And it was as though, all around the defunct headgear and this shaft that was weary of disgorging its coal, creation itself were taking its revenge, as though unfettered love, lashed by instinct, were busy planting babies in the wombs of these girls who were hardly yet women.
—
Émile Zola Germinal.
Beautiful, sad.
By rubbing the surface of each of the following right-hand pages, one can activate the scents of the flowers used in Dufttunnel in the following sequence:
—
Olafur Eliasson’s bilingual book, “Scent Tunnel” that documents/ describes his installation in Wolfsburg, Germany called Dufttunnel—Scent Tunnel (hence the bilingual). It’s the most innovative and interesting (traditional) book I’ve seen in a really long time… and it’s exquisitely printed!
Dufttunnel is an installation made out of of [potted] plants whose contents are changed relative to the blooming time of the respective plants. And all of the plants chosen are especially fragrant. “The rack that holds the in place is openwork… [it invites] viewers to move through the inside of the piece, and by animating it to rotate around them, pouring out seasonal scents….” http://www.artbook.com/3775716165.html
By far the most AMAZING feature about the book is the scratch and sniff chapter of all of the plants in the Scent Tunnel and they are remarkably believable.
“By rubbing the surface of each of the following right-hand pages, one can activate the scents of the flowers used in Dufttunnel in the following sequence:
Cheiranthus cheiri
Viola cornuta
Heliotropium arborescens
Calamintha nepeta
Lavandula angustifolia
Salvia officinalis”
Images do not stay within discrete disciplinary fields such as ‘documentary film’ or ‘Renaissance painting’, since neither the eye nor the psyche operate along or recognize such divisions. Instead they provide the opportunity for a mode of new cultural writing existing at the intersections of both objectivities and subjectivities.
— Irit Rogoff Terra Infirma pg.30
Much of the practice of intellectual work within the framework of cultural problematics has to do with being able to ask new and alternative questions, rather than reproducing old knowledge by asking the old questions.
— Irit Rogoff Terra Infirma pg.29
If we do not revert to ascribing meaning exclusively to an author, nor to the conditions and historical specificities of its making, nor to the politics of an authorizing community, then surely we simultaneously evacuate the object of study from the disciplinary and other forms of knowledge territorialization. Only then are we at long last approaching Roland Barthe’s description of interdisciplinarity not as surrounding a chosen object with numerous modes of scientific inquiry but rather as the constitution of a new object of knowledge.
— Irit Rogoff Terra Infirma pg.29
Q: “Have you made your map?” There could be nothing more wrong than a curator making a map and putting it at the beginning of a book— if I were to make a map, it would go at the very end of the book.”
___________
HUO: “Yes, but I’m too embarrassed to show it—
— Hans Ulrich Obrist in a conference on his book/exhibition-in-process Maps for the 21st Century
“Many maps have actually to do with memory and mapping the past— it’s a negotiation between the past, present and future… Maps give us reality— a reality that exceeds our vision… We are always mapping that which is not visible to our senses now… Maps invent new realities… [They’re] always going beyond the space of the present.”
— Hans Ulrich Obrist on his book/exhibition-in-process Maps for the 21st Century
I wrote it with a sense of acute difficulty: I felt I saw Caro’s sculptures clearly, even presciently, but found it almost impossible to put that vision into words. Welcome to art criticism.
— From Michael Fried’s book, Art and Objecthood in the intro (An Introduction to My Art Criticism) regarding one of his first published critical essays.
