt opened England's first public park, the decade went on to give voice to a whole generation of England's finest authors. The Park Bench Reader seeks to draw these two seemingly unassociated events together again and question the pace of life in a society ever racing forward.

Tuesday, 2 September 2008

The Park Bench Reader: An English Library in New York


The Park Bench Reader: An English Library in New York. Conflux 2008. C.F.A. LaGuardia Place, New York City.

Bram Thomas Arnold will curate a library of literature that has been culled from the charity shops of his Hackney stomping ground in London.This ‘English’ literature library will be shipped to New York and act as a center for the quiet activism of reading: a protest against the ongoing and ever increasing pace of a society that is beginning to collapse under its own weight. The gentle intervention seeks to reignite community and individual imagination through an engagement with the very stories that took this civilization to its current peak.Coordinated readings will take place on prominent benches at set hours across the days of the festival, and the library,will act as a promotion tool for prearranged readings as well as an opportunity for volunteers to take the novels on to the streets themselves.
Posted by bram thomas arnold at 02:34

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