Currently Listening
August 23, 2018
I can’t keep up with all of the electronic music being released. I delve into an album, it leaves a mark. It’s quite possible I forget about it a few weeks later – not because I don’t find it fascinating, but because the pace of releases simply buries it in my mental rolodex. Some albums persist for awhile. Trying to keep a list if only for my own reference. I feel that these works all have some relevance to the art I am researching and making.
Aisha Devi
Djrum
Sinjin Hawke
Aphex Twin
Blanck Mass (on heaviest rotation as of late)
I Was Raised on The Internet @ MCA Chicago
August 8, 2018
Overwhelming show that I wish I could visit a few times. Lots of fascinating work but so much temporal stuff that appreciating all of the video pieces would be unreasonable in a visit, so I focused on what I’m mostly into – the 2-d.
Highlights from the show – showing my bias towards 2-D work of course…
Petra Cortright’s Digital Paintings on aluminum
Sophia Al-Maria: Black Friday (The only installation piece I’m listing here but the visual impact of the phones on the floor is striking, to say nothing of the accompanying video)
Stan Douglas: A66A
Constant Dullaart – pieces from “Jennifer in Photoshop”
Amalia Ulman’s Instagram update large prints
Joel Holmberg’s genre paintings of internet screens
Mendi + Keith Obadike’s “Blackness for Sale” internet performance/monitor installation
Erin Hayden’s “Reading” 2015 painting
Douglas Coupland’s Delaware + Texas A+M paintings
Jon Rafman’s 9 eyes / google earth prints
Luigi Ghirri’s Words
July 30, 2018
In the recent book The Map and the Territory which collects various projects of Luigi Ghirri’s, we get to read in his own words how he thinks about making pictures out in the world. Below are some noteworthy excerpts.
First Photographs
1970-1973
“I have never been interested in what is commonly referred to as style. Style is a coded reading, and I believe photography to be a codeless language, and rather than a kind of restriction, it is a broadening and an expansion of communication.
Photographic ‘style’ is inherent in the very choice of photography as a language, and its way of seeing the world is inevitably limited by horizontal and vertical lines, i.e. what is caught within the frame. In this sense, photography always implies subtraction, or a sense of something missing, something outside of the frame.”
Kodachrome
1970-1978
“My focus on the destruction of direct experience – the invasion of images into our living environments – begins here. In the work, I wanted to offer an analysis of truth and falsehood, of the gap between what we are, and the image of what we’re supposed to be – and ultimately to think critically about the denial and concealment of truth. This distinction between true and false is increasingly difficult to make, and it seems progressively impossible to get beyond the immediately visible.”
F/11, 1/125, Natural Light
1970-1979
“While on the one hand I reject Cartier-Bresson’s ideology, I also find the arguments against the famous ‘decisive moment’ just as sterile and unenlightening. From a practical point of view, if these criticisms were theoretically sound, the images of the new American photography – from Friedlander through Winogrand to Meyerowitz, and the portraits and other work by Mulas – would be impossible to read. Photography always expresses itself in that coincidence between the moment of the photograph – real time – and a simultaneous inner moment chosen by the photographer, even when dealing with aspects that are not directly related to the passing of time. Planning the work does not cancel out the decisive moment, because it is impossible to eliminate chance happenings, even within well-defined choices and projects…”
Infinity
1974
“I’ve never liked ‘nature’ photographs. This applies to all kinds of nature photographs, from those in which nature is portrayed in all its most mysterious or metaphysical aspects, to the abstract coercion of meaning into sheer blocks of colour or signs. In these images and in the desperate attempt to capture ‘natural moments’, I’ve always felt I was encountering an enormous paradox that runs to the very heart of photographic language itself. The Renaissance discovery of the camera obscura – which took place in urban intellectual circles – revealed that ‘natural’ vision was a construct; the image, they discovered, was formed upside down within an enclosed space, when the scope of the outside world passed through a tiny hole. This discovery negated the prospect of ever representing or knowing ‘nature’.
Even though there are wonderful cases in the history of photograhy that seem to contradict my conviction, it’s also true that these episodes are only partial examples, or ‘captured moments’ that lead back to aesthetic phenomena, and to the visual languages of painting, engraving rather than epiphanies or illuminations.”
File Under: Landscape
June 29, 2018
Having a quick show including new, experimental works on the UNC Campus with my classmate and fellow artist Mike Keaveney. On view from June 27 – July 6 at UNC’s Jane and June Alcott Gallery.
Peter Ward – Are We Headed Into Another Mass Extinction?
June 25, 2018
DJ Richard – Dies Iræ Xerox
Nine Inch Nails – Bad Witch
Angélique Kidjo – Remain in Light
Paleontologist Peter Ward – Are We Headed Into Another Mass Extinction?
RAZ: So how are humans different from, you know, all these other species that have gone extinct in the past?
WARD: Oh, humans – come on. We have the golden ticket. We’re able to put a coat on if it gets cold. And we’re able to build air conditioners if it’s too hot. So I think we are essentially extinction-proof. And I fight this concept that we are endangered.
I think we are the least-endangered species on the planet in many respects simply because we have not just the experience but the intelligence to deal with so many of these challenges. And I just think we are going to be the long-term survivals. Now, happiness might be something else.
RAZ: Yeah. I mean, what kind of planet will we survive on, right?
WARD: Well, there’s that. I mean, you certainly see all the post-apocalyptic thrillers and the depressing sort of looks into the future. But it really doesn’t need to be that way. I think we’re just going to see an increasingly manicured planet, an increasingly ordered planet where the wild becomes not wild at all. It’s managed wild.
Human civilization – there’s no reason that we just can’t continue for millions of years into the present with just a modicum of civilization and technology. You can get around this stuff through intelligence.