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Evidence is the result of a two-year investigation of over two million archive photographs. The result is a photographic narrative comprised only of images selected from corporate and institutional archives (primarily on the west coast) including government departments, the military, scientific research establishments, law enforcement agencies (Bechtel, TRW, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Aeronutronic Ford, United Technologies, and the Los Angeles Police Department are but a few examples). A project by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel.
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“Within all great art is a wild animal: tamed… All great art has man’s primitive drives as its ground-base”
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During the siege of Leningrad (1941-44), all the artworks in the Hermitage were removed and stored safely out of harm’s way, but tours continued with guides describing the works that used to fill the now empty galleries.
“Hermitage guides gave soldiers from the front tours of empty picture frames, describing in elaborate detail the paintings they had once held. Most audacious of all was a literary conference held at the height of the blockade, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the great Uzbek poet Alisher Navoi. Hundreds of starving people gathered, in the depths of winter, to listen to a poetry recital as shells shook the building to its foundations. The museum had been fortunate in having a store of lumber with which to make its evacuation crates. Afterwards, the surplus made coffins for its dead.”
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“Who would give up the Iliad for the “real” historical record? Of course the writer has a responsibility, whether as solemn interpreter or satirist, to make a composition that serves a revealed truth. But we demand that of all creative artists, of whatever medium. Besides which a reader of fiction who finds, in a novel, a familiar public figure saying and doing things not reported elsewhere knows he is reading fiction. He knows the novelist hopes to lie his way to a greater truth than is possible with factual reportage. The novel is an aesthetic rendering that would portray a public figure interpretively no less than the portrait on an easel. The novel is not read as a newspaper is read; it is read as it is written, in the spirit of freedom.”
E. L. Doctorow via E.O. Wilson
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“We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us to how live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse “negative capability.” He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had “the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.”
Jonah Lehrer
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Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT… in her 2011 book, Alone Together: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.” The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy,” she writes. “We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.’”
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“Wittgenstein appeals to this picture in his ‘Philosophical Investigations’ to illustrate the point that if the same object can be seen as two different things, it shows that perception is not purely sensory and that we must attend to aspects in our account of perception”
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“I think that’s the great…the great dialectic of our time, which is between individual experience and how those fragments get turned into stories, both by individuals themselves, and then, by the those in power above them. And then there is what gets lost in the process…It’s like when you live through an experience, you have no idea what it means. It’s only later, when you go home, that you reassemble those fragments into a story.”