For over ten years, the visionary Scottish artist Charles Avery has been using drawings and sculptures to create and populate a philosophical allegory called The Islanders. In 2008, Avery published an introduction to this project, and part two is this new artist's book, which reproduces as its centerpiece Avery's huge drawing "View of the Port at Onomatopoeia."
Of the many inspired curatorial concepts that Harald Szeemann devised in the course of his career, one of the most suggestive was “individual mythologies.” Szeemann debuted the term as the guiding thesis of the legendary Documenta 5, 1972; he later explicated it (in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist collected in the latter’s A Brief History of Curating) as “intense intentions that can take diverse shapes: people create their own sign systems, which take time to be deciphered.” Nebulously broad as this may sound, what Szeemann intended by “individual mythologies” was an art in which a unified system, or world view or cosmology manifests itself across a range of media—via a repertoire of signs and symbols, as in Marcel Broodthaers’ eagles, pipes and bricks, or Matt Mullican’s generic Isotype symbols; or through allegory, as in the cosmologies of William Blake, or Paul Thek, whom Szeemann included in the 1972 Individual Mythologies show. Such cosmologies would operate independently of existing religious, scientific and philosophical systems (though inevitably borrowing from them). continue to blog
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FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 12.75 in. / 80 pgs / 22 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $39.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $50 ISBN: 9783865608406 PUBLISHER: Walther König/Koenig Books AVAILABLE: 3/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA ASIA AU/NZ AFR
Published by Walther König/Koenig Books. Text by René Zechlin.
For over ten years, the visionary Scottish artist Charles Avery has been using drawings and sculptures to create and populate a philosophical allegory called The Islanders. In 2008, Avery published an introduction to this project, and part two is this new artist's book, which reproduces as its centerpiece Avery's huge drawing "View of the Port at Onomatopoeia."
