Thursday, July 17, 2008

Get real


We saw an extension of the virtual building thing in Vienna and the biggest photograph we’ve ever seen. About a sixth of St Stephen’s Cathedral was covered by this photograph presumably to remind people what was underneath it while it was being repaired. This is different from the first example we saw where the photograph suggested what a new building might look like in the location. The cathedral photograph serves another purpose. It’s not conjecture but the presentation of some weird kind of reality check. It reminds us of a slide Joseph Kosuth showed when he spoke at Victoria University a few years ago. It was a work he did in 1965 that exhibited a chair, the description of the chair (as a text pinned to the wall) and the photo of the chair. No doubt about it, Kosuth would be right on to the cathedral thing.