I’ve been thinking about art publications lately, and art presses, publishing houses, the things that get made in them and the kinds of aesthetics and philosophies that get bundled between the pages and pushed along with the publication itself. Over the next few posts, I want to perform a kind of informal analysis of a few different variations and takes on this theme, but to begin let’s take a look at a long-standing favorite mover and maker.
Also filed in askao narahashi, japanese photography, masao yamamoto, michiko kon, nazraeli press, publishing, what i'm reading | Tagged art presses, artist books, asako narahashi, masao yamamoto, nazraeli press, publishing | Sophie Calle is not an artist, but an editor…what she practices is an edit without questions, without premise, only formula. She calls the premise for her projects her ideas, says that she is full of ideas, but Ideas they are not; these are parlor questions. She frames herself through the references of repetition and disappearance, but doesn’t use them in an authentic or true way. What she does is manipulate these references to distill and create an affect. What she creates isn’t related to thinking; what she creates is affectation. As an editor, she is also a greedy one, taking and taking and taking. Instead of trafficking in ideas or thinking, she takes other people’s thoughts and experiences as her art supplies, and then calls it collaboration.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 i have a friend that works for a prestigious photography gallery in manhattan. whenever we get together, i am regaled with tales of the unchecked purchasing power of the bourgeoisie, the wheelings-and-dealings of the owner (who for the purposes of anonymity i’ll just refer to here as “mr. burns,” but in reality we have made [...]
what was so extraordinary about black box was that it managed so many things that art usually so stupendously fails at dealing with: things that have to do with politics both past and present; cultural guilt and grief; memory and forgetting; the evocation of universal themes and then the subsequent questioning of what those themes are, what their validity is in the face of changed contexts, agency or audience; and it did all of these things while still managing to be startlingly, breath-gasping-and-all beautiful. it doesn’t try to do or invoke any of the above tropes or themes, but it fully realizes them all. seeing this piece set me about a mad rush to find, see and ingest as much of kentridge’s words and works as i could find.
Monday, November 14, 2005 to have the knowledge that you seek a particular vein of something is to be aware of not only your tastes, but what influences you, creates bias and division, separates one set of concerns from another. connoisseurship, perhaps, but also a little bit of greek wisdom: to know why you are drawn to specific things, [...]
Also filed in birds, camille solygua, japanese photography, masao yamamoto, michael ackerman, other people, stacy oborn | Tagged birds, camille solygua, japanese photography, michael ackerman, stacy oborn | i bring this up not because i have become stymied and inconsistent in my writing due to the fact that i know someone is looking, but because i find it worth mentioning that when one hesitates in the face of their experiment, and then when something outside of that niched out, projected-place she created fundamentally shifts–say, a job, a relationship, a move or all three–the blog is the first thing to go.
Wednesday, February 2, 2005 i have come and come again to herv√© guibert, roland barthes and marguerite duras, who all have much to say about memory, regret, experience and selfhood. i have visited them each differently for different reasons, but as i write here now i imagine a situation where they are all three in the same room together. i don’t imagine they all get along. but they are all sympathetic to one another. all of them go to great effort to articulate a particular lost moment, and what losing that moment does to their memory of it, and of themselves.
Also filed in herve guibert, marguerite duras, roland barthes, what i'm reading | Tagged absolute photographs, camera lucida, ghost image, herve guibert, lost moments, marguerite duras, memory and photography, photography and writers, punctum, roland barthes, the lover | in the introductory essay to anne wilkes tucker’s encylopedic tome the history of japanese photography, the author asserts that araki and fukase both became known to the japanese because they were the first to show the “intimate homelife and personal emotional state of their subjects.” i also can’t help but meditate upon how, in absorbing eastern men reinterpret the tones of callahan’s portrait of his wife, they show something else of themselves, of the woman in front of them, and of east contemplating west. it’s amazing and a little humbling to consider just how revolutionary something so simple as an unguarded moment of one’s wife, captured on film, could revolutionize how an entire generation of photographers began to see, and it’s something i’ve loved thinking about ever since i came across these photographs.
Also filed in academies and institutions, harry callahan, japanese photography, masahisa fukase, nobuyoshi araki | Tagged chicago, harry callahan, institute of design, intimate portraits, japanese photography, masahisa fukase, model wife, nobuyoshi arkai, photographers and homages to other photographers, yoko | Sunday, November 28, 2004 three more for the gold-leaf album: a few notes-to-self on future process: *avoid 90# hotpress. it curls too much with the multiple layers of media, and often jams the copier. *bristol board 2ply curls the least and has the easiest time in the copier, but we also like the radiant white of cold press. leave [...]
Thursday, October 28, 2004 i first came to seiichi furuya through his most famous image, the contact sheet that shows his wife’s suicide, or more precisely, shows him showing us his wife’s suicide. and then coming to him through all the questions which follow such a fantastically passive event. is it mediation? astonishment? a need to rely on something normal or everyday in order to understand, or assimilate, something unfathomable and out of time? stop time in order to stop life from happening at that very moment?
Also filed in japanese photography, seiichi furuya | Tagged art as therapy, christine gössler, intimate portraits, japanese photography, losing love, love and madness, mediating life through photography, mental illness, model wife, photographing loss, seiichi furuya, stultifera navis, suicide | 
