\'What is Real?\' (2001) by Maxine Kopsa (english)
Text with the exhibition and publication Post Nature in the Palazzo Ca'Zenobio for the Venice Biennial 2001, organised by the Foundation for Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB), Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
A small preview:
('...van der Salm relieves the specific, making it at best a vehicle for depicting the impersonal and so heightens the impact of the unspecified, the ‘artificial’, if you will. He shows the specific and the unspecified at the same time, creating from the specific real a (new) unspecified, average. Not that his images are average in the dull sense of the word; they are just the opposite. We see buildings and landscapes and we observe their barrenness and neutrality; we recognize these buildings and landscapes as ones similar to those in our own surroundings and at the same time we understand their barrenness and neutrality. What makes these images anything but dull is the fact that we see, recognize and understand yet cannot accept. It is as though we are being alienated by the sheer ‘logic’, by the sheer ‘neutrality’ of these banal images while our mind incessantly runs around in circles, wrapping itself up in the (to it) irrational equation specific + unspecific = artificial...')...
To read the whole essay by Maxine Kopsa, download PDF.
Text with the exhibition and publication Post Nature in the Palazzo Ca'Zenobio for the Venice Biennial 2001, organised by the Foundation for Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB), Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
A small preview:
('...van der Salm relieves the specific, making it at best a vehicle for depicting the impersonal and so heightens the impact of the unspecified, the ‘artificial’, if you will. He shows the specific and the unspecified at the same time, creating from the specific real a (new) unspecified, average. Not that his images are average in the dull sense of the word; they are just the opposite. We see buildings and landscapes and we observe their barrenness and neutrality; we recognize these buildings and landscapes as ones similar to those in our own surroundings and at the same time we understand their barrenness and neutrality. What makes these images anything but dull is the fact that we see, recognize and understand yet cannot accept. It is as though we are being alienated by the sheer ‘logic’, by the sheer ‘neutrality’ of these banal images while our mind incessantly runs around in circles, wrapping itself up in the (to it) irrational equation specific + unspecific = artificial...')...
To read the whole essay by Maxine Kopsa, download PDF.
