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Roberto Tejeda on Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River at Chinati Foundation (Newsletter Volume 30)

For [George] Baker, Leonard’s determination to re-enchant the analog image con- firmed a technological “lateness” that in turn inaugurated an affective and corporeal “openness” to the world. Baker writes of this photography understood, in light of the A n a l o g u e series, “as inherently relational— affective and loving—its operations not just the indexical fixative of the double or the trace, but the unending (desiring) quest for similarity, comparison, connection, and analogy.” That is, Baker aligns “openness” in a system that relates reception to displacement, to endlessly mutable forms, to connectedness, enclosure, and layers of reflection in the interplay of likeness and desire. “To receive, for Leonard, is to want to bring the new object close, almost to draw it into the void of one’s camera—to incorporate the image, again, like one internalizes a lost object. And in the photo- graphs, we feel this drive everywhere enacted: physically, corporeally, psychically,” he stated.

[…]

In a lens perspective that has no particular purchase on a heightened sense of eventfulness, nor on a relation of detachment to the “man-altered land- scape” specified by exponents of the New Topographics, for instance, so many of the images in Al río / To the River render the middle distance from a standpoint, a certainty “in person,” so to speak. In this sense, active viewership resembles a form of embodied hesitation at the intervals—now unambiguous, now indiscernible—that open up between the built world, the natural landscape, and social processes along the border zone.

Zoe Leonard, “Out of Time,” artist questionnaire by George Baker, O c t o b e r , no. 100 (Spring 2002): 89, 95.
George Baker, Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2023), 56, 57.

…

What potion of forgetting pleases
reason that by neglect of its duty
so toils against itself for satisfaction?
But my affliction seeks solace, measure
of the desire to be remedied and
the desire to overcome it love’s remedy

[When from my counted days], Roberto Tejada

Epiphany No 1: […] you never knew what you were going to find and how much of it was going to be there. It was as if every record store, fleamarket and charity shop in the world had been connected by a searchable database and had flung their doors open, begging you to walk away with as much as you could carry for free.

Epiphany No 3: File sharing is non-contextual. The cohesive vision of an album has been ditched in favour of the single or the playlist. Many people getting music online have no idea where something came from, nor do they care.

Six File Sharing Epiphanies, Kenneth Goldsmith (2011)

Adam Gopnik on American sophistication.

“Sophistication seems a shared longing more than a set style; it’s the desire to see the world shine brighter than it does while still knowing that all the light that shines from it is the light we bring to it. In a darkening time, maybe it isn’t so shabby an aspiration.”

Also, on the shape of certain scandal. “that liberty required privacy to flourish” via Bernard Constant

“The Constant reproach to the Königsberg case is that candor and confession can become cruelty by another name. The categorical Kantian, in turn, warns that the cult of privacy can shelter abuse, protecting the powerful from the scrutiny that might expose what they have done. The Prussian within us wants to force everything into the open, insisting that anyone with nothing to hide should be willing to put everything on display. Our inner Parisian wants to protect twilight concupiscence, believing it essential to civility. Between Prussian and Parisian lies a permanent argument of our moral modernity, unresolved and probably unresolvable. We can try to recognize malfeasance while resisting malice, but doing so requires patience, proportion, and case-by-case judgment—qualities made nearly impossible by the modern media, already emerging in Königsberg in the form of newspapers and helping to fuel the scandal there.”