Wednesday 27 April 2011

Jean Baudrillard - Simulations and Simulacra

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

Read the full essay here.

Thursday 21 April 2011

Ellen Harvey - Local Landscapes (2004)


Ellen Harvey - Local Landscapes (2004)
Site Specific installation for the Project in Los Angeles.

Monday 18 April 2011

Jonathan Monk - A Poster Project

Jonathan Monk A Poster Project 2011




Wednesday 13 April 2011

Daniel Buren - Affichages Sauvages

Affichages Sauvages - 1968 - Present

Tuesday 12 April 2011

Thursday 7 April 2011

Robert Rauschenberg - Erased de Kooning


Robert Rauschenberg Erased de Kooning 1953

Monday 4 April 2011

Mike Kelley - Shall We Kill Daddy?

"...When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts - we want it to happen!

Maurizio Cattelan - The Fat Is On The Table

Maurizio Cattelan We Are The Revolution 2000


The Fat Is On The Table, Maurizio Cattelan on Joseph Beuys
First published in Tate Etc, Spring 2005

Sunday 3 April 2011