Hear that? It’s the TimeBOMB ticking! We have 10 weeks left until we finish archiving the interviews for your retro-pleasure. So—quick! trace the hand of Barbara Hammer, Isabel Toledo’s scarf, Srivnas Krishna’s coiffure, a Segovian mountain range, and more back through the Archive!
Being a magazine that covers all the arts, BOMB has a history of encouraging conversational cross-pollination between media. Poets have the chance to talk to painters, dancers to directors, musicians to architects. The leveling of terms between artists is evidence of a common drive to create.
Keeping this compatibility of artistic terms in mind, I started to question the relationship between language and forms. If and only if the two are equivalent, how would a written abstract compare to a visual abstract? Writing one is the most creative part of the archive procedure. In no more than 255 characters, we archivists have the chance to sum up an interview in our own words. When uploading an interview, there is a box designated for the writing of the abstract. This specific window commands the abstract text to appear after you put in an archive search…you reach a menu of thumbnails and these short blurbs. Well, how effective would a visual abstract be when forms stand in for language? Can a trace of Isabel Toledo’s scarf, the hand of Barbara Hammer, or Srivnas Krishna’s coiffure reveal something to us about who they are? Ha, in your dreams! But…
You’ve dreamed of reading. Right? You look down at the newspaper, and the letters don’t add up to the words that add up to the thought that you’ve better get out of this dream, and fast, because when language is on the loose G-d knows what else may happen. In reality, it’s closest to being taught to read Hebrew, phonetically, which is all a matter of what goes in the eye comes out the mouth—pure reading to pure song. In the same way, follow the extracted drawings to their origin and read these articles again as if for the first time. Curiosity is the only rule so click away and remember:
Ourchive is yourchive.
All best,
Richard J. Goldstein
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