"Partial Facsimile" was part of "FAX" an evolving exhibition from the Independent Curators International that began in New York in 2009 and travels worldwide, when it visited the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in 2012. Invited Bay Area artists re-conceived the fax machine as a thinking and drawing tool. The results were displayed alongside previous FAX works by artists, graphic designers, architects and other cultural producers from around the globe.
FAX exhibit narrative:
Name: Joshua Singer
Title: Partial Facsimile
Method:
1. Selections from Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project.[1]
2. Photograph apparatus and fax photos of record
3. Send daily facsimile(s)[2] of selected spread and related responses and records.
4. Write and amend Exegesis.
5. Send Information Sheet at end.
Exegesis:
- “…multiplicity and discontinuity, far from pointing to the unfinished state of the project, or to a stylistic predilection for fragmentary writing, are implied by the task of presenting an idea.
“Discontinuous multiplicity would first constitute an acknowledgment of the finitude of thinking, of the incapacity of thinking itself to encompass the material as a unified totality. It would avoid the illusory transference of the mode of unity of objects of experience onto the realization of the idea.”[3]
- Quotations (& truncated.)
- Responses and assessments in the form of actions and images.
- Present and moment become past.
- Things travelling across space.
- Things travelling across time.
- Time embedded in things.
- “Ideas are to objects [/images] as constellations are to stars”[4]
[1] Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2002. Print.
[2] A facsimile (from Latin fac simile, "make alike") is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print, or other item of historical value that is as true to the original source as possible. It differs from other forms of reproduction by attempting to replicate the source as accurately as possible in terms of scale, color, condition, and other material qualities. For books and manuscripts, this also entails a complete copy of all pages; hence an incomplete copy is a "partial facsimile". Facsimiles are used, for example, by scholars to research a source that they do not have access to otherwise and by museums and archives for museum and media preservation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facsimile
[3] Friedlander, Eli. “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image”. Duke University Press, 2008. http://boundary2.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/35/3/1. p12.
[2] A facsimile (from Latin fac simile, "make alike") is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print, or other item of historical value that is as true to the original source as possible. It differs from other forms of reproduction by attempting to replicate the source as accurately as possible in terms of scale, color, condition, and other material qualities. For books and manuscripts, this also entails a complete copy of all pages; hence an incomplete copy is a "partial facsimile". Facsimiles are used, for example, by scholars to research a source that they do not have access to otherwise and by museums and archives for museum and media preservation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facsimile
[3] Friedlander, Eli. “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image”. Duke University Press, 2008. http://boundary2.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/35/3/1. p12.
[4] Benjamin, Walter. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama). 1928.
