Caterina.net: Not not stopping at Powell's

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{ Tuesday, September 7, 2004 }

Not not stopping at Powell's

There was no way that we were not stopping off at Powell's. We'd already hit it on the way down, briefly, while we were hanging out with Rael Dornfest (after dinner at a delicious Vietnamese restaurant), but 20 minutes isn't enough time. So on the way back up Interstate 5, we took the exit into Portland and went back. I bought: Typologies by Bernd and Hilla Becher; Constructing Modernity: The Art & Career of Naum Gabo; The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau; Desire and Delusion and Night Games by Arthur Schnitzler; and two other books I don't have next to me right now. Stewart looked at Typologies and asked, Do we really need *another* amazing book that just sits there on the table?. Duh. He was in a bad mood because he couldn't find any wifi within a three block radius of Powell's.

My friend Forrest and his family joke that when they buy a book, they're also buying the time in which to read it. I look at this pile sadly, and consider giving up sleeping.

Typologies is the first book that I'm reading -- reading and looking at, really. Page after page of black and white photographs of water towers, blast furnaces, winding towers, cooling towers and other structures associated with the coal and steel industries. The Bechers have been photographing these buildings together since 1959, in this very flat, extremely rigorous, unemphatic way. The Armin Zweite essay at the beginning of the book concludes:

...the Bechers have gone beyond a merely documentary approach, and through their strictly definzed gaze have formed an aesthetic that is functional and stringent, objective and personal, minimal and all-encompassing. Keeping to a carefully delimited scope of topics, demonstrating truly heroic self-restriction, the work they have produced to date is of absolutely Cartesian clarity in terms of conceptual substructure....[its] aesthetic concept is unparalleled precisely in its ability to incorporate historical reflection. As Reinhold MiBelbeck has argued, the strongly documentary, objective view of reality that in the 1920s and 1950s took a backseat to the experimental approaches (and whose emphasis on the photographic was rated less highly than its artistic prowess) is now recognized as art.

Their influence is enormous. Former students include Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff and Petra Wunderlich.

LINK | 12:56 AM | TB

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