I forgot the name of the artist who did these boxes, but I think this gives me an idea of how i can store the blog-rolls that I made last semester. One of the things that I would like to get started on and finish this semester is to think about how I can improve on that work.

Peter Friedl’s The Diaries, 1981-2014

More than 300 closed notebooks are displayed in piles within specially designed museum showcases. The Diaries is an epic staging of real time, memory, volume, and text on paper. Thousands upon thousands of densely filled pages covering a period of over 30 years testify to the impossibility of capturing bare life in words. His diary installation is a study in narration and is open to change. As private books and authentic documents authored equally by professional writers and amateurs, diaries sit ambivalently on the threshold of literature and history. Their centuries-long tradition has given rise to many ways of constructing, documenting and revoking subjectivity. By blocking access to the contents of his enshrined, closed diaries, Peter Friedl invites the viewer to contemplate the multi-layered meaning of how aesthetic experience and imagination work. In an era of open access and ubiquitous surveillance, overabundant communication and information, the artist’s “real allegory” takes on critically new importance. It questions the power of display and imagination, the drama of form and content as well as the fragility of autonomy.

The Diaries plays with notions of the anachronistic, precarious, and unfinished. Yet Friedl’s installation subverts the myth of immediacy in order to offer an alternative composed of withdrawal, silence, and introspection. Simple, mundane activities such as reading and writing become tools and aids for potential resistance and emancipation.

As a visual prologue to the diary project, the exhibition will include a selection of Friedl’s own childhood drawings from the 1960s. Like the notebooks, the authenticating medium of the drawing can be experienced as a piece of material culture. — e-flux journal

This work is particularly relevant to my own work, definitely. The printed archive of my blog could be seen as the technological counterpart of collecting journals. Will be referencing this work in my report.

samson kambalu

I have no real idea what this work is about. But I like the presentation of this one. Framed pictures are purposefully installed on the wall, against the text (an angry letter which was written quite humorously).