News from the bricks in the mud
Welcome to the 77th edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
If Patreon is not your thing but you enjoy what I'm doing, feel free to send me a little something via Paypal. I'll use the funds to pay for the fee the service provider of this Mailing List charges me every month. If there's money left, I'll invest it into the Japanese green tea that fuels much of my creative work.
As Russia's genocidal war in Ukraine continues, its war crimes keep piling up. Today, there was a news report that the International Criminal Court would start its first cases against Russia. Russia obviously isn't going to comply. If history is an indicator, they'll instead double down and commit even more attacks on civilians etc.
In mid-2022, I read an article about Maks Levin, a Ukrainian photojournalist who had died:
Following a visit to Ukraine from 24 May to 3 June to investigate Ukrainian photo-journalist Maks Levin’s death, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is releasing a report with information and evidence indicating that Levin and his friend and bodyguard were executed by Russian soldiers in a forest near Kyiv on 13 March, possibly after being interrogated and even tortured.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a profile of the photographer in New Yorker magazine. You want to read it.
Far away, there is very little we can do individually beyond sharing information and donating to causes supporting Ukraine. But I also feel that it is our duty to pay tribute to at least some of the people who have died by reading about their lives and stories.
The other day, I was sharing a few spreads from Abigail Heyman's Growing Up Female on Instagram. For a number of reasons, it's an essential book: it's a brilliant example of second-wave feminism, with elements of autobiography included.
It's also an incredibly sophisticated photobook in terms of how it conveys its story, essentially a masterclass in sequencing photographs and using text for emphasis and narration.
I hadn't even seen that there had been a New Yorker article about the book in 2019. It features a lot of pictures and spreads from the book -- have a peek!
If you're interested in the book, you can probably find a decent copy of the softcover for around $30 if you use bookfinder.com. With these kinds of books -- many copies were made and sold back in the day, finding a good copy for a reasonable price often comes down to a little bit of patience. If there are no cheap copies, simply check the site a few weeks or months later. There regularly are new listings.
But beware! On bookfinder.com, I also found what was billed as a "library copy", but it turned out to be a bootleg copy where someone in India printed out some digital file and then had it bound. That's the first time this happened, though. In general, actual library copies can be a good deal if you don't mind the way they were handled (with plastic wrapping added and all kinds of stickers).
For my latest birthday, I was gifted a little thermal-label printer. It makes these very small prints on whatever paper you feed it. I had had the idea of playing with such printers anyway, so I thought I'd make a bigger print by printing out one of my pictures in pieces and then assembling it. The printer can use basic paper. But it came with sticker paper, which made the assemble a bit easier (except for the lining up of the pieces). So this is what I made (it's roughly the size of letter paper).
Now, I really want to get a 4x6" printer (the size you might know from the labels that businesses use). With that size, I could produce larger pictures pretty easily. With a 4x4 mosaic like the one above, I could build 16x20" prints.
My apologies if you're not familiar with inches. I am not, either (even after having lived in the US for over two decades). But I know that four by six inches is roughly the size of a postcard. You get the idea.
Anyway, I needed to add a picture to this email, because you're all visual types, and only reading text is boring, isn't it?
It was either going to be my little mosaic or a picture of the bricks I had to partly reassemble in front of my house after the snowplow had destroyed the set up.
So yes, I spent a bit of time outside, digging through snow and ice to locate bricks and then re-laying them out to... (might as well share this as well) produce this:
By the way, they just changed the interface of the software I'm using to write this email. I have no idea whether this will display well. It better, though, because it took me four attempts to add this admittedly rather underwhelming picture here.
How do you write about really bad art? Typically, I don't. It's not worth your time, and it's almost impossible to do in a way that doesn't leave you with the feeling that you're in dire need of taking a shower.
One of the US' best art critics, Ben Davis just wrote a piece about CumWizard69420 (yes, that's the name) and his show at Cheim & Reid (yes, that's the gallery). "They are not the worst paintings ever," Davis writes, and he then proceeds to deftly pull apart the show and what it says about art in the US at this point in time. You absolutely want to read it (even if you don't care about painting at all). It's just so well done.
The last paragraph is [chef's kiss emoji]:
The fact that the gallery deliberately mis-recognizes such fully baked nihilism as impish humanism tells me that the official art discourse is not really ready, or able, to assimilate this material. And yet, nevertheless, here’s CumWizard, in Chelsea. So you can take “The Americans” as a small sign that the “LOL nothing matters” mindset is far more pervasive than people are able to say out loud. That reality sits in the gallery like a stain on someone’s pants that everyone at the party is too polite to point out.
By the way, Ben Davis has a new book out. I read about a third of it so far, and it's really, really good. If you buy it from the publisher (just follow the link), you'll get the softcover for 30% off with a free ebook version included (the ebook on its own is 40% off).
I'll have more to say about Davis' book once I've finished reading it. For now I'll conclude this email.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg