Swimming in the sea of images.

Quote · Fetishism

Structurally, fetishism is a matter of separation, segregation, isolation; it’s a matter of petrification, ossification, glaciation; it’s a matter of idealisation, mystification, adoration. Greenbergian modernism was an apotheosis of fetishism in the visual arts in the modern period. For a long time, Western art aspired to the condition of non-significance. ‘Content’, said Greenberg, ‘is something to be avoided like the plague’. Strong words, anxious words. The art object was to signify nothing; that is to say, it must not serve in the absence of something which is absent as the signifier of the absence but rather it must serve, like the fetish, to deny that absence.

Victor Burgin, Tea with Madeleine

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Drop your hands to your sides; they are heavy weights now at the ends of your arms … reach out and grasp this photograph — small indistinct city street damp black pavement — mounds of earth to the left, poles, long low building, high bright spot from arc-lamp on its standard etc. in the low flat landscape. The muscles in your arms are rigid, the glossy photo surface crinkles in the clutching fingers of your hand your hand the knuckles now gone white. … (It's the location of the camera which most often determines the character of the particular space — physically you are transferred right there.) As you clutch the photograph the image — a particular space — street curbstones, neat lawns etc., slips, vibrates, collapses under the pressure of your desires. All other photographs clatter on the floor. Now you are left with a single valued section — a single construction — and does it admit others? This condition of attachment will never admit of the 'theory of sequences'.

David Campany, from Jeff Wall: Picture for Women

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Eventually, I stopped understanding how photography works,

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Understanding is an outlier case in a universe of misunderstandings.

Pierre Bourdieu

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Anyway, I think I will restart my work with the Illustrated Botanical Dictionary. I am going to capture subjects in daylight with color photography; I will compile them into the Illustrated Botanical Dictionary. For that, they must be color photographs. This is because I would like to completely cast off any trace of the hand that remains with the darkroom process of black-and-white photography. The hands themselves have made the art. The hands are the others within oneself. But of course the hands are the self. Manipulation and a thing manipulated by the hands are still an extension of the hands. The world is manipulated by the hands. My Illustrated Botanical Dictionary will come to exist by cleanly severing all ties with hand-manipulation. In that sense, the color photograph is already in the other world. Release the shutter once, and everything comes to an end.

Takuma Nakahira, from Why An Illustrated Botanical Dictionary

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A desolate hill, littered. Forms that got on top of that slope might move on to the other side and be invisible.

Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

What the light left behind

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an inverted archaeology of the now, a reversed excavation, slowly burying things in order to let them be found thousand years in the future that is already lost to us.

Heavy Traffic, no. 7 — pinned to the studio wall