“For Levrat, the idea of heterotopia described both the site itself, and the acts of minor carnage that he carried out there – innocent and playful on the surface, but with a subtext of riotous refusal.”
“Animals by evolutionary prowess and survival mode are given differing powers of sight. Humans with the benefit of great vision are still limited to a fairly diffuse understanding of the wider spectrum. Such is the case of our art as well” On the face of it, color or chromatic evaluation of form is spectrum […]
“In very broad terms, it seems that the work made in the West during the 20th century portrays a prolonged event – a disaster, you could say – that unfolded as modernity overtook the landscape and ideologies were instilled in American culture”.
“At some point during that time I was painting inside an abandoned factory and I came across the body of a guy who hung himself. I remember my teacher in painting saying that I should have made a painting of the dude hanging. This teacher later suicided as well. I had several friends kill themselves during that period, maybe a Belgian thing?”
“I was very motivated by Deborah’s Bright’s 1985 essay: Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men, which stressed the importance of differing subjective viewpoints from the established patriarchal vision”
“In a dialogue where it is often difficult not to mention “medium specificity”, it would be fair in jest to contemplate why photography’s utility is toward change and simultaneously toward stasis. Stasis is where comfortablility lies, but this position also breeds contempt.”
“Vandalism” is a way in which to authorize or sign off on a negation of agreement of form and intent. It is to suggest that at its heart, what vandalism does is to distort the fabric of time in appearance governed by the individual” Crypto-architecture is not purposeful on the plane of first person experience. […]
“I consider the photograph as an imprint, remnant, of an activity. The fact that the photograph exists implies a viewer located it at a specific place and time”. Brad Feuerhelm in Conversation with John Divola, October 2015 BF: I’ve been reading some of your interviews from the 80’s to present. What strikes me is the consistency […]
Journal of Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, September 1978 Dialogue with John Divola by Dinah Portner Q. Do you think of photography as a concrete way of dealing with ideas? A. No, it’s not that they are ideas, per se. I see art as a dialogue about experiences and the way you experience things. […]
ASX CHANNEL: JOHN DIVOLA (All images @ John Divola)
Artificial Nature by John Divola Over twenty years ago I read an essay by Arthur C. Clarke that occasionally comes to mind. Clarke was speculating on the certainty that mankind would develop artificial intelligence, and that eventually such intelligence would have the ability to learn, move through the world, and act. It would not be […]