Inlay #3

Great work by Heidi Sill: Inlay#3, 2010

Enter the candy store!

Dan Graham, reconsidered

I am not so fond of Dan Graham anymore, at least he is not as important as when I was studying. I always wondered where that obsession with (linear) history can lead you. New food for thought gave me this interview by  Sarah Rosenbaum-Kranson who met the artist at his apartment on Spring Street in New York to discuss his work, and whatever else came to mind.

Sarah Rosenbaum-Kranson: When did you originally move to New York?

Dan Graham: I was born in Illinois. I grew up in Winfield and then Westfield, New Jersey.

SRK: I actually grew up in Summit, about six miles from Westfield.

DG: But Summit and Westfield are horrible cities. Winfield was like a housing project for shipbuilders, near Linden, but it’s along the river. I really didn’t like the kind of people you’d find in Summit or Westfield, and they usually commute. We moved there so I could get into college, but I never went to college. I never really liked Westfield, although Summit has one thing that’s interesting—it’s near Mountainside, where all the scientists live because of Bell Laboratories.

At the Window
Paul Eluard

I have not always had this certainty, this pessimism which reassures the best among us. There was a time when my friends laughed at me. I was not the master of my words. A certain indifference, I have not always known well what I wanted to say, but most often it was because I had nothing to say. The necessity of speaking and the desire not to be heard. My life hanging only by a thread.
There was a time when I seemed to understand nothing. My chains floated on the water.

All my desires are born of my dreams. And I have proven my love with words. To what fantastic creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world has my imagination enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious of domains, my own. The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so that nothing could attempt to convince me of error.

playing clever with aura

Sherrie Levine: I am interested in making a work that has as much aura as its reference. For me the tension between the reference and the new work doesn’t really exist unless the new work has an auratic presence of its own. Otherwise, it just becomes a copy, which is not that interesting.

Constance Lewallen: “Aura” in the sense that Walter Benjamin used the term.

Levine: Yes.

Lewallen: Paradoxically, he said that work loses its aura because of duplication . . .

Levine: Right (laughter).

Lewallen: And what you’re doing is duplicating objects in a way that they will have an aura, not the same one as the referent, but their own, Sherrie Levine aura?

Levine: Right.

Lewallen: You’re turning Benjamin’s theory in on itself. A lot of your work has the effect of taking ideas one step further than one would expect.

I am not entirely sure about this. Back then in the 80′s and early 90′s it was a clever move, and the idea of a “second hand aura” is somehow interesting. Ewige Wiederkehr, as Nietzsche said, implies its own aura. Does that prove that critical rereading (ouch) generates an aura in itself or was it soleley the framing, the ading a very artworldly context that generated the aura in Levines case?

Interview found over here: Journal of Contemporary Art

A portrait

“Something about the occasion makes me think I’m at my own wake. Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn’t begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We’re doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in the decades to come. It’s their past, their history we’re inventing here. And it’s not how I look now that matters. It’s how I’ll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn’t this why picture–taking is so ceremonial? It’s like a wake. And I’m the actor made up for the layout-out.”

-Bill Gray, from Don DeLillo’s Mao II.

Mode, Fotografie und der Tod

Gestern Nacht lag ich ein wenig länger wach: mich beschäftigte die eigentümliche und dabei so naheliegede Nähe der Mode und der Fotografie: beide bergen in ihrem Kern den Tod.

Die Fotografie, naturgegeben, da sie ein Stück aus dem Jetzt reißt und es für die Nachwelt zur Verfügung stellt, und die Mode, da sie den Tod herausfordert, folgt man Walter Benjamin:

“Das brennendste Interesse an der Mode liegt für den Philosophen in Ihren außergewöhnlichen Antizipationen kraft der unvergleichlichen Witterung, die das weibliche Kollektiv für das hat, was in der Zukunft bereitliegt. Sie kitzelt den Tod und ist schon eine andere, neue, wenn er nach ihr sich umsieht, um sie zu schlagen”

Was für ein brilliante Idee! Die Mode dient der Überwindung des Todes, indem sie immer neu ist, immer anders, sie kommt mit den Jahreszeiten, ist jedoch nicht vorhersehbar wie diese. Ein Schnippchen der Zeit schlagend und sich immer wieder neu präsentierend. Eigenartig, wie sich die Fotografie dazu verhält, als eben ein rettendes, bewahrendes, unflüchtiges Medium, das dieses neue dann in eine Form gießt und still stellt. Gleichsam doch damit tötet. Ist Mode also das, was vor der Fotografie kommt?

Das Werk als Stillstellung (was will uns das sagen?)

Nur im Werk bin ich aufgehoben. Bin ich gefroren. Das hungrige Auge zum Stillstand gekommen.
Denn:

Ein Bild als kontingent Gerahmtes im Gegenzug zum ungerahmten, schweifenden flüchtigen, überwältigt werdenden des Flaneurs. Diese Arbeit ist das Gegenteil des Flaneurs, das Gegenteil des Schweifens. Es friert sich immer ein Dialog ein, ein Dialog des Monogamen, ein Dialog des vielgestaltig Aufgespaltenen. Immer nur ein Blick, immer nur ein Bild. Mehr als diesen einen Ausschnitt bekomme ich nicht. Niemals mehr als einen flüchtigen Ausschnitt und dieser Ausschnitt ist exakt das Partialobjekt der Photographie. (Und das Leiden des Voyeurs)

19th c. Japanese cotton futon cover called “Boro” made from recycled indigo dyed cloth in patches joined together.

Boro textiles were made in the late 19th and early 20th century by impoverished Japanese people from reused and recycled indigo-dyed, cotton rags.

African American Memorial Work Clothes Quilt

American
1930’s
African American made double sided Memorial Quilt. Wonderful abstract wall hanging. Constructed from the work clothes of a loved one that had passed on. Also some strips of vintage ticking. Made by Annie Rogers, Creedmoor, N.C.

via accidental mysteries