he urban crowd in which Beat Streuli finds his images, mostly portraits or partial portraits of people, came into being more than a century and a half ago when Edgar Allan Poe gave this urban phenomenon its current geist in his short story, The Man in the Crowd. Try reading Poe’s short story while looking at Streuli’s photographs. It’s almost like an instruction manual, or a literary riff on Streuli’s images. Here, for example, is Poe’s narrator observing the passing crowd in London as he gazes out a pub window: “At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.” Can you get more Streuli than that?
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omeone once said that a photograph shows effects without causes. In other words, a photograph will always be less than reality. Thanks to an endless paradox, however, photography affirms itself as the faithful double, the mirror that can not be tarnished, and the mouth of light. Thus it is for the images that Gwen Smith has chosen for two books that have come out two years apart: Tropic (2001) and Cancer (2003). Two images of the same place, one before and one after, visibly, shredded and enlarged to fill hundreds of pages. What then do these details hide? They conceal exactly that which can be conceived only through touch and memory, non-representable experience, antagonist of the true imprint in which photography participates. They avoid saying that there is always a tenacious and modest tie (remember, by the way, that the titles of course evoke Henry Miller on the shores of Brooklyn facing Manhattan) that is absolutely essential between space and the lived, the body and the image. It goes without saying that these photographs put before us the unthinkable. But also, in absentia, they tell us how history proceeds in great leaps, tragic and extraordinary: a roof was there, before us. It has disappeared.
ike a child who puts together images, photos and drawings make albums, Matthias Herrmann presents us in this with “a collection of images and ideas that have a certain importance”. Maybe it’s the brief phrase at the beginning that suggests this comparison with a child: “The contents this book could be disturbing for children; owners of book should not let children have access to it”. That said, the suite of photos, self-portraits, quotations, extracts ads for sex toys, extracts from the artist’s intimate journals, covers magazines… has a very charming intimacy, almost innocent. Among photos where the artist represents himself naked are mixed in pornographic pictures that seem almost outmoded, as if an adolescent to his first sexual urges gathered them. Then there are quotations run the gamut from Groucho Marx to Doug Aitken, not to mention Robert Gober, Rirkrit Tiravanija and the cry taken up by Joseph Beuys, La rivoluzione siamo Noi”. Throughout the book the reader has impression of participating in the private life as well as the artistic Matthias Herrmann, and the book ends on a almost silent outburst: large format image of an ejaculation followed by a panel inscribed over, followed by an erection and then it’s over… strange comfort the same time insinuates an eternal return, of sex, of war, of life.
hen Bernard Heidsieck delivers his categorical judgment of “sound poetry,” starting with the 1950s, he gives us a healthy lesson: “Don’t,” he says, “let the machine consume you.” He’s talking about the computer, of course, the all-in-one machine, accessible to everyone. The machine can’t do anything by itself, we know: “Before using such a machine,” Heidsieck continues, “you have to know what you want to do with it. You have to have an idea that the machine may be able to help you realize. You shouldn’t throw yourself at this kind of machine too easily.” Fifty years of practicing the art of sound poetry renders you lucid. Or maybe it’s the opposite: lucidity makes sound poetry possible. Lucidity, for example, may be abandoning “written poetry” when you realize that poetry books don’t sell, that even the term poetry has fallen upon hard times or that, in every sense of the word, the poem remains eminently passive, waiting wisely on the page for its reader. Lucidity means thinking about the support for production, communication and diffusion of poetry in general and finding a way out of its dead end. It means wanting to exit poetry from its double ghetto (“poetry” book + plus small distribution within micro-circles) and resolutely envisioning an alternative that reactivates poetry and finding a material consistence adequate to the modernity of its epoch. 
f genious is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, Closky fits the formula. He works with an energy some call «obsessive-compulsive». But he also inverses the genious ratio, as his book Coloriage (onestar press, 2001) shows. Since his early days with The Frères Ripoulin, a Parisian art/music collective of which he was part in the 80s, Closky has worked his way in hard conceptual pursuit of the absurd in the logical and the logical in the absurd. He has also put together a CV festooned with ministerial ribbons above a highly respectable tally of exhibitions and publications. 
