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Hysterical Fugue: Jamieson Webster on Roe Ethridge’s ‘AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC’

Hysterical Fugue: Jamieson Webster on Roe Ethridge’s ‘AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC’

Photography has changed memory, forming a double to the storehouse of the mind. It is hard to remember anything in the day and age of the personal digital archive, which holds on to everything, as if we had all become hoarders. We keep things in order to more easily forget them, assured that they are tucked away in our basement or in the cloud. But if psychoanalysis is right, this only serves the purposes of resistance, giving repression more mojo.

Hysterical Fugue: Jamieson Webster on Roe Ethridge’s ‘AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC’

Ahead of the Curve: Penelope Curtis on Henry Moore and Marcel Breuer

In the spring of 1955 the UNESCO Committee of Art Advisers invited a number of celebrated artists to contribute an artwork for their headquarters building, which was then under construction. Moore was among them, and he devoted an unusual amount of time to the commission. He visited the site several times, firstly later that same year, and next in July 1956.

Hysterical Fugue: Jamieson Webster on Roe Ethridge’s ‘AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC’

The Tyranny of the New: Adam Caruso on Construction and History

Since the early days of modernism, progressive architects and critics have lamented the backwardness of their discipline, particularly in relation to the design of industrially produced objects. Within the rhetoric of positivism a certain obsession with the new would be understandable. However, even at the height of revolutionary modernist zeal in the 1920s and 1930s, architects were confronted by the cultural foundation of their endeavour.
Hysterical Fugue: Jamieson Webster on Roe Ethridge’s ‘AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC’

Weightless, Boneless, Bodiless: Brian Dillon on Effie Paleologou’s 'Tales of Estrangement'

A catalogue of everything in the world that resists photography – this is in some sense what photographers have always hoped to make. At one point in the process of becoming the artist whose mature work we see in Tales of Estrangement, Effie Paleologou tried to do what Antonino does in Calvino’s tale: to photograph every minute of her day, starting with the instant she woke up by pointing a camera at the ceiling. 
Hysterical Fugue: Jamieson Webster on Roe Ethridge’s ‘AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC’

Memento mori: Alessandra Sanguinetti on 'Some Say Ice'

I remember understanding that everyone in that book was long gone, and then apprehensively asking my Mom if I too was going to die. It was the first time my nine-year-old mind understood that many more people had come before me, and I never would have been able to look in their eyes if not for those photographs.
Hysterical Fugue: Jamieson Webster on Roe Ethridge’s ‘AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC’

Sounding Out: Anouchka Grose on Learning from Listening

Like a good analyst, Claudia Rankine enables people to hear themselves differently. But more than that, she allows their responses to open up further questions for herself. Rather than remaining stuck in one position, or simply correcting other people’s errors, she suggests it may be perfectly possible for people to affect each other, to hear and alter each other, without it being a catastrophe.
Hysterical Fugue: Jamieson Webster on Roe Ethridge’s ‘AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC’

Dramatis personae: Joel Smith on the photographs of Ray Johnson

In his last three years Johnson made and mailed art incessantly, went out for a drive most days, and ran through about one camera a week. When he finished a twenty-four-frame roll, he would drop off the camera—he used a couple of Kodaks at first and then, consistently, Fujicolor Quicksnaps—at Living Color, a shop in Glen Cove, for developing and printing. After turning sixty-five in October 1992, he often took advantage of a senior discount and ordered duplicate prints.