Magnus Plessen at Mai 36

(link)

Pretty desperate to know where this ends up hanging.

Luigi Ghirri at Mai 36

(link)

Which always making reference to its framing, to the vision of its photographer, and reflexively photography itself, and thus its artificiality, casts the photos as rubber substance of malleability rather than the hard stuff of "documentary." Rather than the total staging of Wall, or the total rendering of today's, Ghirri's photographs stress the elasticity in the making the real, an otherworldliness manifested by the photographer which, like Ghirri always taking photographs of other photos irrupting new dimension in our world - a strangeness if there ever was one - the view is the subjectivity of the viewfinder, not what the photograph saw but what they made reality be, or something, a weird and rubber world. It's a subtle and hallucinatory effect to see continually see the subtle distortion of the world by its photographing.


See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel

Paul Thek at Mai 36

(link)

Interestingly the PR connects Thek to Beuys. Both with art as components modular to a mythologizing practice. Beuys used the language of mass promotion, affinity for design, multiples and dissemination into pop culture. Thek used traditional art languages and singular (personal) view, always the sovereign work (however economical) and rarely making multiples save for a prototype children's toy. Bueys never seemed conflicted on the oily extraction of aura for himself. Thek instead appears endlessly conflicted about this romanticism, the formal beauty veering close to cliche, triteness, caroming off it, and this tension of when the bird would land is the force of the work, the paradox of being unable to land on the island of “special sweetness and purity” without immediately crushing it with the bludgeon of art, and so a lightness to leave the land alone.