The Rules Writ Large: Peter Liversidge's The Rules of the Library at National Library of Scotland review

By Greg Thomas, 09.03.2026

Peter Liversidge, The Rules of the Library (c. 2025). © the artist. Photo by Michael Vince Kim.

Peter Liversidge’s The Rules of the Library is printed on two oversized boards located on the second floor of the National Library of Scotland’s reading room. One is placed on a table as if discarded by a BFG-sized reader. The other, huger still, looms over readers from the wall above, its scale belying its humdrum appearance, typical of Liversidge’s work, as a roughly composed, typewritten list.

The instructions themselves, according to the blurb for the exhibition, “have been collected and recontextualised by Liversidge from a wide range of sources, including the Library's own extensive collections.” Removed from their habitat, some have a gnomic poetry to them, or seem like fragments of self-help literature: “Don’t give in to the lure”; “Be tender”; “If it matters, it matters”. In a few instances, they seem to have been lifted directly from archaic sets of rules for occupying public spaces of various kinds. “Do not kindle fire” is reminiscent of the eccentric Bodleian Oath which all new readers at Oxford University’s library must recite out loud, including the promise "not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame". Sometimes they have the ring of a gruff janitor’s admonitions: “After hours there can be no trespassing, no entry, no press access; DO NOT FORCE THE DOORS”.

Humour is central to Liversidge’s practice. Like George Brecht by way of Spike Milligan, he occupies himself primarily with an ongoing series of proposals for artworks, typed up by hand on A4 paper using an old Olivetti typewriter, sent in the post to gallerists, peers, and friends around the world. These proposals do not have the hip spareness of Fluxus or conceptual art, nor do they propose mind-altering impossibilities like those of Liversidge’s contemporary Katie Paterson. Rather, there is a kind of school-lunchtime, knockabout humour to them. Liversidge’s ‘Festival Proposals’ (2006) for the Ingleby Gallery consisted of 105 mailed propositions, including to run a dentist surgery, sweet shop or petting zoo from the gallery, to construct a death slide from Edinburgh Castle to the Scott Monument, and to dress up gallery staff as woodland creatures.

In some cases, Liversidge’s theoretical artworks can actually be realised. His ‘Jupiter Proposals of 2008-09’, a set of 134 presented as a close grid on the wall, resulted in the staging of a ‘Midsummer Snowstorm’ with potato starch-based snowflakes in 2009, and the permanent installation of a signpost showing the distance to Jupiter (‘Signpost to Jupiter’, 2009). This gets to a central aspect of the artist’s practice. Part of the drama and fun in this work is its capacity to be realised in multiple possible ways which are not predetermined by the artist. Rather, the extent to, and manner in, which these proposals are given new life depends on the other people and organisations involved in their reception and circulation.

The most delightful example of this is Liversidge’s decades-long practice of posting un-wrapped domestic objects and foodstuffs in the post, with stamps and addresses painstakingly added to their surfaces. The book-designer Peter Foolen, a long-time recipient, exhibited many such pieces at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven during 2015-16, including a mop, a paint-can, a ruler, an apple, and a potato. Surely these are not only artworks in themselves, but also the props for various chance-based performance works, involving baffled postal staff around the world.

With The Rules for the Library, Liversidge has combined a familiar format with the more lyrical and philosophical bent that comes across in some of his other work, such as his group choral performances and paired polaroid photographs. Each visitor to the library gets to leave with their own set of rules, potentially granting the artwork a series of afterlives on domestic walls around the country: a characteristically generous flourish.

Peter Liversidge’s work, ‘The Rules of the Library’ (2025)', is installed in the National Library’s reading rooms in Edinburgh.