All My Stars (19)

By: Joanne McNeil
May 12, 2016

One in a weekly series in which Joanne McNeil recommends books, films, exhibitions, and more. You can also subscribe to the All My Stars newsletter here.

While I’m purposefully not talking about my own work in this newsletter, the good thing about moderating a panel, as I did last Saturday at the Frieze Art Fair, is: it’s not about me. I was only there to keep the conversation going between Stephanie Syjuco, Oliver Laric, and Thomas Demand. The panel on “new and emerging issues related to the ownership, circulation, copyright, and authenticity of forms and images,” went well — here’s the audio file.

Here’s some of the work that came up in discussion:

Stephanie Syjuco’s Particulate Matter, in which she crafted handmade versions of object designs found in the Google SketchUp user archives. She “chose the objects based on their status as being nebulous and fuzzy. Mostly defined as ‘things’ or ‘thingies,’ these virtual objects defied definition and lacked a utilitarian or recognizable reason for existence.”

Oliver Laric talked about his project 3D scanning objects from the Usher Gallery and The Collection in Lincoln. The files are freely available to anyone. He said, “probably the proudest moment of my career: one of my scans was used in the set at the Eurovision finale.” [See above]

Thomas Demand’s Backyard “depicts the home of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev as it appeared in a news photo. Demand has left out Tsarnaev’s wife, choosing to depict only the small litter-strewn yard and the concrete walkway leading to her vinyl-sided house. In the background, a cherry tree in full bloom interrupts the otherwise mundane setting.” It’s another of his works in which he reconstructed scenery from a photograph in cardboard and paper as a 1:1 replica, photographed the replica, and then destroyed it — saving only the photograph.

A couple weeks ago I picked up Gretel Ehrlich’s A Match to the Heart on a whim. Read a few chapters, brought it home and realized it was the same author of another book I picked up on a whim, The Solace of Open Spaces. Both times, I realized I had the same thought when I got the book — I wanted to read it because the writer seemed very, very smart and very, very different from me. She writes about environments and landscapes and nature and the wilderness and not much about pop culture, technology, or cities. She writes fearless unadorned sentences and makes me wish I were the sort of person who had any ambition to hike through Wyoming wilderness for weeks at a time on my own.

Other than that, I’m liking a lot of things this week that everyone likes. Like James Blake’s The Colour in Anything. And Game of Thrones. I hadn’t even watched it before but on a day when I was dealing with an intense headache, I put it on and soon found myself through the second season by the end of the evening. Granted, I’m checking my phone while its playing, unless Daenerys is on the screen, so I have no idea about half of the subplots, but now I’m having grisly dreams about dragons and swordfights at night and amused that something so transparent about power moves, honor, and diplomacy has captured the world’s imagination.

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