Friday, October 9, 2009

The Epic of Strangeness

Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Evidence, 50 found photographs, 1977

In the Early 1970's armed with a government grant , San Francisco artists Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan created the series called Evidence. Or rather, they found it and compiled it. They, long with their government grant letter of introduction sifted through some 40,000 images at various government agencies at both federal and national levels. These images were originally gathered as a series of images for evidence of crimes, experiments and government research. From this massive pile, Sultan and Mandel selected 50, and exhibited them in 1977 in an exhibition called Evidence.

These images, when stripped of their original context, take on strangeness unparalleled. These seem to constitute the visual event, one where we that audience are placed into a mire of confusion and bewilderment, that our minds must find new structures to make sense of them, and this is the experience of the visual event.

1 comment:

  1. The confusing visual event that we need to make order out of. So interesting! HAve you read any of Mark Dion's writing about categorization and classification, and the ways we organize the visual world? Very interesting. If you don't know his piece The Tate Thames Dig its a good one to start with for that -- it's not direct re. what you're doing here, but related.

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