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Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes by Allan Sekula
Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes by Allan Sekula
For citizens of the United States, Canada is typically neither here nor there. “Canada” occupies a zone of conceptual indifference: unthought, insignificant, simultaneously the same and different, but in ways that do not seem to matter much in an “American” scheme of things. 
 
For Canadians, the United States is both here and there: insistent, present, pressing and beckoning from below. As the novelist Margaret Atwood put it recently, playing on a reassuring geopolitical cliché, Canadians peer through “the longest undefended one‐way mirror in the world.”
Through the empty room: Marta Dahó on Guido Guidi's 'Veramente'
Through the empty room: Marta Dahó on Guido Guidi's 'Veramente'
In 1960s Italy, as in so many other countries that were recovering from the ravages of World War II, the unrelenting urban sprawl led to a phenomenon that was new to some degree but also logical and inevitable, and that subverted the accepted criteria of what had been considered ‘photographable’.
'An Impossible Weld:' George Weld in Raymond Meek's 'ciprian honey cathedral'
'An Impossible Weld:' George Weld in Raymond Meek's 'ciprian honey cathedral'
But if I keep the details of this house
to myself, leave it as a bare
sketch of a house, perhaps even make it an impossible house
The State of British Art: Victor Burgin at the ICA
The State of British Art: Victor Burgin at the ICA
What should be of fundamental interest to us, therefore, in regard to representations of people, is the way these representations help to determine subjectivity itself. Representation is a fact of daily experience which concerns us all intimately. We may tend to think that we were each born into the world as a little ‘self’, as well-formed psychologically as physiologically. Psychoanalysis, however, has built up a different picture: we become what we are through our encounter, while growing up, with the myriad representations of what we may become — the various positions that society allocates to us. There is no essential self which precedes the social construction of the self through the agency of representation. 
The Pacific to San Bernardino: Nigel Raab on his 72.5 mile walk across Los Angeles
The Pacific to San Bernardino: Nigel Raab on his 72.5 mile walk across Los Angeles

On the surface streets, the monotony of the highway has no home. I walked from predominantly white to African American to Hispanic neighborhoods where the Spanish language was the local currency. West of the Los Angeles River, these tightly packed neighborhoods were a mix of urban and suburban. I passed just north of the intersection at Normandie and Florence, the site of riots in 1992; two decades later, the external wounds were invisible in the neighborhood.
Intense Artificiality, Artificial Intensity: A conversation between David Chipperfield, Thomas Demand and Hal Foster
Intense Artificiality, Artificial Intensity: A conversation between David Chipperfield, Thomas Demand and Hal Foster

I think that’s partly why architecture is becoming interesting. Because it seems to be a field where form is being taken seriously. It might also be a little bit of an escape route, I admit. It’s more that architecture provides a form of making a show than it does a form for making an artwork.