Presented as a work-in-progress, this text on American artist Rindon
Johnson's
video practice offers a reflection on the widening creative
possibilities in the multimodal
digital landscape, while discussing the
political and personal aspirations of a new generation of artists and
critics.
This text, which is presented as an unfinished, in-progress document,
combines notes, quotations, and deletions in a fragmentary, indirect
response to Rindon Johnson's VR videos (alongside other of the
disintegrations, psychological and social, of the present moment).
Assessing in relationship to the legacy of expanded cinema, some of
literature's widening possibilities in the multimodal digital landscape—as
postulated across Johnson's broad and inquisitive practice—it suggests a
breakdown of purely textual mechanics, embracing writing and thinking as
uncompleted, perhaps even vulnerable, acts.
Burke's text offers also a portrait of a community of artists,
poets and critics, who share a common experience, thought and commitment,
which considers and welcomes in their reflection the influence of
feminism,
the critique of
post-colonialism
and capitalism, the issues raised by
gender
and trans-studies, Queer theories and the philosophy of care, expressed
and supported both in the artistic field and in everyday life.
Brochure published in the “Before Publication” series, which will gather
the pre-publications—unique notebooks of 4 to 24 pages, 17,2 x 23,5 cm,
offset, black/white, stapled binding, 250 copies—of authors' texts and
artists' inserts, which will appear regularly and in preview of their
final edition in
L'Effet papillon II (second volume of
L'Effet
papillon – 1989-2007, catalogue of the
Centre
d'édition contemporaine published in 2008).
Harry Burke (born 1990, lives and works in New York) is a British
poet,
critic, and curator. He was a curator at Artists Space, New York, where he
organized a performance and reading program. He collaborated on the
exhibition of Ho King Man and Hanne Lippard at SALTS, Basel, co-organized
with Precious Okoyomon, the “Segue Reading Series” in New York, “Poetry as
Practice” for the New Museum in New York and “Random House” for Arcadia
Missa in London. He curated exhibitions at the Cell Project Space in
London and at the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius. His writings have
appeared in
Texte zur Kunst,
Art in America,
Spike
Art Quarterly,
Mousse, and in several artists'
anthologies.
