Haim Steinbach, charm of tradition, 1985
Bertrand Lavier, Beaunotte/Nevada, 1989
Jason Dodge, Darkness Falls on Wolkowyja 74, 38-613 Polanczyk, Poland, 2005,
all of the light bulbs, candles, matches, and anything that illuminates
are taken from a house at the edge of a forest in Poland, 2005
A current of organic life surges from these communal groups -- which share a common destiny -- to their ornaments, endowing these ornaments with a magic force and burdening them with meaning to such an extent that they cannot be reduced to a pure assemblage of lines. Those who have withdrawn from the community and consider themselves to be unique personalities with their own individual souls also fail when it comes to forming these new patterns. Were they to take part in such a performance, the ornament would not transcend them.
Siegfried Kracauer
the charm of tradition
As the 1960s began to lengthen into the 1970s and "sculpture"
began to be piles of thread waste on the floor, or sawed redwood timbers rolled into
the gallery, or tons of earth excavated from the desert, or stockades of logs
surrounded by firepits, the word sculpture became harder to pronounce-but not
really that much harder. The historian/critic simply performed a more extended
sleight-of-hand and began to construct his genealogies out of the data of millennia
rather than decades. Stonehenge, the Nazca lines, the Toltec ballcourts, Indian
burial mounds – anything at all could be hauled into court to bear witness to this
work's connection to history and thereby to legitimise its status as sculpture. Of
course Stonehenge and the Toltec ballcourts were just exactly not sculpture, and
so their role as historicist precedent becomes somewhat suspect in this particular
demonstration. But never mind. The trick can still be done by calling upon a
variety of primitivising work from the earlier part of the century – Brancusi's
Endless Column will do – to mediate between extreme past and present.
Rosalind Krauss
something about J.G. Ballard
Lavier. Who is ~? The rock is Nevada you think and the refrigerator is Beaunotte? which is kind of like beautiful-night in franco-italian and a fittingly smooth name for whitegoods but would sound like Bo-notty if we really transposed the accent and so would sound like a ghettoblaster or someone's nickname. This is like fractions. Beaunotte over Nevada. Beaunotte is a rock from Beaunotte, a department in the east of France, and Nevada is a refrigerator brand and now obsolete. Nevada. So many myths of the American west to stuff under only three syllables. Umbrella concept. And so land-art and earthworks, Heizer in Hiko. Beaunotte's population has been steadily declining since the end of the 19th century. Only 21 people were left in 2012. What does that mean for the Beaunotte on the fridge, so far from home? Not much. A stone could outlast them all and Beautiful Night has as good a chance as any other. Also monoliths are irreducibly ambiguous i.e. Nevada may have laughed but now Samsung is laughing at Nevada i.e. heavy is the head that wears the crown. Hello Mark Leckey.
