#artialisation

Vandy Rattana, Bomb Ponds (series), 2009

“Vandy Rattana traveled to the ten Cambodian provinces most severely bombed in the U.S. military campaign  during the Vietnam War.  Along the way, he engaged villagers in locating and testifying to the existence of the craters made by the bombings, known in the Khmer language as the “bomb ponds”.” The resultant work is a series of nine quiet, mysteriously serene landscape photographs and a confronting one-channel documentary film in which villagers describe their memories of the bombings as well as their relationship to the ponds today.”

Richard Long, a line made by walking, 1967

No land ever primarily exists as landscape. The transformation of the former into the latter requires all the elaboration of art.

'montagne sainte victoire' searched with Google Images

Once the secondary elaboration of style has covered the wild form-play of art, never again can the human eye see its full effects, neither this generation, nor future generations.

Luigi Ghirri, Roncocesi, 1992, Formigine,1985, & Untitled, 1992

I cannot describe anything more clearly about reality than my own relation to reality. And this has always something to do with haziness, insecurity, inconsistency, fragmentation or what have you.

Ontario Place under construction from Domus n.502 (Editoriale Domus, 1971)

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.