Dennis Adams, I TOOK A BULLET FOR CULTURE, 2012

2012

Medium

Archival inkjet print on Hahnemüle Fine Art photo rag

Dimensions

18 × 15 cm

Edition

1/5

Status

For Sale

Price

On request

Collect24 Art ID

C24-987277

Beginning in 1970 and continuing to the present, Adams has continuously kept journals which have noted linguistic experiments, phrases that have struck Adams and appealed to him, quotations from books... “I was always interested in language, but in the beginning I was somewhat intimidated until about age 20. You didn’t come to being an artist out of philosophy”. In 2012, along with Adams’ completion of his 42 minute video Malraux’s Shoes, he was simultaneously referencing his own extensive library and archive documenting the intellectual climate of the 1960s. Entitled Tagging the Archive, this suite of 24 text pieces were montaged over revolutionary ephemera from the 60s as well as book covers such as Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book (1971), Franz Erhard Walther’s Objekte, benutzen (1968), Jean Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, Claude Levi Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, Henry Miller’s Black Spring, and others. This was Adams’ opportunity to formulate a critical dialogue filled with ambiguous clues. Juxtaposed against forerunners such as Broodthaer’s Departement des Aigles (1968-72), or Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1866-1929), or Malraux’s Le Musee Imaginaire, or Richard Prince’s extensive personal library of vintage pulp fiction, Tagging the Archive forms a cryptic link to the underpinnings of Adams’ oeuvre. The mere act of bringing together books and ephemera in the form of a personal library allowed issues to be raised, contiguities to be revealed and borders between disciplines to be transgressed. The project composes a brilliant series of satirical and polemic “flysheets.”