The following extract from Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World shows how slipping in between the definitions can both get the Trickster what he wants, but also ends up enlivening the system itself: he 'casts new spells even as the old ones are undone'.

"A bit of luck and a trick of craft gave Hermes something to trade with that was not part of the old economy. Like the person who has found buried treasure or like the craftsman who has dreamed up a new technique, Hermes appears with a kind of wealth [the music of his lyre] that eludes the received moral grid, and patron of smart luck, he turns it to good advantage and exchanges gifts with Apollo.

With all this enchantment and disenchantment, then, Hermes manages to resolve the dilemma he posed in the speech to his mother ("either they give me honor or I steal it"). He resolves it with a theft that confuses the definition of theft, with lies that muddy the truth, with speech that shifts the threshold of shame, with chance operations that dissolve hierarchy — and with a musical tongue that casts spells even as the old ones are undone."

[p219]

Such work is the strategy of interstitiality; work which crosses the boundaries, shifts the goalposts and blurs the definitions. In so doing it makes room for new inventions and new ways of appreciating that which is made; crucially it also makes us see that the old order wasn't really sufficient to contain the realities of practice as it is really done.

It's something we come across when we want to catalogue or define artists' books. The work of many artists is based right in this strategic niche; to find the exploitable niches that reorder the understanding of the world. It's really part of what we've understood as the notion of avant-garde for some time now, and it is just as frequently part of the tactical DNA of how contemporary artists like to work with being situated relative to their identities, societies, place, etc. They often like to cross, penetrate, deconstruct or otherwise play the trickster with what they encounter. And that work they do frequently helps us towards what might be called a critical literacy. Our encounters with 'Olympian Hegemony' are ever afterwards tainted with the possibility of an Hermetic transformation.

What I would like to present in the research I want to do over the coming year, is the effect of artists' book collections in libraries as a kind of kernel of doubt, of indeterminacy or of interstitiality, that can establish in its users the same kind of useful suspicion of the knowledge structures that surround their research experience. I think that this can make them cannier researchers, and can help mitigate the effects of a close-fitting 'personalized' research experience: such 'doubtful experience' punctures that experience with its inventive, ribald energy.