Friday, December 18, 2009

closed for good

Once you've closed down, what more is there? If you're coming back, does that mean you're unclosed, that closed has been cancelled? Unlikely. More like: closing gives way to closed for good. This is no longer about putting on a sale.

Linh Dinh is quickly becoming my favorite political photographer. I'm pretty sure Linh would brush aside auteur-centered praise, since--at any rate this seems to be so--he's doing precisely no more than just looking closely at what's around him. He gets to affirm his positions just by pointing his camera this way and then that, sensitive to both easy and hard ironies especially in the visualities of language along the rotted cityscape. His blogs are State of the Union and Detainees and there I'm always feeling detained, indeed. I'm reminded of Cid Corman's minimalist meta-text: I make my art in order to detain you, here.