Brian Kennon
Secession - Christopher Wool [Polaroids #1]
Los Angeles, USA: Self-published, 2011
48 pp., 20.3 × 29.8 cm., softcover
Edition size undefined
The first in a series of three facsimile reprints of Christopher Wool's Secession book (see below post), in which Kennon substitutes the polaroid images of Wool's paintings for polaroids found online (mostly nudes, but also some Warhol self portraits, etc.). Published in conjunction with an exhibition titled Get In at Ltd Los Angeles (below), the books are produced in an 'undefined' edition size.
"If pictures give us an out, it also gives us an in. There are innumerable strange and usual sex practices, for example, that curiously get looked up online by teenagers and others, but never actually engaged in, from transsexuals to fun with fruit. We're curious, but perhaps shy or afraid of what things are, the pictures allow us in to the fantasy to see if it suits us, the picture allows us to discover ourselves with enough distance to feel safe.
Isn't critiquing a work of art a way of “getting into the picture? ” Appropriation a way to make the art your own, whether that's snapshots of art in the homes of fancy art collectors (Louise Lawler) or outright knock-offs (Sherrie Levine) or Prince rephotographing ads, each claims previous territory or in the limitless countries of meaning, we don't even say it has to be reclaimed, but is simply new territory whose existence like a peninsula depends on the mainland to exist, but is still wholly separate. Even the act I'm performing now, writing about art, let?s me get into the picture, become a collaborator with its meaning, to be owned by it as something that perplexes or engages me, to own it by making my own meanings for it, even those hewn out of simple biography. Though you wouldn't know this looking at most art writers (or what they write for that matter), but writing about art can feel sexy."
- Brian Kennon, exhibition press release
Available from Motto, for €55.00, here.
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