Found in LACMA's Reading Room

LACMA just opened an online reading room of artist books and exhibition catalogs, looks like this is an excellent tool and resource. I came across this catalog for the exhibition, "The Museum as Site." Produced in the early 80s, the exhibition provides a strange snapshot of a moment when installation art, institutional interventions, and Minimalist sculpture could all be included in one exhibition! Artists included in the exhibition range from Chris Burden and Michael Asher to Robert Irwin. Very nice! Check it out:http://www.lacma.org/art/collections.aspx

Noriko Furunishi at Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The MIA has just started a new exhibition space--new pictures--devoted to contemporary photography, this show is only the second that they have had in this odd little space. The work of Noriko Furunishi is large photographs mostly in California, made with a 4 x 5 camera and then photoshopped until, they become "seamless" landscapes. Furunishi layers twisting, turning pathways through the landscapes on top of one another until the perspective of the space becomes multifaceted. These works are important in this museum since the MIA has a truly excellent collection of ink scroll paintings of Japanese landscapes on silk, my favorite is Hidaka Tetsuo's Floating Mist on Distant Peaks (1858). While viewers seemed to stroll past the monumental scroll paintings (some as large at 50 inches long), in the gallery with Furunishi's photographs I noticed people standing for several minutes tracing the pathways that weave through the photographs, much as I imagine people would have done at one time through the scroll paintings. Rather than simply staring at the photographs, there was lots of discussion about which ways the paths went in the landscape depicted in the photograph. I had the strange sense that Furunishi's work perhaps revitalized a dialogue that I would have heard around the scrolls at one time. Furunishi'photographs, like Tetsuo's painting, engages the spectator in a different way of looking at a landscape.

Why Photography?

I came across this quote last night reading and falling asleep, this morning when I woke-up I was still thinking it over, so here it is. From "Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity" written by Hollis Frampton, first published in Artforum in October, 1974:

"As I sit writing this text, on one of the days of the only life I shall live, a fine April afternoon is passing outside my window. Like a novelist, or a painter, I have walled myself into a room, away from the passage of time. Photography, uniquely among the visual arts, allows us to have our cake and eat it too: if I were making images today, I could be outside, within that day, converting its appearances to the requirements of ecstasy. Instead I am enmeshed in very these words. But I can't find the words to tell you what it is like to be writing them."