o offer each of us the chance to have on his/her desk blotter, collected in a single book, the quintessential writings by its great men on color since humanity began to count is impossible. And yet this is the overall impression I have when holding Pierre Bismuth’s book in my hands. Onestar press’ standard format, pushed to extremes by Bismouth, literally resuscitates before our eyes, after having put them through the grinder of the black and white television in its early days, the mind-boggling tribe of Wittgenstein, Goethe, Delaunay, Kandinsky, Albers, Lohse and others, Rimbaud & Co., all utopians in their own way of the adequate triangulation color/representation/symbol. Thus joining the useful to the agreeable, Bismuth offers us here a resolutely hybrid synthesis that easily goes beyond the editorial constraints imposed and where the contents are at the same time a color chart, basically commercial, designed for Sunday painters (and Saturday painters too) who want to add some color to their “home sweet home:”, and also a magisterial and quintessential résumé of the history of painting. We can contemplate the rainbow he has flattened in the pages of his book, as Bismuth reassures us in a certain manner of our primordial faculty of wonder, and by giving us this simple sky in black and white he contributes in developing our perceptive capacities so that in the end we reveal to ourselves at once the nature of the world and the nature of our brains. Enjoy!
PHILIPPE BUSCHINGER, Paris
Pierre Bismuth
Various colors in black and white
Published April 2005
n the cover a dated image at once moving and cruel, that of a chimpanzee manipulated by men in white jackets getting ready for several experiments. At the end of the book a sentence without head or tail, «Give me orange, eat orange… », closes this collection of images. 9+1=10?, the last book by the artist Mircea Cantor, starts with a question and ends with a command. 9+1=10? is a transitional book, a stage in the work of Mircea Cantor between his previous research and his exhibition at the Gulbenki an Foundation, « If you walk faster it will rain less hard ». There the artist exhibits the video entitled NIM where an apeseeks to answer addition problems in a kind of amusement park in Thailand. The commands refer to NimChimsky, a chimpanzee trained by Herb Terrace, a researcher at Columbia University in New York, who has taught Nim Chimsky to communicate in American sign language such elementary sentences as Apple me eat, Banana Nim eat, Banana me eat, Drink me, Nim eat. 9+1=10? is also and first of all a collection of historical archived images from the recent history of man and space, of man in space. Spatial architecture, satellites, rockets, radar, archival images, an iconographic ensemble from the 1970s brought together by the artist are at the heart if this book. Between documentary and science fi ction, Mircea Cantor unveils his own imagination in relation to space travel and the glorious epoch of bygone utopias mixed up with the image of man and prisoner/guinea-pig and his own foolishness. 9+1=10? shows without commentary the traces of a fantastic epoch when everything was still possible.
queeze together the pages of Heidie Giannotti’s book a tale of a maiden or two + an animal streak and look at it sideways: that’s where you’ll see markings that resemble wood grain. (She might call it an animal streak.) Flip the pages of the book with your thumb front to back, back to front and the grainy moiré pattern springs to life, shifting rhythmically up and down, back and forth, from one page to the next, from thick to thin to blurry to positively cinematic stripes. (She might call it a minimal streak.) The undulating linear tracks activate the book’s interior architecture, which is built to house a streaming surplus of fi gurative images and colloquial speech. Small talk, tall talk, all talk all the time. (Check the index at the back of the book. The entire text is crunched into a stack of subject headings and type faces that read like a long shorthand prose poem composed of phrases caught in passing, snatched out of context, and salvaged in fragmentary form.)
