Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world.
–George Kubler (The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things)
January 23 is notable for two things, past and present. Born on this day was Robin “I Want YOU to WANT Me” Zander of Cheap Trick, a man who helped etch the words Live at Budokan into the mainstream lexicon. Presently it’s a good day to wander over to the Cooley Gallery at Reed College and see New and Used, the US debut of photographer Marc Joseph’s large-scale color photographs exploring the vanishing species of independently owned book and record stores that once populated places like Portland and Rockford, Illinois, the home of Cheap Trick.
With a keen, unsentimental eye, Joseph’s photos amp up our engagement with visual and material culture reframing dime-store pulp, canonical modern hits (like Ginsberg’s Howl,an exclamation point of a book, visually), cassette culture, and freedom-rich pursuits like browsing vinyl and musty paper. Taken as a whole, the result is as wily and seductive as a mix tape: confessional, inviting, and slightly insinuating. New and Used is both visual aphrodisiac and a postcard of fading, raggy odds and ends of incendiary culture resonating as vestiges of a fierce American folk art.
There’s a rigor in Joseph’s photography that approaches the terrain of a lower-fi Andreas Gursky, that, while certainly less operatic in its sense of desire, is nevertheless alluring and evocative. Paperback covers slice space and whiteness like an urban mosaic, 45 rpm records leaning horizontally, resemble wafery shingles. But more than being another take on the death of Main Street this is an epic mash-note to the idiosyncratic wooliness of indie-spiralling discovery that the record and bookstore once provided. Joseph’s cosmology encapsulates a vivid archaeology of style and fading artifice, acting like an animated series of virtual trading cards rich in the currency of pop references. While the lens is slightly tinted with nostalgia and trace amounts of fetish, it’s neither from an obvious consumption critique or sumptuous longing for revisionary what-was. If there are date-movies, this is a date-exhibition. It ignites palpable memories of youthful discovery providing a synapse-tickling passport to deep adolescent dyspepsia, moody escape, literary and musical awakenings, subterranean education, cultural connection to movements-gone by, and reveals a rabid schoolboy crush on candy-colored, awe-inspiring artifice of all shapes, sounds, and syntax.
By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art. It then becomes an urgent requirement to devise better ways of considering everything men have made. This we may achieve sooner by proceeding from art rather than from use, for if we depart from use alone, all useless things are overlooked, but if we take the desireableness of things as our point of departure, then useful objects are properly seen as things we value more or less dearly.
–George Kubler (The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things)
Marc Joseph: New and Used opens tomorrow Tuesday, January 23, 6:45 PM with a reception and artist talk at Reed College (3203 SE Woodstock Blvd.)(Psychology Auditorium Room 105)–Tim DuRoche
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