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Issue 02: Double Take and Déjà vu

Test Inkblot created by Hermann Rorschach (between 1917-1918), as part of the Fonds Hermann Rorschach,
Archiv für Medizingeschichte der Universität Bern

(1917) Blots created by H. Rorschach

As the deadline draws near, there’s this lingering question, especially when she cannot sleep:

What do you think an editorial owes an audience?

Emile Rubino on Paul Niedermayer at Kunstverein Freiburg

DB jokes aside, since the first half of the nineteenth century, trains and photography have run hand in hand, collapsing space and freezing time. In Niedermayer’s dining car still lifes, speed and dynamism are conveyed by way of a filter that simulates motion blur and diffuses light to produce astigmatic visions—as if someone had touched the lens with greasy Käsebrezel fingers.

Cecilia Bien on Trisha Donnelly at The Drawing Center

With these drawings now imprinted in my visual memory and with no vocabulary to attach to them, every prediscursive form is one to feel through and reconsider in its natural shape. The way something is born, or how it breathes before it nearly dies. At first, the drawings from the show appear to demand nothing until they suddenly impose on the faculties where even the cynical must engage with fantasy. These dire times are ones in which we might want an explanation for and from everything, including art, to provide (or provoke?) a certainty or security of what we are looking at and how to understand it.

Brit Barton on Trisha Donnelly at Museum für Moderne Kunst

One is meant to embrace the inaccessible aura of the artist and exhibition, away from the pedestrian demands of a title, date, and list of materials. But this is Germany—the land of the didactic—and, moreover, an institution dedicated to accessibility, despite the artist’s best West Coast ethos of existing on vibes.

Emile Rubino on Photography’s Endless Coming of Age

Today, instead of looking for an arbitrary essence by focusing on one personality trait, photography is more capable of accepting its multiplicity, its codependency, its lack of purity, and its uncertainties about the future. Photography is, in this sense, laying on the couch, looking up at the ceiling, talking openly, even as it remains restless.

Katharina Hölzl on The Weather

A few days ago, it seemed that brightness was beneath. I thought maybe the sun was already working on the transformation and soon, the sky would break through. But the forecast looks the same for the past as it does for the near future: Cloud.

The Shadow Puppets of Hermann Rorschach

Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst best known for developing the Rorschach inkblot test, a projective psychological assessment designed to explore personality and emotional functioning.

At the time of his death, he was deputy director of the psychiatric hospital in Herisau, where he performed shadow puppet shows for patients that recounted the events of the week.