In his Reading Rooms, Barber worked with Alexander Rodchenko's 1925 Reading Room as a model for a workers' library and study. These multi-part installations made use of multi-media formats to re-present various forms of corporate advertising and news reporting. The Red Room addressed the construction of masculinity through media representation. The imagery used for critical readings was obtained from various sites of popular culture including film, advertising, war history, weapons magazines and comic books. The Newsroom section contained newspaper accounts of male violence; the Viewsroom contained slide projections; the Videoroom contained video footage of x-rated films and a Marvin cartoon satirising male parenting behaviour; the Theory/Criticism Room provided tools with which readers could alter a selection of magazines. A theoretical essay titled "Excision, Detournement and Reading the Open Text" elaborated the process they would have then been using. Among some of the aphorisms contained in this essay are the following:
3) The excision is less a surgical operation than a cognitive procedure, opening up the possibilities for renegotiating the areas of signification both within and beyond the image or text. Excising elements from the image confirms the existence of a primary context, pretexts and within the image itself, subtexts which disclose the competing economies of the sign(s).
9) Warning: Excision should not become the servant of censorship.
25) Close reading has never been a good substitute for criticism.
29) Absence only becomes a problem where power is concerned. Absence is difference (Jacques Derrida). Open reading allows readers to acknowledge the provisionality of meaning. Power and political efficacy is a function of use. In this context history may represent change yet remain the same.
30) The open reader accepts his/her status as a political subject with all this may imply.
38) Open reading may assist the promotion of critical education.
39) Critical education may become education for criticism.
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