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AIPAD 2016

You can view AIPAD as a (mostly) non-verbal version of the book that Benjamin planned to produce, comprised entirely of quotations from other sources. Benjamin structured his “Arcades Project” — first conceived in 1927 and unfinished when he died in 1940 — after the glass-roofed shopping malls of 19th-century Paris, epitomizing that “commodification of things” which he saw as the defining characteristic of modernity. […]

Bob Adelman (1931-2016): A Farewell

“Down Home” is not simply a set of images, but a more complexly structured work involving a lucid combination of words and images to present the texture of present-day life in a small Alabama town. […]

Spring Fever 2016: Bits & Pieces (1)

In “Virginibus Puerisque” (1881), Robert Louis Stevenson noted that “Enthusiasm about art is become a function of the average female being, which she performs with precision and a sort of haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated machine.” In the emerging android era we won’t need what Tom Wolfe dubbed the “culture buds” to perform this task; there’s an automaton for that. […]

Rendering Unto (Irene) Caesar

Irene Caesar, engrossed in her process, seems entirely oblivious to my discomfort, even when, quietly, I give verbal indications thereof. Crouching, kneeling, sometimes squatting on a soft-sided suitcase of mine, she appears to have entered a trance state in which she channels the spirit of David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. Squirming around to adjust her vantage point, she calls out, repeatedly, “Give it to me! Give to to me! Show me your eroticism!” […]

Election 2016: Image World (6)

The visual images of mostly white men preventing a legitimately elected black president from appointing a highly qualified candidate to the Supreme Court may suit the “base” just fine, but with these and the Flint images all over the media in the final months of the campaign they can pretty much kiss the “minority” vote goodbye. […]