lease meet Philippe Buschinger, a man transformed by the power of digital photography. You might even say that the digital explosion acted on Phil the way that first atomic explosion acted on Bruce Banner,turning him into the Hulk of digital photography. Phil bought a Nikon Coolpix 990 a couple of years ago and his hard drives now contain more images than professional photographers used to produce in a lifetime. Phil’s life-long academic interest in concrete poetry (the subject of his Ph.D thesis) suddenly found a way to express itself creatively. But wait, that’s not all: Phil has used the digital revolution to turn himself from a high-school German teacher in Paris into a grantwinning artist, published with pride by onestar press. His Typographical Safari, one of onestar’s best-sellers, catapulted Phil onto planet art, where his maniacal observations of the way languagevisually informs the urban environment surprised and delighted everyone. Here’s his second book at onestar press. Check it out.
Richard Dailey (Paris)
Philippe Buschinger
Rome invisible
Published May 2003
See Stephen Vitiello’s 16 unique prints here.
t’s a contemporary art technique to take something barely noticed on the periphery of perception and focus on it. The game is to present such oblique sights or sounds or textures in such a way as to fulfill one of art’s oldest and most satisfying roles: to revitalize our perceptions, to make the world exciting and interesting again. Stephen Vitiello is known for accomplishing this and more in his sound installations. He is also an expert in perceptual dislocation, putting our ears in one place and our eyes in another (as anyone who experienced his recent installation at the Cartier Foundation in Paris can attest). In his onestar press book he has collected found texts related to sound, helping to round out a poetics as accomplished as it is visually and aurally fragmented. As Vitiello puts it (with Cornellian modesty): “Sounds Found has been a 2 month-long project to document descriptions, words and drawings that refer to sound in an evocative way, without being specifically about music. Primarily a way to pass the time each morning on the commuter train, small sections of the newspaper would be ripped out, stuck in a back pocket and hopefully not lost by the end of the day”. Who says poetry is dead? Just listen to this guy.
Richard Dailey.
magine a sort of vagabondage, a long reverie. Imagine being plunged without warning into an image fl ux that seems to allude to a memory, a real lived experience which is nonetheless opaque, as if someone descended to the basement and after having brought up some old video cassettes begins watching them compulsively, mumbling a little, with the absent air of one of the great solitaries. And imagine this Beckettian character, a Krapp who has replaced the reels of his tape recorder with a VHS and now spends his days running around in a world shrunken to the dimension of a football match, watching those games engraved in our memories and those we have forgotten, a game of mirrors, time travel, the images and the voice superimposed, mixed, bouncing off each other like a visual stream of consciousness. Oliver Kahn, the fi lm that Steve Fagin directed in 2003, carries the name of the football player from Bayern Munich, but it isn’t a biography: we are more like witnesses of “an intermittence” in his memory, where the chaotic materials of his pervious life are interlaced. And it is through the superimposition of these fragments that we are led, as the artist puts it, “to deal with the issue of memory in this new age of stream video. The piece puts forward that memory is linked with “machines of vision” (also sound) and new machines of vision do not simply replace old ones, hence the overlap and confl ation in the piece among pre-cinema devices, Hollywood cinema, VHS recorded matches, toy camera diary, and stream video”.
Stefano Chiodi, Rome.
