binoculars are her weapon...of today

So much great stuff in your post Marnie:

I love the hyperbola perception applied to Cotan's paintings - and really love the photograph that you and Clare produced - it really taps into image as object infused with many voices/tricks/intimacies - a very evocative staged fiction, if you will. I guess Hito S would relate it to a 'bruising' that leads to curious kinds of tangibility.

I'm certainly open to pushing the public address potential of these light-boxes works in relation to contemporary homosexuality, and in a way I haven't perhaps done before. I think the tangents and stories in these posts are generative in relation to how the public address might function - it's scope, too.

I really enjoyed reading the piece by Hito Steyerl Marnie, especially in the possibilities suggested:

‘This would mean participating in the material of the image as well as in the desires and forces it accumulates.’

‘The contemporary opium of the masses – an apparently private property that simultaneously invites and resists foreclosure’

I thought I'd include an excerpt from a piece I recently wrote for Enjoy about Lee Kit's exhibition/residency. Kit's work opened up some interesting things for me in terms of the readymade/everyday

Language functions at times in Lee Kit’s work as a border territory. Language borders abstraction; it touches the personal; it bites into the airtight. Language is important to the act of thinking, which one could say helps a person distinguish responsible action from obedient action . These border companionships that language lit up in Kit’s work and exhibition could be seen to operate as staged fictions. These fictions entailed tangible responsibilities, and though it is unusual to think of fictions compelling philosophies of action – this was a key part of the terrain that Kit’s work underscored.

The viewer and artist in good faith undertake the fictions of the (Ready-made) Everyday. The title of Kit’s exhibition is apt here. It suggests that the potential for individuals to live a life or series of lives, short or long, and yet rich and full, is contingent on the ability to think in time with others, for the absence of thought leads to disaster. It is the exhausted un-thoughtful life that is worth resigning from. The thoughtful 2-second life takes place in the border territory of the ‘Ready-made’ and the ‘Everyday’.

After the exhibition closed, Kit asked people he had just met, or didn’t know, to take his works away with them, and to store them, display them, possess them and sometimes, after a short time, give them away again. Kit’s gesture connected again with the as yet un-disclosed 2-second life, which can be seen to be less about usurping the future for its benefit or warning it of the past, and more about thinking the 2-second life into existence.

Marnie, I've taken up some of your ideas - perhaps a little too literally - but I liked the idea of working with the staged fiction of a film/movie - weaving in the binocular booklet colours and some imagery and putting Beatrice Krill in the protagonist/driver's seat. I worked up an imagined poster for the film, integrating the value of the light box location to operate as sign/ad/image/text:

I've also attached some original images from the Binocular booklet for you all to preview. I can post more if you're interested in following this line of inquiry - I'd be quite interested in perusing works which utilize this booklet. There are some excellent situational drawings of people using binoculars for different activities which I will try and post in the next few days.

I really like the idea of somehow incorporating perforations/holes in the images. Here is a link to a short film by Jeff Keen that feels inspirational:

http://artforum.com/video/id=24702&mode=large&page_id=3

Word-out.