The Black & White Gallery in Chelsea is hosting an exhibition of Robert Whitman’s photos of Prince, c.1978, taken just as he was on the cusp of fame. The photos are pretty great, although I’m pretty sure a two-year-old mandrill could point a camera at Prince and take an amazing picture.
In 1954 Jean-Philippe Charbonnier documented French Psychiatric hospitals and some of the photographs were first published in Réalités in January 1955. Here a selection of the original reportage is shown followed by the magazine layouts - published in the magazine with two fluffy cats on the cover. It is interesting to see that a number of most most powerful images were not published due to the sensitivities of the 1950s and that the eyes of the patients are at times masked to protect their identities.
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An old man turned ninety-eight. He won the lottery and died the next day… of chronic emphysema from inhalation of the latex particles scratched off decades’ worth of lottery tickets.
A black fly in your Chardonnay… poured to celebrate the successful fumigation of your recently purchased vineyard in southern France.
A death row pardon two minutes too late… because the governor was too busy watching Dead Man Walking to grant clemency any earlier.
Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” (mp3) (in which she clearly has a tenuous grasp on the definition of “irony”)
As we arrived, the chunky, braided proprietor—Bill—was seated in a folding chair in the sweltering outdoors, smoking a cigarette and leisurely reading through the new edition of the gripping Southwestern Bell Oklahoma City Area Telephone Directory. Our hunt was neither deterred nor derailed by the “CLOSED” sign leaning against the establishment’s front, as Joe had been tipped prior by his educator that rumor had it Bill’s Yesterday Books is never officially “open.” Rather, the treasury of literature reportedly had been classified by crime-busting city officials as a “fire hazard,” exposing Bill to the potential of touch liability issues, steep consequences and monetary fines.
We would soon discover why.
… It’s a whole damn house with no living space whatsoever. Books are literally (and pat yourself on the back, dear reader, if you caught that pun) piled to the ceilings, but not on shelves, with a foot-wide pathway rudely carved through the rubble that one must shimmy through sideways in order to travel. The place is so overflowing with reading material that the path itself is comprised of volumes. It is near impossible to see the walls. And a window? Forget about it. There isn’t enough sunlight to discourage insects from forming veritable kingdoms in there. With careful balance and a reliable pair of mountain boots, the home is navigable, but it’s a one-way trail, and friend, there ain’t no passing once inside.
White Tiger (Kenny) Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge Eureka Springs, Ark.: In the United States, all living white tigers are the result of selective inbreeding to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose. Kenny was born in the care of a breeder in Bentonville, Ark., on Feb. 3, 1999. As a result of inbreeding, Kenny is mentally retarded.
Marijuana Research Grow Room National Center for Natural Products Research Oxford, Miss.: The center is the only facility in the United States that is federally licensed to cultivate cannabis for scientific research.
Hymenoplasty Cosmetic Surgery, Professional Association, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The hidden patient in this photograph is a 21-year-old Arab woman living in the United States. In order to adhere to cultural and familial expectations regarding her virginity, she had her hymen reconstructed.
“The VeinViewer by Luminetx™ uses a combination of near-infrared light and patented technologies to image vascular structures, thus allowing physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals to clearly see accessible vasculature (or lack
thereof) in real time, directly on the surface of the skin.”
“A shiv is a weapon crafted from the limited resources of a prisoner’s closed world. Crudely constructed from such things as spoons, shoelaces and upholstery tacks, shivs lie somewhere between the graceful and the grotesque. They’re primitive, too — like outsider art, but produced deep on the inside.
“The shivs shown here, from the collection of designers Chris Kasabach and Vanessa Sica, were confiscated more than twenty years ago from New Jersey’s Rahway Prison (now East Jersey State Penitentiary), a maximum-security facility that houses more than 1,500 inmates serving sentences of twenty-five years to life. The designers saw each shiv in their collection as a piece of evidence, and over time, came to identify a kind of unique design pathology. Their observations are fascinating, as are the artifacts that inspired them and the circumstances surrounding each object’s unique method of manufacture.”
By law, prisoners must be provided materials to have an opportunity to prepare their own legal defenses. In the 1980s, typewriters were made available for this purpose: the long, notched “spear” here is the carriage return from a prison-issued typewriter. The handle was wrapped with tape is likely to have been taken from Rahway’s boxing facility, where several world-class boxers trained, including Rubin “Hurricane” Carter.
Lifted from the facility’s metal sign shop, this shiv is wrapped in “rubylith” — a red, masking tape classically used in signmaking (and, before the digital revolution, commonly employed by graphic designers in the production of “mechanicals”). Eleven disposable razor blades, available for purchase from Rahway’s commissary back in the 1980s, are carefully inserted down the sides.
At its core here is a spoon, stolen from the staff dining room at Rahway, where, as in many federal penitentiaries, inmates were restricted to using plastic flatware. Stamped “State of NJ,” the spoon likely to have been sharpened on the cement floor or wall of a cell. The bowl of the spoon was filled with wax and then wrapped with upholstery thread (taken from the furniture shop, where it was used to re-stitch chair cushions) thereby forming a generously-scaled handle.
Over on his personal website, Art Garfunkel has done something pretty fascinating (and oddly neurotic). He has listed every book (complete with how many pages the book is) that he’s read since June 1968. The list would make Art’s high school English teacher proud—it’s all Dante and Twain and Delillo and Sophocles. But what would inspire someone to publish this information (besides the obvious reason of showing off)? And if you had to disclose every book that crossed your hands in your adult life, don’t you think you might be inclined to fudge a little? Did he really finish Dickens’ Bleak House(975 pp.) in 1989, or did he just, you know, buy it? Whatevers his motives were, that level of dedication to the archive and record keeping is pretty amazing. Even if he did leave off the entire Harry Potter series.
I’ve frequently thought that if I could ever launch my own magazine, I’d want it to be a whole hell of a lot like Plazm. They’ve got terrific, uninterrupted layouts of art from people like Raymond Pettibon, Richard Misrach, and Melia Jensen; the writing is totally smart and unpretentious; the printing—especially on the current issue—is remarkably close to perfect; and since it’s the publishing branch of Plazm Design, it looks like a million bucks. Therefore, it’s really fun to watch this video featuring every page of Plazm, issues #1-28.*
*I should note that all the praise I just heaped on the magazine becomes more and more applicable further into the video. We were all geeky as kids, and Plazm was no exception.
Vito Acconci, Trademark, 1970
SHELLEY JACKSON: You’d long since left the page by this time, but in your piece Trademark you turn yourself into a printing press. You’re biting yourself, you smear the bites with ink, printer’s ink, specifically, and then you print them on—what?
VITO ACCONCI: Anything. I could print them on a piece of paper, I could print them on the wall, I could print them on another person’s body…
SJ: So you were the writer, you were the printing press, you were also the page…
VA: Was I the page? I bit myself, but I didn’t make a bite print on myself. I used the bite to print something else.
SJ: I thought of the bite as itself a print on the page of your body.
VA: It’s a print, but it’s not a distributable print. It’s not a distributable print until the printer’s ink is applied. This was pre-Gutenberg Bible!
