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✖yayoi kusama, flowers overcoat, 1964
Rose quartz headstone covered in snow.
“Contemplating Joyce’s scrotum-tightening Sea, Sandycove”
Joseph Beuys in the Forty-Foot urinal, Dublin [1974]
Parko Calendar, Dominique Issermann, Japan, 1985, Archaeology of Elegance 1980-2000, 20 Years of Fashion Photography
tristetriste - Things are Queer (1973) by Duane Michals
This piece by Duane Michals comprises nine photographs, each one a detail of the one that follows. The first shot shows a bog-standard bathroom. Then the camera pulls back to reveal what is either an oversized man, or an undersized bathroom: the man’s foot is the size of the lavatory-bowl. During the ensuing sequence, it emerges that the photograph of the man in the tiny bathroom is itself a picture in a book being read by another man in an alley. Then it turns out that the man reading the book in the alley is also a picture of a picture in a frame which is hanging on a wall. The final twist in this circuitous tale is the revelation that this picture of the man reading the book in the alley is itself a picture hanging on the original bathroom wall. Things are Queer neatly challenges the viewer’s assumptions about the photographic version of reality. The sequence taken as a whole has a cheeky intrigue - at no point can we actually identify the perspective of the camera, the reality of each shot is superseded by the next.
William Wegman
For a Moment…, 1971
Sophie Calle began following strangers because she didn’t know what to do with herself; she had no friends. “It was a way to force myself to get out of the house without having to decide what I was doing.”
January 1980 in Paris, she followed a man for the day and then lost him in the crowd. She later attended an art exhibition to find him there, she believed this was fate. She overheard him talking to a friend about a holiday to Venice and decided to go to track him down. She phoned hundreds of hotels and finally found the man.
She began to follow him every day, photographing him, writing down his every move with her thoughts and feelings and kept them in a journal. If he stopped to take a photo, she would go to take exact spot to try and capture the same image he had taken. She became obsessed with this man, she would often think and dream about him. When he would leave a hotel, she would book out the exact same room, just so she could sleep in the same bed he was in. Her work is more similar to a detective’s than a lover, she highlights the vulnerability of the stranger as she tries to examine his identity.
After following a subject something within her just clicks, and she decides she must leave them behind, forget about them, and move on.
This project lead her into another, she requested her mother to hire a private investigator to follow her. She took him on a journey through the streets of Paris to her favourite places. She kept a journal of the things she was up to, to compare with the detectives notes for her amusement. She was intrigued with the idea of switching roles and her privacy being invaded, like the many that she had once followed, and the contrast of the scenarios the detective pieced together from following her, to the actual truth.
The Sleepers (Les Dormeurs), detail
Courtesy of Sophie Calle and Centre Pompidou
The Sleepers is Sophie Calle’s first fully realized installation consisting of 173 photographs and 23 explanatory texts (6 x 8 inches/15.2 x 20.3 cm each photo and text unit) that document a series of situations orchestrated by Calle, in which people (friends, neighbors, strangers) allowed her to observe them as they slept. She photographed and interviewed these people - each of whom was allotted one eight-hour sleeping period in Calle’s own bed - over the course of an entire week.
Such behavior, which might have seemed intimate or slightly titillating if photographed in a single episode, becomes, when it is repeated twenty three times, of little more interest than a clinical record. Although captured in the midst of their “deepest” reveries, the subjects’ psychological states remain inaccessible to Calle’s observation and to the viewer’s gaze. Like Andy Warhol’s minimalist films, Sleep, Eat, and Kiss, Calle’s representations of the human body are aggressively anti-romantic.
Courtesy of University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive
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Flickr.
Victoria Falls
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
David Rabinowitch, Plan of 4 masses II (1968-69)
Lucio Fontana
Teatrino bianco III, 1968
Eva Hesse with a rope sculpture
Hermann Landshoff c.1969
tree climber
Robert Rauschenberg - Mud Dauber, from Rookery Mounds series, 1979
Waxed concrete bowls by Philippe Malouin for Dezeen
Stella Tennant in “Talking to Myself,” Yohji Yamamoto (2002)