fantastic. We hope you enjoy this strange and compelling volume. EDITOR. Amy Marjoram .... I think I know best, and will
maGaZine
INSIDE ISSUE
05
The unexpected quietly coils around the familiar in the works of nathan lyons, nadège mériau and Yvonne Todd.
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MAGAZINE COVER IMAGE
Give me the moon and the stars
WELCOME
It seemed strange to choose a 115 year old photo for the cover of what is for the most part a contemporary magazine. Yet the more I looked at the image the more necessary it became. The image just didn’t seem old, fixed or sorted out. Nostalgia hadn’t gotten in- for nostalgia isn’t simply the past in an image but the present being invited in by it to straighten it out and know better.
Each Excerpt Issue is a distinct concoction and it is with excitement that we share with you number 5. As an independent, non-commercial publication we share incredible work that stirs and shake us; eschewing the insipidly picturesque in favour of conceptually rigorous and visually rich projects. Brought together under the editorial guidance of Amy Marjoram and the creative direction of Caitlin Smooker.
In the image the guard still guards, the door and stairway still lead off somewhere and the moon, embedded like a wreckers ball, makes the wall appear unnervingly permeable. 115 year later and a few people have bounced across the moons surface and there are five hundred and two million photographs when you search the moon on the internet. Just as the internet voraciously slurps up images and text, the moon continues to try to pull at anything on the earth to bring it closer, causing the oceans to slosh back and forwards. Wanting everything. Wanting what it can’t get. These thoughts intertwine as Issue 5 develops; an issue that wanted the moon and the stars. Things begin to seem vast and cryptic, the surface of a coin becomes a landscape and the funereal become something to share not bury. Across this Issue the unexpected quietly coils around the familiar and I am faced with the tautological bind that the inexplicable is what it is.
Issue 5 blends the familiar with the fantastic. We hope you enjoy this strange and compelling volume.
EDITOR Amy Marjoram
[email protected] Creative Director Caitlin Smooker
[email protected] SUPPORTERS Lou Hubbard Louis Porter
Amy Marjoram
Field columbian museum moon model Unknown photographer. Model prepared by Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt, Germany | 1898 |
SUBSCRIBE – IT’S FREE www.excerptmagazine.com
Issue 5 - March 2013 ISSN 2202-5340
FOLLOW US www.facebook.com/excerptmagazine 2
MAGAZINE CONTENTS NATHAN LYONS_RETURN YOUR MIND TO ITS UPRIGHT POSITION 4 YVONNE TODD_50% SEAHORSEL 7 SHERIDAN MILLS
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STEfAN ABRAMS_HORSES 9 NATHAN LYONS
STEfAN ABRAMS
MARTIN JOHN CALLANAN
Nathan Hill
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GLENN SLOGGETT 17 MARTIN JOHN CALLANAN_WITH TEXT BY PAu WAELDER 18 LANCE WAKELING
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JOHN ALEXANDER_A CHINESE DISPLAY 24 BRIDGET COLLINS
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KYLE WEISE_GOOGLE BOOKS - PHOTOGRAPHY’S NEW MEDIA 32 PATRICK CREMIN_THE GREAT AMERICAN BUFFET
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CARL BURGESS_MORE SOON_TALK SHOW 41 PATRICK CREMIN
NADÈGE MÉRIAU
scott mcCulloch
VERNACULAR
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NADÈGE MÉRIAU 49 SCOTT MCCULLOCH_SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT CLEAN 56 TEReNCE HOGAN_ (park & home) series 61 PAUL BATT_LOST AND LEFT
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PIppa milne_endless atlas 69
terence hogan
Paul Batt
Phil Kneen
PHIL KNEEN_ONE WAY TRIP TO YELLOWKNIFE
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Excerpt Exhibition
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Contributor links
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THANK-YOU 93
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nathan lyons
RETURN YOUR MIND TO ITS UPRIGHT POSITION 4
return your mind to its upright position | Nathan lyons
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return your mind to its upright position | Nathan lyons
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50% SEAHORSEL, 2012 | yvonne todd
Glue Vira 2
Henriette 2 7
A CHINESE DISPLAY | JOHN ALEXANDER
Sheridan MILLS Sometimes the lines are blurred. At the border between South and North Korea however, they are not.
The Korean Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea (South Korea), 2012
On a recent trip to South Korea I visited the ‘demilitarised zone’ between North and South Korea, what you can see here is a picture of all of the tourists scrambling towards the viewing wall to get a glimpse of North Korea on the other side. The yellow line on the ground demarcates where you are ‘allowed’ to take photos up to. No photographs are allowed to be taken beyond this point, only your gaze.
HORSES Stefan Abrams
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HORSES | Stefan Abrams
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HORSES | Stefan Abrams
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HORSES | Stefan Abrams
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HORSES | Stefan Abrams
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HORSES | Stefan Abrams
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Finding her Nathan Hill
Providence perhaps, that I should chance upon the scene set out ahead of me. I had not been looking, not for this. Inside my mind, a switch pinions itself into place, setting me to motion. I am to record. I am in control. Though I am not in control. My control is only the seeing, and quavers beyond that. Elements contrive to distort my view. Light is prime amongst them, for as much as I might wrestle with this invasive, seeping liquid, I am ultimately its slave. My self proclaimed mission is now to capture this image, to rupture it from its seating. Armed with the squat periscope of this camera, I am to capture now. I am a moment hunter. Really I am nothing more than a prodigious lens. Through routine, I will push the glass close to my eye, hoping to ingest this collusion of sensor and crafted monocle. It is a clumsy affair, and presumptuous of me to ask these images to tumble inside. I will simply initiate a process, pressing a button that opens doorways from which dark hands will spit forward, tearing reality from its moorings and hauling it reluctant, back inside, to rebuild a visual jigsaw against the sensor.
I did not kill her, though I did descry her. I can, perhaps, make her immortal, as she clearly was not. I can hope to give this view justice. My anxiety is that of so many in my world, that my work may be too biased, too subjective. She will become still life. Everything I record becomes still life. One still frame per life. But she does not care for this. She has no concern for posterity. She is not still a life. She is a part. She used to consist more than the sum of her part, but now she does not. I crave that my image becomes more than the sum of its parts. The camera has many parts, yet remains a tool. I am the sum of its parts. Should I consider for who this picture is destined? It does not matter one iota. The gross reality of the situation is all too apparent. As soon as I have walked away, all context has evaporated. Irrespective of lens, film or myriad intervening settings, my image is but a brief capture, lost immediately after. I really am a moment hunter, a history thief. I hoard instantaneous, stolen contexts.
I am only with her for the shortest while, out here alone, where somebody left her. History is not the past, and I will tell her this as I take my picture. Every time I look at art I am a tourist of somebody else’s history. How did she get here? I neither know nor care. The context is lost on me. There is only here and now, and every picture is then. Later, as I work, I will overcompensate everything and ruin this moment, but I cannot help myself. I think I know best, and will tweak. I will lighten. I will alter the spectrum and add contrast where currently there is none. Through my interactions with another machine, I will introduce definition not present in the reality. She is but information now. I am in control of all of this. I will inject the meaning to this image, once this sensor has swallowed and re-pieced it. But right now I see her, and I will show you what I have seen, for that is all I have. I will show you in my own way, but this is not her. She is gone, and she left the moment that flick-fast shutter flared to instantaneous life. She is gone.
I tire of aberrations, but this is what it’s all become. This will be a chromatic slant; a saturating distortion of what was once true. I will not lift this experience; I will only seize the semantics of my own, unique viewpoint and relay them. I push my tongue out to a point and connect it to the cold metal of the camera. The taste is inert, sterile; it is analogous, I feel, to the images I am taking.
I really am a moment hunter, a history thief.
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Marthe
50% SEAHORSEL, 2012 | yvonne todd
Glenn Sloggett
From left: Deathcar, 2012 House with red flowers, 2012 17
Pau Waelder, Curator Catalogue essay Horrach Moyà, Palma de Mallorca 9 November 2012 – 17 January 2013
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Martin John Callanan w/ words by Pau Waelder
On May 16, 2008, Martin John Callanan changed his name to Martin John Callanan, by Deed Poll, sworn and sealed at the City of London Magistrate’s Court. On July 5, 2012, Martin John Callanan assumed the name of Martin John Callanan by Deed Poll, sworn and sealed by a Comissioner for Oath, and enrolled in the Supreme Court of Judicature. Through this action, at once absurd and totally in keeping with the laws of the United Kingdom, the artist Martin John Callanan (formerly Martin John Callanan) turns an administrative process into a reflexion on his own identity and the systems that validate the laws and institutions that govern our society. We live in a multitude of systems: natural systems that affect our environment, social systems that define the possible actions in the framework of an established community, computer systems that enable and control the transmission and storage of data with which we create our memory and the image of our world. They shape our everyday reality, but we tend to ignore their existence or assume it as an indisputable fact: as the clouds floating
overhead, these systems respond to a logic that is largely out of reach of the average citizen. Through methodical and precise processes, Martin John Callanan explores the notion of citizenship in a globally connected world. The relationship between the individual and the systems that surround and affect our lives take shape in a series of works in which both the structures and the fragility of these systems are shown, sometimes by resorting to the absurd and the excess of information. The atworks in this exhibition at Horrach Moyà Gallery venture into the dynamics of natural, economic, administrative and mass media systems by means of an observation both on the cosmic and the microscopic level. Inspired by the forms of scientific data visualization, the artist made in A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe) a globe that only shows the position of the clouds during a second in February 2, 2009. This ephemeral map, made from hundreds of photographs from NASA satellites, is embodied in a sculpture
created with a 3D printer and shown as an unattended object, an ignored finding, a fragile piece containing an unusual vision of our environment . The economic system, which has raised to such notorious prominence in recent years because of its obvious impact on our lives, is a complex structure whose functioning is increasingly necessary to understand and, as much as possible, to predict or even control. In this sense, and in response to the dominance of macroeconomics in the discourse of the media, the artist chooses a microscopic view of the world economy. The Fundamental Units, a series that begins with the works produced by Horrach Moyà Gallery for this exhibition, is an exploration of the lowest denomination coins from the world’s currencies using an infinite focus 3D optical microscope at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington (UK). The images obtained with the microscope have been combined to form an extremely detailed large scale reproduction of the least valuable coins from Australia, Chile, the Euro, Myanmar and the Kingdom of Swaziland. In these
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Martin John Callanan w/ words by Pau Waelder
images the humble metal acquires a planetary dimension and is displayed as the atoms that shape the global economy. The reality shown by the media consists in turn of its own units, the news covering the front pages of newspapers and circulated by television and radio, websites, blogs and social networks. The speed and density of the information flow that is generated in every corner of the planet and invades all communication channels exposes us to a saturation that paradoxically makes data illegible. I Wanted to See All of the News From Today deals with this excess of information by means of a web site that automatically collects the front pages of hundreds of newspapers around the world and displays them in a grid. From these data, the artist has produced a series of prints in which the pages of newspapers form a totemic picture of everyday life in the information society. Martin John Callanan completes this exhibition with Deed Poll, which is both the action taken in the process of change (or recovery) of his name on July 5, 2012 and the legal documents, canceled passport, letters and responses, official notice in the newspaper and other items related to this administrative procedure. Callanan thus adds to his analysis of the systems that determine the conditions of life in the societies and the planet we inhabit an action on a personal level, as an individual and citizen that participates (voluntarily and involuntarily) in the dynamics generated by these systems.
First page: The Fundamental Units, 2012 Second page: A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe), 2008-09 Last page: The Fundamental Units, 2012
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LANCE WAKELING 21
UNTITLED | LANCE WAKELING
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UNTITLED | LANCE WAKELING
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JOHN
Alexander A Chinese Display
Archeology, 2009
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A CHINESE DISPLAY | JOHN ALEXANDER
3946-3, 2009
Tower, 2008
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A CHINESE DISPLAY | JOHN ALEXANDER
Construction worker posing as porter, 2012
Handprint (S-Class), 2012
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A CHINESE DISPLAY | JOHN ALEXANDER
Renovation, 2009
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A CHINESE DISPLAY | JOHN ALEXANDER
Sunset (Three Gorges), 2012
Untitled, Chongqing, 2012
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A CHINESE DISPLAY | JOHN ALEXANDER
Tour bus, 2009
Taiwan, 2009
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A CHINESE DISPLAY | JOHN ALEXANDER
Untitled, Chongqing, 2012
Untitled, Chongqing, 2012
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Bridget
Collins Computer Landscape 2, 2012
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Google Books
Photography’s ‘New Media’ By Kyle Weise
Taking ‘Art’s New Media’ as its theme, the recent landmark fiftieth anniversary issue of Artforum (September 2012) explored changing conceptions of media within contemporary art. In the face of detailed articles discussing digitisation, the magazine’s continued adherence to its distinctive physical media format weighed heavily: not so much in the content of the articles, but in the magazine’s telephone book-like proportions. Just as viable alternatives to the portability and ease of use of the printed book have finally emerged (Kindle, iPad, etc), Artforum thrusts its unwieldy physicality on readers, its uniquely enormous dimensions stretching across desks and pushing backpacks to their limits. This physical manifestation of Artforum’s potentially digital content is linked, inexorably, to economic imperatives: the magazine’s hulking size is both supported and constructed by the endless, but often brilliant, full page advertisements. Larger than usual, this particular issue of Artforum includes an uninterrupted stretch of 150 pages of advertisements (p.251401). Comprised of almost 550 glossy colour pages in total,
the self-congratulatory ‘new media’ anniversary issue reflects on the history of the publication, whilst inadvertently emphasising the magazine’s impressively unwieldy physical presence. It does this precisely at the moment when, as its own articles discuss, the consumption of art, art criticism, and visual culture in general, is increasingly digitised (as the ‘pages’ of Excerpt attest). Physical production presents a material presence apparently at odds with the ephemerality of digitisation, yet the two are inseparable. As Wolfgang Tillmans notes in this same issue of Artforum, the ubiquity of digitisation in artistic practice has resulted in the unprecedented ascendance of a single technical medium in material artistic production: ink-jet printing (a technological medium which is itself dominated by a small number of manufacturers who produce quality machines) (“Step into Liquid”, p.420-429). As such, vastly different practices come to rely on a homogenous material output. While Tillmans is particularly concerned with the physical details
of exhibition outcomes in gallery spaces, there is another technology that truly seems to command the visual field, dominating both production and reception: the LCD monitor. The circulation of images and documentation of art is invariably mediated through screens. In this context, media is an increasingly flattened field, and the distinction and boundaries of ‘photography’ seem progressively unstable. Inevitably, this context and the ubiquity of the LCD screen has itself become the subject of photographers. The recent work of Doug Rickard and Michael Wolf takes the screen as both theme and site of their artwork. Sourcing their images entirely from Google Street View, these artists then use these images to produce saleable, physical artefacts in the form of large-sale prints and limited edition books. In such artwork the dimensions of ‘art’s new media’ are tested, their Google journeys traversing the circuits of: digitisation and reification, production and consumption, physical and virtual, scarcity and reproduction, commodity and commons.
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GOOGLE BOOKS PHOTOGRAPHY’S NEW MEDIA | KYLE WEISE
For the desktop artist, Google Maps is a generous resource. Jon Rafman’s 9 Eyes project, comprising a website which collects Street View screenshots, towers above all other similar examples in terms of volume, and the site elicits sheer amazement at the breadth of remarkable scenes captured. While at times recalling the surrealism of Joel Sternfeld’s photographs of vernacular America, Rafman’s site refuses to translate these images into the print language of the traditional photographic essay or series. Instead, 9 Eyes embraces the random juxtapositions typical of web-surfing, the stream of images, without commentary, lurches from the hilarious, to the melancholy, to the deeply disturbing, and back again. A few themes emerge: costumes, camera glitches, animals, accidents, guns, arrests, trompe-l’oeil, butterflies and Segways, amongst others. And, of course, people reacting to the Google car as it passes by, usually giving it the finger, features prominently amongst the stream of images.
wall whilst it looks directly at the camera. Wolf’s first book in this style, ASOUE (A Series of Unfortunate Events) (Wanderer Books, 2010) is the most akin to Rafman (with whom it shares a few images), While it does not account for all of the images, amongst an at times seemingly random assemblage, the book is dominated by ‘accidents’ of all sorts, some more ambiguous than others: computer errors, falls, fights, birds flying in front of the camera, a car on fire, and so on. Portraits (Super Labo, 2011) presents close-ups of people’s faces in the auto-blurred style of Street View, made further abstract by Wolf’s technique across all three books: rather than screen captures, Wolf returns to the physical act of photography and takes a photograph of the LCD monitor on which he first views the images. The effect is to emphasise the technology, each pixel of the screen is visible, its red, green and blue elements almost shimmering on the page; the level of zoom shifting the size of the pixels from page to page.
Wolf and Rickard, on the other hand, produce sumptuously printed limited edition publications (and even gallery-exhibited prints) from the same source material, playing with the fluctuating boundaries of digitisation and material production. In A New America Picture (White Press 2010; Aperture, 2012) Rickard uses screen captures from Street View to assemble a sobering and serious portrait of economically depressed areas of America. Rickard’s choice of images share a muted tone and the book takes on the appearance of a traditional documentary photobook, only revealing its source via the appearance of Google’s graphical overlays.
The chance encounters that define street-photography are here no longer generated by feet on the sidewalk, but by fingers on the keyboard. Wolf’s books retain an ambivalent relationship with their source. By both emphasising the technology and the centrality of the LCD screen, whilst separating himself from it, Wolf literally remains, absurdly, a ‘photographer’. Though, for both Wolf and Rickard, with their limited edition books, their work hinges on such tensions between the digital and the fetish of the material.
Wolf’s themes are much more modest than Rickard’s, and his technique much more particular. FY (Wanderer Books, 2011) consists of 34 images of people giving the finger to the Google Street View camera, and one image of a dog urinating on a
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50% SEAHORSEL, 2012 | yvonne todd
Moonsap
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the great american buffet 2011 | patrick cremin
Great American Buffet 2012 the
pat r i c k c remi n
From left: Balloon Staples
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the great american buffet | patrick cremin
From left: Flat Zabriske
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the great american buffet | patrick cremin
Typewriter
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the great american buffet | patrick cremin
From left: Sand Forest
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Hope
50% SEAHORSEL, 2012 | yvonne todd
Merril 39
Excerpt Magazine asked everyone to anonymously share what has left them thinking is it just me or...
do video cameras turn you on. does everybody else take shit photos. should politicians should have to compete in photo shoots judged by Tyra Banks to see if they can take direction and smize. are all guys that work in camera shops ugly fat assholes powertripping somewhere on planet technotronic. are YouTube montage fan videos the greatest art of our times? are photography competitions where you pay to enter basically gambling and exploitation? are we all fed up with the photograph of a sexy girl on a bicycle, with long hair and no helmet riding her bike away from the camera whilst smiling back at us.
IS IT JUST ME OR... are we all making work about the inherent oddness of everyday existence? do we all secretly harbor the feeling that we’re not really good enough. does eating cheese before bed give you bad dreams. do I have a multiple personality disorder.
does everyone enjoy mayo on their crumbed snitchel’s?
are we all unphotogenic?
does someone else out there not have a smart phone?
are the NAB bank a little too persistent in asking what your favourite transaction is....
somewhere, at any given moment, when an Instagram is born, an SLR loses an F Stop.
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VIDEO | TALK show | CARL BURGESS_MORE SOON
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Excerpt Magazine asked Asger Carlsen, Michael Schäfer, Louis Porter & Ellinor Forsberg to share the vernacular images they have been looking at for inspiration.
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VERNACULAR
I found this in a flea market. This kinda set the mood for my project Wrong. Like how subtle insanity can look. I still have this piece hanging in my apartment. Asger Carlsen
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VERNACULAR
I found it like that and didn’t add anything. Michael Schäfer
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VERNACULAR
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VERNACULAR
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VERNACULAR
Images from the book Looking Forward to Being Attacked. Louis Porter
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VERNACULAR
Australian images from Flickr’s The Commons Ellinor Forsberg
State Library of Queensland collection, Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh arriving at Archerfield airport, 1948 Powerhouse Museum collection, Kookaburras, c. 1900
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Lost and left | paul batt
NadÈge
Mériau
Au centre de la Terre I, 2012
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untitled series | NadÈge MÉriau
From left: Au centre de la Terre II, 2012 Au centre de la Terre III, 2012 50
untitled series | NadÈge MÉriau
Adrift, 2012
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untitled series | NadÈge MÉriau
Contemporary food stylists titillate and shame us with their culinary ikebana. Photographs of neat white plates loosely scattered with greens and seductive curls of parmesan bombard us, creating a tightly shot pornography of food. Meanwhile, amateurs snap meal pictures with their phones, getting their angles wrong and making their poached pears look snotty and alien. Then there is Nadège Mériau and her weirdly lush and perplexing work. We are used to sanitized images that attempt to idealize and trigger hunger, but Mériau’s photographs quiver somewhere between satiation and nausea. Her gluttonous photographs seem to devour the food they depict. This dramatic break, from the visual starvation of neat pretty food photos trapped in their own blandness, sits closer to reality; when it comes to food we are mostly trough hogs. There might be the occasional person who delicately nibbles away at their nutritional requirements whilst wearing white, but the rest of us gobble, slurp and spill. Similarly, Mériau’s camera visually burrows in to foodstuffs, there are no restrained slithers of plate. The edible becomes allconsuming. Mériau’s photographic fixation makes for epic morsels. Theatrical lighting lends a hallucinatory quality to the congealing landscapes. The quasi-mystical effect, as inverse to the normalised meticulous depiction of food, is a tense reminder of how much the depiction of food is fraught with social coding. Every good 70’s kitchen had a photograph glued to particleboard of say, a cane basket brimming with fruit surrounded by luscious ferns like a tacky version of a Chardin painting. It is testament not simply to fashion, but our evolving relationship to food itself that these photographs now appear exquisitely dated and naive. Today food photos are stripped back to the minimal and often present ingredients like the sum of an equation. This is not surprising in this crazy age where we have turned gluttony from a sin to a science. Our atonement for feasting until we bulge is to then detoxify our brains out. We balance the junk in our shopping baskets with punnets of blueberries and the latest cult super foods all regimentally beautified, primped and packaged. Accustomed to clinical breakdowns of food, the unidentifiable foodstuffs in Mériau’s images are both a messy threat and an exotic escape.
Debris, 2012
Mériau’s series moves from the seductive to the repellent, the gooey mountains and doughy caverns are as fascinating as they are smothering. These arresting images, in all their disorienting strangeness, may be antithetical to the systematically warped food depictions and eating patterns in our everyday lives, but they are not stranger. Amy Marjoram 52
untitled series | NadÈge MÉriau
Mériau’s photographic fixation makes for epic morsels.
Cocoon, 2012
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untitled series | NadÈge MÉriau
Offering, 2012
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50% SEAHORSEL, 2012 | yvonne todd
Sandy2
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SCOTT M Culloch c
See That My Grave Is Kept Clean 56
See That My Grave is Kept Clean | Scott McCulloch
Earlier. My mum’s drowning in one of the lakes of the USSR. Her mother wades out in her apron, rescues her, then ties her up in a potato sack and leaves her on the doorstep. The village shares breastfeeding. 30 souls, all related. A painted bird is nailed to the stump of a tree. A regular orthodox town, regular orthodox folk - ploughing for the state. Smashed October sky. And the sun threading through it all with their crimson hands. A boy is struck by lightning; dies. The peasants mourn until they die too -- into their parents into their parents into their parents. The dead is led unbidden by the other young men of the village. The photos of the dead arrive in the mail to the refugee relatives in Glenroy. Later. I flick through the family photo-album of the dead and swallow bread-drink. Thick-dreamed in death – the images of the corpses aren’t so haunting, however, the impetus to send them halfway across the world is, perhaps.
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See That My Grave is Kept Clean | Scott McCulloch
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See That My Grave is Kept Clean | Scott McCulloch
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A CHINESE DISPLAY | JOHN ALEXANDER
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terence (park & home) series
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(park & home) series | Terence HoGAN
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(park & home) series | Terence HoGAN
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(park & home) series | Terence HoGAN
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Morton
50% SEAHORSEL, 2012 | yvonne todd
Seaweedil
Paul Batt, 2010 - 2011
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LOST AND LEFT | paul batt
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LOST AND LEFT | paul batt
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ENDLESS
ATLAS Pippa Milne
First page: Maurice Jarnoux, André Malraux midst of photo reproductions for his book Le Musée Imaginaire, 1947 Second page: Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas. Last page: Maurice Jarnoux, André Malraux in his living room at Boulogne, the Holy Caves embossed images for the second volume of the virtual museum, 1953
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ENDLESS ATLAS | PIPPA MILne
We live in an image-saturated age, where photographs, figures, tropes and motifs are everywhere: on street corners, building tops, desktops, in books, on televisions and in our pockets. However, within this era of exaggerated exposure — where we not only have the ability, but often no choice than to archive, collate and process images everywhere, all the time — there is also the risk that we become desensitised to where they came from, why they impact upon us, and what conclusions we draw from them. People have been considering these ideas for a long time now. One of the most paradoxically compelling investigations was by Aby Warburg in his creation of an atlas of memories; Mnemosyne Atlas. Between 1925 and 1929, Warburg amassed images from myriad sources and pinned these together in a variety of combinations on a black velvet boards. This poetic, yet methodical evocation of different epochs, cultures and artistic moments created a series of meaning-generating networks of non-linear and intangible paths of association. The act of actually positioning the images together appears to have revealed subconscious ties and hidden discourse between the images, which people have since interpreted in various ways. Garnering images from all areas of visual culture (there are images of a female golfer beside medieval friezes within the boards) Warburg sought conjunction, collision, frisson, diffraction and rupture. In this exploration, he illuminated themes and structures that tend to pervade a collection of collated images. Nearly 30 years later, in 1947, André Malraux devised his ‘Musee Imaginaire’. With this ‘Museum Without Walls’, Malraux described the idea that photographic reproductions essentially relocate the art world, altering the way we access and think about art. By juxtaposing and examining images of artworks that would never otherwise be seen side by side, Malraux effectively created a compendium of global art...a precursor to the Google Art Project perhaps? Digital technology and the Internet provide us with unprecedented access to all number of images. In a sense it has opened up a set of individual and infinite archives. Anywhere that images pool; on sites like Pinterest, in our phone memories and computer folders, even our old sticky paged photo albums, we collate images in accordance with the history that we bring to them. We move them, compare them, post them, tweet them, store them on hard-drives, comment on them, discard them, alter them... We are now afforded an extensive, personal sense of control over images. Subsequently, these images garner some vertical complexity. That is, they embody a number of temporal instances, and reference more than one series of connections. Every images itself (and unwittingly also its context) has multiple lives. This vertical complexity was something Warburg championed. He organized images, and in fact his whole library, in terms of eccentric, rearrangeable connectors based on elective affinities and secret systems of connection rather than alphabetically or chronologically. 70
ENDLESS ATLAS | PIPPA MILne
History breaks down into images, not stories Walter Benjamin
Within all of our image pools, or archives, there is a rambling sense of coherency, even where no cohesion is sought. Contemporary applications of Warburg’s mnemosyne atlas might allow us to look at the connections between disparate images within contemporary culture, exposing the leitmotifs that run through images we gather around us.
archaic figures and classical scenes from ancient sarcophagi, and Picasso’s Guernica sits alongside cinematic scenes of mourning and war. These paroxysms of emotion create a kaleidoscope of synchronic, yet diachronic instances. But, for all its polish and complexity, this is still essentially a work in progress. This is key.
A beautiful example of this coherency and expansion of Warburg’s atlas (though I must caveat these comments with the fact that I haven’t seen and won’t see this exhibition) is Mnemosyne 42, which is currently being exhibited at the Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Art, France. This exhibition, curated by Georges Didi-Huberman, uses the 42nd board of Warburg’s Atlas as a base and extends Warburg’s explorations into a contemporary visual field.
Of course the archiving and collating of images is in the overarching sense always a work in progress. These archives change and grow with the continued proliferation of images, and with our exposure to them. However we process them, and whether they impact upon us immediately, or in a delayed way, these seemingly random sets of images actually contain significant trends. They are tropes of now, when we process them and remember them (in our minds, or in more concrete archives) loops and currents emerge. Sporadic reoccurrence sprouts into recognisable themes that are not necessarily determined by the linear rhythms of order, but still produce a somehow cohesive, Warburgian whole.
Warburg’s 42nd black velvet board offers a nexus of images that traverse subjects of mourning, loss and lamentation. In this new interpretation, Didi-Huberman projects the original images onto a floor and adds new images and content that likewise evoke emotions relating to pain, mourning, nausea, violence and suffering. Documentary footage of the Kim Jong Il’s state funeral pushes up against
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ONE WAY TRIP TO YELLOWKNIFE Phil Kneen
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One-way trip to Yellowknife | Phil kneen
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One-way trip to Yellowknife | Phil kneen
There’s only one road in to Yellowknife, highway 3, and I suspect it’s a one-way trip for most vehicles. There appears to be abandoned cars around every corner, yet somehow they don’t look ugly. I’m kind of indifferent about cars, for me they’re just a means of getting from A to B, but during a 3 week stay in Yellowknife last September I managed to photograph more than 50 of them. Most of the vehicles look dead and some of them look as though they should be dead, to be honest. I think most Yellowknifers share my sentiment, when it comes to cars. 2012
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One-way trip to Yellowknife | Phil kneen
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Gorgon
50% SEAHORSEL, 2012 | yvonne todd
A CHINESE DISPLAY | JOHN ALEXANDER
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Excerpt Exhibition Excerpt Magazine invited eight people to visually respond to the front cover image to make an exhibition beginning from a visual premise.
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Excerpt Exhibition
Annabelle Kingston Moon Land_2013
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Excerpt Exhibition
Mathew Lynn photograph of Eliza Soares, 25, of Asualau, ermera District, Timor-Lest gibing birth to her fifth daughter, Roberta_2012
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Excerpt Exhibition
Amy Lombard Untitled_2013
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Excerpt Exhibition
Aline Smithson The Stairs_2008
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Excerpt Exhibition
MacDonaldStrand Neil Armstrong, The Moon, 1969 from their Project Most Popular of All Time_2012
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Excerpt Exhibition
Matthew Harris from the series ‘The Great Indoors’_2012
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Excerpt Exhibition
Yanni Florence Untitled_1981
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Excerpt Exhibition
Yanni Florence Footpath_2012
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Excerpt Exhibition
Yanni Florence Untitled_2013
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Excerpt Exhibition
Sun Yanchu
Obsessed_2004 - 2011
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Excerpt Exhibition
Sun Yanchu
Obsessed_2004 - 2011
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Excerpt Exhibition
Sun Yanchu
Obsessed_2004 - 2011
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Excerpt Exhibition
Sun Yanchu
Obsessed_2004 - 2011
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Excerpt Exhibition
Sun Yanchu
Obsessed_2004 - 2011
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LINKS EXHIBITION SECTION
CONTRIBUTORS Asger Carlsen
asgercarlsen.com
Aline Smithson
alinesmithson.com
Bridget Collins
bridgetcollins.com
Annabelle Kingston
annabellekingston.tumblr.com
Carl Burgess
moresoon.org
Amy Lombard
amylombard.com
Ellinor Forsberg
ellinorforsberg.com
MacDonaldStrand macdonaldstrand.co.uk
Glenn Sloggett
stillsgallery.com.au/artists/sloggett
Mathew Lynn
matlynn.com.au
John Alexander
jrajrajra.com
Matthew Harris
cargocollective.com/matthewharris
Kyle Weise
beamcontemporary.com.au
Sun Yanchu
sanyanchu.com
Lance Wakeling
lancewakeling.com
Yanni Florence
yanniflorence.net
Louis Porter
louisporter.com
Martin John Callanan
greyisgood.eu
Michael Schäfer
mschaefer-studio.de
EDITOR
Nadège Mériau
nadegemeriau.com
Amy Marjoram
Nathan Hill
contact excerpt
Nathan Lyons
brucesilverstein.com/artist/129/Nathan-Lyons
Patrick Cremin
patrickcremin.net
Paul Batt
paulbatt.com
Pau Waelder
pauwaelder.com
Phil Kneen
philkneen.wordpress.com
Pippa Milne
contact excerpt
Scott McCulloch
contact excerpt
Sheridan Mills
ridiculousandthesublime.blogspot.com.au
Stefan Abrams
stefanabrams.com
Terence Hogan
terencehogan.com
Yvonne Todd
ervon.com
amymarjoram.com
Creative Director Caitlin Smooker
caitlinsmooker.com
SUPPORTERS Lou Hubbard
sarahscoutpresents.com/lou-hubbard
Louis Porter
louisporter.com
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THANKS Thank you to everyone supporting Excerpt Magazine
PROPS
Excerpt Magazine is an indie publication dedicated to sharing thought provoking projects and we are immensely thankful to our contributors for their engagement and support. Each issue is shaped gradually by the ideas that our contributors put forward and this influence is what makes the magazine. Our Creative Director, Caitlin Smooker is an essential part of this process, her conceptual involvement as each issue develops is as vital as the fantastic design skills she brings to the project. Her countless hours spent on the magazine are tremendous and inspiring.
Thank you to Meyers Place for hosting our Issue 5 launch party! Issue
Excerpt’s editor Amy Marjoram wishes to thank Lou Hubbard, Louis Porter, Georgia Metaxas, Sheridan Mills, Nathan Hill and Glenn Sloggett for all their ideas and encouragement. And a special thanks to Laura Gulbin for her technical guidance. We also extend our deepest appreciation to everyone who is spreading the word about Excerpt Magazine.
Our lovely audience continues to grow and we are nearing 30,000 downloads across our Issues which spurs us on through many late nights and early starts as we work on the publication. Please share the magazine, it is the best way of supporting us. Our contributors have kindly provided content without receiving payment and they retain copyright over their material. If you wish to reproduce any parts of Excerpt magazine please contact us. Please subscribe via our website or join our Facebook page to stay in touch with news of our future projects and please feel free to email us at any time.
Amy Marjoram
[email protected]
CRIBE – IT’S EE
ISSUE #06 Late 2013
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