is a dog book that tries to be more than a dog book! An intermix of dogs, art and politics! To view dogs as myth, symbol, aesthetic musings and in scenes of casual and/or extreme tension such as the extremities of state violence. Images are jittered and fractured visually and informationally, concrete and irrational. After all, the dog is a great player in our worlds.
Leon Golub
Leon Golub’s DOG is a guide to the third Millennium. It is a manual that, in the words of J.G.Ballard, challenges all our
assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions. Who are we and why are we here?
Akin to John Gray’s Straw Dogs, Golub’s DOG explores what the world and human life could be once humanism is
put aside. Golub shows us homeless dogs, bondage dogs, running dogs, atomic dogs, in other words, not domestic dogs at all. And with them there is random movement, collapsed space and entropic fields. Everything seems contingent, things are in permanent transformation and yet forming, if only for a moment, what Golub calls the “necessary and urgent symbolism of our time”.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
use the Internet too much. I’m on it all the time, non-stop, when I work, when I’m tired of working, when I’m looking for an airline ticket to leave on vacation, when I need to calm my nerves. In short, I’m a pretty typical victim, but I don’t suffer too much from it. So when I see the screens drawn by Valéry Grancher, this surprising catalogue of inexhaustible flux of images and words, catalogue by definition impossible and absolutely provisional, I ask myself if he has ever felt, as I have, this sensation of losing footing, of sometimes being too quickly absorbed in a whirlpool of forms, of a message completely understandable, of course, but at bottom enigmatic and vaguely menacing. Because that is precisely my feeling when I flip through this surprising book, Internet Drawings. Pencil drawings, or markers maybe, white paper, material. Without mentioning the stopping of time. Does he take himself for the last painter? Or does he simply need a memory device? Strange diary, collage by chance, calculation ? And what choice is meant? Yes, the choice is perhaps the key. Let’s look closer then: museums, foundations, artists, galleries… in short, the art world. A phenomenology sub speciem internetis ? That is to say he’s not talking to us about about graphics, or interfaces or interactivity, happily, but about a fugitive, ungraspable, subtle object ? Art as a substance that resists transformations, as a procedure rather than a technique? What appears in these pages is the diagram of a secret voyage in which the stages are not defined: happy meetings? Deceptions? Misadventures? We are left in uncertainty. Clearly these traces, hesitant, that keep all the hand’s clumsiness, are not here to remind us of all the many-colored charms of web sites, but rather to let us perceive their ephemeral reality, this “human” dimension, mortal and disordered, that continues to inhabit us.
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