[F]inding it unacceptable to sell these immaterial zones for money Yves Klein, 1957, from “Invisible: Art of the Unseen: 1957-2012) (2012) Is composition important to you? Only in the sense that there are four corners. – David Schutter from “Reluctance to Reveal: A Conversation with David Schutter” (2017)
We live in a world of unreality and dreams. – Simone Weil, 1942, from ‘You Are Here’ by Nicholas R. Bell in “Wonder” (2015) Forgive me, please, but I would like to speak of something else, to speak of Tubal – Rosee Rosen from “The Blind Merchant 1989-1991”
Ah, books, books, books all over everything For you humans, one could ask where can we live but days? But for we library-ghosts, aka the spirits of dead libraries, where can we live but books? It is too soon for me to tell you how this particular library died or how libraries die in general, […]
‘the library of images unseen,’ [is] a radical alternative to the garbage-images of the video-idiots of our time. – Mario Perniola Fellow Reader, I realize that I has started these dispatches very much in the middle of things and you must be wondering who exactly is speaking. Please understand that I cannot tell you the […]
I read something on Google Books yesterday (yes, a library ghost can also move through online bibliopias!) and, given what has happened to me since I died (a story for another time), it really pissed me off. It was a chapter in a book with the promising title Art and Activism in the Age of […]
A ghost, even of a library, recognizes its own. I see myself reflected in Friedl Body’s 1975 photograph of the dark, hollowed eyes of Harry Smith starting out at me from page 150 of Jonas Mekas’ A Dance with Fred Astaire (Anthology Editions, 2017). In 1987-1988, Smith – musicologist, filmmaker, painter, anthropologist and paper-plane collector […]
Trying to make myself write some sort of commentary on the latest “emergency” reportage, I tear up my notes as soon as I write them. – Roland Barthes Some books whisper to me as I pass through the shelves I haunt. The final pages of Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books 2015) , amid […]
A new rite in belated homage to Pierre Bal-Blanc’s recent exhibition I GOT UP at Hot Wheels Athens, with works and performances by Sophie Calle, Delia Gonzalez, Dan Graham, On Kawara, Georgia Sagri, Scratch Orchestra, Serapis Maritime More info here: https://hotwheelsathens.eu/exhibitions/i-got-up/
I can begin here; it’s as good a page as any. I suppose if you are willing to listen to a library’s ghost story, then mysterious dreams of the future are no less fantastical. Maybe it even helps you to picture me as that skeleton you see here, staring out from Tshimumba Kanda Matulu‘s painting, […]
This isn’t really a post, it is a reminder; a memorial. As Minus Plato prepares for its 10 year anniversary (and potential conclusion) next year in May 2022, I am thinking a lot about that ‘Minus’ and what it means (and, specifically, what it means for me). On reading Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian […]