Carson Ellis has a blog - how was I unaware of this?
Yuken Teruya's papercut shadowboxes are made from shopping bags - I think they're sweet and wistful.
And look! Little twigs sprouting from toilet paper tubes!
A pair of shredded wings spreads from the cover of Breton's Nadja, who was both an angel and a tiger, always unlike herself.
Charles Vildrac believed that art and intellect should stand apart from a utilitarian regard for worldly concerns - and now his book is unreadable, a purely aesthetic object.
Memoire sheds a mass of tatters, as messy and multilayered as a lifetime of impressions retained and recalled.
I love books not only for their contents, but also as physical objects. Whether considered as concept or as craft, this is just amazing.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
"In claiming these tools for teaching trigonometric functions as artworks, Sugimoto follows in the footsteps of artist Marcel Duchamp...who removed everyday objects from their functional context and used them in his work, inviting questions about the definitions, boundaries, and processes of art."
-Hirshhorn Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, 2006
I love Sugimoto's aesthetic - both in his own work and in his personal collections of art, antiquities and fossil specimens - but this sort of thing makes me tired.
Seriously, can anyone really believe that these models were devoid of "artistic intentions" before Mr. Sugimoto turned his lens upon them? Also, in what world are these "everyday objects?" They were specifically designed to engage the student's attention with their strikingly elegant forms.
I've lately been loving A Little White Shadow, by Mary Ruefle. She took a book by the same name, published in 1889, and strategically whited out swathes of the original text. What is left behind comprises poetry.
It's not quite the same as radi os, in which Ronald Johnson pruned a new text from the first four books of Paradise Lost. That was a single coherent piece, while A Little White Shadow is all bits and shards.
And it is not entirely like A Humument, which is more visual.
I was also reminded of John Clark's film noir-inspired mystery novel portraits, which you can buy by the page from his Etsy shop.
I don't read a lot of poetry - there are only so many hours in a day - so perhaps this seems more fresh and new to me than it does to readers who are less naive. But I've been loving it, so there it is.
Hey, David Foster Wallace is actually able to stop being a pretentious dick! Check out Good People in the New Yorker.
I have such a crush on Susie Ganch. Seriously, people - just look at this.
