February 19, 2025
No Judgement, Annotated.
The follow are screen grabs from my Notes application of Gordon Hughes' review of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster's book, titled Exit Interview.
This is my favorite method of close-reading texts I like. Copy and paste it into
Notes, highlight, color fonts, underline, bold, italicize, change font size.
Really liked what Gordon Hughes had to say, extremely interesting. He touches on thoughts I've written about elsewhere in this blog. Intrinsic and extrinsic value, commodities and art objects, Modernity and the Industrial Revolution, the relation between the Modern and Postmodern, Duchamp (especially Thierry de Duve's writing), the inherent death wish within Western Civilization, deskilling, Ryman, the need to move past the End of History thesis...
Again, the images below are screen grabs. The links you see can't be clicked. Sorry about that. This is much easier than adding a hive of html's to the original text. Plus, I wanted to bust this out and get on with studio work.
These are raw notes, written on the fly paragraph to paragraph. More to come in terms of mapping out the facets of the diamond of Western Civilization and presenting it in a more succinct manner. A huge task, yes, but I feel compelled to do it before too much of my time on earth runs out.
been following your work over the years, for some reason I can't see this 'exit' sign being too very much a piece of art work in that it's merely an artifact stuck into a frame. Having said this, your work is both quite 'organic' and 'thought provokingly rich' in texture, evokes a lot of examination and beats the dog piss out of this other guy's stuff. Were you being 'polite' maybe?
anyway, glad to see you're at it. so many of our Truxtun contemporaries are in the '404' locker.
best wishes
d.c.