September 14:
The unplanned theme for this week’s objects was OBSOLESCENCE. KN brought a mix CD (am tempted to call it a MIX TAPE, an artifact from an even earlier era) that he’d carefully curated for a grad school party. “Groove Is In the Heart.” The rubber finger book page turners were added and the image inverted for maximum aesthetic effect.
CNW brought an assemblage titled “Bureaucratic Obsolescence” composed of various office supplies that have lost their utility in their original setting. A Rolodex, a “FAXED” rubber stamp, an envelope “licker,” typewriter ribbon, Texas Instruments calculators… They’ve been bricolaged into a conceptual art piece on time, bureaucracy, and capital.
September 21:
AC brought a piece from her collection of expired camera film. Making images with expired film, whose chemicals have aged, alters the pictures unpredictably, adding an element of chance to the exercise. The contingency aspect reminded me of Benjamin in “A Short History of Photography”:
“No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”
[“Malgré toute l’ingéniosité du photographe, malgré l’affectation de l’attitude de son modèle, le spectateur ressent le besoin irrésistible de chercher dans une telle image la plus petite étincelle de hasard, d’ici et maintenant, grâce à quoi la réalité a pour ainsi dire brûlé de part en part le caractère d’image le besoin de trouver l’endroit invisible où, dans l’apparence de cette minute depuis longtemps écoulée, niche aujourd’hui encore l’avenir, et si éloquemment que, regardant en arrière, nous pouvons le découvrir.”]
September 28:
HH brought objects that might be thought about together or separately: Advil Liqui-Gels, which, for someone in a thinking profession, can be indispensable, and the mock-up for a hotline postcard for the upcoming Now Is the Time show at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC. We thought together about the hotline as a cultural phenomenon.
MH brought a manual whose audience is printers and which shows the range of typefaces available in a given slice of time. A typographic treasure from the archive…
October 5:
AC made us into children, into makers, into material meditators with Play-Doh. The smell, the texture, the color: We wondered why adults age out of this magical substance and the experimental modes it enables.
JN brought a hamsa (hand of Fatima) from Fez, Morocco. It led us toward reflections on magical objects, collecting, display…
October 12:
JG+MM
FALL RECESS
October 26:
November 2:
November 9:
November 16:
November 23:
THANKSGIVING RECESS
November 30:
December 7:
