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Miss.Tic 3

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Miss.Tic 2

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This week we'll feature Jesús Rodriguez Velasco's photos of Miss.Tic in Paris.



These images come from the time when I used to live in the rue Marie Benoist, by the Place de la Nation. Oftentimes, I wandered around the neighborhoods with my cameras just looking for something that would provoke my thoughts. Upon finding something, anything, I would simply take a picture, maybe more, and then I would stop and start writing. It was all about what Ansel Adams used to call visualization, that is, the abstract and subjective representation of what you had just registered by the unstable means of light, and film, and lenses. How wonderful was that experience of shooting and writing, at the time in which digital cameras either didn’t exist or were too expensive for me to afford. One of the charms of film is that you have to wait until the film has been developed; in the meantime, the image grows different in you, as a result of ‘visualization’, having, hence, forgotten about the precise elements of the original, fugitive image from ‘reality’. On the other hand, what kind of visualization can grow up while shooting against the wall, even if you have les yeux fertiles? One in which the History of Art is a labyrinth of streets with narrow pavements; in them, Art is asking questions to pedestrians whose better answer is “Sorry, not today”.

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Kevin Sudeith, on the road in North Dakota.

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From Lizzie Calligas

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Thessaloniki, August 2007

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Jesús D. R. Velasco, Contrescarpe, Paris

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With thanks to Sara Jane Bailes.

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This week we'll feature the work of NYC graffiti artist Jim Joe.

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One final portfolio from Peter Stallybrass, this time from his growing collection of manicules in Medieval and Renaissance books.

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More from Peter Stallybrass, this time from his project on Fanny Hill in America. The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, A Woman of Pleasure, was a notorious pornographic novel first published in London in 1748-9. It was circulated widely and suppressed in various ways. These images show unfolded sheets of Fanny Hill that have been marbled and pasted to the covers of some unlikely books-- Asa Lyman's The American reader: Containing Elegant Selections in prose and poetry: designed for the improvement of youth in the art of reading and speaking with propriety and beauty, and for the cultivation of a correct moral taste (1811) and an index to the sermons of the puritan preacher Cotton Mather.

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Censored Petrarchs from the files of Peter Stallybrass:

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca [1304-1374]) wrote the so-called “Babylonian” sonnets in the mid-fourteenth century. They are an attack upon the second papacy that was established in Avignon in France in 1309, in opposition to the papacy in Rome. 16th-century critics of the papacy interpreted Petrarch’s poems, which do not mention Avignon, as attacks on the papacy in general and specifically on Rome. During the Counter-Reformation, the papacy put several famous vernacular writers on the Index of Prohibited Books, including Petrarch’s Avignon poems and letters. In the 1560s and 70s, many copies of Petrarch were censored by hand, using a variety of methods and materials. Here are some graphic examples.

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This week we'll feature some texts and photos from the collection of Peter Stallybrass, mostly from his work on the history of censorship and the development of printed forms. We start with Jack Ruby's toe-tag.

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From Patrick Wildgust, a sneak preview of the new exhibition at Shandy Hall, One Previous Owner.

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With thanks to Sara Jane Bailes

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Shepard Fairey's Mayday Mural
Corner of Houston and Bowery, NYC