Nina Katchadourian and I have all the same obsessions: maps, information, charts, and genealogies. I just finished interviewing her for some other writing and she told me about how when her Airplane Family Tree project first opened in New York, one reviewer talked about how well-researched the piece looked and how he had learned so much about aviation history. He didn't get the joke, that it was all a fiction. Or I should say, he missed the point, which goes way beyond a simple joke and instead makes a pretty cogent argument about how in our minds certain forms of precise presentation often equal authority. (above, Nina Katchadourian, World Map, detail)

Above, Airplane Family Tree and detail

W. Gerome Temple's work in the back gallery at Eyedrum (closing April 19) play with similar notions. This idea that precision somehow equals truth. Or at least looks like it does, although in Temple's exquisite drawings, etchings, prints, and paintings, the subjects are obvious fantasies. I guess that's what we might call visual truthiness; something speaks the visual language of things that are factual no matter how at odds they are with testable reality.


Above, very bad photos of great work by W. Gerome Temple

Most kinds of writing do the same thing; writing precipitates and then confers authority. In case you missed the huge dust up between The Brooklyn Rail, Modern Art Notes, and the Village Voice, this is the very thing that's at stake here. Who has authority to talk about art and in what way? Ed Winkleman has gotten in on the act with his own questions and responses, and has defended himself rather vigorously on his own participation in the ArtBloggers@ panel at Red Dot, which raised a whole other set of questions about authority, art, and writing a few weeks ago.

Art criticism is not arts journalism. They are separate things. Sometimes the same person does both. Sometimes they exist in the same publication side by side, but they are not in fact identical activities. This fact confuses people. Art criticism comes out of the tradition of poetry and philosophy (Diderot), which explains why artists themselves so often undertake it. Their task is to clarify and sometimes render meaning. Arts journalism is an outgrowth of journalism proper, which is historically concerned with reporting on what powerful people do. Tyler Green mostly does the latter, Mr. Viveros-Fauné does the former, or did at the Village Voice before he was canned.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this issue since Debbie Michaud at the Loaf and I have had some recent interactions. I don't know where, if anywhere, that will go, but I know that Atlanta has a strange opacity, a strange sense in which people feel that they ought not talk about things "publicly," or else you'll--I don't know--get in trouble somehow. Ethics weirdness thrives is dark silences like those. But outside of the bubbleverse ringed by 285 all this careful quietness is reading as apathy, or worse absence. I for one have an annoying tendency to shout.

[Edited to remove link in poor taste.]

Any chance you can upload higher resolution photos?

Well, you can click to enlarge, but that's basically as good as they get. All of the Temple images are pretty blurry to begin with and the Katchadourian photos are all that was available. Sorry.

Dang. I'm itching to read that map - I'll see what google turns up.

I need to get some images from her anyway; and we did talk about Australia. I can check and see if she's got anything higher res. I'm pretty sure they are just place names, though, since that map was made with bits and pieces of a real map. She doesn't mention anything about changing any of the text, but 'spossible.