books incipient chaos
archives | between the covers by stephanie white
coherence intimacy geography embeddedness collections
sketches for Nostalgia for the Present, 2006
that gives each mark, each little fragment an importance that is both marginal and heroic, tender and anonymous. Their subject is the city: ‘Beautiful Infections’, 2006, is like a 3-d version of Candilis and Woods’ 1961 model of organic urban growth. ‘Untitled’ from Limited Activities (2006) – a brush sweeping a clean circle in a dusty, messy floor: a diagram of various kinds of cleansing . It all looks so open-ended, so provisional, so ephem- eral we can project a hell of a lot onto this exhibition. It invites critical shaping. It is an archive that has lost its labels , so we can project what we need back onto it. To do this is both dangerous and gratuitous. Although it is very very difficult to achieve coher- ence when using great piles of found materials: Bill Woodrow, working in Britain in the 1980s, shaped his rubbish into iconic shapes – no escaping his messages; here, Blue Republic presents a spatial order that is intimate and infinitely more subtle and equally pointed. It injects us into the eccentric spaces between diagrams and objects, diagramming our real position in the city – personal, interstitial and irrelevant – and lets us know it.
Blue Republic: nostalgia for the present . Catalogue to accompany the exhibition Blue Republic: nostalgia for the present , curated by Caroline Bell Farrell for the Koffler Gallery, Toronto Ontario. Essay by Mark Kingwell. Toronto/Sudbury/Barrie: Koffler Gallery/Art Gallery of Sudbury/MacLaren Art Centre, 2008 An exhibition catalogue of the work of Anna Passakas and Radis- law Kudlinski – Blue Republic – a Toronto collective. An essay by the ubiquitous Mark Kingwell embeds their project in a check- list of theoretical stops: in order – Joseph Cornell, Kim Adams, Duchamp, Doug Copeland, An Te Liu, Foucault, R G Collingwood, Slavoj Zizek, Adam Phillips, Schopenhauer, Derrida, John Berger and Walter Benjamin, plus Judith Butler and Althusser in the foot- notes. Impeccable credentials. ˇ ˇ Photos of the installations and drawings show vast assemblages of material – construction debris, rubbish, little objects, lots of tape on walls and floor, all meticulously arranged according to unseen texts with a spatial evenness in both drawings and installations
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On Site review 20: archives and museums
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