Relational Aesthetics

I immediately thought of this project when I was reading through the Logic of the Lure. It was created by a graphic designer who In photographing men's public spaces in the Midwest, the designer came across a bathroom stall in a truck stop in the middle of Illinois, inside of which he found the text: 'gay fagget (sic) fucker die you know it's a truck driver.' Using the author's existing handwritten forms, the designer constructed an entire alphabet according to his writing style. Then "based on a reflective system and rooted in Western representation of homosexuality in duplicate" the designer "morphed the author's letterforms to generate a homo-sexualized uppercase and lowercase alphabet consisting of same-letter ligatures."

He returned to the original bathroom stall and superimposed his own text reading 'let's face it, we're all queer' on top of the original.

The exersice attempted to "uncover the latent homosexuality in the author's written homophobia to generate an alphabet 'code' in which the graffiti artist cannot answer back.

An artist's book exploring the experience of growing up gay in the 1960's in the Midwest. The hand lettered book consists of 7 stacks of text which can be recombined infinitely, yielding any possible number of readings. The results are actually quite humorous and I'm pretty sorry I couldn't get more images than this:

Foucault's Friendship as a Way of Life brought this one to mind, although it's only tangentially related. It's Shawn Wolfe's Live Twice the Life in Half the Time! The caption reads: "Introducin Remover Installer Gold. Makes any lifestyle choice easy to dispense. Represents every detail of your life in full dimension, even when you're away. Direct experience is recorded in real time and automatically vouch-safed Plus: Nostalgia for the Right Now...at no additional cost!"

This candid series of photos by Benjamin Wittner kind of invites the viewer make a connection between sexual and musical predilection in order to promote an underground club in Fuerth, Bavaria. It made me think about spatiality and its relation to erotics.

I had seen this postcard before so I searched for more of his images, which are coming in the next post...