JohnDORY 56
Ruminations on Paul Johns 2013 show Mum
"I have been hyphenating photo-graphing largely
to induce a sense to which Johns’ show is less about representation the more it
is about topography. That is, it is less a show interested in the discursive
representation of an earthquake’s aftermath the more it is a reclamation and
stamping out of an entire history that only happens to begin from this
momentary absence. Which is why at this stage it is entirely appropriate to
conjure something of the descriptive matrix through which the show comes together,
so that what we witness is not just the melancholic rendition of a former theatre
as civic institution, but instead a socio-collective history garnered through
the testimonial élan of the artist’s mother.."
28 pages, colour cover (if you're lucky)
(sold out)
JohnDORY 55
"Creative Capital"
Reprint of found freelance photographers 2013 diary.
38pp (black and white)
SOLD OUT
&
REPRINT WITH NEW EXPANDED TEXT OF JDR51 "CITY AS ORGANISM"
"If we take a sign of life to be the ability to
draw attention to oneself, to express a certain consciousness, can we not say
that the city performs as such! Let us look simply at the scrawled writing that
populates so many cities, that which covers fences, allotments, hoardings and
buildings. Do we not call this writing,
this graffiti the language of the dispossessed? That is, do we not lump it
together less as the petty vandalism of unique individuals, the more we
recognise it as the expression of a whole social class. Perhaps though we fail to recognise this,
after all we deploy whole agencies to combat such problems, so that even such
habituated expression, this language of the dispossessed is really only uttered
in the most laconic of ways so that we do not really mean it. Nothing seems to
exemplify this more than the reception that followed Luke Willis Thompson’s
exhibition of the roller doors that ultimately lead to the death of one
particularly graffito. There we have a kind of diagramming in which such language becomes attached to
the very building itself, now extracted and posed in the gallery as an object
of political-ethical import. Which it is, but why settle so easily into this
routine in which the very scaffolding of the city is on display and not comment
on the force flowing through it"
20pp
(sold out)
