Monday, August 6, 2012
queercontemporaryart: Julie Mehretu, Stadia, 2004. “We talk regularly now of a world increasingly out of control, beyond comprehension; this is Mehretu’s world. There are disasters, certainly - among them a proliferating information culture, sublime in the scale of its urgency and apparent omniscience, that reinforces a hysteric fear of being overwhelmed, overstimulated and utterly unable to maintain a grasp on our lives. Everything is happening everywhere but we’re missing it because we can only be here. However, Mehretu’s ‘narrative maps without a specific place or location’, as she terms her paintings, allow us to be nowhere and everywhere at the same time.2 She takes the position of Walter Benajmin’s famous angel of history, looking at this world as an accumulating wreckage of events, its strata piled up yet transparent, a chain of events both painterly and referential that are collapsed into a single catastrophe.3 In our despair she is our angel, offering  a view that, while utterly decontextualised, feels sympathetic. Her provision of the appearance of an overwhelming amount of data from a safe distance keeps the chaos from being threatening, even at the enormous scale at which she sometimes works.” — Peter Eleey

queercontemporaryart:

Julie Mehretu, Stadia, 2004.

“We talk regularly now of a world increasingly out of control, beyond comprehension; this is Mehretu’s world. There are disasters, certainly - among them a proliferating information culture, sublime in the scale of its urgency and apparent omniscience, that reinforces a hysteric fear of being overwhelmed, overstimulated and utterly unable to maintain a grasp on our lives. Everything is happening everywhere but we’re missing it because we can only be here. However, Mehretu’s ‘narrative maps without a specific place or location’, as she terms her paintings, allow us to be nowhere and everywhere at the same time.2 She takes the position of Walter Benajmin’s famous angel of history, looking at this world as an accumulating wreckage of events, its strata piled up yet transparent, a chain of events both painterly and referential that are collapsed into a single catastrophe.3 In our despair she is our angel, offering  a view that, while utterly decontextualised, feels sympathetic. Her provision of the appearance of an overwhelming amount of data from a safe distance keeps the chaos from being threatening, even at the enormous scale at which she sometimes works.”

— Peter Eleey

Posted at 8:55 PM 82 notes Reblogged from unacclimated

Notes

  1. akustik-stringz reblogged this from blackcontemporaryart and added:
    So many things at once here.
  2. ohnothespoonsarefalling reblogged this from unacclimated
  3. unacclimated reblogged this from birrastorm
  4. birrastorm reblogged this from sophiemunns
  5. sophiemunns reblogged this from blackcontemporaryart
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  7. embracecomplexity reblogged this from crankyskirt
  8. cheri0125 reblogged this from blackcontemporaryart
  9. pansytwist reblogged this from hyperbody
  10. crankyskirt reblogged this from queercontemporaryart and added:
    I love Julie Mehretu’s work like a rap kid loves breaks. That is all.
  11. lowest-of-the-low reblogged this from blackcontemporaryart
  12. hyperbody reblogged this from blackcontemporaryart
  13. jessenova reblogged this from pithypeach
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  16. vanbrabsongallery reblogged this from blackcontemporaryart
  17. janerasolomon reblogged this from blackcontemporaryart and added:
    I really like Julie’s work and had the pleasure of meeting her during the Carnegie International. Hope to see more of it...
  18. rafelmanera reblogged this from blackcontemporaryart
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  24. mamaindanstafacemynoseinyourass reblogged this from blackcontemporaryart and added:
    Julie Mehretu, Stadia, 2004. “We talk regularly now of a world increasingly out of control, beyond comprehension; this...